The Hymnal I Brought Every Sunday

The church

The Methodist church on Third Street is red brick with a white steeple that Dad helped reshingle in 1979. It has a gravel lot that floods every spring and a ramp on the side that the Men’s Fellowship built for Mrs. Pauley’s wheelchair twenty years ago.

I parked by the ramp. Mom wouldn’t take it.

“I’ll go up the front steps,” she said. “I’ve always gone up the front steps.”

So I held her elbow, and she held the rail, and we went up the eight front steps of that church one at a time while the organ played the prelude. The ushers were the Oltmann brothers, both in their seventies, and when Dale Oltmann saw who was on my arm, he dropped the bulletins.

He just let them fall out of his hand onto the carpet. Then he opened both inside doors wide.

We walked in during the prelude. I don’t know who saw her first. I think it was Marlene, because I heard her say, “Oh,” the way you’d say it if you saw a deer in your yard.

Then somebody in the back stood up.

Then the whole row stood up. Then the next row. It went forward through that church like wind going through a wheat field, people getting up out of the pews, the old farmers getting up slow with a hand on the pew in front of them, the young mothers lifting babies to their hips to stand.

The organist, Jean, stopped playing. She just took her hands off the keys.

Nobody clapped. Methodists in our part of Nebraska do not clap in church, and nobody did. They just stood there, a hundred and some people on their feet, while my mother walked down the center aisle in her navy coat and her gray hat to the third pew from the front on the window side.

Pastor Ellen had come down out of the pulpit. She met us at the pew. She had a hymnal of her own in her hands and she was crying, which I had never seen her do.

“We saved your seat, Lois,” she said.

“I know you did,” Mom said. “Karen told me.”

Then Mom sat down. And the whole church sat down with her, all at once, a sound like a big quiet breath. And Jean put her hands back on the keys and started the prelude over from the beginning.