The Prayer I Had to Take Back

I lay there something under an hour. It felt like a day. My teeth chattered and then they stopped chattering, and a farm wife knows what it means when the shivering quits.

I said, “Ray.” Not loud. The way you say a name to see if someone is in the next room.

I said, “Lord, I’m afraid.”

That was the first honest thing I had said to Him in a year.

I heard the engine before I saw the truck. It came up the lane too fast for the gravel, and a door opened, and I heard quick boots, and then the boots stopped dead. For a second there was no sound in all of Carrollton Draw but a cat chewing on something.

Then Garrick was on his knees beside me with his face a foot from mine. It was white around the mouth. His eyes went over me once, fast, the way you look at something you are afraid is broken, and I watched him decide exactly what to do.

“Mrs. Wahl. Don’t move. I’ve got you.”

He had his canvas coat off before I answered. He laid it over me to the chin, then fetched a flannel jacket and a moving blanket from the truck and tucked them down against the gravel on either side so the cold could not get under.

He dialed 911 and laid the phone on my chest on speaker and gave the address without asking me for it. Then he took off his glove and put his bare hand over mine, which was blue. He asked my name and the date, and I told him, and he said that was right as though it were a great accomplishment. The ambulance would be twenty-two minutes. He counted every one of them.

I said, “You came by awful early.”

He did not answer at first. Then he looked at the broken tread, and back at me, and said so low I nearly lost it in the wind, “Your step.”

I closed my eyes.

I did not know until later that he had loaded the new lumber the night before, meaning to come at first light and put in a good tread and leave without knocking, so I would never have to say yes to him. Lavon told me afterward what he said when she asked why. “If I ask again, she’ll say no again, and it’ll cost her something. So I’ll just come at daylight and take the cost on myself.”

I only knew, lying there, that the man I had refused was kneeling in the frost with the very board in his truck that might have kept me out of the dirt.

“Mrs. Wahl. Look at me. Stay with me. Tell me a hymn.”

The first thing in my head was not a hymn. It was the Psalm I had read at six o’clock that morning, with a fried egg on the plate beside me. “The Lord is my shepherd.”

“I shall not want,” Garrick said.

I opened my eyes.

I had never listened to that voice before. It was low and a little rough, like a gate that wants oil. He said the Psalm one line at a time, the way you walk someone across ice. He got the second line crooked and corrected himself, like a man who learned it from a person and not from a page.

“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.”

“He leadeth me beside the still waters,” I said.