Who Plowed the Church Lot Before Dawn
At twenty to eight, Dwight’s old Mercury crept across the lot to the foot of the steps. Frank had come up beside me. Ardis was in the vestibule behind us with her hands in her lap, and Pastor Tim stood by the coat rack, saying nothing. That was all. Five of us. We had agreed on it the night before without ever saying so, and it was the one thing I am proud of in the whole business.
A walker came out of the car first, then a stooped, enormous, white-stubbled old man in a black suit that had clearly been bought in 1975. He took off his cap before he put his second foot on the ground. He stood looking up at the small white church with its green door and its stained-glass lamb.
“It’s smaller,” Lyle said at last, “than I remember.”
“It always is,” I said.
He put one hand on the iron rail and one on the walker, and took the first step. I did something I had not planned. I put out my arm, and he took it lightly, and we went up the steps of Zion Lutheran one at a time, with the sand crunching under our shoes.
At the third step he stopped and looked down.
“Too thick,” he said.
“Elliott knows,” said Frank, from behind us. “He’s working on it.”
At the top, he stood where the stoop ends and the door begins. He looked at the stone edge of it for a good while. His lips moved, once. I do not know what he said, and I did not want to. Then he nudged the sand at his feet with the toe of his black shoe, scattering it a little thinner, the way a man does in his own kitchen when he straightens a rug.
“Good morning,” Ardis said, from inside the door.
“Good morning,” said Lyle Engstrom.
I held the door.
He did not take a pew in the front. He asked Frank, quietly, whether there was a place by the door, and Frank showed him the last pew on the aisle, on the left, where a man can leave if he has to. He sat down in it with the walker folded beside him and the cap in his lap.
Then the others came in, thirty-six of them that Sunday, shaking snow off their coats. I had thought for a week about what would happen, and I had thought of every kind of terrible thing: a gasp, a hand lifted, a person who could not help it. What happened was that Abner Mohr, handing out bulletins at the door, said, “Morning, Lyle,” and held one out, and Lyle took it.
“Morning,” he said.
The next person said it, and the next. They said it the way you say it to a man across a fence, on the way to the mailbox, and they went on to their seats. A woman I had known all my life stopped, and for a moment I saw her hold back what she wanted to say, her whole face working at it. Then she patted the end of his pew twice, hard, as if it were a dog, and sat down in front of him.
Pastor Tim preached on the loaves and fishes. It was the text for the day, and he did not bend it by an inch. Lyle held the bulletin in both hands. He didn’t know when to stand, so he stood a half beat behind everybody else, and sat a half beat behind them, as if he were listening for the music to land.