The Prayer God Answered with My Daughter

“Thank You for the girl who was in the other chair all those years while I was asking You for someone who was somewhere else. Thank You that You were patient with me, and did not take offense, and waited until I could hear my own daughter on the radio. Thank You that she is exactly the one You meant. Forgive me for telling You who to send. Thank You that You worked around me.

“And bless Hollis, Lord. Whatever You made him for, let him have it. Amen.”

When I finished, I felt lighter than I had felt in two years. It was the feeling of setting down a sack of feed I had carried so long I had mistaken it for part of my own back.

That evening I called Hollis. He had flown in the morning after the hail, as promised, stayed two days, washed up with his sister, and driven back to the airport with his face closed and quiet. I had not said a word to him then, because I was not sure of my own words. Now I said it all.

Now I said it all. I told him about the table. I told him Dorene wanted the farm, and that I was going to see she got it, and that I had quit praying for what I had prayed for. “I thought you should hear it from your mother,” I said.

He did not say anything for so long I thought the connection had failed again.

Then he said, “Mama. Are you sure?”

“I am sure.”

I heard him breathe in, and breathe out. It was not anger. It was not hurt, either, and I had braced for both. It was more like a man setting something down.

“Can I come in October?” he said. “I’d like to come home when it’s all signed. I’d like to sit at the table.”

“Of course you can, son,” I said. “You never needed to ask.”

“I know,” he said. “Mama, I’ll see you then.”

We signed on the last Friday of August, at the bank in town. Ambrose, who sits on the bank board as well as running the scale, had spread the papers on the long oak table in the back room, eleven pages with yellow tabs where the signatures went. Dorene had given notice at the elevator that week. The arrangement was simple. She would buy the ground from me over twenty years, at what Stan and I had always figured the place was worth, no more and no less. I would keep the house and the garden and the right to die in my own bed. Pastor Sherwin sat in the corner to witness, and brought a pie.

Dorene’s hands shook so hard on the first signature that Ambrose had to steady the paper. When it was done, my daughter looked up and said, in a small voice, “Mama, is this real?”

“It’s real, honey.”

She cried then, at a bank table, with Ambrose studying the ceiling and Sherwin politely examining his pie. I held her until she stopped. I said what I had learned to say. “You are the farmer, Dorene. You were the farmer when you were nine. I am sorry it took me so long.”

That night I wrapped the eleven notebooks in dish towels and set them in the cedar chest, with a note on top that said, Treva’s prayers, 22 years, answered. And I started a twelfth notebook. At the top of the first page I wrote a name.

Dorene.

Beneath it I wrote: Thank You.

That was all. It is all I write, most mornings now.