The Key The Pastor Handed Me

The nights in the sanctuary

I started the third week of October 1986.

Three nights a week, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, I would wait until Raymond’s breathing went slow and even, and then I would ease out of bed and dress in the dark.

I kept a bucket, a jug of Murphy Oil Soap, a tin of paste wax, and a stack of rags in the trunk of the Buick. I drove the two miles with my headlights cutting across the harvested fields and let myself in the side door by the furnace room.

I never turned on the big overhead lights. I did not want a passing car to see the church lit up at midnight and worry there was a prowler. I worked by the one bulb over the stove and a flashlight I propped on the windowsills.

I waxed the pews first, every one of them, running the rag along the curved backs where forty years of shoulders had worn the varnish thin.

I scrubbed the kitchen until the old enamel sink went white again. I cleaned the little bathroom. I ran a rag along every windowsill in that sanctuary until the whole room smelled like lemon oil and paste wax.

The hardest thing was the floor in front of the altar, where the wood had gone gray from a hundred years of feet. I got down on my knees with a bucket and worked it a square yard at a time, back toward the door, the way my mother taught me so you never wax yourself into a corner.

There is a particular quiet in a country church at one in the morning that I have never found anywhere else. The furnace ticking as it cooled. A branch against the east window. The old building settling on its foundation like a man easing into a chair.

I talked to the Lord out loud some of those nights, because there was no one to hear me think I had lost my mind. I told Him about the corn and the note and the propane. I told Him I was not asking for a miracle, just for the strength to keep my own word, which seemed like a thing a person ought to be able to manage without special help.

One Saturday in November it snowed four inches while I was inside, and when I came out at two in the morning the whole county was white and silent under the moon and my car was the only dark thing in it. I sat behind the wheel a minute before I started it, and I felt, for the first time all that terrible year, something close to peace.

I would be home by two or three in the morning, my knees aching, my hands cracked from the soap, and I would lie down next to Raymond and he would never stir.

He thought I was sleeping poorly because of the money. In a way I was. I just did my worrying on my knees in the Lord’s house instead of in my own bed.

I kept a little notebook in the glove box where I wrote down what I figured each night’s work was worth, at the twenty dollars a week the church would have paid Dewey. It was a foolish, private thing. But by Christmas my notebook said I had made good on the whole fall’s pledge and then some, and I let myself believe it, and it got me through.

I thought I was alone out there. That was the whole point of it, that no one would ever see, that it would be between me and God and my own conscience.

I was not alone even one of those nights. I just did not know it for forty years.