The Prayer I Had to Take Back

I let him change the subject. Underneath the wall I heard something that was not unkindness. He was sparing me the sentence. He had decided, for reasons I could not see, to carry whatever lay between us himself, and not hand it to me while I lay down.

My neighbor Marlene told me about the house, the second Sunday. “Lavada, I’m not one to carry tales. There’s been a truck in your yard until ten every night this week, and lumber stacked on your porch like you’re building an ark.”

I knew already. After the surgery he had driven out to the Draw in the dark, fed my old collie and the cats, and pulled the broken step out by his own headlights. Then he did not stop. He sat on my porch in the cold with a flashlight and a pencil and drew the whole thing.

Pastor Elmer came on Saturday with two men from the church, Orville and Josh, and Tobin took four days off work. They built a ramp along the east side of the porch with a rail on both sides, stained the exact gray-green of my trim, which he had matched from the can in my barn. They put grab bars in the bathroom and widened its door. And every evening Garrick came to the care center with a thermos and spoke of cherry wood and radio shelves, with sawdust in the creases of his knuckles, and let me think he had spent the day on somebody else’s kitchen.

I came home on a Friday in the second week of December, with an inch of snow on the Draw. We turned in at the lane, and I saw my house.

New fir steps glowed the color of honey where the snow had melted off. Along the east wall a long gentle ramp rose to the porch, with rails on either side so smooth you could slide your hand the length of them.

“He wanted to be here,” Lavon said quietly. “He didn’t think you’d want him to be. He said the key is on the table.”

The rail was warm under my hand, the way a thing is warm when someone has sanded it a long time.

The kitchen smelled of lemon oil and cut wood. And at the sink, facing the window, there was a stool.

It was not a store stool. It was tall and sturdy, built of fir, with a curved back and two low arms, high enough that a woman with a new hip could sit and still reach the faucet. It faced the exact spot where for a year I had stood and said my piece. Along the front edge of the seat ran a thin rusty line where a nail had once sat.

Lavon was watching me. “That’s the second step. He cut the good heartwood out of both pieces. He said it was sound underneath, it had only rotted along the edge where the water sat. He said it didn’t seem right to throw it out. He said the board was only doing what boards do. He said it ought to hold you up for once.”

I stood with my hand on the seat of a stool made from the very board that had broken me, and I could not say a word.

I sat down on it. It held.

At a quarter to six the next morning I climbed onto that stool, folded my hands, and looked out at the first light coming pink on the woodpile. I opened my mouth to pray, and the old words came to meet me, three hundred and some mornings of them stacked behind my teeth like cattle at a gate. Not that boy.