The Towel I Kept for Orva

My mother started taking us to Pilgrim Methodist that same month. She had never been a churchgoer, and I think she went the first time to find out which woman in that building was the one in the long coat. The first Sunday in March was the seventh. The pastor held up a loaf at the front, and said the words, and broke it, and the ushers came down the aisle with a plate of pieces.

I was eleven. I took mine in my fingers and put it in my mouth. I knew it before I had swallowed. It was the same bread, with the honey, with the salt, with that plain brown crust. I looked across the sanctuary and there in the third pew from the back, in a navy dress with a small white collar, sat Mrs. Ketterling with her head bowed, not looking at anybody. I put my head down.

It was one loaf, a Saturday loaf for a boy and his brother and their tired mother. It was enough, for a winter, to believe that someone in the world had noticed.

My mother kept the secret until the day she died. She died on Tuesday, the twelfth of February, 2019, at the age of sixty-three, of the cancer in her pancreas that took her in about four months. I was with her. She did not say Orva’s name at the end. She said, “The Bible,” and I said I would get it, and I did, and I put it in her hands. She said, “No. For you.”

I opened it at home that night. It fell open to the Twenty-third Psalm, and there, folded in thirds, lay a flour-sack towel with a blue chain stitch around the hem, and a pencil note on the back of a church bulletin in my mother’s hand.

It said: This is Orva Ketterling’s. I never returned it because I could not stand to give back the one my boy carried in. She never asked for thanks and she never will. Give it back to her when you can do it without making her feel paid.

I carried that towel to the bottom of my sock drawer. I had meant to return it that spring. I had meant to find the right way. I put it off through a funeral and a hard summer and two more years, and by the time the years began to feel long, I did not know how a man says, I have had your towel since 1993, without it sounding like the very thing my mother had told me not to say.