The Boy Who Emptied His Piggy Bank

What happened after Hollis walked back to our pew is the part of this story that I am still, weeks later, having trouble making other people believe, so I will just tell it to you the way I watched it happen.

For maybe ten seconds, nobody moved. Ushers do not typically stop a collection plate mid pass to stare at it, but ours did. Ida Renner, two rows up, had her hand pressed flat against her mouth. Then Wendell Cutter, who owns the hardware store and has sat in the back pew of this church every Sunday of his adult life without ever once, to my knowledge, volunteering for anything, stood straight up in the middle of the next hymn and walked to the front. He is not a young man. He had to steady himself on the pew end going up the two steps. He took an envelope out of his jacket, an envelope he had clearly brought that morning already sealed, already planning to give something, and set it on top of the plate on top of Hollis’s coins. He told me afterward it had four hundred dollars in it, money he’d set aside toward a new storefront sign nobody but him cared whether Cutter’s Hardware ever got.

Then Elias Yoder stood, from the Mennonite family that farms the ground north of ours, a man I have exchanged maybe forty words with in ten years of living near him, and said out loud, right there in the sanctuary, that he had six hundred dollars coming to him from a hay sale that week and the McAllisters could have every dollar of it, because Denny had helped him bale in a hard rain two Augusts back and never once brought it up since.