The Key The Pastor Handed Me

What I had left to give

I lay awake a good many nights that October trying to find forty dollars where there were not forty dollars to find.

I sold a quarter of my laying hens to a woman in town. I sold the good canner my aunt had left me. I put the money toward the propane, because you cannot eat a pledge card and you cannot heat a house with one either.

The church came after the house and the seed corn and the taxes, in the honest order of things. I knew that. Raymond knew it too.

But knowing the order of your debts does not quiet the part of you that made a promise.

So one night, scrubbing my own kitchen floor at eleven o’clock because I could not sleep, it came to me plain as anything.

I did not have forty dollars. But I had two hands, and I had the hours after the farm went dark, and the church was paying a man named Dewey twenty dollars a week to clean the building on Saturdays.

If I cleaned it, Dewey did not have to be paid. If Dewey did not have to be paid, that was money the church kept. And in my own private arithmetic, which I never showed to another living person, that was my pledge, made good with the only currency I had.

It would not show up on any card. It would not go in any box. But I would know. The Lord would know. And my word would not be sitting empty anymore.

I had a key to the side door already, because I ran the Sunday morning nursery and had to get in early to turn on the little space heater before the babies came.

So I decided I would let myself in at night, after Raymond was asleep, and I would clean that church until my labor was worth what my crop should have been.