The Pew My Son Swore Off
That was the promise. I made it with the cold coming up through my shoes. I have kept it every day since.
The next morning I was up at five, because cattle and habit do not care who has died. I sat down at the kitchen table by the east window with my coffee poured. The house was so quiet I could hear the clock in the hall.
I had been praying for Tim for fourteen months, and now there was no Tim to pray for. For a minute I did not know whom to ask for anything. Then I heard Danny’s feet on the floor upstairs, in the room he and his brother had shared, and I knew.
I folded my hands and said it out loud, the first time.
“Lord, keep a place for Danny.”
Six words. That is the whole prayer. I did not ask for him to come back, because I had promised not to ask him, and I would not go behind his back and ask God to do the pushing I had sworn off myself. I only asked that when he was ready, in whatever year that turned out to be, there would be somewhere to land.
I had the pew in mind, I suppose, though I never said so. The Lord can read a mother.
I have said those six words every single morning since. At the table by the east window, with the first sip of coffee left untouched and going cold. In the hospital with pneumonia in 1996, whispered at the ceiling tiles. On the morning of Harold’s burial, with his barn coat still on the hook. Nearly sixteen thousand mornings.
My mother, Opal, used to say that as long as a person is still breathing there is room for the Lord to work. She said it about her brother Leland, who drank himself half to death and was sober the last eleven years of his life. After the funeral I held on to it like a rope. As long as Danny was breathing, the door was still a door.
I will not tell you it was always faith. Some mornings it was only habit. But a sentence said that many times starts to carry itself, the way a path worn in the grass carries you along even when you are not looking at your feet.
And in the meantime, I want it understood, Danny was a good son.
He married Pam Thornton in June of 1988 on the lawn of her folks’ farm, with a hay wagon for a stage and a justice of the peace instead of a pastor. It was lovely. He has worked thirty-eight years as a lineman for the rural electric co-op. In the ice storm of 2007 he showed up at our farm at three in the morning with a generator on a trailer. He cleaned my gutters every spring and called every Sunday evening at six.
He was polite. He was kind. And on the one subject, he was closed like a bank on a holiday.
When their daughter Kate was baptized, Danny stood at the back by the font rather than sit for one minute. Every Christmas Eve from 1983 on, he drove me to the candlelight service, opened my door, took my arm up the front steps, and walked back to the truck. I would sit in our pew with my little candle and sing “Silent Night,” and through the window I could see a pair of parking lights out in the gravel and a small red glow where he had the heater running.