The Man I Prayed for by Name

Township Road 41

My sister Dorothy was four years older than me, and for most of my life I was a step behind her on every stair. We grew up in the same farmhouse outside Wren Creek, and when she lost her husband to a stroke at fifty-two, she moved into a little brick house two miles from mine so we could be, as she put it, “one phone call from a casserole.”

Everyone called her Nadine. She sang alto in the church choir for thirty-one years, slightly flat and with complete confidence. She worked in the school cafeteria and could tell you which children had stopped eating lunch the week their parents divorced. She drove a green Buick that smelled of peppermints and wet hymnals. She was fifty-nine years old.

On Thursday, the fifteenth of October, 2009, Nadine went to choir practice, as she had every Thursday for decades. She left the church at about twenty to eight. It was full dark. She took Township Road 41, the way she always did, past the old creamery and around the long curve before the Miller bridge.

A pickup truck came around that curve from the other direction and crossed the center line.

The deputy who came to my door at nine o’clock was a boy I had taught in Sunday school. He stood on my porch with his hat in his hands and could not get the sentence started, so I finished it for him. “It’s Nadine, isn’t it,” I said.

The driver was thirty-four years old. He had worked a double shift at the grain terminal, the second one because another man had called in, and he had been awake, the report said, for about twenty-two hours. He had not been drinking. He was not on his phone. He had simply closed his eyes on a curve for a second or two, the way tired people do on every road in this country every night of the year, and most of the time nothing is there to be hit.

Nadine was there.

He broke his wrist, and that was all. He called for help from the ditch, and the deputies told us afterward that when they arrived he was kneeling on the gravel beside the Buick with his good hand through the broken window, holding my sister’s hand, and he would not stand until they promised him someone was coming. She was already gone. He did not seem able to hear that.

I did not want to know any of it. It is much easier to hate a pair of headlights than a man kneeling in the gravel.

There was a hearing. He pleaded guilty. I went for the first ten minutes and then I walked out into the hall and stood by a drinking fountain until my husband came to get me. I saw him only as a thin man in a borrowed jacket with a cast on one arm and an older woman holding his elbow. I never looked at his face. I looked at the cast.

A kind young woman from the prosecutor’s office came to the house about a month later and sat on my sofa with her knees together. She gave me an envelope.

“He asked that this be delivered to the family,” she said. “You don’t have to read it. Some families don’t.”

The handwriting on the front was square and careful and pressed down hard, as if he had been afraid the pen might skip. I put it in the kitchen drawer under the telephone book, beside my Christmas card list, and I closed the drawer.

It stayed there for fifteen years.