Who Plowed the Church Lot Before Dawn
He did not cry. That was not that kind of room. He sat very still and looked at Ardis a long time, and then he reached out with one hand, slowly, and laid it over hers, and left it there.
“Now,” he said eventually, to me. “You’ll want to know what happens next. I have thought it over while I was waiting for the ten minutes.”
“It’s your lot,” I said. “Whatever you say.”
“It isn’t my lot. It’s the Lord’s. I’ve been borrowing it.” He almost smiled. “Do they know who’s been doing it?”
“No, sir. Only that somebody has, and that he’d rather not be thanked. And that this morning nobody did. We shoveled it ourselves.”
“Who did the steps?”
“My husband. With a pail.” I thought. “He says he did it wrong.”
“Too thick,” Lyle said.
“How did you know?”
The corner of Lyle’s mouth went up. It was not quite a smile. It was the place where a smile had once been kept.
“It’s the first mistake everybody makes,” he said. “You throw it like you’re seeding a field. It wants to go on like you’re feeding chickens.”
“That is what I always thought it looked like,” I said. “Chickens. I never said.”
“Then somebody noticed.”
He looked at the window. “Here is what I’d ask. Ardis may tell Pastor Tim. She may tell the church, if she thinks it’s good for the church, because I’m no hand at telling it. But I’ll ask this: nobody comes out to 63rd Avenue with a casserole. Nobody makes a speech. Nobody says thank you.” He lifted a finger. “I couldn’t stand there and take it. I would go in my barn and not come out.”
“We can manage that,” I said. “We are Lutherans.”
“I know it. I’ve watched you not say things for fifty-four years.” It was a short dry cough, and in other circumstances it might have been a laugh. “And if I come, which I’m not promising, and don’t you tell Ardis I said it…”
“I heard you,” Ardis said.
“If I come, there’s one thing they could say. They could say good morning. As they would to anybody.”
“Good morning,” Ardis said. “I think we can manage that.”
The news got through Zion Lutheran in two days, the way water goes through cloth, one kitchen at a time. There was no meeting and no committee. By Wednesday, I think, every household knew, and the strange thing was how few people said anything at all.
When I stopped by on Thursday to see about the furnace room, six people had already been to the church and gone, and each had left something on the front step.
A pan of kuchen under foil. A pan of scotcheroos. A pair of knit gloves, very large. A bag of rock salt that someone had tied a ribbon around, which I decided was the funniest gift I had ever seen. Nobody wrote the word “thank” on anything. The gloves had a tag in a child’s pencil that said only, “For the hands.” The kuchen had a note on the foil in Ardis’s writing: “Good morning, Lyle.”
Frank went out to 63rd Avenue on Friday with Dwight Mohr, to see about the truck. Lyle had asked three times whether anyone had plowed the church lot. They had sent him from Jamestown to the rehab wing at the Nordby care home to learn the walker, which he did not like, and the nurse told Ardis he kept asking about the weather.