The Pew My Son Swore Off

And Danny prayed harder than anybody in that building.

He was eighteen when it started, a freshman at Iowa State studying ag. He drove home from Ames every Friday and straight on to Iowa City, slept in a vinyl chair beside his brother’s bed, and carried Tim to the car when the crutches were too much. At church he knelt at the rail, and I would see his lips moving long after the rest of us had gone to coffee hour. He prayed like a man arguing a case before a judge he trusted.

Tim died on the eleventh of March, 1983. He had turned fifteen five weeks before.

The funeral was the following Monday. The church held three hundred and we had more than that. I sat in our pew with Harold on my right and Danny on my left, and a space beside Danny where Tim ought to have been.

The boys had that pew in their bones. When they were nine and fourteen, Pastor Teague preached an hour and ten minutes one Sunday in July, and Danny took out his Boy Scout pocketknife and the two of them worked their initials into the underside of the hymnal rack. I found out a month later when Harold slid his thumb along the wood and said, “Marlene, what’s this?” We never scolded.

At the end of the first hymn, an elder named Clarence Voss came down the aisle to pay his respects. Clarence was eighty, had buried a wife of his own, and meant every kind word he ever said. He put his hand on Danny’s shoulder and said, loud enough for the pew to hear: “The Lord needed that boy more than we did, son.”

Danny looked at the hand on his shoulder as if it belonged to a stranger.

Then he stood up. In the middle of his brother’s funeral, in front of three hundred people, he stepped over Harold’s knees and walked down the center aisle in his good shoes. I heard every step. I heard the big front door open, and I heard it close.

Harold did not turn his head. He put his hand over mine and gave it one squeeze, which meant go.

I found Danny on the church steps with no coat on, in the March slush, with his arms wrapped around himself. I sat down on the cold stone beside him in my funeral dress.

“I’m not going back in there, Mom,” he said.

“All right.”

“I mean ever. I will never sit in that pew again. I’m telling you now so you don’t plan on it.”

“Danny.”

“I prayed for fourteen months. I prayed harder than anybody in that building. And now I’m supposed to hear it was for a reason.” His voice cracked down the middle. “Don’t ask me to come back. Please. Promise me you won’t ask.”

I looked at my nineteen-year-old son. I thought of Clarence Voss, who would be sorry by suppertime. Then I thought of my own mother, who taught me that you can bring a horse to water but you will drown the both of you if you push.

“I won’t ask you,” I said.

“Not ever?”

“Not ever.”

He nodded and put his head down on his knees, and I sat there beside him until we heard the congregation start the second hymn through the door. Then I went back in for the rest of my boy’s funeral. Danny stood at the graveside with the rest of us and drove back to Ames that afternoon.