Who Plowed the Church Lot Before Dawn
“After the funeral I told the council I wouldn’t be back. I told Ardis she was never to say whose truck it was, if somebody ever saw it. I had it in my head that if they knew, they’d thank me. And once they thanked me, they would forgive me. I hadn’t earned that. I’d said ‘Leave it to me,’ and I slept. A man doesn’t get forgiven for that. A man gets to do the job until he’s not able. So I started with the lot the first snow after, and I never stopped, and I never went in.”
“Fifty-four years,” I said.
“Fifty-four years of Sundays. I stand at the edge of the lot with the light off and watch you all go in. I know who’s got a new baby. I know whose husband walked in with a cane this year that didn’t have one last. I know who’s had a hard winter by how long they sit in their cars.” He nodded slowly. “It’s more church than most people get.”
Ardis had her hands knotted in her lap.
“There’s the part he left out,” she said. “I told it to him upstairs before you came. I’ll say it again for you, Lyle, if you don’t mind.”
“Ardis told me something today I had not known,” Lyle said. “I’d as soon Janelle heard it the way I did.”
Ardis took a breath.
“I was in my kitchen at ten minutes after seven. I had rolls in the oven for the same breakfast. Marnie came to my back door in her blue coat with her pan. She said, ‘Aunt Ardis, don’t wake Lyle, he’s finally asleep, he was up all night with that heifer. Will you walk down with me? The road’s a sheet of glass.'”
Her voice was quite even.
“I looked at the oven timer. I had eleven minutes on those rolls. I thought, they will burn if I leave them. I said, ‘Go ahead, honey, I’ll catch you up.’ And she laughed, and went. I stood at my sink and watched her go down Third Street in the blue coat, one hand out for balance, and I turned back to my rolls.”
Nobody said anything. The radiator knocked.
“The rolls came out at twenty past. I put my coat on and went down the street with them in a towel. I got to the church at a quarter to eight, and the ambulance was backing up the drive.” She looked at her own hands. “I told the sheriff she’d gone ahead. I told Lyle in my kitchen after the funeral that she hadn’t wanted him woken. I never told anyone she asked me to walk. For fifty-four years I have gone to bed knowing I could have taken her arm.”
“Ardis,” Lyle said.
“Every time I tried to tell you, you stepped out of my kitchen. I took it to mean you knew, and held it against me, and I let it lie.”
“I did not know,” Lyle said. “I stepped out because I thought you were about to say it was not my fault, and I could not stand to be told.”
They looked at each other, two people at the end of a very long road. For a moment nothing at all happened.
“That road was glass that morning,” Lyle said at last. “Your knees were bad even then. You’d have gone down beside her, and there would have been two of you on the steps, and I’d have had Marnie and you both to carry.”
“That may be.”
“It’s so.” He rubbed his jaw with his big hand. “I’ve had it wrong a good while, Ardis. I thought it was mine and nobody else’s. I wouldn’t share it out.”