The Jar on the Feed Store Counter

What I Carried on Saturdays

I am not a preacher. I am a feed store man and a deacon at Marlow First Church, which in a town our size means I fold the bulletins and run the sound board and carry the casseroles to the back door when the pastor’s wife has had a long week. I have no gift for prayer. What I have is a stool, a counter, a quiet hour, and the plain conviction that if somebody trusted me with a name, I owe it to them to say it and mean it.

You would think it gets easier. It does not. You come to know a town through its handwriting. I read names I would see on Tuesday in the checkout line with a gallon of milk, and neither of us would say a word, and I would think, I carried you Saturday. I will carry you again.

The boy Cody was in the jar again in the second year, in the hand of the woman who had come back. I read it out loud and prayed, and I will tell you I had no particular faith that morning. I was tired. I prayed anyway. Eight months later Gary, who runs the volunteer fire department, took that boy on as a junior firefighter, drove him to meetings, and gave him a pager and a reason to be home at night. I cannot say how a name in a pickle jar and a pager on a boy’s belt are connected. But I have noticed that when I pray for someone in this town, the answer usually walks in wearing somebody else’s boots.

That is what I believe about prayer after fifteen years of it. I do not think God hands out answers like feed. I think He hands out people.

There was a name that came in a shaky man’s hand, week after week for nine months, and the word was “Corinne.” She was the wife of Vern, who sold me seed wheat and sorghum for twenty-two years out of a warehouse in Lubbock, a big patient man in a feed cap. He came through the first Wednesday of every month, drank a cup of my bad coffee, and left. I had never once heard him say his wife’s name. Then the slips stopped, and I did not ask. About a year later Vern bought a dozen more bags than he needed and left a fifty-dollar bill under the cash register tray, and I understood that the news had turned.

I never said a word to him. He never said a word to me. That was the deal, and I was proud of it.

I never knew the whole of anything. I got the front edge of a story, the name, and then, if I was paying attention, the back edge: a boy with a pager, a man with a fifty-dollar bill. The middle I left to God.

But I will say one more thing, because it matters for what came after. I got proud of it. Not loud proud. I came to believe I was a man who could hold anybody’s trouble without flinching, who asked nothing and judged nobody and kept every confidence, and I told myself that was a kind of holiness.

It was hard to find out how much of it was the opposite.