The Prayer He Finally Asked For

His voice was very even. It was the voice he used to read the cattle market.

“We were checking the fence along the low pasture, the one that backed up to Sugar Creek. I had a pocketknife. Alton wanted to see it. I told him no. He kept on, and I got tired of it, and I turned around to fix the staple. It was maybe a minute. Maybe two.”

“Arlen.”

“When I turned around, he was not there.”

I held his hand with both of mine.

“I ran the bank. I yelled until I had no voice. There was a plank over the narrow part where we crossed, and it was gone. I ran to the house and Mama was at the sink. She dropped a plate. I remember that. It didn’t break. It just rolled on the floor, around and around.”

He swallowed.

“Every farmer in the township came with flashlights. I wouldn’t leave the creek bank. Dad came back from town and walked right past me down to the water and stood in it to his knees till dark. I sat there all night in the cold, Lo. And I prayed.”

He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me for the first time.

“I prayed like I never prayed before or since. I said, Lord, if You’ll let him be alive, I will do anything. I’ll go to church every day. I’ll never be mean to him again. I’ll never touch that knife. I said please until I couldn’t say it anymore. I was twelve years old and I begged.”

“And in the morning.”

“They found him at noon. About a mile down. In a brush pile.”

There was nothing in this world to say, so I did not say anything.

“Nobody blamed me out loud,” Arlen said. “That was the worst of it. Mama set four plates for a month before she caught herself. Dad never said Alton’s name in the house again, and he never said mine much, either. We just went around it, the three of us, for the next thirty years.”

“Oh, Arlen.”

“So I figured it out,” he said, and his voice cracked for the first time, a little hairline in the glass. “I figured I got my one answer. I asked God for one thing, with everything I had, and the answer was no. And a man who gets his one answer has got no business asking for another. And I had no business sitting in His house with my head bowed like I had a right to.”

I felt something turn over in my chest, slow and heavy, like a stone being lifted off a field.

“That’s why,” I said.

“That’s why. It wasn’t spite, Lo. I know people thought it was. I wasn’t mad at Him. I figured I’d used it up. I figured if I bowed my head, it’d be a lie, because I’d be asking, and I’d already been told.”

“Then why did you come? Every Sunday for fifty-three years. If you thought you had no right.”

He was quiet.

“To be near it,” he said.

I put my forehead down on the rail of the bed, and I cried, and he let me. He just kept my hand.

When I looked up, the yellow square had slid a little way across the ceiling.