Who Plowed the Church Lot Before Dawn
The woman looked at her a moment. Then she picked up the phone and spoke softly to somebody upstairs, and waited, and looked at the ceiling, and said, “Mm-hm. Mm-hm,” and set the phone down.
“He says to give him ten minutes to get presentable,” she said. “He’s sitting up in a chair already. The surgeon had him on his feet at six this morning, if you can believe it.”
We waited in a little room with a fish tank and a rack of pamphlets about hand-washing. Frank read a pamphlet on the care of the elderly diabetic from front to back as if there would be a test. I turned over what she had said in the truck, and what I knew, and tried to make a shape from it, and could not.
At ten minutes the nurse came for Ardis. Frank pushed her to the elevator, and I stayed where I was with a cup of bad coffee. Twenty minutes went by. I watched the fish. It was a long twenty minutes.
When the elevator opened again, Frank was alone, and he came toward me with his cap in his hands.
“She asked for you,” he said. “Not me. She said I could come up to the door, but she’d like you inside. She says he said it was all right. Only you.”
“What did she say about the church?”
“She said, ‘Not the church. Not yet.’ That’s how he put it.” Frank rubbed the back of his neck. “Janelle. I think I’m going to sit in the hall, and you’re going to go in.”
Room 214 had a window that gave onto a parking lot and a long white field beyond it.
He sat in a vinyl chair by the glass in a hospital gown, with gray wool pants pulled on under it and a gray wool cap pulled low. He was a big man, even sitting, stooped and bony, with hands in his lap that looked as if they could have lifted a tractor tire. His walker stood beside him, and a plastic cup of ice water on the tray.
On the tray table sat the other thing. It was an old lard pail, dented, with the handle worn smooth and a line of sand at the rim. It had been in his coat pocket, Ardis told me later, the way a man might have a Bible. When the ambulance came, he had asked for it to ride with him.
He looked at me.
I have thought since of what I expected. Anger, I suppose. A man who says, “Who sent you?” But the eyes that looked up at me from under that cap were pale blue and tired and curious. They were the eyes of a man who has watched, from the dark at the edge of a lot, a great many people walk into a building, and knew every one of them by their cars.
“Janelle Vance,” he said, slowly. His voice was gentle and old, and rough as a rasp, the voice of a man who has not said much to anyone in a long time. “You unlock the church.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You pull in at ten till eight. Silver Ford. You leave your lights on for a minute after you park, as if you were thinking something over.”
I did not know how to answer. I had not known anyone watched.