The Pew My Son Swore Off
The side door at Verdell United Methodist sticks when the weather turns damp, and it was damp that morning, so I put my shoulder into it the way I have for fifty-some years and came in with my umbrella dripping on the mat.
It was ten minutes before nine on the second Sunday in October. The sanctuary lights were still low. Phyllis was at the organ working the same four bars of the offertory over and over, like a woman trying to get a stubborn jar lid to give.
I took three steps down the center aisle and stopped.
Somebody was sitting in our pew.
Third from the front, left side, under the window with the cracked pane. The pew where Harold and I raised two boys through every Sunday of the sixties and seventies. The pew I had sat in alone, with my purse on the cushion beside me, for forty-three years and seven months.
A man sat in it with his head bowed. Gray hair cut short. A brown canvas coat with a corduroy collar. Big hands hanging down between his knees.
I did not need to see his face. I had known the back of that neck since it was the size of a teacup. I had washed it in a kitchen sink. I had watched it through a school bus window and through the windshield of a pickup the morning he left for Ames.
My son Danny was sitting in the pew he swore he would never sit in again.
I put my hand on the end of the pew behind me, because my knees had decided to stop being reliable, and I stood there with the umbrella dripping on the carpet and I did not make a sound.
I did not know why he had come. Nobody had called me. Nobody had warned me. In all my years of asking, I had never once gotten as far as picturing what it would look like when the answer came, and now that it had, I could not think what to do with my hands.
You will want to know how a woman ends up praying one sentence for forty-three years, and I will tell you. But I have to start with Tim.
My younger boy, Timothy James, was born on the ninth of February, 1968. He was a freckled, jug-eared, tender-hearted child who could not walk past a stray cat without bringing it home in his shirt. Harold used to say we ran a farm and an animal shelter and only one of them paid.
In January of 1982 Tim started limping. The doctor in Marshalltown took an X-ray of his left knee and went very quiet, and by the end of that week we were in Iowa City at University Hospitals, where a young doctor with kind eyes used a word I had never heard before. Osteosarcoma. Bone cancer. Thirteen years old.
They took the leg above the knee in February. They gave him a year of chemotherapy that made him sicker than the cancer ever did. In the fall the spots showed up on his lungs.
I will say this for Verdell. That town prayed. The prayer chain met every Wednesday night in the church basement, and Pastor Teague read Tim’s name from the pulpit so many times that the little ones in the choir loft started saying it along with him. When harvest came and Harold could not leave Iowa City, eleven men from the church took our corn off in a single afternoon. Three women brought casseroles every week for fourteen months.