The Prayer He Finally Asked For
The Sunday before Arlen died, Warren Teel came out to the house.
He came alone, after church, in his gray suit, with a bulletin folded in his breast pocket. He is eighty-one. He has ushered at Pinkney Methodist for fifty-six years and drives the same Oldsmobile he bought in 1998, and he stood in the front room doorway with his hat against his stomach like a man at a depot.
“I won’t stay,” Warren said.
“Sit down, Warren,” said Arlen. His voice was down to a thread, but it carried. “You’ve been standing up in that church for fifty-six years.”
Warren sat on the very edge of the couch.
“I brought you today’s,” he said. He took out the bulletin and unfolded it and smoothed it on his knee. “You’ve had one every Sunday since I started handing them out. I never knew if you read them.”
“I read them.”
“Well.” Warren cleared his throat. “I left the one at the end of the table for you. The times you weren’t there. Sick, or the hay. In case.”
“I never missed but four Sundays,” Arlen said.
“I counted,” Warren said. “It was five. You had the flu in ‘oh-nine.”
The two of them looked at each other. Then Arlen said, “Read me the hymns.”
Warren read them off the bulletin, one at a time, in his flat usher’s voice. The opening hymn, the hymn of preparation, the closing. When he got to the last one, Arlen said, “That’s only two verses. They always skip the third.”
“Pastor skipped it.”
“It’s the best verse.”
“I know,” said Warren Teel. “I told him.”
They sat there another twenty minutes. At the end Warren folded the bulletin in half and in half again, small and tight, and laid it on the tray table next to the pencil. Then he put his hat on, looked at the floor, and said, “Arlen. It was an honor.” He shook the hand on the blanket, one short pump, and went out to the Oldsmobile without waiting for an answer.
That night Arlen woke me at eleven. I thought it was the pain. Roxanne had said to watch for it.
“Lo. Say the short one.”
“Which?”
“The one Mama taught. I think I’ve got it. Say it with me.”
I took his hand.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I said, and he said it with me, quiet, the words coming a half beat behind mine, and then he was not behind me anymore. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
He had it. All four lines. He let go of a long breath.
“There,” he said. “Second line and all.”
“Yes.”
“Is the stock fed?”
“Darrell fed them at five.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
He slept. That was the last I heard him say.
I stayed in the recliner. Some time before dawn, the sound in the room changed, and I did not know at first what was different. Then I knew. The oxygen machine was still humming. It was the only thing in the house making a sound. I got up and went around the bed and put my hand on the switch and turned it off.