The Key The Pastor Handed Me

The crop came back and I never stopped

The rain came back the next spring. The crop in 1987 was a good one, and the one after that was better.

We caught up on the propane and the bank note and, a little at a time, we caught up on our pledge to the fellowship hall too. They finished it that summer. I ate scalloped potatoes off a real counter in a room I had scrubbed in the dark, and I never said a word about it to anyone.

Here is the part I cannot fully explain. The money came back, and I kept cleaning.

Dewey took another job over in Carbon Hill, and the church needed someone, and by then the building and I understood each other. So I just kept the key and kept the bucket and kept the Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday nights, only now I did some of it in the daylight because there was no longer a reason to hide.

I cleaned that church through my children growing up. I cleaned it while my daughter took her first communion and while my son got married under those same beams.

I cleaned it the week we buried Raymond.

He died in the winter of 2009, his heart, in his sleep, in the chair by the window where he used to watch the fields. I was sixty then. We had been married thirty-nine years.

I stood in the front of Shiloh Union and said goodbye to my husband in a sanctuary whose every pew I had waxed with my own hands, and there was a strange comfort in that I have never been able to put into words for anybody.

After the funeral the church offered to hire a service to clean, to take it off my shoulders now that I was alone. I told them no. I told them it kept me moving, and that was true, but it was not the whole truth.

The whole truth was that cleaning that church was the one promise I had ever kept all the way, and I was not about to let go of the one thing in my life that had come out even.