I won’t tell you what I asked Him to do. It was not kind. When I ran out, I stayed on my knees anyway. The furnace kicked on in the basement. I got tired of my own noise, and in the quiet that came after, I found I had stopped talking about Walt altogether. I was thinking about Pipp’s hand in his father’s hand, and a rubber-banded bundle of tags.
So I prayed the other prayer, the one I should have started with.
“Lord, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t have forty trucks. I have a flatbed and a bad temper. If You want those four hundred trees to reach that family, You will have to show me who to call, because I can’t see anyone from here.”
That was all. I got up off the rail. It was a quarter to six.
The side door opened and Pastor Carlisle came in, still in his work coat, with the old brown church phone book under his arm.
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“Elowen called,” he said. “She said to tell you she has chili on and you’re not allowed home until you’ve asked me for something.”
“Carlisle, I need the Chain.”
He didn’t ask what for. Half the congregation already knew.
“Tonight,” he said. “All forty-one names.”
The Kettle Grove prayer chain is not a group text. It is a list of forty-one names on a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve, photocopied and re-photocopied since nineteen seventy-four, when a woman named Helen started it after her brother’s farm accident. A request goes in at the top and runs down the list by telephone, and each caller says the same three things: the need, the hour, the instruction. Then they pray together for thirty seconds, out loud, before hanging up.
There is one rule. No names on the Chain except the people we are praying for. No gossip, no blame. A call that uses the word “because” about anybody’s character is a call Helen will personally end.
Helen is eighty-six. She still runs it from her kitchen table. When Carlisle reached her that evening and told her the need, she asked one question. “What do they need to hear?”
Carlisle looked at me.
“Tell them the fund family needs four hundred trees moved to the church field by first light tomorrow,” I said. “Bring a truck or a trailer or a strong back. Tell them it’s cold and it’s for Marcus and Tasha and the three kids. Tell them to pray for the family. Tell them to pray for the whole town.”
“And Walt?” Carlisle said.
“Tell them to pray for Walt, too.”
I said it before I knew I was going to. Carlisle set the phone book down, and for a moment neither of us spoke.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell Helen to say it exactly like that.”
I don’t know what was said on forty-one phone calls. I only know what came back. By seven-thirty my phone had stopped ringing with questions and started ringing with offers. A farmer named Cal had a hay wagon and two boys who could load. The Methodist church two streets over asked if they could come, too. The man at the lumber yard had plywood and stakes to spare. The girl who reads the farm report on the county radio station said she’d put it on the air at five and again at six and again at seven.