The Prayer God Answered with My Daughter

Hollis,

I am writing this in the truck so your mother won’t see. Do not let her talk you into the farm. I know she is praying for it and I know you are not made for it, and I won’t have you come home out of guilt and be miserable the way I would have been in an office. You go on and do your work. It is good work.

The farmer in this family is your sister. She has been since she was nine. She doesn’t know I know it, and I haven’t said so because the day I do your mother will have to look at it, and she is a good woman but she is slow to turn a thing over. I have decided to leave it to the Lord and to time. I think she will see it. She has the best heart I know.

I have quit asking God for a son-shaped answer. I started asking Him for a farmer. I think He has already sent one. Your mother is the best prayer I ever met, son. She just has the wrong name on the envelope.

When it’s all come right, take her to supper somewhere nice.

Dad

I read it twice. I read it a third time, and by then the page was too wet for me to see.

Stan had known.

For four years he had known, and he had left the Lord and time to do what he knew I would never have let him do by argument. He was right about me. I was slow. I had to get there walking.

I laughed, and then I could not stop. I put my head down on my arm on that old oilcloth, and Hollis came around the table and put his arms around me from behind. I said, “That old fool. That wonderful old fool. He prayed the right prayer all along.”

“He did,” Hollis said.

“And I was down here at five in the morning, asking for the wrong one.”

“No, Mama.” Hollis held on. “You asked for the right thing with the wrong name on it. You prayed that the land would be loved. And it will be.”

We were still there when the screen door banged. Dorene came in with the cold on her, pulling off her gloves, and stopped at the sight of us. She looked at her brother’s arms around me and her father’s letter on the oilcloth.

“What happened?” she said.

Hollis straightened, wiped his eyes, and laughed the way he used to laugh at nine. “Dorie, sit down. There’s something Dad wrote about you.”

I will not tell you the rest of what was said that afternoon. Some of it is theirs. I will tell you that my daughter read the letter standing up, with her hand on the chair back, and when she got to the part about a farmer she put her other hand flat over her mouth and sat down very slowly, as if the floor might tilt. At sundown Hollis walked out to the south pasture with her, and I watched them from the kitchen window, standing side by side at the fence in the last light, not saying anything at all.

I said a prayer at that window. It was short, and it was accurate.