The Question My Grandson Asked the Deacon

I have known Harold since I was a girl. He is seventy years old. He drove a route for the propane company for forty years, and he has taken up the offering at Laurel Branch for thirty. When Dale died, Harold was one of the six men who carried him. He is not a hard man, and I need you to know that before I tell you the rest, because it would be a simpler story if he were.

He called the names off the clipboard one at a time. The children lined up along the front pew beside the Christmas tree and the piano, and each one walked up when called and got a sack. I knew without looking what was in those sacks, because it has not changed since Eisenhower. An orange. An apple. A peppermint stick. A handful of chocolate drops and orange slice candy. Mixed nuts still in the shell, which no child has ever once wanted and every child’s grandfather ends up cracking on the porch.

I got that same sack in that same church in 1971, when I was seven.

Tucker had gotten himself to the end of the line, because he is polite, and because the shepherds had been the last ones off the stage. He watched every child ahead of him take a sack. I watched him watch. He was up on his toes.

Then Harold got to the bottom of the clipboard, and you know what came next.

“Thank you, Harold,” I said, and I took Tucker’s hand, and I said to him, “Come on, baby. Let’s get your coat.”

I had come out of my pew before Harold even finished his sentence. I do not remember deciding to. One second I was sitting in the back row on the left, where Dale and I always sat, and the next I was at the front of that church with my purse still on my arm.

I had a twenty dollar bill in that purse. I thought about it. But a twenty was not going to change whose names were on those four sacks, and I was not going to stand in front of sixty people and buy my grandson’s way into a line he had already stood in. And I did not know, right then, what Amber had or had not done. I could not defend what I could not see.

So I did the only thing I could think of that would get him out from under all those eyes. I thanked the man and I went to take the boy home.

Tucker did not cry.

That was the worst of it. If he had cried I would have known what to do. He just looked at his two empty hands, and then he put them down at his sides, and he let me lead him.

We were halfway up the aisle toward our pew when his hand slid out of mine.

I thought he had tripped on the robe. I turned, and he was already walking the other way, back toward the front, by himself. The hem dragged a little on the left side where I had not gotten it quite even. The dish towel had slipped back on his head. His sneakers did not make a sound on that old carpet runner.

“Tucker,” I said, and I started after him with my hand half up, the way you reach for a child near a road.