The Prayer He Finally Asked For
It was the first time I had ever heard him say that word. It came out rusty and a little too loud, like a gate that had not been opened in years.
I laid my head on his chest and listened to that failing, stubborn heart. Neither of us said another word. Outside, snow came down on the stubble field. When the sky began to go gray, we were both still awake.
On Friday morning, he said, “Call Steve.”
I called. Steve came in twenty minutes, in a sweatshirt, with his hair on end. He had not even stopped for his coat.
“Close the door,” Arlen said. “Lo, you stay.”
He told it again to Steve, start to finish. Steve did not interrupt. He sat close, elbows on his knees, and when Arlen got to the part about the answer being no, Steve just nodded slowly, like a man hearing a number he had expected.
“Was it a no?” Arlen said. “I want it straight. You’re the one with the training.”
“I don’t know that I have the training for that one,” Steve said. “May I tell you what I think?”
“That’s what you came for.”
“You were twelve years old,” Steve said, gently. “You were handed a job that no twelve-year-old can do. I can’t tell you why Alton was not saved that night. I don’t have an answer and I won’t pretend to. But you said you got your one answer. I don’t believe it was an answer. I believe it was a silence. Those are different things. A prayer on a creek bank at midnight doesn’t expire, Arlen. It’s been waiting on you.”
Arlen’s jaw worked.
“Here’s what I’d ask,” he said at last. “When it’s time, you tell it. Alton, the creek, all of it. I’ve carried it long enough without anybody saying his name.”
“I will.”
“And Lo’s prayer. If she says you can.”
“I’ll ask her,” said Steve.
He stayed another hour. They did not say anything else about God. Steve held the cup of water with the bent straw while Arlen drank, and then they argued about whether corn would go over four dollars by spring.
Sheryl got there Friday night, white-faced from the drive, and I told her on the porch about the two in the morning and the creek. She sat down on the step in her good coat.
“Thirty-four years, Mom. Why didn’t you ever say?”
“It wasn’t mine to say,” I told her. “It was his to answer.”
She went in and knelt by the bed in her coat, and Arlen put his hand on her hair.
“Are you scared, Dad?”
“Some,” Arlen said. “Less than Monday.”
He lasted eleven more days than that Thursday night, which Roxanne said was more than she’d have guessed and fewer than I wanted.
They were quiet days. The neighbors left things on the porch without knocking: soup, a coffee cake, a bag of oranges with a note that said Thinking of you both. Mrs. Updike from Pike Lane sat with me one afternoon and never said much. At the end she patted my knee and said, “He filled my propane for eleven years, you know. The whole county knew. We just never let on, because he’d have quit.”
I laughed until I cried over that.