The Question My Grandson Asked the Deacon

That was a hard October. The truck needed a battery, a hundred and forty dollars, and the care center had cut everybody’s overtime. I work the lunch line at the elementary school cafeteria, and between the two of us there is not a lot of slack in the rope.

A few weeks later the card was gone from the refrigerator. I saw the bare spot under the rooster and I thought, good, she handled it. I never asked. You do not ask a grown daughter who is working nights whether she remembered a twenty dollar card. You trust her.

So when Harold said there was no card, the first thing I felt, before the anger, was a drop in my stomach. I thought, oh, Amber. I thought she had forgotten, or come up short and been too proud to tell me. And she was not there to ask. She had worked her regular shift Saturday night, and at a quarter to seven Sunday morning she had called the house to say the first shift girl had called in sick and they were holding her over for a double.

“Mama, I am going to miss it,” she had said, and her voice cracked right down the middle. “Tell him I am so sorry. Take a picture when he says his line.”

His line. Lord, his line.

Tucker was the third shepherd. He had exactly one thing to say in the whole program, and it was eight words out of the second chapter of Luke: “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem.”

He had practiced it for three weeks. He said it to the dog. He said it to his oatmeal. He said it in the bathtub every night with a washcloth on his head, in a big deep voice he thought a shepherd ought to have, and then he would ask me through the door, “Was that loud enough, Grandma? Could the back row hear that?”

“The back row in the next county heard that,” I told him.

The bathrobe was his idea. I had offered to make something out of a brown bedsheet, and he had gone to my closet, where Dale’s robe has hung on the same hook since the week of the funeral, and he had stood there looking at it.

“Could I wear Papaw’s?” he asked. “He would be at the program if he was not in heaven. This way he kind of is.”

Dale has been gone four years. His heart quit on him in the tomato rows on a Tuesday in July, and Tucker was three and does not remember much beyond a lap and a smell of Old Spice. But he has decided he remembers, and I am not going to argue with him.

So that is who was standing in the aisle with his hands out.

The program itself had gone as well as those things ever go. One of the angels lost her tinsel halo and stepped on it. The innkeeper said “No room” before Joseph had finished knocking. The littlest sheep, who was three, sat down in the middle of the stage and would not get up. And when it came time, my grandson stepped forward in his papaw’s bathrobe, put his shoulders back, and said in that bathtub voice, clear to the back wall, “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem.”

I got the picture. My hands were shaking, but I got it.

Then the children sang “Away in a Manger,” and Brother Loomis thanked the teachers, and Harold Simms came down the side aisle with his cardboard box and his clipboard, same as some deacon has done every Christmas of my life.