“Yes, sir.”
“The roof leaked right over the front. Right over her. Water came down onto the white roses I picked, and it dripped off the casket, and Leon’s predecessor, old Reverend Pike, stopped in the middle of the Twenty-third Psalm to move a bucket.”
“I stood in that aisle holding a bucket at my wife’s funeral.” His voice went flat. “I decided that day I’d never walk into that building again. And I thought, if they had fixed it when she asked, it wouldn’t have happened. And if they fix it now, that means it could have been fixed then.”
He took a breath. “So I didn’t want it fixed. That’s the truth. I wanted it to stay broken so I’d have somebody to be angry at. And when your daddy’s little girl said she’d fix it, I wanted to knock her down, because she was going to take away the reason.”
It was quiet on the tailgate. Out in the lot a trailer gate banged shut.
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Glenda’s feet did not reach the ground. She swung them once, then stopped.
“Uncle Wayne,” she said, “that’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”
“I know it.”
“I’m sorry about the bucket.”
He put his arm around her. I had not seen him hold her since her baptism. He held on like a man hanging onto a rail.
“Honey,” he said, into her braids, “I’m the one who’s sorry.”
I looked away. Whatever else I am, I am not made of stone.
That should be where a story ends, but there is a little more, and the little more is where the roof comes in.
On Sunday, after the service, Glenda carried the coffee can up the aisle herself. She had counted it three times Saturday night. $3,100.
She did not hand it over during the service. We waited until the fellowship hall emptied out and it was only a few of us, Pastor Leon, Ben, me, and Mrs. Alder, who had stayed to put away the coffee cups.
Glenda held the can in both hands. “This is for the roof,” she said. “It’s three thousand one hundred dollars. I counted it three times.”
Pastor Leon took off his glasses. He wiped them on his tie, which did no good at all, and put them back on. Then he sat down on the nearest folding chair, rather suddenly, as though someone had taken the legs out from under him.
“Glenda Hart Tate,” he said, “I have been a pastor twenty-six years. I have never been handed an offering like this.”
He took the can. He held it against his chest and bent his head, and I will not tell you what he said, because he said it to God and not to us.
Mrs. Alder, who is eighty-four, came across the floor slowly, patted Glenda’s cheek, and said, “That wet book was my Harvey’s. I forgave the roof a long time ago, dear. But I’ll be glad to see it fixed.”
Word got around the county the way it does. The board met the next Tuesday. By the end of that meeting, they had voted to take $2,500 out of the savings they’d kept for the sign’s maintenance, which tells you something about signs.