The Pew My Son Swore Off
He slid toward the window to make room, away from the aisle, where a man ready to bolt would have sat.
“Sit with me?” he said.
I sat down beside my son. My purse went in my lap, not on the cushion. The cushion was for him now.
We did not say another word. People began to come in. Doris Pelzer, who sits directly behind us and has told this entire town about her gallbladder, came down the side aisle with her bulletins, saw Danny, put her hand flat on her chest, and said nothing at all. In sixty years I had never seen it happen.
Pastor Dale Henning came out in his robe, a lean, plain-spoken man three years with us. He looked at the third pew and his face did something small and kind. I was too full to notice that nobody in that sanctuary looked surprised.
During the opening hymn I saw Danny’s right hand slip down below the book rack in front of us, feeling along the underside of the wood. I knew what he was looking for. His fingers moved along the grain until they stopped. I watched his shoulders go.
The initials were still there. Tim’s above Danny’s, cut into the underside with a Boy Scout knife, in letters you could read better with your fingers than your eyes. Nobody had ever sanded them out.
He bent forward and put his forehead down on the back of the pew in front of us, the way the old women do for the prayer of confession. I put my hand between his shoulder blades. I felt his breath catch under my palm, and I kept my hand right where it was.
I could not tell you one word of the sermon. Doris told me later that it was good.
When it came time for the passing of the peace, Pastor Henning said the words the way he always does. “Let us offer one another signs of reconciliation and love.” Danny turned in the pew. He held out his hand to me.
“Peace be with you, Mom.”
“And also with you,” I said, and the words came out in pieces.
He turned around then, because manners are manners, and held his hand out to the pew behind us. Doris took it in both of hers.
“Peace be with you, Daniel Kuhlman,” she said, using his whole name, in a voice that wobbled. “We kept it warm for you.” I noticed that. I did not understand it. I put it away with a lot of other things that morning.
We sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” to close. Danny did not pick up a hymnal. On the second verse a low bass came up out of him that I had last heard in the youth choir in 1981, a little rusty at the bottom, like a gate that has not been opened in a while.
I closed my eyes and let it go by me.
Nobody made a fuss. I want to say that for the people of Verdell United Methodist. When the benediction ended they came by slowly, one at a time, and said nothing large. A small church knows how to be quiet when it matters. The questions come later, over casserole.
Eleanor Voss was waiting at the door, Clarence’s youngest daughter, eighty-four now, with a cane and a good wool coat. She took Danny’s hand and held it.
“Daddy talked about that day until he died,” she said. “He never forgave himself. He never knew what to say to you.”