The Prayer I Had to Take Back

The wedding was set for the second Saturday of the following June, under Ray’s apple trees. That Sunday I told Tobin on the phone that I was not at peace about it. “Mom,” he said, “I’ve been in that man’s company three times and I can’t find the thing you’re afraid of. What do you know?”

I could name a mailbox, fourteen years old. A runaway father. A truck. I could not name one thing I could stand behind.

“I just have a feeling,” I said.

“A feeling’s not a reason, Mom.”

I told him I had something on the stove. I did not.

By the end of September I had said my prayer so many times that I no longer heard it. It had gone smooth, like a stone in a creek. That is how a person can go on praying against the very thing God is building, and never know it.

Now I have to tell you about the step.

Ray built our porch steps the first summer we were married, out of fir, and they held through forty-some winters. But the second tread had gone soft at the nail line. I felt it give under my foot like a bad tooth every time I came down.

On the last Sunday in September, Garrick came up the steps ahead of Lavon and stopped. He rocked the second tread with his boot. He crouched and pressed his thumb into the edge, and the wood left a gray dent.

“Mrs. Wahl, this one’s going. Give me one afternoon. I’ve got the lumber at the shop.”

“Ray’s cousin’s boy is going to see to it,” I said.

There was no cousin’s boy. I made him up standing in my own doorway in my church shoes, because a man who fixes your porch has a claim on you. He has a right to be in your yard. And I had spent a year making certain that man had no rights in mine.

Garrick looked at me a moment. It was not hurt in his face. I could have borne hurt. It was patience, the way a man looks at a horse not ready to be led.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Well. Watch that second one.”

Then he went in and ate my pot roast and told Lavon about a deck he was building by the river.

That brings me to the first Tuesday in November, and the frost.

I get up at five. At a quarter to six I stood at the sink and said my prayer, with my lips and not my heart. Then I fried an egg, read my Psalm, fed the old collie, and at ten after six I put on Ray’s barn coat and carried a bucket of scraps out to the porch for the cats.

I had my left hand on the rail and the bucket in my right. I put my foot on the second tread, and it was gone.

It did not crack. It went like a trapdoor. The whole right side of me dropped through the gap and my hip took the edge of the third step with a sound I felt more than heard, like someone snapping green kindling over a knee.

I did not scream. No sound came out of me at all. The bucket rolled into the gravel and the cats came scattering after the scraps, and I lay across the steps looking at the sky, and understood with my whole body that I could not get up.

My phone was on the kitchen counter. I could see it through the window, a little rectangle by the coffee pot. Forty feet away. It might as well have been in Portland.