The Key The Pastor Handed Me

The pledge card in the box

We belonged to Shiloh Union Church, a plain white clapboard building on County Road 9, two miles from our back gate.

My people had gone there since before the road was paved. Raymond’s mother was buried in the little cemetery behind it, under a cedar tree she had planted herself as a girl.

That spring, before the drought, the church had launched a drive to finish the fellowship hall. For years the congregation had made do with a half-poured foundation and a tarp, eating potlucks in the sanctuary with card tables jammed between the pews.

Pastor Harmon, who was younger then, maybe forty, had stood up one Sunday and asked every family to pledge what they could toward finishing it. A kitchen, a real floor, a roof that did not leak on the deviled eggs.

Raymond and I talked it over on the drive home and pledged forty dollars a month. We signed a card and dropped it in the wooden box by the door, the way everyone did.

Forty dollars a month does not sound like anything now. I have grandchildren who spend that on lunch without thinking.

But by that October, with the crop gone and the operating note at the bank coming due and a propane bill I did not know how we would pay, forty dollars a month was a mountain Raymond and I could not climb.

We fell behind in September. We fell further behind in October.

I would sit in the pew on Sunday morning and look at that wooden box by the door and feel my face go hot. I knew exactly what we had promised. I knew exactly what sat empty.

It was not that anyone would have blamed us. Half the church was behind that year, and Pastor Harmon never once read the giving numbers from the pulpit or shamed a soul.

It was that I had signed my name. Raymond and I had put our word in that box. And I could not stand to be the family whose word sat there hollow while other people’s dollars built that hall.

Pride, my mother would have called it. Maybe it was. But it is the kind of pride that makes a person get up and do something instead of lying down, so I have never been able to make myself fully ashamed of it.