The Thank You Cards That Told the Truth

I went to the front door with a dish towel still in my hand.

Mr. Fenske came up our steps one at a time, with his good hand on the rail. In one hand he carried my card. In the other he carried a gray metal cash box.

Pastor Jim Olesen was a step behind him, in his shirtsleeves, with no collar on. Behind the pastor, standing in my yard with their caps in their hands as though they had come to a visitation, were Dennis and Gene and Larry and four more of the men who had cooked.

“Beth,” Mr. Fenske said, “I have one question for you, and then I have something to show you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am not going to ask you who. Jim and I have agreed on that, and so have these men. It is not ours to ask, and you were right not to write it.” He held up the card. “My question is this. What does the boy need, to the dollar, and by what day?”

I had to hold on to the door frame.

“Seven thousand three hundred and fifty. That’s our share at the hospital. And Travis will be off two weeks. June seventeenth.”

He took out the pencil and wrote it on the back of my envelope.

“All right. Now look here.”

He set the cash box on the porch rail and opened it. I think I expected money. There was no money in it. There was one sheet of paper from the bank downtown, a signature card, and under them, folded in half, a paper plate with Gene’s arithmetic on it.

“This afternoon the church council opened a benefit account for Cody, under the church’s name,” he said. “It takes two signatures to move a dollar out of it. One is mine. One is Jim’s. Neither one is yours, and I mean no insult by that. It is so nobody can ever say a word about you. Every deposit gets counted by two people who are not kin to each other or to you, both of them sign the sheet, and I have made copies of the sheet.”

“Mr. Fenske, people already gave.”

“They did. And I stood in that hall and let a nice young woman pat me on the arm, because I did not want a fuss at a child’s supper. I knew better. So some of this is mine to fix.”

Pastor Jim spoke then, quietly. He buried my father.

“Beth, I saw a woman who could have burned a house down and wrote a thank-you note instead.” He looked at his shoes and then back up. “I am not going to say a word about this from the pulpit. Not a name, not a hint. I will tell the congregation there is an account at the bank for Cody, and how it is counted, and that is all. If somebody out there has something to set right, I want the door of that church standing open when they are ready. I would be a poor pastor to nail it shut.”

“That is what I want too,” I said. And I found that I meant it, which surprised me.

Dennis cleared his throat from the yard.

“We’ll cook again, Beth. I got four loins in the freezer and Gene’s got a hog. A week from tomorrow. No coffee cans, unless Fenske counts them.”

Some of them laughed, and I laughed, and then I was crying on my own front porch with a dish towel in my hand in front of nine men.