The Prayer Card Behind the Baseboard

I learned the names that fall. Everyone in a town the size of ours knows who bought what, and it did not take any detective work. Arden ran the lumberyard. Edna kept bees.

I started walking by on Sunday afternoons, after church and dinner, when my mother lay down with a cold cloth over her eyes. I did not stop. I stood on the far sidewalk under the mulberry tree, and I said their names in my head, Arden and Edna, and I said a prayer for them, and I went home.

Mother found out in the second year. I came in one Sunday with my cheeks red from the wind, and she was sitting at the table with her mending, and she looked at me for a long while.

“You’ve been over to Cedar Street,” she said.

“Yes, Mother.”

“Did you knock?”

“No.”

“Good.” She bit off a thread. “We don’t look in other people’s windows, Delma. That house is theirs now. It was good to us, and we leave it be.”

I understood her. She was a proud woman, and it had cost her to hand over that key. I thought she was telling me to stop.

But after a moment, she said, without looking up, “You can pray for the roof over them, though. Nobody ever said a thing against that. A house that’s been prayed in is never empty.”

So I kept on. I never knocked, not once in sixty years. That was the bargain I made with my mother, and I kept it long after she was gone.

I started a notebook at sixteen, the first year I had my driver’s license. A spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen, the date and the name, and under it, whatever I was asking.

I have filled four of them since. They sit in the cedar chest at the foot of my bed, with a rubber band around each one.

The first names in the first notebook are Arden and Edna, and the first thing I asked for was a baby.

I knew, because the whole town knew, that Edna had lost two before they ever came to Quincy Flats, and that she did not talk about it. I saw her on the porch in the afternoons, sitting very straight with her hands in her lap, looking at the road.

So I asked. I did not know how to ask for it properly. I wrote a baby for Edna in my round hand, and I asked for it every Sunday for five years.

In April of 1971, I drove past on a warm afternoon, and there was a white wicker bassinet on the porch with a yellow blanket in it. Edna was sitting beside it, with her hand on the side, rocking it gently with two fingers.

I parked the car and I cried until I could see to drive again.

Her name was Lorraine. She is fifty-five now, and she teaches school in Sioux Falls, and I have never said a word to her about any of this.

Next was Elvin and Joan, who bought the house in 1979 and had twin boys. In 1986, when the farm crisis was eating through our county like a grass fire, Elvin was laid off from the elevator, and I watched him sit in his truck in that driveway at four in the afternoon, not going in.