The Altar Flowers Too Country for Church

He picked up his fork. “Then I’ll just say it to the television.”

And he did, in fact, say something to the television, and it was not something I will repeat here.

I need to tell you about the garden, because the garden is the whole reason this story has any weight.

My mother-in-law gave me a coffee can of zinnia seed in the spring of 1996, the year Elmer and I moved into the house on Cutler Road. The church had just lost its flower lady, a woman named Verna who had done the altar for nineteen years and died in February.

The vase on the altar sat empty for three Sundays. I remember the way the sanctuary looked without it, like a table set with no food.

So I brought a mason jar of whatever was blooming in my yard on the fourth Sunday. It was zinnias and a few stems of cosmos, and a little bit of bachelor’s button I had thrown in because it was blue. Nobody asked me to do it, and nobody told me to keep doing it. I just kept doing it.

It cost me about sixty dollars in seed and a little more in twine and floral wire every year. I never put in for a penny of it, and the church never offered. In thirty years I missed four Sundays, three for surgery and one for Elmer’s brother’s wedding in Tulsa.

That is all it was. Nobody was going to carve my name on the altar rail. It was a bucket and a pair of clippers and a quiet hour on Saturday morning.

I cut five buckets the Saturday before the florist took over.

I told myself it was out of habit, but I think I just could not make my hands stop. I walked out at six with the dew still on the grass and the sun barely over the milo field across the road, and I cut until my arms were full.

Zinnias in orange and cherry and a creamy green I love. Cosmos. A few tall sunflowers. Celosia like little red brains. I carried them into the shade of the shed and put them in water, and I stood looking at them, and I felt a little foolish.

“You could just leave them be,” Elmer said from the doorway.

“I know.”

“You going to church with them?”

“I don’t know yet.”

I knew. I put the buckets in the truck bed on Sunday morning, wrapped in a wet towel, and Elmer drove us in without a word.

The florist’s arrangement was already on the altar.

I could see it from the church door. A tall glass cylinder of white lilies and eucalyptus with a few white roses stuck in, stiff as a hospital lobby. It was a handsome piece of work, I will say that. It just looked as though it had arrived from somewhere else and had not yet decided to stay.

Not one thing in that arrangement had ever been in Kansas dirt.

I had my first bucket in each hand when Kristin met me in the narthex. She was in a good cream-colored jacket, and her hair was just so, and she seemed glad to see me. Thirty-eight years old, small and quick, with a laugh that carried across a room.

“Oh, Gail,” she said. “We won’t need those.”

I stood there with the water slopping against my wrists.