The Towel I Kept for Orva

The Mower

On the first Saturday of September, at ten past seven in the morning, I was riding the church mower along the north side of Pilgrim Methodist when I saw the kitchen light on and the back door propped with a brick, and I shut the mower off, because that light was not supposed to be on until noon.

I have mowed the church lawn on the first Saturday of every month for nine years. I do it so the grass is clean for communion Sunday, and I do it early because I run a custom spray service and my fall Saturdays belong to other people’s fields. I was not looking for anything. I was looking at the clock on my phone and thinking about a sprayer nozzle that needed replacing.

I walked up to the back door and looked in. Orva Ketterling was standing at the kitchen sink with her right arm under the cold tap, and her face was the color of flour.

I am Dirk Zerbe. I am forty-four years old. I chair the Pilgrim Methodist board, and you have already heard from Orva what I said to her on the fifteenth of September in the fellowship hall. She told it straight. I want to tell you the part she could not tell, because she did not know it, and because I made a promise at that sink that I kept for exactly as long as I could.

She did not turn around. She said, “Don’t you say a word, Dirk Zerbe.” Then she said, “It’s a burn, not a funeral.”

It was a burn the size of a playing card, along the inside of her right forearm, blistered white at the edges and an angry red in the middle. I could smell it from the door. She had laid her arm along the hot edge of the top rack in that old Garland oven, moving it down a notch, and she had run it under the tap for what must have been ten minutes by then, because the water on the floor had gone past the drain.

I said, “Orva, let me drive you to the urgent care in Kearney.” It is forty minutes. I would have driven it in twenty.

She said, “I have a loaf to finish.” She took her arm out from under the water, wrapped it in a wet dish towel, and turned back to the dough on the counter, which was already shaped and waiting, a round the size of a dinner plate. She finished scoring the cross on the top with a razor in her left hand. The cut was straight. I want you to know that. Seventy-seven years old, burned that badly, shaking so that the pan rattled against the counter when she lifted it, and the cut was straight.