The Prayer God Answered with My Daughter

I did not write in the notebook that morning. I closed it. I sat with my daughter until the percolator went cold, and then we walked out to the field to see what the hail had left. Forty acres of flattened straw. And the combine at the edge of the east section, its cab full of her thermos and her sweatshirt, the way a place looks when a person has made her home in it.

“What is it you want, Dorene?” I asked. I had never asked her before. I was seventy-two years old.

She stood a while with her hands in her coat pockets. A wind came off the pasture, smelling of rain.

“I want to farm it, Mama,” she said. “I’ve wanted to farm it since I was nine.”

I went back to the house alone, and I opened the closet door, and I sat on the floor with the eleven notebooks. I read my own prayers like a stranger reading someone else’s mail. Hollis. Hollis. Hollis. I was looking for something, and I did not know what, and I was nearly to the end of the fifth notebook when I found it.

It was a line from the spring of Dorene’s thirty-fourth year, at the bottom of the page under Hollis’s name. Dorene’s car needs a new belt. Lord, see to it.

I went through all eleven. Her name appeared fifty-one times in twenty-two years, always at the bottom of a page, and always about a belt, a cold, a fender bender on an icy road. It never once appeared beside the word farm.

I closed the closet, and I went to see Pastor Sherwin.

I found him in the sanctuary on a weekday afternoon, putting out the hymnals. Light came through the plain glass windows and fell on the front pews in long yellow bars. I sat down in the second row, and I said, “Sherwin, I think I’ve had my prayer answered, and I think I almost threw the answer away.”

He sat down beside me and waited. I told him all of it. The radio. The hail. The grate in the floor. When I finished, he looked at the cross on the wall for a time.

“You know,” he said finally, “there’s a story in First Samuel. The prophet goes to Jesse’s house to find the one God has chosen, and Jesse lines up seven sons, the tall ones, the strong ones, the ones he is proud of, and the Lord says no to every one. Samuel asks, ‘Are these all of your sons?’ And Jesse says, well, there’s the youngest, but he’s out with the sheep.” He turned to me. “Jesse had a child in the field and never thought to send for her. The Lord didn’t take it hard, Treva. He only waited until somebody asked.”

“I prayed so hard for the wrong thing,” I said. “Twenty-two years.”

“You prayed for what you loved,” Sherwin said. “That wasn’t wrong. It was only partial. God heard every word, and He answered the part of the prayer underneath the words, which was: Lord, let this land be loved. Let it be worked by someone who knows it.” He smiled. “He sent you the person who already did.”

I was quiet a long time.

“How do I fix it?” I asked.

“Well,” Sherwin said. “Start by saying it correctly.”

He left me there alone. I stayed in the second pew while the sun moved across the floor. I folded my hands and said it plainly, the way you would to a person sitting across the table.

“Lord,” I said. “Thank You for Dorene.