The Prayer I Had to Take Back

I heard them for the first time as they were. A woman telling the Creator of the universe about a man who had built her the very chair she sat in to say it.

I put my hand over my mouth. “Oh, Lord.”

When I could speak, I did not say what I had planned. I had planned to say sorry. But a different thing came out first.

“Thank You. Thank You for the boy who found me.”

And then: “I asked You for something every morning for a year, and You did not give it to me. And I am so ashamed. And I am so glad You didn’t. Both at once. Forgive me the prayer. And thank You for not answering it the way I asked.”

It was not pretty. But I felt it go up out of that kitchen like a bird that had been shut in too long. I have shortened it since. Thank You for the answer I did not ask for. Forgive me the one I did. And bless the hands that built what I could not.

I have said a great many prayers in seventy years, and I believe that is the only one I ever said that was entirely true.

I did not get my apology said that winter. Three times I tried, over the pot roast, in the yard, on the telephone at night. Every time he turned the subject, so gently I could not take offense, the way he turned a board, one smooth stroke along the grain. I came to think he was afraid I would say it badly. I was wrong about that, as I was wrong about almost everything concerning that man.

On Christmas Eve I did something that surprised the whole church. I had sat in the second pew from the front for forty-one years. That night I stood in the vestibule on my cane and looked at that pew, and then I looked the other way. Garrick was in the back row, on the aisle, with his head bowed.

I walked back. It took a while. I sat down next to him and said nothing, and I felt the whole congregation turn its head the way wheat turns in the wind. We sang “Silent Night” with the lights low, and I sang it out loud beside a man weeping without a sound. When Pastor Elmer gave the benediction, Garrick did not slip away. A large warm hand covered mine on the pew between us and stayed there.

That was the closest we came to talking about it. It was enough, for then.

The second Saturday in June came clear and warm. The wedding was under Ray’s apple trees, beneath an arbor Garrick had built from the good fir of my old porch steps, fitted without a nail. Eighty-some people came, and Garrick’s mother, a small gray woman in a green dress, who held my hand a long time beforehand and said, “He talks about you.” Tobin walked Lavon across the grass in her grandmother’s lace and a wreath of white clover, and she did not look at the guests at all. She looked at him.

I have never seen a man look at a woman the way Garrick looked at my daughter coming across that grass. His face just opened and stayed open, and I thought, I prayed against that very face.