Benediction (Plainsong #3)(12)

She smiled and there were tears in her eyes now and she leaned toward him and kissed him on the mouth.

She’s awful good-looking too, the boy said and grinned.

They turned forward on the sofa and looked at Lyle.

I think that’ll do, he said. That’ll do just fine. You know about love, I can see that. But let me just add my own thoughts. Love is the most important part of life, isn’t it. If you have love you can live in this world in a true way and if you love each other you can see past everything and accept what you don’t understand and forgive what you don’t know or don’t like. Love is all. Love is patient and boundless and right-hearted and long-suffering. I hope you may love each other all your days of life together. And I hope you may have a great many years of those days.

They sat looking at him talk. Yes sir, we will, the boy said. He glanced at the woman. Can you perform the service now?

We’d like it in the church if you could, the woman said.

Of course. It requires a big room, doesn’t it. Something more than a small ordinary place like this. Come in here.

He rose and they followed him into the sanctuary.

Afterward, after Lyle had said the words out of the old book, holding it open in his hand, and after the boy and woman had repeated what he’d said and they had kissed each other for a good long time and were still standing in front of the altar with the sun streaming through the stained-glass windows, the boy took out his wallet from the rear pocket of his jeans and presented a fifty-dollar bill to Lyle.

I never forgot my wallet this time, he said. Will that be enough?

It’s more than enough, Lyle said. It’s too much.

No sir. It’s worth every dime to me to have this wedding here. To have Laurie and myself be connected together.

Then thank you, Lyle said. I’ll find something good to do with it.

The boy shook his hand briskly and turned and picked up his hat from the pew behind them and he and the woman twined their arms together and walked up the aisle, and outside the boy set his hat firmly on his head and they stepped down the shining concrete steps to the freshly washed pickup parked at the curb and drove off.

That evening, over the dinner table, Lyle told his wife and his son about the wedding and about the way the boy and the woman talked and conducted themselves. That was love, he said.

His wife and son didn’t say anything.

That was an example of love for anyone to see.

He took out from his shirt pocket the fifty-dollar bill and set it on the table.

I’m going to put this money in the World Mission Fund. I think it’s important to use this particular bill and not some other or some check but this one specifically. I won’t use his name. Let it be anonymous. It represents a half, better than half a day’s work for that boy. Maybe even a whole day. Something good should come of it. Nobody but the three of us will ever know. An anonymous gift. To somebody somewhere else in the world who needs it without the giver even knowing he’s made the gift.

Later in the evening while Lyle was out of the house making calls at the hospital, John Wesley went into his parents’ bedroom at the top of the stairs. His mother, a pretty dark-eyed woman, lay in bed reading, the bedside lamp shone onto her face and shoulders. She had on a summer nightgown and her shoulders were bare. She pulled the sheet up and put down her book. The boy stood at the foot of the bed.

Why does he have to talk like that? It makes me sick.

Don’t talk about him that way.

He’s not preaching here. At the table to us. But he still sounds like he’s preaching or pointing up some moral.

He means well, you know that. He was trying to tell us about something that was important to him.

He’s full of shit, Mom.

Don’t talk like that. It’s not true.

It is. I can’t stand it when he sounds like that.

Be patient, you’ll be gone to college before long.

Two years from now. I want to go back to Denver.

We’re living here now.

These kids are all going to be hicks. You know they are.

You’ll find someone to like. You didn’t like everybody in Denver either, don’t forget.

I liked some of them. I still have friends there. I’m never going to have any friends here.

Yes you will. Somebody’ll come along.

You don’t have anybody here yourself.

We just got here. I have your father and you.

The boy looked at her and looked at himself in the bureau mirror. You don’t have him very much.

Don’t say that.

I haven’t forgotten what happened in Denver.

I know and I wish it had never happened. Go to bed. You’ll feel different tomorrow.





8


IT WAS HER WAY, Willa’s manner and her character to keep the house clean and in good repair out in the country east of Holt though few people drove by to see it and almost no one ever visited and entered it. A white house, with blue shutters and a blue shingled roof. The outbuildings were all painted a deep barn red with white trim and they were in good condition too though they had not been used for thirty years, since her husband had died.

She still drove a car. Her eyes were failing but not so much nor so fast that she was ready to give up driving. She had the thick prescriptive glasses. She leased the land to the neighbor and he had black cattle in the pastures and did the haying and what he paid her was enough to live on if she were careful. She liked seeing the cattle standing at the stock tank at the corral beyond the barn. She liked the sound of the windmill working and cranking, the sight of the spouting water. She still kept a garden and she canned the vegetables and fruit and gave most of it away, and went into church on Sundays and attended various church meetings and served on the boards and did her grocery shopping on Wednesdays and ate in the Wagon Wheel restaurant on the highway east of town. Now her daughter had come home again.