The Question My Grandson Asked the Deacon

He set the box down on the front pew. He took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on.

I knew that yellow paper from all the way in the back. I had looked at it under a rooster magnet for three weeks.

He read it. Then his hand came up and covered his mouth.

“Where was this?” he said through his fingers.

“In the desk drawer in the office, rubber banded in with the empty offering envelopes from November,” Mrs. Loomis said. “It went in the plate the first Sunday, in a regular envelope. Whoever counted that day put the money in the general fund and dropped the card in with the empties. It never got to your folder.” She stopped. “I saw her handwriting on that envelope a month ago when I was hunting for staples, and I did not think one thing about it until that child asked his question.”

Harold walked the length of the aisle with that card. It took him a long time. He held it out to me, and his hand was shaking so that the paper rattled.

Child’s name: Tucker Greer, age 7. Parent: Amber Greer. The little box for “paying later” was checked. And underneath, in my daughter’s round, careful handwriting, squeezed in along the bottom margin:

$5 enclosed. I will bring the rest after payday. I am sorry it is not all here. Amber.

It was dated the second of November.

She had turned it in. On time. With five dollars she did not have, and an apology for it.

I read it twice. I folded it once and I put it in my coat pocket, and I did not trust myself to say anything, so I did not.

“Patsy,” Harold said.

“Not now, Harold.” I said it gently. I meant it gently. “I have to get him home and get some dinner in him. Not now.”

He nodded. He looked down at Tucker, who was holding eleven oranges in a dish towel and looking back up at him without any grudge in his face at all. Harold started to say something to the boy, and his chin gave way, and he turned and went and sat down by himself on the front pew, next to the box.

Brother Loomis came down out of the pulpit then. He is a big, slow-talking man who preached at a church in Hawkins County for twenty years before he came to us. He looked at the children, and at the staples all over the floor of the back pew, and at his wife.

“I had a few words to close with,” he said. “I believe the children have already said them, and I am not fool enough to follow that. Let us be dismissed.”

He prayed about four sentences. I did not hear any of them.

I drove home on Indian Ridge Road with the heater going and the dish towel of oranges on the seat between us. Tucker held one in his lap and smelled it every little while.

“Grandma?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Was Mr. Simms being mean?”

I thought about that for about a quarter of a mile. There is a place where the road drops down by the creek and you can see the church steeple behind you in the mirror, white against the brown hills.

“No,” I said. “I do not believe he was. I believe somebody gave him a rule, and he was so busy keeping the rule that he forgot what it was for.”

“What was it for?”