The Boy Who Emptied His Piggy Bank

The days between the fire and that Sunday were quiet in their own way too. The McAllisters stayed with Sherry’s sister over in Rolla, close enough to still get the kids to school, and the church took up a small collection that first week almost automatically, the way you’d send a casserole, canned goods and gas money and a stack of gift cards that added up to maybe three hundred dollars by Friday. It was a kind gesture and everyone knew, without saying it out loud, that it was nowhere near enough to rebuild a house. Denny McAllister told Pastor Cole he was grateful and that they would figure the rest out somehow, the way people say that when they do not actually know how.

Pastor Emmett Cole announced a special love offering that Sunday for the McAllister family, the way this church has done for every family it has ever lost a barn or a harvest or a roof to. He is not a showy preacher. He stood up front in his plain gray suit and told us Denny and Sherry had insurance, but not enough, not for what it would take to rebuild the way that house deserved to be rebuilt, and he asked us to give what we were able and not one dime more than that, because he never once in nine years at this church has asked anybody for money they didn’t have. He read from Mark, the story of the widow and her two small coins, worth almost nothing, that Jesus said were worth more than all the large gifts of the rich, because she gave out of what little she had rather than out of what she had left over.

I do not think Hollis planned it around that scripture. I asked him later, gently, and he told me he had not really been listening to the sermon at all. He had been looking at Cora, three pews up, sitting very still between her parents in borrowed clothes that did not fit her, and he told me, in the longest string of words he had given me in a year, that he decided right then the bike could wait. That is the whole of his explanation. The bike could wait. Cora could not.