The Question My Grandson Asked the Deacon

He stopped in front of Harold Simms and tipped his whole head back to look up at him.

“Mr. Simms?”

“Yes, son.” Harold’s voice was not steady.

“Does Jesus keep a list too?”

Now, I have heard that sentence in my head a thousand times since, and I want to be plain about how he said it. He was not being smart. There was no sass in it. My grandson does not have that in him yet.

He wanted to know.

Santa keeps a list. Everybody knows that. Mr. Simms had a list right there on a clipboard, and Tucker had just found out he was not on it. He was seven years old in his dead grandfather’s bathrobe, and he was asking, honestly and with some worry, whether there was a third list somewhere that he ought to be concerned about.

The church went so quiet I could hear the furnace tick.

Mrs. Eileen Burchett, who has played the piano since my mother’s hands gave out, had been playing something soft while the sacks were handed around. She took her hands off the keys and put them in her lap.

Harold opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it. He looked at the clipboard like it might tell him what to say, and then he looked at Brother Loomis, who had stood up out of the chair behind the pulpit with his Bible still open in one hand.

I got to Tucker before anybody else could.

I knelt down on that carpet runner. My knees were sixty-one years old and I felt every year in both of them. I turned him around by the shoulders so that he was looking at me and not at sixty people.

“That was a fair question,” I told him. I said it loud enough that the front pews could hear it, and that was all the speech I had in me. “And you asked it politely. Now it is time to go home.”

“But does He?”

“No, baby,” I said. “He does not.”

I stood up. I did not look at Harold. I am not proud of that part, and I am not ashamed of it either. I walked my grandson back up the aisle to the last pew on the left, where our coats were folded on the seat, and I picked up his little blue jacket and held it open for him.

He got one arm in.

That was when I heard paper crinkle behind me.

I thought somebody was opening a peppermint. Then I heard shoes on the floorboards between the pews, small ones, and then Tucker, who was facing that way, went very still with one arm in his coat.

“Grandma,” he whispered. “Look.”

Caleb Mason was standing at the end of our pew. Caleb is nine, a big quiet boy with a cowlick, and he had been Joseph. He still had his mother’s gray shawl around his shoulders. He did not say anything. He set his brown paper sack on the seat of the pew, right beside Tucker’s hat and gloves, and he stepped back.

Behind him was Katie Burchett, Eileen’s granddaughter, the angel who had stepped on her own halo. She put her sack down next to Caleb’s.

Then the innkeeper. Then both of the wise men who were brothers. Then a little girl in a sheep costume made out of a cotton ball sweatshirt, who had to reach up over her head to get her sack onto the pew, and whose big sister boosted her elbow.