The Sunday Meal the City Tried to Stop

“Treas, I did not want it to be me that served it,” he said. “It came down from the council, and I am the one who has the stapler.” He looked at his boots. “Prentiss signed off on it. He says the permit for the Sunday meal has been running on a clerk’s handshake for eleven years, and it has to be a thirty-day application, and the thirty days have not been filed. And he says the pavilion has been booked since September.”

“Booked for what?”

He rubbed his neck. “Private rental. Three hundred dollars. His daughter’s engagement party. Sunday, noon till six.”

Verlie called at eight. I do not know how she knew. I have long since stopped asking how word reaches her.

“I hear it’s Prentiss,” she said. “Did you pray?”

“Not yet.” I had stewed, which is a thing I can do with great skill, and I had rehearsed the speech I would give the council on Monday, which began with the words “In eleven years” and went downhill from there.

“When you do,” Verlie said, “say his name. Out loud, by name, in front of the Lord. Don’t pray about him. Pray for him.”

“Verlie, I can’t do that tonight.”

“I did not say tonight,” she said, in her old cafeteria voice, the one that quieted three hundred children at lunch. “You have until Sunday.”

And she hung up.

I prayed Friday morning, standing at my sink with the water running, and what I said was ugly, and I will not repeat it. What I will tell you is that somewhere in the middle of it I ran out of ugly. And when I ran out, there was only one thing left to say, and it was his name.

“Lord,” I said. “Prentiss.”

At nine I called Pastor Wiley. He had already heard. The whole town had heard by seven.

“I need a clipboard,” I said. “Fifty of them. I want a petition.”

“Treas, the council won’t hear anything until Monday, and Prentiss has the pavilion booked for Sunday.”

“I know that. It is not for him. It is for the people. I want three hundred names on a piece of paper, so the next time somebody in this town wonders if anybody is paying attention, they can count.”

“There are two thousand people in this town, and about a hundred and forty of them eat at my table,” I said. “I think I can find a few more.”

By noon we had thirty-one clipboards and a church fellowship hall full of the kind of women who have been waiting their whole lives for somebody to give them a cause. Wanda, who runs the city clerk’s office and has been my friend since high school, came in at ten past twelve and shut the door behind her.

“I am not here,” she said. “I will tell you one thing, and then I’m gone. The clerk’s office cannot take a petition unless it carries registered city voters. Not county, city. So write the address by every name, in ink, and print it where I can read it.”

At the door she turned back. “And I will tell you this for free, Treas. I have worked that counter nineteen years. I have never seen three hundred names on one sheet of paper, not for the school levy, not for the stop sign on Church Street. If you bring me three hundred, nobody at City Hall will be able to pretend they did not see it.”

She walked out. So we went to work.

Friday night the Willard Fork Bobcats played Pinewood County at home, and I will tell you that no small town on this earth is as honest as it is at the gate of a high school football game.