The Sunday Meal the City Tried to Stop

Jonah had never asked a stranger for anything in his life. He stood at the ticket table in his grandfather’s old canvas coat with a clipboard held against his chest like a shield, and for the first twenty minutes he said nothing at all. I watched from the concession stand with my heart in my throat.

Then a big man in a Bobcats cap stopped in front of him. His name is Carl, and he drives a tow truck. He ate at my table most of the winter after his hours got cut.

“What’s that you got, son?”

“It is a petition, sir,” Jonah said. His voice cracked on the second word. “The city shut down the Sunday meal at the park. We are trying to get three hundred names.”

Carl signed, and wrote his address in block letters, and then he took the clipboard out of Jonah’s hands and held it up over his head.

“Hey!” he hollered, loud enough to turn heads in the bleachers. “This boy’s granddad smoked meat for this town for seven years! Everybody who ever ate off that trailer, get over here and sign!”

At the final whistle, we had a hundred and eighteen names. We lost the game, fourteen to seven. Nobody minded.

Saturday we took the rest of the town. We worked the feed store, where Wanda’s husband let us set up a card table by the sacks of layer pellets. The women of the church went door to door down Dry Branch Road in their garden hats.

About four o’clock that afternoon I ran into Prentiss himself, coming out of the Fork Market with a sack of ice. I was holding a clipboard with sixty-one names on it, and he looked at it, and I watched him do the math.

“Treas,” he said, and tipped his head. “I imagine you are upset with me.”

“I am,” I said, because I have never been able to lie to a man’s face. “I think you made a mistake. But I wanted to tell you something before I lose my nerve. I have been praying for you since Friday morning.”

“I would just as soon you didn’t,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I’m doing it anyway.”

“It’s a permit, Treas,” he said, turning back to his truck. “Rules are rules.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Then I reckon the rule is going to meet a lot of people tomorrow.”

I do not know why I said it. It came out of me like the Lord had put it in my mouth and I had not looked at it first.

Saturday night I sat at my kitchen table with every clipboard we had, and Jonah sat across from me with a calculator, and Pastor Wiley and Wanda’s husband and two of the deacons crowded the corners with cups of coffee. We counted. We counted a third time.

“Two hundred and ninety-eight,” said Jonah.

Then the back door opened. It was Verlie, in her blue cardigan, with her cane tip tapping on my linoleum. She had walked three blocks and a half mile of dark road, and nobody had known she was coming. She had a sheet of lined paper in her hand, folded in thirds.

“I was at the senior center today,” she said. “Two ladies there could not get to the feed store.”

She laid it on the table. Two signatures in shaky blue ink, with their addresses written out like a schoolchild’s, one letter at a time.