Sister Doris

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 51: Sister Doris

Sister Doris Akers died on the fourth of October, twenty twenty-eight, at the Methodist Le Bonheur hospital, eleven days after the stroke that had taken her down in her own kitchen on the morning of the twenty-third of September.

She was sixty-eight.

She had answered the call to the prayer-floor on the first Sunday of June twenty twenty-six. She had been keeping her own list for two years and four months at the time she went. Her list, when her daughter found it in the small green notebook in the top drawer of her mother's dresser three days after the funeral, had fifty-one names.

The daughter's name was Lisa Akers-Greene. She was forty-four. She lived in Southaven. She had, over the course of her mother's last eleven days in the hospital, been the primary caregiver, because Sister Doris's husband had died in 2011 and her son — Lisa's older brother — lived in Seattle and could fly in only for the last three days. Lisa had been at her mother's bedside for most of the eleven days, and she had been, Tiana would learn on the porch in late October, a woman who had known since about day six that her mother was not coming home.

Tiana had been at the hospital twice during those eleven days.

She had gone on the second day, at Lisa's invitation, with Yvonne. They had sat for forty minutes with Sister Doris, who had been able, on that day, to speak in small careful sentences. Sister Doris had asked Tiana, near the end of the visit, to take her hand. She had said, in the voice that had sung the alto line for thirty-two years and which had thinned, in the stroke, to a reed: Baby. The book. You take the book. You fold the names in. You and your mama. The way your grandmama did for Mother Wells. Lisa will bring it to you.

Tiana had said: Yes, Sister Doris.

Sister Doris had said: The alto line is retired.

Tiana had said: The alto line is retired.

Sister Doris had nodded once.

Tiana had gone again on the eighth day, briefly. Sister Doris had not been able to speak that afternoon. Tiana had sat beside the bed with Yvonne's hand on her shoulder and had held Sister Doris's hand for ten minutes and had read — aloud, at Lisa's request — the Twenty-third Psalm and the small closing lines of First Corinthians thirteen. Sister Doris's eyes had, once, moved toward the sound of Tiana's voice. The eyes had not opened fully. The moving was the acknowledgment.

She had gone three days later.

The funeral was on Saturday, October seventh, at Mt. Calvary.

It was smaller than Mother Wells's, and smaller than Mother Tate's, but it was not a small funeral. Sister Doris had sung alto in the choir for thirty-two years, and the congregation had filled the sanctuary the way it filled the sanctuary on the Sundays when an elder who had been in the pews as long as Sister Doris was being sent home.

Pastor Honeycutt asked Tiana, two days before the service, if she would give the Mothers' Board testimony.

Tiana said yes.

She prepared for two days. She wrote in her kitchen Thursday night at the table with the composition book open beside her. She wrote the first draft of the testimony by hand on a legal pad. She cut it by a third on Friday morning. She cut it by another quarter on Friday afternoon, because she had learned — from her grandmother's pulpit testimony at Mother Wells's funeral in June twenty twenty-six — that the sharper the testimony, the better it did its work in a sanctuary.

On Saturday morning, at the pulpit, she spoke for three minutes.

She said: "Church. Sister Doris Akers sang the alto line at Mt. Calvary for thirty-two years. I grew up listening to it. My grandmother sang beside it. Mother Wells sang in front of it. The soprano moved over it. The bass moved under it. The alto was the thing that held the middle of the hymn together and which, when Sister Doris was on a good Sunday, made the rest of us — those of us in the pews who did not sing — close our eyes and know we had been brought, by a woman in a robe, to a place a sermon could not quite reach.

"I want to tell you one thing about her. Mother Wells, in the pew in April of twenty twenty-six, turned her head a fraction and called Sister Doris to the prayer-floor. She called her without calling her. I watched. I was on the floor at the time — my grandmother's listener, not yet a keeper. I watched the call pass between two old women across a pew without a word. Sister Doris answered, the first Sunday of June twenty-six, at Mother Wells's funeral, in the basement at the repast, in the small green folding chair Brother Carlton had set up for her. She told me that afternoon — and I have not, until today, told anyone — that she had been called since nineteen ninety-six and had been answering, as she put it, with her alto line in place of her answer for thirty years. Mother Wells's going was the thing that converted the alto line into the answer. Sister Doris began her book that afternoon. I saw her begin it.

"Fifty-one names. In two years and four months. Sister Doris did not waste the answer.

"Church. The alto line is retired. The book has been handed to the next keepers. The keeping continues. I am not going to sing Sister Doris's alto line because the Lord did not give me the voice. But I am going to carry her fifty-one names into my own book, and my mother is going to carry them into hers, and we are going to pray them every morning for as long as the Lord gives us hands. That is what a Mother of the Board does for another Mother. That is what Sister Doris did for Mother Wells. That is what Mother Wells did for my grandmother. That is what my grandmother did for the three before her. The line is the line. The alto is retired. The keeping continues.

"That is what I came to say."

She walked back down.

