The Bible I Bought Twice

I leaned on the counter. I did not trust my knees. “Say that,” I told him. “Say exactly that.”

“That’s not good enough, though. Everybody else says something about sin and stuff.”

“Micah,” I said, “that is the best testimony I have heard in thirty years.”

He grinned and went back to his biscuits. Then, without looking up, he said, “It’s okay about the Bible. I can just carry Dad’s old one. I don’t want you to feel bad.”

I turned around and faced the stove. I turned a burner knob that was already off. I counted the squares in the wallpaper behind the pans.

“I don’t feel bad,” I said, when I could. “Eat a biscuit.”

He ate one. He ate three.

I put him to bed in the back room at nine with his white shirt hanging on the door, and I sat in the hall and listened until his breathing slowed.

Then I went to my dresser and took out the Bible and held it. I turned it over. I read his name by the hall light.

Micah Michael Lathem.

I had not settled how I was going to give it to him.

All I knew was that I was not going to do it in the kitchen of that brick house, and I was not going to do it behind a closed door where a story could get changed again.

Sunday came up clear and cool, the kind of late October morning we get in Winston County after the first frost.

The sweetgums on the church lawn had turned red. The cotton trailers were already rolling down Highway 195 toward the gin. It smelled like woodsmoke and cut hay.

Harlan Odom, our head deacon, had turned on the baptistry heater at six that morning, the way he does every baptism Sunday.

He stood by the side door in his good brown suit with the key ring on his belt and shook every hand that came through.

I got to church at a quarter past nine with the Bible in a clean brown sack. I had folded the top over twice.

I took a seat on the ninth pew, on the aisle, where I have sat since my husband passed.

Warren came in with Micah in his white shirt and a clip-on tie. Heidi was behind them with her parents.

Lowell Colburn is a tall, tanned man with a good watch. Sherry wore a cream suit and carried a white leather Bible with a tassel and a gold zipper.

They took the front pew.

I want to say something about Sherry Colburn, because she is not the villain of this story. When she saw me she smiled and lifted her hand, and I lifted mine.

She did not know. I am almost sure of it. Whatever Heidi told her about her grandson’s Bible, she did not tell her that.

The service began at ten-thirty.

We sang “Just As I Am,” and Brother Wayne Tidwell came up in his black waders under his white robe and said a few words about the water and the Lord.