Pastor Jeff pastor of the church of Donnell's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Pastor Jeff slept four hours and woke before the bell. He sat at the desk in the chapel with his notebook open and a blank page in front of him. He had a count of heads for the morning. He had no words to say to them. He wrote a line about faith and crossed it out. He wrote a line about welcome and crossed it out too. Every sentence he tried belonged to some other church, in some other town, for people he had never met. The families walking here at nine o'clock did not need a sermon. They needed to know he saw them. He closed the notebook and walked outside. The sky was still gray. He turned away from the town and followed the path to the iron fence at the edge of the settlement. The cemetery was small. Two dozen stones, orderly rows, a gate that hung straight on new hinges. Beside it stood the funeral house Mr. Riggs kept, gray stone with a cross above the door. Pastor Jeff had recruited Mr. Riggs a week back to sit with grieving families before burials. Mr. Riggs was already up, sweeping the front step in his shirtsleeves. "Pastor. You're early for a man with nowhere to be till nine." "I need names," Pastor Jeff said. "Not the living. The ones here." Mr. Riggs set the broom against the wall. He unlocked the gate and walked Pastor Jeff down the center path. He stopped at each stone and gave what he knew. A woman who died in her second winter. A logger crushed under a bad cut. A child, three days old. A brother buried last year by a family still waiting to hear their name spoken in public. Pastor Jeff wrote them down. Nine stones. Nine families in his ledger with a mark next to them now. "Some of these folks are coming this morning," Mr. Riggs said. "They won't ask you to mention their dead. But they'll listen for it." Pastor Jeff walked back to the chapel with the list in his pocket. He wrote his sermon in forty minutes. He did not speak about doctrine. He read the nine names aloud, one at a time, and said what Mr. Riggs had told him about each. He said the town had built a church because it had already built a graveyard, and both were the same promise kept in different weather. He rang the bell at nine. They came. Twenty-six confirmed walked in, and seven of the nine maybes came behind them. He counted thirty-three heads in the pews before he stepped to the front. He read the names. A woman in the third row put her hand over her mouth. A man in the back nodded once and did not stop nodding. After the service, four families stayed to ask when he would come to their houses again. One asked if he would bury a grandmother who had waited too long for a pastor. He said yes before she finished the sentence.