Margie Teasdale was at the front. Somebody had wheeled her out, but she was holding the door open herself with the tip of her cane, as straight as a crossing guard. Ardis Bohn sat just in front of her in a wheelchair with a lap blanket over her knees.
Ardis is ninety-four years old. She played the organ at Hadley Methodist for forty-one years, from 1958 until her hands gave out, and she taught half the town to read music. She also has the most formidable posture I have ever seen on a woman in a wheelchair.
She held out a Folgers coffee can to me with both hands.
It rattled when she moved it.
“We’ve been saving these for you,” she said.
I took the can. It was lighter than I thought it would be. I looked at her, and then at Margie, and at Arvid Pfannenstiel in his bathrobe, who was not looking at me at all, but staring hard at the pavement.
“What is it?” I said.
“Open it,” said Ardis.
I pried the plastic lid off with my thumbnail. Elmer had come up behind me, and he looked over my shoulder.
Inside there was a wad of paper napkins, and on top of the napkins was a pile of coins. Nickels, dimes, quarters, a few pennies. Underneath the coins were four dollar bills folded into squares and a ten, soft as cloth.
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And under that, wrapped carefully in a paper napkin, was a small handful of dark, flat, dry things I did not recognize at first.
Zinnia seed.
They had saved the seed heads from the blooms I had brought, the ones that dried on their windowsills. Arvid had shown them how to pull the petals and flick out the seeds. They had counted them. Eunice had written on the napkin in careful, shaky pencil, and I read it later in the truck: Plant these.
“Fourteen dollars and thirty-five cents,” Ardis said. “For seed. And for whatever you need. We talked it over in the dining room.”
I did not say anything. I could not.
Elmer took off his cap.
I had been married to that man for forty-four years, and I had seen him take off his cap for exactly three things in all that time: his father’s grave, the flag at the courthouse, and the birth of our first grandson.
He held it against his chest now and looked at the can in my hands, and his jaw worked, and he looked off toward the milo fields across the road.
“Ma’am,” he said to Ardis. His voice was not steady. “That’s the best offering I’ve ever seen taken.”
“We don’t need much,” said Ardis. “We just need you to come on Sundays.”
“I’ll come on Sundays,” I said.
I would have come every day. I would have come in a blizzard.
We went inside. I should say what I did, because it surprised me. I did not cry. I set the can down on the folding table, and I thanked every one of them by name, and then I started cutting stems.
Margie arranged. Arvid gave lessons. Lloyd said “orange” again, three times. Eunice sorted the colors and told us we were doing it wrong.
Judith stood in the doorway with her fingers pressed against her mouth.
Word got around, the way it does in a town of eleven hundred. Judith told the aides, and the aides told their sisters at church. By the end of the month, Marjorie Olsen, the one who had studied her coffee cup, stood in the chapel doorway with her purse in both hands and watched Margie arrange a jar of marigolds.