Because what I saw, when the back panel came free in my hands, was a small square chamber lined with faded blue velvet, and sitting inside it, wrapped in a white linen cloth gone yellow with age, was a communion set. I knew it at once for silver. A chalice, a plate, six small cups, and a pitcher, polished once and then shut away in the dark. On top of them lay a leather ledger with a brass clasp, and a folded sheet of paper in an old fashioned script.
The congregation was waiting in the pews, as they had been all morning. There were nine of them, the little group who had bought the old chapel back from a developer and meant to bring it to life. The leader of the group, a stout woman named Pearl Hoskins, stood in the aisle with her hands knotted together. When I lifted out the chalice, she made a sound like a child. “That is it,” she whispered. “That is the one in the photograph.”
She told me the story while I carried the pieces to the altar table. In 1931, at the bottom of the Depression, the bank had called in a loan against the church. The pastor, a Reverend Josiah Tate, had been given thirty days to raise four hundred dollars or lose the building. Rumor said the congregation had sold the communion silver to a dealer in Charleston to make up the sum. In the church history, the line was always the same: the silver was sold, and the church was saved, and nobody liked to speak of it.
I opened the folded letter. It was written in a firm slanting hand on the stationery of the church, and the pastor had signed it at the bottom with a flourish. “To the future congregation of Mount Hope,” it read. “By the time you read this I shall be in my grave and you shall be in better times. I write to confess a deception. We did not sell the silver. The bank would have taken it with the building. Our elders agreed to hide it, and to tell the world it was gone, so that no officer of the court could come looking.”
What a faithful people hide in the dark in the hour of need, they will one day lift up in the light with thanksgiving.
The pastor went on. The money for the loan, he wrote, had come in the end from the pennies and quarters of the congregation, from a farmer who sold his best cow, from the sewing circle, from a young widow who gave her wedding ring. The silver had been set aside as a trust. He was sorry for the lie, which had weighed on him all his years, but he could not see another way. The elders who had known the secret had died one by one, and he was the last. He sealed the panel himself, and told no one.
Pearl read the letter aloud again, standing in the sunlight that came through the dusty windows. When she reached the end, the small group behind her was in tears. An older man in the back pew said, “My granddad was an elder.” Another woman said, “So was mine.” For ninety four years the descendants of those same families had lived with a story of loss, and the truth had been sitting under their feet, sealed in the pulpit where they had listened to the Word.
I have been restoring church furniture for twenty three years, and I know the rules. What I found was not mine, and it was not quite theirs either. It belonged to the church. I called a friend who was a lawyer for the diocese, and he agreed it should be recorded, photographed, and properly insured. Within a week, an appraiser had examined the silver. It dated to 1897, the work of a small silversmith in Baltimore, and was worth more than the building itself.
The congregation voted, unanimously, to keep it. Not to sell, not to display behind glass, but to use. The first Sunday service in the restored chapel was set for the last week of April. We spent three weeks sanding, waxing, and re hanging the pulpit, and I took extra care with the back panel. I put a small brass hinge on it, so it could be opened. Inside, I set a framed copy of the letter of Reverend Tate, so every preacher who stood there would know whose shoes he was standing in.
The morning of the service, cars lined both sides of the country road for half a mile. Descendants had come from Ohio, Kentucky, and one from as far as Oregon. Pearl stood at the door with a hymnal in each hand, greeting everyone by name. A young pastor, borrowed from a church in town, read the letter from the pulpit before the sermon. When he finished, no one moved. Then a voice from the back began to sing the old hymn Blest Be the Tie That Binds, and the whole room joined.
At communion, the silver went around the pews, each cup passed from hand to hand. I sat in the last row with my hat on my knee, and when the chalice came to me I took it with both hands, as you would a sleeping child. The wine was sweet. I looked across the aisle at Pearl, who was smiling with her eyes closed, and I thought of the pastor sealing that panel on a cold night in 1931, sure he would never be forgiven.
I send a bill for the work, as I always do. Pearl paid it on the spot, in cash, and added a pie. I have no doubt the work I did on that pulpit was good, but it was not the best thing I did that spring. The best thing was a smaller job: I stood still and said nothing, and let ninety four years come out of the dark in the quiet of an old oak box. Then I put my tools away, and went home to my supper.