Then he wiped his hands on the dish towel he keeps over his shoulder, said he’d let the pot finish, and went and sat back down beside me, and he never answered the man at all.
Ed Tolliver answered him. Ed is the treasurer, seventy-six, and he has the personality of a filing cabinet, and he stood up in the middle of dessert with his little zippered folder.
He asked the administrator if he’d ever been down in the church safe.
What’s in that safe, behind the communion silver and the old ledgers, is a promissory note dated November of 2002, First Federal of Kessler County, twenty-eight thousand four hundred dollars, second position on this building. And there are four signatures on it as personal guarantors.
In 2002 this church had thirty-one members and no pastor and a furnace that had quit, and the bank was going to take the building in March, and everybody in this town knows that part. What almost nobody knows is who kept it from happening.
Ed read the four names. Merle Whitcomb, dead in 2009. Ruth Ann Skaggs, dead in 2014. Ed Tolliver. And Daniel.
My husband was forty-one years old, we had two kids and a mortgage and he drove a truck for the co-op, and he put his name on a note for a building that the law would have come after our house for. He never said a word about it to me until it was signed. He has never mentioned it since. I found out from Ruth Ann at a funeral in 2011.
Ed said the note was paid off in 2016. He said the reason there’s a church for anybody to administrate is those four names, and two of them are in the cemetery out the window, and one of them has been unlocking that door at five-forty in the morning ever since without being asked and without being paid and without being anything the man at the microphone would recognize as official.
Then he opened the folder and read out the last thing, which was a note Merle Whitcomb left in the safe with the paperwork, in a sealed envelope marked TO BE READ WHEN NEEDED.
If anybody ever wonders who this church belongs to, it belongs to whoever shows up first and leaves last. That has been Daniel every Sunday since I’ve known him. Feed that man a doughnut and leave him be. — M. Whitcomb, 2003
The administrator stood there holding his plate. To his credit he did not try to be funny again. He came to our table and apologized to Daniel and then he apologized to me, which I thought was decent, and he asked what he could do.
Daniel told him five-forty on Sunday and to wear old shoes because the coffee scalds.
He has been there every Sunday since. He is not good at it. He makes weak coffee and he stacks the hymnals crooked. But he comes, and he has learned all the names on the prayer list, and last month he was the one who unlocked the door.
My husband is sixty-four. He says the church doesn’t need a caretaker, official or otherwise. It just needs somebody who can’t sleep past five.