The Pew My Son Swore Off
My son looked at her a long moment.
“He meant it kindly, Eleanor,” he said. “I should have let him.” And she put her free hand over her mouth.
Pastor Henning shook Danny’s hand with both of his. “Good to see you, Danny. It’s always open.”
“Yes, sir,” Danny said. “Thank you for leaving the door unlocked.” I remember thinking it was a strange thing to say, and then Danny was at my elbow.
“Mom, can I follow you home? There are some things I want to tell you. Pam and Kate and Josie are coming around one with a pie.”
“I’ll put the coffee on,” I said. It was all I could manage.
I live in a small white house two blocks from the church, on Maple Street, with a porch swing and Harold’s tomato cages still stacked against the shed. The oak table in my kitchen is the same one that sat by the east window out at the farm.
Danny sat in Tim’s old chair, which he had never in his life done. I don’t think he noticed. He turned his cup in his hands.
“I’m going to tell you this in order,” he said, “or I’ll lose my nerve.”
“Take your time.”
“It starts with Lyle.”
Lyle Brandt was Danny’s partner on the line crew for twenty-nine years, a big, dry, soft-hearted man who ate the same bologna sandwich every day of his working life. Pancreatic cancer, found in October. By January he was on hospice at home in Marshalltown. His wife Joann ran the lunch line at the elementary school and had been up with him nights for six weeks.
“So I told her, Joann, go sleep, I’ve got him. I took my vacation weeks and sat up with Lyle nine nights in February.”
On the sixth night, around two in the morning, with the oxygen machine humming in the corner, Lyle said, “My mother’s Bible is on the dresser. Read me the one about the hills.”
“I don’t read that, Lyle.”
“Read it anyhow. I’m dying. You can’t turn down a dying man. It’s in the rules.”
So Danny read Psalm 121. He said it fell open in his hand like something he’d always known the weight of. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” He read to the end. “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.”
Lyle lay a long time with his eyes closed.
“You read it like you’re mad at the man who wrote it,” he said.
“I’m not mad at Him,” Danny said. “I quit talking to Him.”
“Forty years is a long time to leave a man on hold, Dan.”
I laughed out loud at that, in my kitchen, and my son smiled with his mouth shut, the way his father did.
“And then Lyle asked me, finally. Twenty-nine years and he never asked once. He said, ‘Who did you lose?’ And I told him, Mom. All of it. Tim. The leg. The lungs. Clarence Voss and his hand on my shoulder. The steps. What I said to you. It took until about three, and Lyle just listened. When I finished he said, ‘That’s a lot to carry by yourself, buddy.'”
Lyle died on the nineteenth of February at ten minutes after four in the morning, with Danny holding his hand. Danny went and woke Joann.