Part 3 — The Year Stamped
Lamar turned the rocker onto its side so the whole congregation could see the last line Willie ever wrote in carpenter pencil.
“Nineteen seventy-four. Book 211, page 40. The year I bought it, and the year it was recorded.”
Deacon Kendall had already climbed the pulpit steps. He lifted the big Bible with both hands and opened the back cover.
A flat brown envelope had been taped inside, and written across it were three words in Willies hand. “Ora. The lot.”
He handed the envelope to me, and I opened it at the front of the church with the choir still holding their breath.
It was the deed, cream paper gone soft as cloth. Over the corner was a clerk stamp that read Recorded 1974, and my husbands name stood above mine in the typed lines.
A note was tucked behind it. “Ora, let them keep the fellowship hall. The church has done good with it. I just did not want anybody to ever tell you that you had no say.”
I stood in the aisle of the church my husband loved and understood that he had spent fifty years making room for people who never once made room for us.
Hershel stepped down from the pulpit without a word. He had the memorial fund book under his arm, and he laid it on the front pew with the cash box on top. Nine thousand, two hundred forty dollars, counted aloud by Deacon Kendall in front of the congregation.
He said he had borrowed from it to repair his roof, and he had meant to put it back before anyone noticed. Nobody in that church believed he was a wicked man. Everybody in that church knew he had been a proud one.
The board met after service. Hershel resigned as head deacon, and Kendall was voted in by a standing show of hands.
I went to see the church lawyer on Tuesday. The lot was mine under Alabama law, and I agreed to a lease, one dollar a year, for as long as the fellowship hall stood there. The congregation could keep the hall. I only asked for the porch.
They gave me that and more. Lamar and two of the young men from the choir hauled the rocker home on the church van, and they sanded it down and oiled it.
The new sign went up beside the steps. Underneath, in smaller letters that Kendall had painted himself, were the words WILLIES PORCH.
On Sunday morning I sat in the rocker, and as folks climbed the steps I said what he always said.
“Morning, sugar. Sit a spell before you go in. The Lord is not going anywhere.”