Great Is Thy Faithfulness

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 4: Great Is Thy Faithfulness

Mt. Calvary was three blocks from her front door, and she walked them.

She could have driven. The Buick was in the carport, where it had been since 1998, and she still had her license, which Yvonne had not yet had the conversation about. But she had walked to Sunday service for fifty-two years, and she was not, on the morning the Lord had answered her in her own front room, going to drive.

She walked slowly. Her hat was straight. The letter was in her purse. The purse was on her left arm because her right knee had begun, in the last year, to suggest she favor it.

She walked past Miss Renita's, where two of the grandbabies were playing in the yard in their Sunday clothes, and she lifted her hand and said Morning, babies, and they said Morning, Mother Tate, in the chorus of children who had been taught how to address an elder before they could read. She walked past the corner where Eldridge had once helped Brother Jenkins push a stalled Buick LeSabre out of the intersection in 1985, and she gave the corner the small acknowledgment she gave it every Sunday, which her body knew to do without her telling it.

She arrived at the church at ten twenty-eight.

Mt. Calvary was a brick building from 1947, set back from Park Avenue behind a low chain-link fence with the gate that had needed a new latch since 2003 and which the trustees had been about to fix every quarterly meeting since Y2K. The doors had been propped open for the spring. The choir's warming-up came faintly through them, the alto line of a hymn she did not need to identify because the alto line was Sister Doris Akers, and Sister Doris had been singing the alto line for thirty-one years, and the alto line was the alto line.

She walked up the steps. Brother Carlton, who had been the head usher since 1994 and who took the position with a seriousness that some of the younger men found amusing and Ola Mae did not, met her at the door with the small white program and the small careful nod that he had given to every Mother of the Church for the last three decades.

"Mother Tate."

"Brother Carlton."

"You look like a woman with a thing on her."

"I am a woman with a thing on her."

"You want me to tell Pastor?"

"No, sir. Not today. Today I just want my pew."

He nodded. He did not press. He had been an usher long enough to know that some Sundays the elder needed to be seen and some Sundays the elder needed to be seated, and the wisdom was knowing which without asking.

He walked her to the third pew on the left.

She sat. The pew was warm — Mother Wells had been there since ten o'clock, two seats down, in the place she had occupied every Sunday for forty-eight years until last fall, when her hip had finally argued enough that her grandson had to bring her in a wheelchair, and even then she had insisted on transferring to the pew because I will sit in my seat, baby, the chair can wait in the aisle.

Mother Wells looked over.

She did not say anything. She looked at Ola Mae for a long moment with eyes that had been watching congregations since the war, and she gave one small nod — the nod of one prayer-warrior recognizing another, the nod that says I see it on you and I will ask later, when there is time.

Ola Mae returned the nod.

She did not, in front of Mother Wells, do anything but sit.

The choir came down the center aisle at ten thirty-one, two minutes late, which was on time by Mt. Calvary's clock.

They were singing Great Is Thy Faithfulness.

Ola Mae had heard the hymn ten thousand times. She had sung it, by her own count, somewhere over four thousand. She had sung it at her wedding. She had sung it at her father's funeral and her mother's and her brother's. She had sung it in the kitchen with Eldridge in 1971 the night they had stood in the cold by the window watching for an ambulance for Yvonne, who had been sick for three days with a fever that would not break and who had broken her fever an hour before the ambulance arrived because Eldridge had laid hands on his daughter and prayed and the fever had broken under his hand. She had sung it the morning she had buried Eldridge in 2008. She had sung it every first Sunday of every month for as long as the hymnals at Mt. Calvary had numbered it as 86, which was longer than most of the congregation had been alive.

She did not sing it today.

She sat in the pew with her hands folded over her purse and she let the hymn arrive at her the way the spring light arrived at the pecan tree, without resistance and without contribution. The choir came forward. Sister Doris's alto line moved underneath the soprano like the river underneath the bridge, the way it had moved for thirty-one years, the way it would move when none of them were left to hear it. The organ — Brother Calvin Hightower, who had been at the bench since 1979 and who was now seventy-six and whose hands had begun to tremble on the bass pedals in a way nobody yet had the heart to name — held the chord that had been holding the hymn since Thomas Chisholm wrote it in 1923.

Strength for today, and bright hope for tomorrow.

She had asked for one thing, on Saturday afternoon in her kitchen.

