The Service

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 19: The Service

The funeral was on Friday, June fifth, at eleven in the morning at Mt. Calvary, and by ten-thirty the parking lot was already full and the cars had begun parking on the side streets, because Mother Wells of Mt. Calvary had been a Mother of the Church for forty-eight years and had been known to every adult in Orange Mound and to most of the children, and the city had decided — by the small unannounced process by which a city decides — that it would be present in the room.

Mama Tate walked the three blocks alone.

She had told Yvonne that she would meet the family at the door. She had told Marcus, who had flown back from Atlanta on Wednesday night and would fly out again on Saturday morning, that she would walk by herself this morning because the walk was a thing she needed to do alone. She had told Tiana, who had asked whether she should drive the Buick over so that her grandmother had a ride home if she were tired, that the Buick was to stay in the carport because Mama Tate would walk over and Yvonne would drive her back.

She walked slowly. Her hat was the navy one with the cream band. The dress under the spring coat was the dark blue dress she had worn to Eldridge's funeral in 2008. The shoes were the small black flats Yvonne had bought her last fall. The purse was on her left arm. In the purse, beneath the small white handkerchief she had carried to every funeral since her mother's in 1971, was the green book.

She had decided last night, sitting at the kitchen table with Yvonne, that she would bring the green book to the service. She would not, she had told Yvonne, take it out. She would not, she had told Yvonne, mention it. The green book would sit in her purse on the pew, unseen, the way a small stone of confirmation sits in a pocket on a long walk. The green book would be present because Mother Wells would have wanted it present. That was the only reason.

She walked.

She passed Miss Renita's. She passed the corner where Eldridge had pushed the LeSabre. She passed the small house with the yellow door where Mother Cole had lived before Mother Cole had gone home in 2014. She passed the lot where, in 1981, the small Mt. Calvary outdoor revival tent had been set up for two weeks in August because the basement had flooded that summer and the church had decided to take the gospel to the corner.

Each of the small landmarks was, this morning, full.

She arrived at the church at ten forty-eight.

The sanctuary was full to the doors.

Brother Carlton, who had been an usher for thirty-one years and who today was in the gold-trimmed gloves he wore only for funerals, met her at the entrance. He did not, today, give her a program. He took her elbow.

"Mother Tate. Pastor wants you on the right of the family. First pew. Pamela is on the left of the family. Curtis is between you. Pastor Honeycutt asked me to walk you up myself."

"Thank you, Brother Carlton."

He walked her up the center aisle. The aisle had been laid with the small purple runner the church used only for funerals and Easter. The casket — closed, mahogany, with the small spray of yellow lilies on top that Pamela had chosen because her grandmother had loved yellow — was at the front, on the small wheeled bier the trustees had restored in 2019. The choir was already in the loft in their robes. The organ was playing low, the small wordless intro Brother Hightower played before all the funerals, the one he had played for the last forty-some sendings of the people who had been a church to one another for half a century.

Mama Tate did not look at the casket as she walked past it.

She had decided this in the kitchen at six this morning. She would look at the casket later — at the right time in the service, when the pastor invited the family. She would not, on the way in, give her body the work of looking. She had given her body enough work this week.

She sat on the right end of the first pew. Curtis sat down beside her, slowly, the way he had been moving all week. Pamela came in from a small side door with Pastor Honeycutt, and Pamela took the first seat to Curtis's left, and Yvonne and Carl and Marcus and Tiana — who had been seated in the second pew, behind the family pew — leaned forward briefly to touch Mama Tate's shoulder before settling back.

The organ shifted. The choir rose.

The service began.

The opening hymn was Blessed Assurance.

It had been, Pamela had said two days ago at the kitchen table, her grandmother's favorite hymn since 1962. It was not a surprising hymn. It was not an unusual choice for a Mother of the Board. It was, Pamela had said, the hymn her grandmother had hummed in her own kitchen on Saturday mornings for sixty years, and Pamela had not been able to sit at the planning table with the program committee on Wednesday and let them choose anything else.

The congregation rose.

The congregation sang.

Mama Tate did not, today, sing. She stood. She held the program in her hand and she did not look at it because the program had her name on it and she did not, this morning, want to look at her name. She let the singing happen around her. She let Sister Doris's alto line move underneath the soprano the way it had moved for thirty-one years. She let Brother Hightower's chord under the third verse hold the room.

