The Prayer He Finally Asked For

On the Tuesday, Arlen said, “Lo, I need you to go out to the shop.”

“What for?”

“Top shelf. Over the vise. There’s a Purina feed sack folded up with something in it. Bring it to me.”

I went out in the cold. The shop smelled like oil and cut metal and old wood. Over the vise there was a high wooden shelf, and on it sat a bundle wrapped in a feed sack and tied with baler twine. I carried it in, and I set it on his lap, and Sheryl untied the knot because my fingers would not.

It was a hymnal.

A black cloth Methodist hymnal, the 1966 kind, with a cracked spine and a stamp inside the cover that said Property of Pinkney Methodist Church. Withdrawn. The church had put its old books in the rummage sale the spring they bought the new ones. I remembered that sale. I remembered Arlen coming home from it, in 1992, with a box of canning jars and nothing else.

“Fifty cents,” he said. “I told you the jars were two dollars.”

I opened it.

The margins were gray with pencil. Next to the title of every hymn there were tally marks, little upright strokes in fives with a slash through them, the way you count bales on a barn wall. Some hymns had a mark or two. Some had whole rows of them. Next to “Holy, Holy, Holy” there were nineteen. Next to “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” there were twelve. Next to “It Is Well with My Soul” the marks ran off the edge of the margin and started again along the bottom.

I looked at Arlen.

“Warren hands you the bulletin at the door,” he said. “I took it home in my coat. Sunday after dinner I’d go out to check the heater in the stock tank and I’d sit in the shop with the bulletin and the book, and I’d find the hymns and read them. And make a mark.”

“Read them,” I said.

“I couldn’t sing in there with you all listening. But I could read the words.” He was not looking at me. His eyes were on the book. “I figured if I couldn’t bow, I could at least know what was being said. I never was going to tell you.”

I thought of him alone in the shop with the radio off and the cold coming under the door, reading about God where nobody could hear. All those Sundays I’d thought he was shut up inside himself. And he had been in there the whole time, with the lamp lit.

“Which one do you want?” I asked, though I thought I knew.

“The one about the sea. I got that one down.”

So on a Tuesday afternoon in January, in the front room of our farmhouse, my husband and our daughter and I sang “It Is Well with My Soul” over a hospital bed. Arlen did not sing. He moved his lips. He had every word right.

When sorrows like sea billows roll, we sang, and I thought of a boy on a creek bank in the dark.

When we finished, he held out his hand for the pencil on the tray table. It took him a while. He made one stroke, slow and crooked, next to the title, and gave the pencil back.