The Man I Prayed for by Name

The Cross on Township Road 41

He came to the pantry the next Thursday, and stopped at the foot of the stairs with his hat in hand, waiting, as if I might change my mind overnight. I crossed the basement and handed him his canvas bag myself.

“Eggs on top,” I said. “Same as always.”

He nodded. His eyes were red.

At the end of the month he brought his mother to church. She was a small, white-haired woman in a wheelchair with a blanket over her knees, and her left hand did not open fully. He wheeled her to the third pew. After the service she took hold of my wrist with her good hand. She had a surprisingly strong grip.

“I am Lucille,” she said, the words coming slowly, one by one, like stones across a creek. “I was at that hearing. I held his arm. You walked out into the hall.”

“I did.”

“I have prayed for you every night. Fifteen years. I did not know your name. I said, ‘Lord, be with the sister.'”

I knelt by the wheelchair, which is not easy for a woman of seventy with a bad hip, and took her hand in both of mine. “Then I’m glad to know who was holding me up,” I said.

The second Saturday in December, he drove me to Township Road 41. I had said only, at the church kitchen sink, that I could not bear to go to the curve alone. He set down his dish towel and said, “I haven’t been either. I could take you. If you wanted somebody to go with.”

A thin snow was starting. He drove the speed limit exactly. I watched his knuckles on the wheel go white around the creamery and loosen again past the Miller bridge, and I said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the road was not already saying.

There is a white cross at the edge of the ditch, small and plain. Elton and two men from the church put it up the week after the funeral, and I had never been able to look at it. We stood in front of it on the shoulder of a township road in the falling snow, with my sister’s name on the crossbar in Elton’s careful paint.

I had brought a small pot of chrysanthemums. He knelt in the gravel, as he had once before, and set them at the foot of the cross. When he stood, he said quietly, “Do you want to say it together?”

So we did, out loud, in the snow. “Dorothy,” we said. “Dorothy Ann.”

He added, “And Verna.”

I added, “And Royce. And Lucille.”

The snow came down on the cross and the flowers, and I stood there beside a man who had been a pair of headlights in my mind for fifteen years and who had turned out, in the end, to be someone who knelt in the gravel and stayed.

I still keep the index card in my Bible, at the verse about debts. I have not taken it out to pray since that Thursday. What I say now at the kitchen window is not what I said for fifteen years. I say thank you. I say Nadine’s name, and Elton’s, and his, and his mother’s. I say, “Lord, keep him off the road at night,” and I mean it, and I do not hate myself for it anymore.

I asked only to be made able. I asked for a feeling, a thing I could reach for. What God gave me was a place at a table and a man carrying crates and a note in pencil in my husband’s hand telling me to ask anyway.

That is what I would say to anyone who has a name on a card and a prayer that has gone unanswered for years. It may be that the answer is already coming up the stairs. It may be carrying an empty bag. It may need you only to say, when the time comes, “Hold your bag open, please,” and to fill it slowly, one item at a time, with the eggs on top.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.