The sanctuary was silent. Then the amens came — not the scattered amens of an ordinary Sunday, but the full chorus of a congregation that had, over two and a half years now, been watching its oldest keepers go one by one, and was learning to say goodbye with the kind of amen that understood what was being passed.

Lisa Akers-Greene came to Park Avenue on the last Saturday of October.

She came alone, in a small blue Toyota, at eleven in the morning. She had the small green notebook in a manila folder on the passenger seat.

She had been, Tiana could see when Lisa got out, sleeping poorly. Lisa was forty-four, an elementary school secretary, divorced for six years, with two teenagers at home and a mother she had just buried and a brother who had flown back to Seattle and a small stack of paperwork she had been working through every evening at her kitchen table in Southaven for three weeks.

Yvonne met her on the porch.

"Baby."

"Mrs. Brooks."

"Yvonne, baby."

"Yvonne."

"Come up."

Lisa came up. She sat in the second wicker chair. She did not, for a moment, open the folder.

She said, quietly: "Yvonne."

"Yes, Lisa."

"I found this in Mama's top drawer last Tuesday. I had not looked in the drawer until then. I thought — I thought there would be another album, or another letter, or something small. There was this. I sat on the bed and opened it. I read it for about five minutes. I closed it. I have not opened it again."

"Yes, baby."

"I did not know."

"I know, baby."

"I did not know Mama was a keeper. I had never heard the word in that way. I knew she prayed. I did not know — Yvonne, I did not know she had a book."

"Baby. Your mother kept the book private. That is part of the practice. Mothers do not, for the first years, show the book. Some never show it. Your mother was in her second year. She had not yet decided when she would tell you. The Lord made the decision for her."

"Yes, Yvonne."

Tiana came out of the kitchen. She had been in the kitchen on purpose for the first ten minutes because Yvonne had said, last week when they had planned this visit, that Lisa would need a minute with Yvonne alone before Tiana came into the conversation. Yvonne knew the shape of first receptions. Yvonne had been learning it from Tiana by watching for two years, and Tiana had been learning it from her grandmother, and Yvonne was, today, the first point of reception for Sister Doris's daughter.

Tiana sat.

"Lisa."

"Tiana."

"Thank you for bringing the book."

"Tiana. I have a question I do not know how to ask."

"Ask, baby."

"Mama had fifty-one names in the book. I read — I read maybe twenty of them before I had to stop. Some of them were church people. Some were my own children's friends. Two of them were my own children. One of them was me. I was on my mother's list. I did not — Yvonne, I did not know I was being prayed for in that specific way. I thought I was being prayed for the way everyone's mother prays for them. I did not know I had a line next to my name with a date and a small note that said — Tiana, it said — Lisa. My daughter. She is tired. She has been tired since the divorce in 2018. I am carrying her until the Lord sends her a rest."

Lisa's eyes filled.

Tiana did not, at first, speak.

Then she said: "Lisa."

"Yes, Tiana."

"Your mother saw you."

"She saw me."

"She saw you the way a keeper sees. Not the way the world sees. She wrote down what she saw. The page is the record of her seeing. You are going to carry that page for the rest of your life. It is going to be hard to carry and good to carry at the same time. You will — Lisa, you will find that you open the book sometimes in the next five years, when a thing happens that you would have told your mother, and you will read the page and you will feel her seeing you one more time. That is the keeping of a dead keeper. She does not stop seeing you. The page keeps the seeing."

Lisa wept into her hand.

Yvonne rose, quietly, and went to the kitchen. She came back with a box of tissues and a glass of water. She set both on the small table.

Tiana waited.

After a while Lisa lifted her face.

"Tiana. I am not — I am not going to be a keeper. I do not have the call. I want to be honest. I want you to know."

"Yes, Lisa. That is honest. That is all right."

"I want the book to come to you. I want the names that were not my family to be folded into yours and my mother's. The family names — the two grandchildren, the two cousins in Atlanta, the two names I am still figuring out — I would like to keep at home. Not in a book I write in. Just in a small file on my desk. I want them somewhere so I can look at them when I need to. But the church names, the Mt. Calvary names, the stranger names, the ones that were my mother's keeping work — those go to you."

"Yes, Lisa. That is the right arrangement."

"Can you — can you and I go through the book together, today, and agree on which stay with me and which come to you? I do not want to decide alone. I do not trust my judgment. I am tired."

"Yes, Lisa. That is what we will do. Mom, you stay with us. Three pairs of eyes is better than two."

"Yes, baby," Yvonne said.

They went to the kitchen table.

The sorting took an hour and forty minutes.

They went through the fifty-one names. They agreed, with Tiana asking careful questions — did your mother know this person well; was this a stranger; was this from the pulpit call or from before — on which names belonged to Lisa and which belonged to Tiana and her mother and the wider floor.

Of the fifty-one:

Eight were family names — children, grandchildren, siblings-in-law, a niece. Lisa kept those.

Twenty-three were Mt. Calvary names — church members, Sunday school children, the praise team, the custodian. These went to Tiana and Yvonne to fold in.