She let it.

She thought about Mother Wells.

She thought, specifically — the memory rose without her summoning it, the way memories rose now that were not yet lost — about the night of February fifteenth, 2007.

Eldridge had been in the kitchen that night drying dishes after dinner, and he had set down the dishtowel slowly and had said, in the steady voice he had used for the last things, Ola Mae, something is happening. He had sat down hard in the chair second from the wall. The color had gone out of his face. Mama Tate had called the ambulance from the wall phone in the hallway. The ambulance had come in fourteen minutes. They had taken him to Methodist Le Bonheur, where he had spent the next four days in cardiac care. He had survived that one. He had not survived the second, eighteen months later.

The night he had been taken, after the ambulance had gone, Mama Tate had stood in her own kitchen alone — Yvonne had gone with the ambulance to the hospital with Eldridge; Carl had been stationed at home with the children — and she had picked up the phone and had called one number.

She had called Mother Wells.

It was twelve-twenty in the morning. Mother Wells had been seventy-two years old. Mother Wells had picked up on the second ring the way she always picked up, and Mama Tate had said only, Mother. Eldridge. And Mother Wells had said, I am coming.

Mother Wells had walked the four blocks over from Saratoga in February. She had walked them at twelve-thirty in the morning in a coat over her nightgown, in twenty-eight degree weather, with Brother Wells's old wool scarf around her neck. She had reached Mama Tate's door at twelve-forty-five. She had come in. She had not, in the doorway, said anything. She had taken off the coat. She had walked Mama Tate to the front room. She had sat on the small couch. She had not, for the next nine hours, said more than perhaps twenty words. She had simply been in the room. She had been there when Yvonne called from the hospital at one-fifteen and again at three-twenty and again at six-oh-five with the news that Eldridge was stable. She had been there when Mama Tate had wept at one of those calls, and she had crossed the room and put her hand on Mama Tate's back without speaking, and she had stayed that way for as long as Mama Tate had needed.

She had left at nine-thirty in the morning, when Yvonne had come from the hospital to take her mother to see her father, and Mother Wells had said only, on the porch as she had left, Sister, you call me again the minute you need me.

That was Mother Wells.

That had always been Mother Wells.

Mama Tate, in the first pew of Mt. Calvary on the morning of June fifth, 2026, with the second verse of Blessed Assurance moving around her in the long held voices of the congregation Mother Wells had served for forty-eight years, set her hand on her purse — and on the green book inside it — and she did not, in any visible way, do anything else, because the small private acknowledgment was enough.

The hymn finished. The congregation sat. Pastor Honeycutt rose.

He was sixty-one. He had buried, in his thirty years at the pulpit of Mt. Calvary, two hundred and forty-three people. He had a small list in his desk drawer with the names. Mother Wells was on the list as of this morning. He had told Mama Tate two days ago, when she had come by the office to discuss what she had been asked to do today, that he had been preparing for Mother Wells's funeral for fifteen years, and that he was, as a result, less prepared than for any other funeral he had ever done.

He said, from the pulpit, simply: We have lost a Mother of the Church.

The congregation did not, at first, respond.

Then a small voice from somewhere in the back said amen — Mama Tate could not see who; it was a man's voice, an older voice — and the amen was joined, gradually, by the small scattered amens of a congregation that had been preparing, for a year, to say this one.

Pastor Honeycutt let the amens settle.

He preached briefly. He preached on the cloud of witnesses from Hebrews twelve, the same passage he had preached on in April when Mama Tate had received Stephen Pruitt's letter, and Mama Tate registered — without surprise — that the Lord was repeating instruction. He spoke about the long quiet work of the Mothers of the Board. He spoke about the women who, since 1947 when Mt. Calvary had been founded, had carried the prayer-floor of the church in shifts that no one had ever organized but that the Lord had organized Himself. He spoke about Mother Wells specifically — the seventy years of praying, the forty-eight years on the Board, the steady warm severity of a woman who had been formed by the Spirit into a vessel the Lord had used widely and quietly.

