The Prayer He Finally Asked For
I prayed for him. Just a few words, in the cold wind, with the dirt not yet thrown.
Let him bow his own head. Please.
The next day was Sunday, and I sat in the pew behind him by the knocking radiator, and when the pastor said, “Let us pray,” I looked at the gray stubble on the back of my husband’s neck, and I said it again.
I have said it every Sunday since.
Not aloud. Never aloud.
I said it on Christmas Eve with the candles lit and on Easter morning with the lilies, and on the Sunday after Sheryl’s wedding. I said it once in a snowstorm when only eleven of us made it, and Arlen sat by the radiator with snow melting off his shoulders and his arms crossed.
Thirty-four years of Sundays. I figured it up one night. It comes to about seventeen hundred.
You may ask why I never just asked him. I did. One time.
It was April, the spring after my mother died. We were at the kitchen table. Supper was over. I put my hand on his and said, “Arlen, would you pray with me? Just a minute. Just out loud, or in your head, I don’t care.”
He took his hand back.
He stood up and carried his plate to the sink and rinsed it. He took his cap off the hook. And he went out to the barn, and he slept on the cot out there that night and the night after that. He came in on the third morning, ate his eggs, and said, “Pass the salt.”
I did not ask him again. It was not the kind of door you could push. All I could do was stand outside it and keep the porch light on.
So I sat behind him on Sundays and said my prayer to the back of his head.
And he never bowed.
The hospital bed came on Tuesday at ten in the morning, on a truck from the hospice supply.
Two young men set it up in the front room by the south window, where my mother’s china cabinet used to stand. They brought the oxygen machine too, a gray box that made a sound like a sleeping animal. A hose ran from it to Arlen’s nose, and he looked at the hose like it owed him money.
The nurse came an hour later. Her name was Roxanne Kincaid, and she was somewhere near fifty-five, solid and quick, with short red hair going gray and a canvas bag over her shoulder that said Kincaid Angus on it.
“You raise cattle?” Arlen said before she had her coat off.
“My dad does. Down by Rensselaer. I grew up pulling calves in February.”
Arlen studied her. “Then you know what it is to stand in a barn at three in the morning.”
“I know it very well, Mr. Lorenz.”
“Hmm,” Arlen said, which from him was a handshake.
She listened to his chest and checked his ankles, which were swollen like loaves. Then she set a small white box on the top shelf of our refrigerator.
“This is your comfort kit,” she told me, not him. “If he gets short of breath or restless, you call me, day or night, and I’ll walk you through it. Don’t wait until it’s bad. Don’t be brave.”