The Pantry Door Nobody Voted To Close
“The pantry money,” I said.
“It’s in the building line now.”
“Wally, that was $14,600. Nine years of harvest offerings and Lions Club checks and Farm Bureau envelopes. Every dollar of it was given for groceries.”
“It was given to the church,” he said. “The church decides how to use it.”
“Did the church decide?”
He shifted the folder. “The deacons did.”
“Did the church vote?”
He did not answer that.
Behind me, Lila started to fuss, and Jolene shushed her. Wally glanced past my shoulder at the two of them, and something crossed his face that I could not read. Then it was gone, and his mouth went flat again.
“Marlene, I’m going to say this once, and I’d like you to hear it kindly. That pantry draws a certain crowd. Cars idling in the lot at all hours. People we don’t know walking through our hall. We had a break-in in August, you remember that. They took the coffee money and two of Dorothea’s skillets. I’m not accusing anybody. I’m saying it’s the wrong crowd for a church that wants to grow.”
“That’s Jolene Marsh,” I said quietly. “She’s standing right there.”
“I know who she is.”
“Her husband hauled grain for the co-op, and he’s been laid off since July.”
“I’m sorry for that.” And I think he was, in some small corner. “But the church can’t be everything to everybody.”
I looked at him. I thought of seventeen things to say, and I thought of Alvin, who would have said every one of them, louder, and gotten himself nowhere.
I said none of them. I put my hand flat on the hasp for a moment, on the cold brass and the little paper sticker, and then I turned to Jolene and said, “Come on. I’ve got a freezer full at the house. Tell the others to follow us.”
Behind me Wally said, “Marlene. It’s the roof. It’s the roof and the furnace and the hall.”
“I heard you.”
I had not decided anything yet. I only knew I would not be the loud woman who fought the treasurer on the church steps. The loud woman loses, because the treasurer is the man who keeps the lights on.
By afternoon I was at my kitchen table with a cold cup of tea and Alvin’s old green ledger pad, and the six cars had come and gone with what my cupboards could spare.
Our pastor, Ray Dillard, was in a hospital in Omaha, five weeks out from a bypass, and the doctors had told him to stay out of the pulpit until Thanksgiving. We had an interim, a retired preacher named Thurman Hagerman, 78 years old, kind as the day is long, and entirely willing to believe whatever the treasurer told him because the treasurer drove out and handed him his mileage in an envelope.
The deacons had met on a Thursday night in September without Pastor Ray and voted 3 to 0 to repurpose the pantry room and move the fund. Delbert Wheeler, Tom Ashby, and Velma Tate. I joined that church 36 years ago, and I had known all three of them since the winter the grain elevator burned. Delbert taught my son to drive a stick shift. I do not believe any of the three had been inside that pantry room on a Tuesday morning in their lives.