Who Plowed the Church Lot Before Dawn
“I did not sleep, I swear on the Book,” Elias would say, and his voice would drop. “At ten after six, the lot was plowed. Around me. A neat clean circle around that Oldsmobile, and not one track leading in or out. I think whoever it was looked at an old man asleep in a car, and plowed carefully around him, and let him be.”
He told it like a ghost story. I thought, even then, that it was the gentlest ghost story I had ever heard.
The very next Sunday, Pastor Rieger stood up after the second hymn. He had been with us eleven years by then, and he spoke slowly, so that people had to lean in. He did not name Elias.
“Whoever he is, he does not want to be found,” Pastor Rieger said. “We can be a congregation that hunts a man down to thank him whether he likes it or not, and I believe that would be an unkindness dressed up as gratitude. Or we can take the gift the way it was handed to us. A gift you chase is a gift you scare off. So I am going to ask us to let the man alone.”
We did. Nobody put a notice in the Nordby paper, and nobody asked at the feed store, and nobody sat up in the lot again. You do not shine a lamp in the face of somebody who has chosen to give in the dark.
Frank was the one person at Zion who actually read that lot. He would stand at the fellowship hall window on a snowy Sunday with his coffee going cold and study it like other men study a ball game.
“Straight blade,” he’d say. “Six and a half foot, an old Western. Lifts the edge at the seams so he doesn’t gouge the patches. See how he lays the windrow soft against the flower bed? That’s so it doesn’t snap the petunia stakes. That is a man who has been doing it fifty winters.”
“Could you tell who it is by the work?” I asked him once.
“I can tell you who it isn’t.” He drank his coffee. “Whoever he is, he never bought a cutting edge from me. I stock that size. In all my years at the counter nobody ever once asked.”
That was as close as anyone came.
We shoveled for an hour that December morning: Frank, old Dwight Mohr, who is eighty-one and should not have been shoveling, Elliott Vickers, who is sixteen and came in his father’s barn coat, and Pastor Tim Olmsted, who is thirty-nine and had worn his good shoes. We started the service twenty minutes late. There were thirty-eight of us, with our boots still wet.
I kept watching Ardis.
She sat in her wheelchair in her spot under the east window with her gloves in her lap. She did not sing. She looked at the stained-glass lamb over the choir loft, and I saw her press her hands flat under her pocketbook to quiet them. I had known Ardis my whole life. I had never seen her hands shake.
I thought it was the cold. I thought she was ninety-four.
After the benediction, I went to take her chair down the hall to the fellowship hall coffee, and Judy Kjellberg stopped us in the vestibule with her purse on her arm.