The Man I Prayed for by Name

The Prayer

I did not pray for him at first. For most of the first year I prayed about him, which is a different thing. I prayed that he would lie awake. I prayed that God would see to it he never again slept through a whole night, since my sister never again would sleep anywhere but the Wren Creek cemetery. I was fifty-five, I had been a church member since I was baptized at nine, and I prayed these prayers with total steadiness.

My husband Elton let me. He was a quiet feed-store man, forty years of back pain and good manners, and he never argued with a grieving person.

But one night the following autumn I stood at the sink with my hands in the water and said out loud, to nobody, “I will never be able to forgive that man.”

Elton was drying a plate behind me. He did not stop drying it.

“Then ask to be able,” he said.

“What?”

“You don’t have to be able to forgive him, Verna. Not tonight. Not this year. You’ve got to ask the Lord to make you able. That’s all anybody’s ever been required to do. Ask anyway.”

I was furious. I told him it was easy to say for a man who had not lost a sister. Elton set down the plate and said nothing, because it was true, and because he had the sense to know when to hold his tongue.

But it went in, the way things do when they are said without pushing.

The next morning I took an index card from the drawer where I kept my recipes. On the front I wrote his full name, because Elton said I was not allowed to call him “that man” in front of God anymore. Under the name I wrote one line: Lord, make me able to forgive him before I die.

Not that I had forgiven him. Not even that I wanted to. Just: make me able. As if I were asking for an extension on a loan.

That was exactly how it felt. In the sixth chapter of Matthew there is a line that says “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” and I had always read that as a thing about people who owed you. For fifteen years I read it the other way around. I did not think Royce owed me anything. His debt had been paid as far as it could be paid. It was I who owed. I owed the Lord a forgiving, and I did not have it to give, and I was asking Him to loan me the means.

I put the card in my Bible at that verse, and every morning after, while the coffee finished, I stood at the window over the sink and said the name out loud. Then I said the line. Then I put the card back.

In the second year I said it through my teeth. Around the fifth year I noticed that I had said the name and not felt the wall go up in my chest. By the eighth year I was praying for his mother, whom I had seen for ten minutes in a courtroom, because I thought somebody ought to. By the twelfth, I sometimes added, “and keep him off the road at night,” and I hated myself for saying it, and I said it anyway.

I told nobody but Elton. I did not want a prayer circle. It was a private account between me and the Lord.

Elton died four days after Christmas in 2017, a heart attack in the feed store parking lot, in the middle of loading a customer’s truck. For three months I could not get out of the house. Then Maren telephoned on a Wednesday in April and said she was short a person for Thursday afternoons. She did not say it would be good for me. She said she needed a pair of hands.

I have been in that basement every Thursday since. I did not know I was standing in the place the Lord had been saving.