He said, near the end of the sermon: Mother Wells did not die today. She went home today. The keeping she did on this side has not stopped. It has only changed sides. She is praying now from the other prayer-floor. She is interceding from the place where the praying is the looking. She has been called from the work of the not-yet-seen to the work of the directly-known. We are still on this side. We still have the work of the not-yet-seen. The Lord is, even at this hour, calling the next women to the floor she just left. I want to ask you this morning to be willing — when the small still voice comes, when you find yourself awake at four in the morning for no reason you can name — to consider that the Lord may be calling you. The floor is being passed. We have lost a great many of the original keepers in the last decade. The next generation must rise. I am preaching to the daughters in this congregation today. I am preaching to the granddaughters. The work is real. It is not glamorous. It does not produce reports. But it is the work without which a church is not a church, only a building. Stand up. Take your turn. The Lord will form you the way He formed her.

The amens were stronger this time.

Pastor Honeycutt sat.

Pamela rose.

Pamela's eulogy was short. She had decided, two days ago, that she would not speak long. She told three small stories from her childhood — her grandmother making cornbread in the old kitchen; her grandmother teaching her to braid hair on the porch in the summer of 1986; her grandmother handing her, at her wedding in 2002, a small hand-embroidered handkerchief that Mother Wells had stitched herself with the words Behold, I am with you always and which Pamela had carried to every meaningful event of her life since. She did not, in the eulogy, speak about her mother who had died in 2005. She did not speak about Tamika in California. She did not, today, in front of the congregation, raise the family wounds. The eulogy was a tribute, not an account.

She finished.

She sat down.

She put her hand on Curtis's hand. Curtis put his other hand on Mama Tate's.

Pastor Honeycutt rose again.

He said: We will hear now from a Mother of the Board. Mother Tate, sister and friend of Mother Wells for forty-eight years, will speak for the Board.

Mama Tate stood.

She walked to the pulpit.

She did not, today, hurry. Her hips made their announcement and she ignored them. She climbed the three small steps to the platform with one hand on the rail. She crossed to the pulpit. She set her purse on the small shelf inside the pulpit Pastor Honeycutt had pulled out for her. She did not take out the green book. She did not need it.

She looked up.

The sanctuary was full. The pews were full. The aisles had folding chairs. The balcony was full. The doors at the back were open and there were people standing in the lobby. The choir was in the loft behind her. Pastor Honeycutt was in the pastor's chair to her right.

She looked at the congregation.

She did not, at first, speak. She let them look at her. She let herself look at them. She let the small careful seconds happen that happened, in this church, before a Mother spoke.

Then she said: "Church."

"Mother," the congregation answered, in the soft full chorus by which a Mother of the Board is greeted at a Mt. Calvary funeral, which had been the form of greeting since long before Mama Tate's time and which would, the Lord willing, continue to be the form of greeting after.

"I am going to be brief. I am eighty-two and I have been on my feet a long time this morning, and I have a daughter in the second pew who is about to come up here and take this microphone away from me if I run long. So I will be brief."

A small ripple of laughter moved through the room. Yvonne, in the second pew, smiled.

"I want to tell you about Mother Wells. I am going to tell you one thing. I am not going to tell you about her seventy years on the prayer-floor, because Pastor told you. I am not going to tell you about the youth program she ran from 1971 to 1989, because half the men in this room were in it and you all know. I am not going to tell you about her cooking or her singing or her witness or her wisdom, because you were here for those.

"I am going to tell you about a night in February of 2007.

"Eldridge had taken sick. The first cardiac event. Yvonne went with him in the ambulance. I was in my kitchen alone at midnight. I picked up the phone. I dialed one number.

"I dialed Mother Wells.

"It was twenty after twelve in the morning. It was twenty-eight degrees outside. She was seventy-two years old. She had been asleep. She picked up. I said, Mother. Eldridge. She said, I am coming.

"She walked the four blocks. She came through my door at twelve forty-five. She did not, when she walked through that door, ask me what I needed. She did not ask if I had eaten. She did not ask if anyone had been called. She took off her coat. She walked me to the front room. She sat on my couch. She did not speak. For nine hours, church, she did not speak. She sat. She was in my room. She was the room with me.

"I want to tell you what that was. That was the keeping at the keeper's door. That was a Mother of the Board doing the smallest, oldest thing a Mother does, which is to be in the room with another woman who has just been knocked sideways and who does not need words and who needs to know that the Lord has sent her a body to sit with her until the morning. Mother Wells did not, in nine hours, give me a sermon. She did not give me a scripture. She gave me her body in my front room. She gave me her presence. She was the answer to the prayer I had not yet had the breath to pray.

