Pastor Jeff stood in the empty chapel on Saturday afternoon and counted the pews. Twelve rows. Room for eighty people. Tomorrow was his first Sunday service, and he did not know a single family by name. The town had brought him here on the strength of an old memory. Years back, before this settlement had a proper name, he had preached to a handful of loggers under a tarp. Now they had built him a church with stained glass and cross-braced beams. Forty-one roofs stood outside these walls. He had promised to fill every pew. He had not asked how. He sat on the front step and opened his notebook. The page was blank. He had no roster, no list of households, no way to invite anyone by name. If he rang the bell in the morning and nobody came, the silence would answer for him. He walked into town. The realty office had a lamp burning. Carol Donnell was behind the desk, sorting deeds into stacks with a wetted thumb. She looked up without stopping her hands. "Pastor. You look like a man who forgot something." "I forgot to meet anyone," he said. "Service is tomorrow. I don't know who lives where." She pulled a ledger from a low drawer and set it on the counter. "Forty-one households. Every plot, every name, every door." She turned it so he could read. "I sold most of them the land they're sitting on." "May I borrow it?" "You can copy from it. It doesn't leave the office." She slid paper and a pencil across. "Start with the ones nearest the chapel. They'll come if it's a short walk." He copied for two hours. Carol added notes as he wrote: this one has three children, this one lost a brother last winter, this one won't come unless you knock twice. When he finished, he had thirty-eight names and a route. He walked it before dark. He knocked on doors. He said his name and the hour of the service and nothing more. At the doctor's building he found Dr. Richard washing his hands in a basin, and the doctor said he would come and bring the family two doors down. At the jail Sheriff McDuffie said he would come in uniform and sit in back. Mr. Farah said he would bring the schoolchildren whose parents worked Sunday. Not everyone said yes. Some said maybe. Two said no. He walked back to the chapel after dusk with a count in his head. Twenty-six confirmed. Nine maybes. He wrote the numbers on the first page of his notebook and closed it. The pews would not be empty. They would not be full either. Tomorrow he would learn which faces belonged to which names, and which of the maybes had meant it. He climbed the steps and rang the bell once, to test the rope.

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.