The Towel I Kept for Orva

I stood in the yard until the car was gone. Then I went up the steps and unwrapped the cloth. It was a flour-sack towel, white and soft from washing, with a blue chain stitch around the hem. Inside was a round loaf of bread, still warm, so warm that the steam had made a damp ring on the cloth. It had a cross cut across the top.

I did not feed the hogs. I did something I have never told anybody. I sat down on that step in my father’s coat and I held a loaf of bread against my chest for as long as it stayed warm, and then I carried it inside and put it on the kitchen table, and I did not touch it.

My mother came home at ten to six. She stood in the kitchen door in her white smock with the hairnet still on, and she looked at the loaf, and she looked at me, and I told her. I told her about the Buick and the finger. She sat down in the kitchen chair. She was thirty-six years old. She put her hand over her mouth and she kept it there for about a minute.

Then she said, “You never say it, Dirk.” She said it the way you say a thing you mean to have remembered at a funeral. “You hear me? Not to Reid, not to a teacher, not to her. Some gifts you take with your mouth shut, because the minute you say thank you, it turns into a debt, and she did not give it to be paid.” She took a bread knife out of the drawer and cut the loaf, and she buttered it with the last of the butter, and the three of us ate it standing up.

The First Sunday

That loaf came every Saturday for seventy Saturdays.

I worked that out afterward, in my thirties, from a calendar on my mother’s kitchen wall, when I thought to count. It began on the nineteenth of December, a week after my father went, and it did not end until the sixteenth of April, 1994, when my mother got on at the grain co-op on day shift and no longer had to sleep through the morning. In all that time I do not think the loaf was ever late. I never saw the Buick again.

The towels went back. My mother washed each one on Friday nights in the kitchen sink with bar soap and hung it on the line in the cold to freeze-dry, and she folded it in thirds and set it on the porch rail under a rock, and on Saturday morning it would be gone and a new one would be on the step. Never a word, never a note. If somebody asked me today whether I believe in angels, I would ask them what time they got up on Saturdays.

One towel did not go back. It was the one from the sixth of February, the one I had unwrapped on the step. I saw my mother fold it that morning and put it into her Bible on the kitchen shelf, and I never saw it come out again. I did not ask her why.