"That was Mother Wells.

"That is what a Mother of the Board does.

"Now. Church. Listen.

"Pastor told you the Lord is calling the next women to the floor. He is right. He is more right than you may yet know. I am eighty-two. Mother Cole is gone. Mother Wells is gone. Sister Loretta is gone. Mother Hawkins is gone. We have lost six of the eight original Mothers of the Board in the last fifteen years. There are two of us left. I will not be on this floor much longer. The Lord has, in His mercy, given me a window of time, and I am using the window. But the window is closing. The work has to pass.

"I want to say one more thing, and then I am going to sit down.

"Some of you in this room are going to be the next Mothers. I do not know which of you. The Lord knows. He is, this morning, calling some of you. He is calling some of you who think you are too young. He is calling some of you who think you are not godly enough. He is calling some of you who are afraid. He is calling some of you who have been carrying a small list in the back of a notebook somewhere already and have not told anyone.

"You write the list down. You start the keeping. You do it in your own kitchen. You do not need the church to give you permission. You do not need anyone to lay hands on you. You do not need a title. The work is between you and the Lord and the names. The Lord will form you the way He formed Mother Wells. He will do it slowly. He will do it without telling you, until one day a sister of yours calls you at twelve-twenty in the morning, and you say I am coming, and you walk through her door at twelve-forty-five, and you sit on her couch for nine hours without speaking, and then — that day, sister — you will know. The Lord will have made you a Mother. You will not have asked. The Lord asked. You answered. That is all of it.

"Mother Wells went home this Monday morning at four-oh-two. The Lord is the Lord. The cloud is bigger this morning than it was on Sunday. Mother Wells is at the prayer-floor on the other side. She is praying for us from there. She is praying for whoever in this room is going to be called to the floor she just left. She is praying for the next Mother. She is praying for you."

Mama Tate paused.

She looked at the congregation.

"That is what I came to say. Brother Hightower, you bring them in. The choir is going to sing now. I am going to go sit down. The Lord be with you."

She stepped back.

The congregation did not, at first, respond. Then the amens came. They came not as a wave but as the small full chorus that came when the Lord had been in a room and the room had agreed about it together. Pastor Honeycutt was crying quietly in his chair. Brother Hightower, at the organ, did not, for ten seconds, play. He bowed his head. He let the silence finish.

Then the organ began.

The choir rose.

They sang the anthem Mother Wells had requested two years ago in writing — I'm Going Up Yonder. They sang it the way Mt. Calvary's choir had been singing it since 1972. Sister Doris's alto line was the foundation. Brother Hightower's chord was the room.

Mama Tate walked back to the first pew.

Curtis stood up to let her in. He hugged her without speaking. She sat. Pamela, on the other side of Curtis, was wiping her face with a small handkerchief. Yvonne, in the second pew, leaned forward and put her hand on Mama Tate's shoulder. Mama Tate covered her daughter's hand with her own.

The choir sang.

The room sang with them.

The benediction came at twelve forty-eight.

The recessional went down the aisle slowly. The pallbearers — Curtis, three of Mother Wells's nephews, two of the older deacons — carried the casket out into the bright June light. The hearse was waiting at the curb. The procession to Elmwood Cemetery was set for one-fifteen.

The graveside was small. Only the family and the deacons and a handful of the oldest Mothers of the church went. Mama Tate did not go. She had decided this in the morning. She had said her piece. She would not, today, stand at another grave. She would go to the repast in the basement and she would let her body rest in a folding chair, and she would receive whoever came to her, and she would, at three o'clock, let Yvonne drive her home.

The repast was downstairs. The fellowship hall had been laid by the women's auxiliary with the cold cuts and the cornbread and the macaroni and the small cakes that the auxiliary had been making since before Mother Wells was born. Mama Tate sat in the small green folding chair Brother Carlton had brought up to the corner of the hall for her. She did not get her own plate. She let people bring her things. She nodded. She thanked.

Many of them came to her.

