the building we are sitting in tonight. Not the roof or the pews. The whole building. In April of 1987, Imogene and her husband Lester walked into my little office, with the river still in the basement, and she said, Pastor, I have a plan, and you are going to hate it.” A soft laugh went through the hall, the nervous kind. I sat very still with my hands in my lap. “They bought the old Harmon Bluff Furniture Mill, three blocks from here, with cash. Then they paid the contractors to turn it into this sanctuary. The cost was four hundred and ten thousand dollars.”
A woman at the back table gasped. Someone dropped a fork. Bishop Coleman turned the microphone a little toward me. “She gave only one condition,” he said. “Harold, she told me, nobody knows. Not the board, not the congregation. If it ever gets out, I will give you not one more dime. And then she said the thing I have never forgotten. She said, I will put two dollars in the plate every Sunday for as long as I live, so that no one can ever say Imogene Pruitt gave nothing, and no one can ever say she gave everything.”
I heard my sister Bonnie make a small sound. I did not turn around. The bishop continued. “Over thirty seven years, I have watched that woman fold that two dollars in half and lay it in the plate like it was a pearl. She has also paid for the new organ, the church van, the roof twice, and every Christmas basket on the west side. She paid for the pastor scholarship that put me through seminary, and she did it all through a bank in Louisville, so that nobody would ever look back at a little woman in the third pew.”
Two folded dollars every Sunday had been a promise kept, and a whole congregation learned who gave them the building they were standing in.
The hall was so quiet I could hear the old refrigerator humming in the kitchen. I thought about that April, and how Lester drove me past the mill on a Sunday afternoon and said, Imogene, the roof is sound, and the beams are oak, and there is room for four hundred people. I said it was a furniture mill. He said, so was the stable in Bethlehem, near enough. We laughed all the way home. Then we sat at our kitchen table on Jefferson Street and wrote the check together, and Lester prayed over it, and neither of us ever spoke of it again.
Garrett was white as paper. His iced tea sat untouched in front of him. I will say this for my nephew, he did not look for a hole to hide in. He stood up, slowly, and walked to my table, and in front of two hundred people he got down on one knee. At fifty six, with a bad knee, I might add. “Aunt Imogene,” he said, “I audited your giving record. I should have audited my own heart. I called you cheap in front of this church. I am so very sorry.”
I took his hand, the way I used to when he was six and cried over a broken kite. “Garrett,” I said, “you looked at the numbers, and the numbers said two dollars. They were not wrong. Lester always said the Lord keeps the real books. The rest of it was only ever between me and Him.” I patted his cheek. “And do not you dare name that broom closet after me. I intend to keep my proper pew until the Lord calls me home, thank you.” He laughed, and he cried, and the hall laughed right along with him.
Then the strangest thing happened. A man I had not seen in thirty years stood up from the back row. His name was Tommy Reyes, and he had been a boy of nine in 1987, sleeping on a cot in that basement when the river came. “Mrs. Pruitt,” he called, “my mama cleaned this church for twenty years. You kept her job.” An old woman stood beside him. Then a deacon. Then a young mother holding a baby. One by one, the whole fellowship hall rose to its feet, and I could not see them through my tears.
They did not clap at first. They just stood there, two hundred people, as quiet as a prayer. Pastor Mike came down from the stage and took my elbow, and the bishop stepped off the dais, and together they walked me to the front. I told them I was not much for speeches. Lester would have said something funny. So instead I said, “Folks, I never gave that money to be seen. I gave it because this church held my husband when his mother passed, and it held me when I could not have children. A home gives back, and I only paid it forward.”
After the dinner, Bonnie found me in the coat room, still crying, and held on to me like we were girls again. “I laughed,” she said. “I laughed at you, Imogene.” I said, “Honey, it was funny. A broom closet is a very funny idea.” We stood there giggling like fools while the deacons stacked chairs. When the hall was nearly empty, Garrett came in with a coffee can in his hands, and inside were forty seven dollar bills. Every one had been folded in half. He said it was the start of something he wanted to do.
That Sunday I sat in the third pew on the left, as I have since 1951. When the plate came down the row, I folded my two dollars once and laid it in. The usher, who is a young father with a baby on his shoulder, bowed his head a little as if I had handed him something precious. Maybe I had. Behind me I heard rustling, and then another soft rustle, as pew after pew of people reached for their wallets and quietly folded their own dollar bills in half. Lester would have loved it.
