He closed his Bible around his finger, keeping his place, stepped out of the pew, and started up the center aisle toward that stage, slow and steady as a Sunday offering, and he never got on it.
He stopped at the communion table, which sits on the floor in front of the platform, where it has sat since my father and four other men built it in 1976.
He opened that Bible flat on it, at the place he had been keeping.
Not a verse. The flyleaves, front and back, and four pages of onionskin he taped in when he ran out of room in 1998.
Two hundred and sixteen names.
Every member of Grace Fellowship my father has helped carry out since 1974. Name, date, and beside about forty of them a small D, which took me a while to work out. It means he dug it. For years this church did its own graves out at the Hollis plot.
Across the top of the first flyleaf, in his hand, in 1974, when he was twenty-nine:
Names of the members of this church I have helped carry out. A deacon’s work is not the front of the room. It is the back door, the graveside, and the folding chairs after. Somebody ought to keep the count so they are not just a line in a minute book.
He did not read it out. He did not say one word about Chad and did not look at him.
What he said to the room was that every family on those pages ate in that fellowship hall on the worst day of their lives, that he set up the chairs for most of them, and that they ought to vote however the Lord led them. Then he picked up his hat and went out the side door.
People got up and read that Bible on the table for twenty minutes. Nobody organized it. My aunt found her husband on page three.
The vote was a hundred eighty-nine to sixty. The fellowship hall is still standing and the Wednesday potluck came back in the fall. It is not what it was in 1988 and they come anyway.
Here is the part I did not expect.
Chad drove out to my parents’ place in March. He is thirty-four and has buried nobody. Not one, in eleven years, because the churches he came up in had a staff person for that.
He asked my father to teach him how to do a funeral.
Dad took him to two. Ruby Kessel in April and a man from the trailers on Route 9 in June. Chad sat with the family both times and Dad made him carry.
He is still the pastor. He still has the fog machine and I still do not care for it. But he preached Ruby’s service and got her husband’s name right without a card, and my father has stopped calling him young man.
A man on a stage said the future does not need your permission. Two hundred and sixteen families in that county would tell you it needed my father’s back and his truck and his shovel, and he wrote every one of their names in the front of a Bible so nobody would have to take his word for it.