Sister Doris Akers came first. She sat down beside Mama Tate without preamble and said, in the small dry voice that had been her speaking voice for forty years: Sister Tate. The Lord called me to the floor at three this morning. Mama Tate had laughed quietly and had said, Sister Doris, the Lord has been calling you to the floor since 1996, and I have been wondering when you were going to answer. Sister Doris had said, I am answering. The two of them had held hands for a moment without further words.

Two others came after Sister Doris. Sister Linda Briggs — the late Pastor Briggs's daughter-in-law, sixty-one — said quietly: Mother Tate. I have been keeping a list for ten years. I have not told anyone. I want you to know I have been keeping it. I will pass it on when my time comes. Mama Tate had taken her hand and had said, You tell me which names you would like me to take with mine, baby. We will fold them in. The list does not die.

The third was a woman Mama Tate did not, at first, recognize. Mid-forties. The woman knelt by the chair and said: Mother Tate. I am Stephanie Edwards. I was in the youth group in 1995. You may not remember me. I am — I am the one Mother Wells walked home one night in 1996 after a thing had happened at my house I never told the church about. She walked me four miles. She sat in my room with me until morning. I have been a member of a Black Baptist church in Houston for twenty years because of her. I had to come tonight. I flew in. I am going back tomorrow. I came because of what you said up there. I am — Mother Tate, I am going to start a list when I get home. I am going to do what you said. Mama Tate, who had not been prepared for the woman, had begun to cry quietly, and had said, Baby. You start the list. You start it tomorrow morning. The Lord will keep you. He will form you the way He formed Mother Wells.

There were others. Mama Tate could not, by the end of the repast, remember all of them. The hall held her. The hall held the family. The hall held the cloud.

At three o'clock Yvonne came over with the keys.

"Mama. Time."

"Yes, baby. Take me home."

She rose.

Curtis, who had returned from the cemetery, came over and walked her up the basement stairs. At the door of the church he kissed her cheek. He said, very quietly: Mother Tate. Grandma said up there, on the other side, to tell you the names are safe.

Mama Tate stopped.

She looked at him.

"Curtis."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You said that the way she would have said it."

"I — I did not mean to, Mother Tate. The words came up."

"Son. The Lord is forming you too. You write the list when you are ready. The Lord will tell you when. You do not need to be the woman to keep the list. The Lord makes Mothers and He makes Fathers of the keeping too. Brother Wells was one. He kept his own list of forty-some men. He gave it to me in 1991. It is folded into mine. The Lord will, in His time, bring you to the floor. You will know."

"Yes, Mother Tate."

She walked out of Mt. Calvary into the bright June afternoon. Yvonne walked her to the Toyota. Carl held the door. Tiana and Marcus were behind them, talking low. Mama Tate got in. Yvonne closed the door.

In the car Mama Tate sat for a moment with her hand on her purse.

She did not, on the short drive home, speak.

When they pulled into the driveway she said: "Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama."

"I am going to sleep until tomorrow. You wake me only if the house is on fire. You hear?"

"Yes, Mama."

"I have done my work today. Mother Wells is in the cloud. The keeping is mine until it is Tiana's. The Lord has been the Lord. I am tired."

"Yes, Mama."

Yvonne walked her in. She put her in Eldridge's chair. She pulled the small quilt over her knees. The green book and the prayer book were on the side table. The composition book was on the kitchen table where Mama Tate had left it that morning.

Mama Tate closed her eyes.

She slept.

She slept through the afternoon and through the evening and through the night. The house held her. Yvonne stayed. Carl stayed. Tiana and Marcus came and went. The keeping continued without her hand on it for the first time in two months, because the keeping had been gathered, in the last six weeks, into the hands of people who could carry it for the small intervals when the keeper herself needed sleep.

Mother Wells was in the cloud.

The next Mothers had begun to rise. Sister Doris had answered. Sister Linda was already at the work without titling it. Stephanie Edwards was, somewhere over Arkansas in a plane back to Houston, beginning to draft a list in the small notebook she had bought at the Memphis airport two hours ago.

The Lord was the Lord.

The room was full.

The work, Mama Tate had taught the church this morning from the pulpit of Mt. Calvary on the funeral of her oldest friend, did not depend on any one keeper. The work depended on the Lord. The keepers were the small honored hands the Lord had been borrowing for two thousand years.

He would borrow more.

He always had.