Fifteen were the names from Sister Doris's wider calling — people she had encountered in her job at the school where she had worked as an aide for fifteen years before retiring, people she had met at conferences in the eighties, a woman from her Alabama girlhood who had moved to Chicago and whom Sister Doris had never stopped carrying. These went to the book too.

Five were names Lisa did not recognize at all. Tiana took those — she said, gently, that the Lord had given them to Sister Doris for a reason, and that they should stay in the keeping line until the reason revealed itself or until the Lord lifted them. Lisa agreed.

Tiana wrote them all in. She did it slowly, over the next two weeks, three names a day, so that each name was received with the care it deserved.

Lisa left Park Avenue at two in the afternoon.

She hugged Yvonne at the door. She hugged Tiana. At the bottom of the path she turned back and looked up at the porch.

"Yvonne. Tiana."

"Yes, Lisa."

"Mama was proud of what you two are doing. I did not know until last week. She said so in the book. On the page where she listed the fellow Mothers of her floor — you two, Sister Linda, Sister Stephanie, Denise, Curtis. She wrote beside your names — Tiana, she wrote beside your name the next keeper. She will teach Naomi. The Lord arranged her through Mother Tate's line. She wrote beside your name, Yvonne — the matriarch. She holds the house in a way that does not draw attention to itself. She is a keeper without a book. I have been learning from her."

Yvonne, on the porch, put her hand to her face.

"Lisa."

"Yes, Yvonne."

"Your mother was generous."

"She was. I miss her."

"We all do, baby."

Lisa got in the car. She drove away.

That night Tiana wrote in her own book.

She added, on the current active page — just above the running column of new names from Sister Doris's list — a small note:

October 28, 2028. Sister Doris Akers crossed from the active list to the legacy pages of Mt. Calvary. Her book came home today by way of Lisa Akers-Greene, her daughter. Thirty-eight of her fifty-one names are being folded in. Five are names we do not yet know the shape of. The keeping continues. The alto line is retired.

She underlined alto line is retired.

She closed the book.

She thought about Sister Doris.

She thought, specifically, about the Sunday in June 2026 in the repast basement at Mt. Calvary when Sister Doris had sat down beside Tiana's grandmother on the small green folding chair and had said, in the small dry voice: Sister Tate. The Lord called me to the floor at three this morning.

She thought about her grandmother's laugh — the small dry pleased laugh — and the sentence her grandmother had said back: Sister Doris, the Lord has been calling you to the floor since ninety-six.

Sister Doris had been called at fifty-two for eleven months and had answered at fifty-eight.

Her grandmother had been there at the answering.

Sister Doris, on the other side now, was probably — Tiana would not claim — across from her grandmother at whatever prayer-floor the Lord had arranged for them, trading the small greetings of women who had already worked together on this side for a long time.

Tiana went to bed.

In the next weeks, she folded the names in slowly.

Three a day. She had decided on three because her grandmother had once, in a passing sentence in October 2026 about how Mother Wells's forty-three names had been absorbed through the summer of 2026, had said: Tiana, baby, you do not take on more than three in a morning. The new name is a heavy weight for the first week. Three is what the body can carry fresh. You spread the folding over a couple of weeks. You do not gulp.

Tiana gulped nothing.

She folded Sister Doris's thirty-eight names over thirteen days. On the fourteenth day, when the last three were settled in the book, she sat in Eldridge's chair and said, quietly, to the room:

Sister Doris. They are in. The alto line is retired. The keeping continues in your old songbook.

She closed the book.

The fall light through the window was the gold of early November. The pecan tree was yellow at the tips now, its pecans nearly down. Naomi would be over on Saturday to help Carl gather them. The routine was the routine.

The cloud of witnesses around Park Avenue had gained, in October, one more keeper and fifty-one names, most of which had been strangers to Park Avenue and were now household.

The work went on.

At Mt. Calvary, the choir — which had, over a year, been quietly auditioning a new alto — announced on the first Sunday of November that Sister Jocelyn Patterson, thirty-eight, a welder at the shipyard who had a voice like a bell and who had been attending Mt. Calvary since 2012 without ever, until this year, joining the choir, would be taking Sister Doris's place.

Jocelyn Patterson sang her first Sunday on the first Sunday of Advent.

The congregation listened.

The alto line had not died with Sister Doris. The alto line had, as always, passed.

Sister Doris had been in Mt. Calvary's choir loft for thirty-two years. Jocelyn Patterson would be there for — the Lord willing — another thirty. The line held.

Tiana, in the pew on that first Sunday of Advent, listened with her eyes closed.

She thought: Grandma. The alto has been passed. Sister Doris's book has been folded in. The line holds.

She did not say the last line out loud. She did not need to. The Lord, who had been weaving the small quiet threads of the line across forty years and who would weave them across forty more, heard the small interior saying.

The alto sang.

The congregation stood.

The first Advent Sunday of 2028 went on, and the keeping continued, and Sister Doris Akers, in the cloud, did not sing the alto line herself anymore — because on the other side, the songs were different — but she listened, Tiana believed without claiming, to the new voice filling the loft she had filled for three decades, and she smiled.