The Lord had given her the thing on Sunday morning at nine-thirty.

She put her hand on her purse. The letter was inside. She did not open the purse. She did not need to. She had read the letter four times since Stephen had left and she had it, now, the way she had hymn 86 — not by paper but by bone.

The hymn ended. The congregation sat. Pastor Honeycutt walked to the pulpit and welcomed the visitors and read the announcements and called for the morning prayer, and Ola Mae did not hear the prayer he prayed because she was praying her own, the small one she had not been able to pray on the porch, which was the prayer of thanksgiving she had learned at her mother's knee in 1949 and which she could no longer say in a public voice.

I thank You, Lord, for being the Lord. I thank You for keeping what I could not keep. I thank You for letting me see, before I was too tired to see, that the keeping was real.

She did not know that she was crying until Mother Wells, two seats down, reached over and put her hand on the back of Ola Mae's gloved hand without looking. The hand stayed. Ola Mae's hand stayed under it. Neither of them looked at the other. The pastor finished the prayer. The congregation said amen. The hand lifted.

That was Mother Wells. That had always been Mother Wells. The keepers, in Ola Mae's experience, did not make a production of one another. They simply put a hand where the other one's hand was, and they moved on.

She did not remember the sermon afterward.

This was not, she would tell herself later, a symptom of the failing. The sermon at Mt. Calvary was a thing one received the way one received the air in the sanctuary — fully, automatically, without afterward needing to recount it. Pastor Honeycutt was a careful preacher. He had taken over from Pastor Briggs in 1996, and he had spent the first decade of his ministry being measured against a man whose shadow had been so large that Pastor Honeycutt had, by his own admission, kept a photograph of Pastor Briggs in his study not as inspiration but as warning — do not try to be him; be the one he prayed for.

He had been the one Pastor Briggs prayed for. The congregation had agreed, eventually, that this was true.

He preached this morning on a passage from Hebrews — the cloud of witnesses, the great long line of the dead who had gone on before. Ola Mae caught fragments. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. She caught the cadence. She caught the moment, near the end, when Pastor Honeycutt's voice dropped half a register and he said something about the people we had not yet met whose lives our prayers had touched, and the congregation said mm-hmm in the soft scattered way they said it when something true was being said and the words did not yet need to be amen.

She sat. She listened. The letter was in her purse.

She did not need the sermon to be about her. The sermon was for whoever needed it, and she had already received hers in the kitchen yesterday and on the porch this morning, and a sermon is not a thing one greedy-handles.

The benediction came at eleven fifty-seven.

The congregation rose. The recessional hymn started. The choir filed back out. The aisles filled with the slow Sunday traffic of people who had nowhere to be until afternoon and who used the time between the benediction and the parking lot to do the small important work of being a church — how is your sister, how is the baby, did you hear about Brother So-and-So, I'll bring something by Tuesday.

Ola Mae remained seated.

She was not in a hurry. She was eighty-two years old and she had walked three blocks and she would walk three blocks back, and the pew would hold her until the foot traffic thinned.

Mother Wells turned.

"Sister Tate."

"Mother Wells."

"Tell me one thing about it."

Ola Mae considered. She had been considering, all through the sermon, what she would tell Mother Wells. She had decided, somewhere during the third verse of Great Is Thy Faithfulness, that she would tell her one thing and only one, and that she would not show her the letter, because the letter was a thing she was going to need to hold by herself for a while longer before it could become a thing two could hold.

"A boy I prayed for in 1978," she said. "His son came to my door yesterday morning."

Mother Wells closed her eyes.

She kept them closed for what would have been, in a younger woman, an awkward length of time. In Mother Wells it was the closing of a long door against the wind, the way a woman with ninety-one years of practice received a thing the Lord had handed across the pew.

She opened her eyes.

"Did the boy live?"

"He lived. He pastored a church in Detroit for thirty-one years. He died three weeks ago."

"And the son came to tell you."

"The son came to tell me."

Mother Wells nodded. It was a slow nod, deliberate, the nod of a woman whose neck no longer moved in haste.

"The Lord is gathering the receipts, Sister."

"Mother?"

"He is. I have noticed it for a year. He is letting some of us see the receipts before He calls us. It is His mercy. It is also, I think, His instruction. I think He is showing us — those of us who have been at it the longest — that the work was not for nothing, so that we can tell the younger ones not to give up." She paused. Her eyes went distant for a moment, the way her eyes went distant when she was doing the small interior work that no one else in the building had the credentials to assess. "I have had three of my own come back, since November. Three. I had not had three answered in twenty years. Now three in five months."

