The Prayer Notebook in His Tackle Box

It was the first thing I had written by hand to the Lord since I was a girl at church camp in 1957.

That was how it began. Not with a plan. With a pencil.

I do not want to make it sound holier than it was. Every morning at five I made coffee and read the day’s pages. There were thirty-nine years of them, more than nine hundred pages by my rough count. I started with the green book because its names were the living ones. Otha had put a small cross by the names of the people who had died, and he had gone on praying for their widows and orphans for years after the funeral.

In the afternoons I called people. That was not in the notebook. Otha would have thought it forward. But I do my praying aloud and my loving by the telephone and the casserole dish, and I decided that if I was going to pray for people I had never before bothered to pray for, I could at least find out how they were getting on.

Hettie was first. She is eighty-six, lives on Church Street in the house with the green shutters, and had her hip replaced in September while I was busy getting my own husband into the ground. I took her chicken and dumplings and sat in her front room.

“Otha fixed my porch rail every spring for nineteen years, you know that?” she said. “He’d come over with his drill the first Saturday of April and not even knock. Never let me pay. I’ve been standing on that porch since the funeral wishing I’d said thank you.”

I told her he would have run from it. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I never did.” I took the green notebook out of my purse and read her the page. Hettie. Lives alone. Will not ask. Lord, send somebody to her porch without her having to ask. Beside it was a row of check marks, one for every year, nineteen of them.

“He fixed my rail,” Hettie whispered, “because he prayed for somebody to go to my porch. He was the somebody.”

We prayed right there, holding hands over a plate of dumplings going cold. Hettie’s voice shook. I didn’t help her. I just stayed.

It turns out you do not have to say much. You can just read what the man wrote and let the room do the rest.

I was beginning to understand something. My husband had never held back his words because he had nothing to say. He had held them because he had so much to say that he could not trust it to come out the front of his mouth. He had carried it into the world in his drill and his box of nails, and a whole town had been loved by a man who never told them so.

I had married a man of few words, and he had been talking to God the whole time.

Karen worried, naturally, and the Saturday after, I sat her down at the kitchen table and found her the first page of the steno pad. I told her what I had told no one, that the first name Otha ever put in that book was hers. She read Let her be mine, and turned the page, and the next. Her name was on every one. And in March of 1999: K lost the baby. Phyllis told me in the car. I told her I was sorry and that is all I could get out. Lord, give me words for the girl. Or give her someone with words. I had never known he knew. My daughter put both hands flat on the table and bowed her head over the pages like a woman at a communion rail, and Caleb, twelve years old, pulled his chair in close and put his hand on the back of her neck.