The Prayer He Finally Asked For
People said he was hard. I never argued, because it was true. He did not hug. He did not say “I love you,” or only in the dark, so quiet I had to hold my breath to be sure I had heard.
But Connie at the church once asked me, “Lo, how do you live with a man like that?” and the answer is that she did not know the other half.
Every winter, the widows in our township had their driveways plowed before they woke up. Mrs. Updike out on Pike Lane had her propane tank filled every October for eleven years and thought it was a church program. When the Holbrooks’ barn burned, forty bales of hay showed up in their lot overnight, and the tire tracks went home to our place.
Arlen did all of that after dark, so nobody could thank him.
That is the kind of hard he was. He would give you the coat off his back, but he would not stand there and let you say a word about it.
The one thing he would not do was bow his head.
I grew up in that Methodist church. My mother played the organ there thirty years. When I married Arlen in 1973, I was nineteen and he was twenty-two, and he said his vows in a voice like gravel. He did not look up at the cross.
I thought he was nervous. I thought we had time.
He came with me to church after that, every Sunday. I say it to anyone who calls him a godless man. He drove me. He sat through the whole hour. He never once left early.
But he picked a pew, the fifth from the front on the north side, against the wall, right beside the radiator that knocked all through the sermon, and he wanted the pew empty around him. So I sat in the one behind. And for the entire hour, while the congregation bowed for the opening prayer and the offering prayer and the benediction, Arlen sat with his arms crossed and his chin level, looking at the back of the pew in front of him.
He did not sing. He did not take the bread on communion Sundays. He let the plate go by him, and when Warren Teel held it out, he gave a short nod, as if to say, I see you, but no.
For nineteen years, I figured he would come around on his own. I was patient. I was young and sure of things.
In January of 1992, my mother died.
She went quick, in her sleep, at seventy-one. The ground was frozen so hard the men from the township road crew had to bring a torch and a jackhammer to open it, in the cemetery behind that same church. All sixty or so of us bowed at the grave.
I opened my eyes and looked across it, and there was Arlen. He had his hat in his hand, which was the one concession. His head was up. His arms were crossed.
I thought: He cannot even do it for her.
I was so angry, and so tired, and so full of grief that I stood at my own mother’s grave and did the only thing I could think of. I prayed. Not for my mother. She was in the arms of the Lord, and I knew it the way I knew my own name.