The Pantry Door Nobody Voted To Close
First Baptist is a Baptist church, which means that on paper the congregation decides. The annual meeting was in January, eleven weeks away. In eleven weeks the thirty-eight families on my list would go through the first cold snap and the week the propane ran out. I could stand up at the meeting and say all of it. I could also see how it would go: ninety-odd people voting on a line item, and the man defending the line item holding the folder and the pencil.
I wrote on the pad: They have never met them.
That was the plain truth of it. I had put the pantry door on the outside of the building on purpose, so nobody coming for groceries would have to walk past the sanctuary and feel looked at. It was kindness. It also meant that in nine years not one person in our pews had shaken hands with anyone who ate off the Tuesday shelf. They knew them as cars in the lot, and a break-in in August that nobody ever tied to anyone, and a line in a report.
I did not like all of it. There is a way to do what I was thinking that uses people, a church putting its poor on display so the rest can feel their hearts move. So I made myself a rule at that kitchen table and wrote it under the first line: Ask. Don’t arrange.
First Baptist has a fellowship dinner after the service on the first Sunday of every month. Ham, scalloped potatoes, a dozen kinds of casserole, the long tables set out in the same hall Wally wanted to rent for showers. The sign on the door says all are welcome, and the Tuesday people had read that sign for nine years from the other side of the building. The first Sunday of November was five days away.
I picked up the phone and called my friend Sherry Peeler, who does the church bulletin and knows everything.
“Sherry, is the dinner on Sunday?”
“It’s the first Sunday. It’s always on.” There was a pause on the line. Sherry is sharper than she lets on. “Marlene Ostrander. What are you up to?”
“I’m going to invite some people to church,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Which people?”
“Neighbors. Would you hold a few spots at a table for me? Don’t make anything of it.”
“I’ll hold them,” said Sherry.
That evening I wrote down 22 names, because 22 of the 38 families lived within twenty minutes of the church, and then I went to the grocery store and spent $41.60 on bread. You do not knock on a hungry person’s door and ask them for something with your hands empty.
I started with Teddy Halvorsen.
Teddy had worked eleven years at the implement plant in Creston and was laid off in the spring. His wife worked at the nursing home and they had three boys. Their house sat at the end of a gravel road, and when I got out of the car Teddy came to the screen door in his sock feet and did not open it.
“If this is about the pantry,” he said, “I heard it’s closed.”
“It’s not closed. It’s locked. That’s different.”
“Sounds the same from here.”
I held up the bread. He looked at it, then at me, and finally opened the screen and took it, and I saw his ears go red. Hunger does not make a proud man less proud. It makes him better at hiding it.