Ola Mae looked at her.

"Mother. You did not tell me."

"I am telling you now. I tell what is needed when it is needed. You did not need it then. You need it now."

The two of them sat in the pew. The aisle was thinning. Pastor Honeycutt was at the back greeting the last of the line. The organ had stopped. The sanctuary had begun the small humming silence it always entered between the recessional and the cleanup, the silence of a room that had been full of singing and was preparing itself for the prayer of the women who would stay behind to vacuum.

Mother Wells looked at Ola Mae.

"You are losing things, Sister Tate."

"I am, Mother."

"Have they named it."

"Tuesday."

"Mm."

"Yvonne is taking me."

"Mm."

Mother Wells did not, on the front of her face, react. But her eyes did the small thing they did when she was being told a thing she had been afraid she would be told. It was a private grief. It did not announce itself.

"You will keep your book."

"I will, Mother."

"You will keep it as long as you can. When you cannot, you will let someone else keep it. The keeping is not the writing. You know that."

"I know it, Mother."

"The keeping is the will to keep. The Lord will receive the will whether the hand can write or not."

Ola Mae did not answer. The thing in her chest had begun to move again, the way it had moved when she had read Stephen's letter, and she did not have the resources to manage it in front of even Mother Wells. She turned her face slightly, toward the stained glass on the south wall — the window of the Good Shepherd, given by the Henderson family in 1962 — and she let the light do what it did to a face that needed to not be looked at for a moment.

Mother Wells gave her the moment. Mother Wells had been giving people moments for seventy years.

After a while Mother Wells said: "Help me up, Sister."

Ola Mae helped her up. They walked together to the back of the sanctuary. Mother Wells's grandson — twenty-six, patient, a tall man named Curtis who had taken on the care of his grandmother with a quiet dignity that Ola Mae had marked from the first Sunday — was waiting with the wheelchair in the aisle. Mother Wells transferred. Curtis nodded at Ola Mae the way a younger man nods at an elder his grandmother has just spoken with at length, which is to say: I know that was something.

Ola Mae nodded back.

Pastor Honeycutt was at the door.

He did not, today, do the line he usually did with her — the small joke about her hat, the inquiry about Yvonne, the brief blessing he laid on the back of her hand. He looked at her, and he looked into her, and then he said only:

"Mother."

"Pastor."

"Whatever the Lord did this week, you let me know when you are ready."

"I will, Pastor."

He put his hand on her shoulder. He held it there for the count of three. He removed it.

She walked out into the parking lot.

The walk home was longer than the walk over. The sun had moved. The April light had warmed past gold into the noon white that meant lunchtime, and her knee was beginning to argue with her in a more committed way, but she walked the three blocks without hurry.

She let herself in. She took off the hat. She set it on the bed.

She walked to the front room.

She opened the prayer book. She did not need to look up Calvin Pruitt's entry; her finger went there. The crossed-out name, the date, the word.

Free.

She added, in small letters underneath, in the careful hand she still had on the third Sunday in April: His son Stephen. His wife Brenda. Their children Calvin Jr. and Ola.

She had remembered, on the walk home, what Stephen had told her at the door — that his daughter was named Ola, and that she was twelve.

She did not put a date by the new entry. The new entry did not have a date yet. The new entry had a future. The keeping was beginning again, in a different hand, on the same page, for a child she would not live long enough to see grown.

She closed the book. She set her hand on it. She sat in Eldridge's chair.

She looked at the pecan tree through the window for a long time.

Mother Wells had said the Lord was gathering receipts. Ola Mae did not know if that was right. She did not know if the Lord gathered. She did know that He kept, and that the keeping was, in the end, the only verb she had ever needed Him for.

She closed her eyes.

The house held her. The afternoon light moved across the floor an inch at a time, the way it had been moving across the floor of this room for sixty-four years, and she sat in it without resistance, an old woman in a chair her husband had bought her when they could not afford it, with a book on her lap, on the third Sunday in April, and the cloud of witnesses around her — three of Mother Wells's, one of hers, the others she did not yet know about — held the room as quietly as the room held her.

She did not sleep.

She rested.

There is a difference, at eighty-two, between the two, and she had learned it.