The Question My Grandson Asked the Deacon

Harold Simms ran his finger down the clipboard one more time, as if a name might have slipped under the metal clip, and then he looked over the top of my grandson’s head at me.

“Patsy,” he said, low, the way you talk in a hospital hallway. “There wasn’t a card turned in for him.”

Tucker was standing right there. He was seven years old. He had on his grandfather’s brown bathrobe, which I had hemmed up nine inches, and a striped dish towel on his head held down with one of Dale’s old neckties. His hands were already out in front of him, cupped, the way every child ahead of him in that line had held theirs.

“A card,” I said.

“The pledge card. For the children’s treat. It went home in October.” Harold’s ears had gone red. “The deacons voted on it. I was told to count the sacks against the cards, and I did. I bought for nineteen.”

There were twenty children in the Christmas program at Laurel Branch Baptist Church that year.

I looked down into the cardboard box he was holding against his hip. There were four brown paper sacks left in the bottom of it, tops folded over twice and stapled. Each one had a name written on it in black marker. Jenny Collins. Kayla Collins. Josh Webb. Sam Webb. All four of those children were home with the flu that had been going through the elementary school since Thanksgiving.

None of those sacks said Tucker.

I wanted to say a good deal, because I am not a saint. I wanted to say, my mother played that piano for three decades and my husband is buried forty yards from where you are standing, and you hand that child a sack of candy right now.

What I said was, “Thank you, Harold.”

And I took my grandson’s hand.

I should back up, so you understand about the card.

It came home the second Sunday in October, a half sheet of yellow paper folded in Tucker’s Sunday school take-home folder, behind a coloring page of Daniel and the lions. I read it standing at the kitchen counter. Children’s Christmas Treat, it said across the top. Then: Each family is asked to pledge $20 to help cover the treat sacks, costumes and the program dinner. Please return this card by the first Sunday in November. There was a line for the child’s name, a line for the parent, and a little box to check if you were paying now or later.

We had never had a card before. In all my years at Laurel Branch, the sacks just appeared. A deacon stood up front with a box after the program and every child in the building got one, members, visitors, cousins from Knoxville, a neighbor boy somebody had brought along. Nobody counted anything.

I put the card on the refrigerator under the magnet shaped like a rooster, and I said to my daughter that evening, “That is yours to turn in. Do you want me to cover it?”

Amber was tying her shoes for work. She is a nursing assistant at the care center in Morristown, third shift, eleven at night to seven in the morning, and she has done it for five years without complaining to anybody but me. She is twenty-nine. Tucker’s daddy has been in Knoxville or somewhere like it since before the boy could walk, and he sends nothing.

“No, Mama,” she said. “You cover enough. I will take care of it.”