The Question My Grandson Asked the Deacon

They came in a line, the same line they had stood in up front, only pointed the other way.

I counted, because I am my father’s daughter and I count things when I do not know what else to do.

Eleven.

Eleven sacks in a row down the last pew on the left, where my husband sat every Sunday for thirty-two years.

Fifteen children had gotten a sack that morning, and eleven of them had walked to the back of the church and given it up. The four who did not were all under five. One of them, the little sheep who would not get off the stage, had hers wrapped in both arms and was eyeing the rest of us like we might come for it, and there was not a soul in that building who held it against her.

Tucker looked at the sacks. He looked at me.

“I cannot eat all of them,” he said.

Somebody laughed, a wet kind of laugh, and then a lot of people did. I heard a man blow his nose like a truck horn. I think it was Caleb’s daddy.

I got down on my knees for the second time in five minutes, and I looked at those children. Eleven faces, some of them with glitter still on.

“That is the kindest thing I have ever seen in this church,” I told them, “and I have seen a good deal. But I am not going to send you home without your Christmas. You all take these back.”

Nobody moved. Children are stubborn when they have decided to be good.

Caleb chewed on the inside of his cheek. Then he reached over, unfolded the top of his own sack, popped the staple, and dug out the orange.

“Then he can have this out of mine,” he said. He held it out to Tucker. “I do not like the white stuff on them anyway.”

Tucker took it in both hands.

Well, that did it. Katie Burchett got her orange out. The wise men got theirs. Staples were popping up and down that pew like a string of little firecrackers. In about a minute and a half my grandson had no sack of candy at all and eleven oranges, and nowhere to put them.

He pulled the dish towel off his head, necktie and all, and laid it open on the pew, and they piled the oranges into it. He gathered up the four corners.

“Thank you,” he said to each one. He went right down the line. “Thank you, Caleb. Thank you, Katie. Thank you. Thank you.”

I had to look at the ceiling.

When I looked back down, Mrs. Loomis was coming through the side door that leads to the church office.

I had not seen her leave. Nobody had. She is a small, brisk woman in her sixties who types the bulletin every Thursday and keeps the nursery schedule, and she moves through that building so quietly you forget she is in it. She had an offering envelope in one hand and a half sheet of yellow paper in the other, and she was not walking toward me.

She walked straight up the center aisle to Harold, who had not moved from the spot where Tucker left him. He still had the box on his hip.

“Harold,” she said. She did not raise her voice, but it was so still in there that she did not need to. “I would like you to read this.”