The Question My Grandson Asked the Deacon

TUCKER.

“Son,” Harold said, “this is yours. It was always yours. Your mama turned in that card on time, and it got put in the wrong drawer, and that is the church’s doing and none of hers. But I want to tell you something else, and I want your grandmother to hear it.”

Tucker took the sack. He held it against his chest.

“Even if she had never turned in any card at all,” Harold said, “I should have handed you a sack this morning. I had four sitting in that box. I could have given you the Webb boy’s and packed him another one by supper, and nobody on this earth would have been harmed. I knew that. I stood there holding a clipboard instead.” He swallowed. “You asked me a question, and I did not answer it, and I have been ashamed of that since eleven thirty this morning.”

“Grandma already told me,” Tucker said. “She said He does not.”

“Your grandmother is right. He does not. Not that kind.” Harold’s eyes had filled up, and he let them. “And if He does not keep one, then I have got no business keeping one in His house. I called the other deacons from my kitchen before I came out here. All four of them. There will not be a card next year. There will be a box of sacks, and more in it than we need, and any child who walks through that door will get one, the way it was when your grandmother was little.”

“Who is going to pay for the extra?” I asked. I could not help it. I work a cafeteria line. I know that food comes from somewhere.

Harold looked up at me, and for the first time all day he almost smiled.

“Last year the treat fund came up a hundred and twelve dollars short,” he said. “I made it up out of my own pocket and did not tell anybody, and then I went to the deacons’ meeting and complained about it. That is where the cards came from. That is the whole sorry history of it, Patsy. I traded a hundred and twelve dollars for that little boy’s face this morning, and it was the worst trade I ever made in my life. I will pay it every year I am living and be glad of the chance.”

I did not say anything for a moment. The wind chime Dale hung by the door was going.

“I am sorry,” Harold said. “I am asking you both to forgive me. You do not have to answer today.”

I have been in church my whole life. I know what the right words are. I also know that when you say them before you mean them, they do not count for much. So I stood there on my porch and I checked, honestly, to see whether I meant them.

“I forgive you, Harold,” I said. And I found, saying it, that I did.

“Me too,” Tucker said. “Do you want to see my oranges?”

Harold laughed. It came out of him like something that had been held underwater. He got himself up off his knee with a hand on the porch rail, and he followed that boy into my kitchen and looked at eleven oranges in a green glass bowl for as long as Tucker wanted him to, and heard which one came from which child.