The Prayer Notebook in His Tackle Box

Lord, You heard that. I can’t say it so I am writing it. Heal the girl. She is nine and she is not even mine yet, not really. Let her be mine. Amen.

Mar. 10. Fever broke at 4 a.m. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.

I read that page standing up. Then I sat down on the overturned feed bucket he used for a stool and read it again.

I need to tell you about the grace.

In forty years of marriage my husband never said grace out loud. Not once. Not at Thanksgiving, not at Christmas, not at the table when his own mother passed. At every meal he bowed his head and folded his hands, big square road-crew hands with knuckles thick as walnuts, and he waited. And I said it. I said the blessing for forty years, and when I was done he said “Amen” in that low voice and picked up his fork.

When Karen got married, the pastor asked Otha to bless the wedding supper. I watched my husband go the color of putty. He said, “Phyllis, you do it,” and I did, in front of two hundred people in the fellowship hall, and I saw people look at each other.

I want to be honest about what I thought, because honesty is the whole reason I am telling this. For forty years I believed my husband was a good man who had never quite got hold of his faith. He sat in the third pew from the back on the aisle every Sunday, and he ushered and took up the offering and mowed the cemetery. But he did not sing out, and he never once said “God” in conversation unless it was “God bless you” after a sneeze.

So I prayed for him. That is the part that makes me put my hand over my mouth now. For forty years I kept Otha on a little line at the bottom of my morning prayers. And Lord, bring Otha closer to You. I said it the way you would say it for a man on the far side of a river.

And the whole time he was standing right beside me, saying it in pencil.

It was not a diary. I had expected a diary, with the weather in it and what he’d had for dinner. It was a list. Every page, a date at the top. Then a name. Then a line or two beside the name. Then the next name.

Old Pastor Junius. Wife has the lump. Biopsy Thursday.

Hettie. Widowed this spring. She lives alone and will not ask anybody for a thing.

Thurman at the hardware. His boy is overseas. He pretends he isn’t scared.

Rex.

Cleta.

There were dozens of names on a page, and I knew every one. That was what undid me. Every one was a person from Easterbrook, Kentucky, population twelve hundred and falling. People I had waved at from the car. People I had judged, I am sorry to say, from the third pew, over the top of a hymnal.

Karen finally came in with a sandwich I did not eat. She looked at the notebooks in my lap and did not ask, and I will always love her for that. “He used to pray in the truck,” she said, after a while. “His lips would move at stop signs. He told me he was counting. He said it was a long count.”