…one of them holding a stopwatch, calling out the seconds as my mother scrubbed the linoleum. “Thirty seconds on that corner, Mother Odom,” he said. “Pastor wants the hall spotless before the Wednesday service.” The second deacon pointed with his coffee cup at a dull gray spot under the long table. “You missed one, Mother,” he said, in a voice that was almost kind. My mother, seventy nine years old, in a church dress that had been white that morning, shifted her bucket and crawled toward it on her sore knees. I pushed the swinging doors open so hard that they banged against the wall and rang through the whole building.
All three deacons turned. The youngest dropped his stopwatch. “Sister Renee, we did not know you were here,” one of them stammered. I did not look at them. I walked straight across that wet floor and knelt beside my mother and took the scrub brush out of her hand. Her palms were red as raw meat, and the knees of her stockings had gone to ribbons. “Mama, how long?” I asked. “Since eight, baby,” she said, with a small, embarrassed laugh. “I am just doing the Lord work. Calvin said the hall had to be ready.” She looked past me at the deacons. “These boys have been very helpful. They bring me coffee.”
My brother came out of his office at last, adjusting his gold cufflinks, the man who has preached to eight hundred people every Sunday for twenty years. Pastor Calvin Odom is fifty five, tall and handsome, with a voice like warm syrup. He took in the scene, the bucket, the brush, the deacons with their cups, and he spread his hands. “Renee, this is a labor of love,” he said. “Mama volunteered. The ladies of the church usually clean the hall, but we are short this month.” I stood up slowly. “Calvin, the ladies of the church do not take a stopwatch,” I said. “Mama is seventy nine. You have her on her knees in front of three young men.”
A worn scrub brush left on a church floor gave one daughter the weekend to bring her mother back to the front pew in Shreveport.
I gave my terms in the middle of the fellowship hall, with my mother seated in a folding chair and a cold compress on her hands. The church would hire a professional cleaning service, and the cost would come from the budget, not from the widows. The deacons would take the brush themselves on Tuesday morning and finish the hall, on their own knees. For the Tuesdays that my mother had spent in that building, the church would pay her an honorarium of sixty dollars a visit, which came to six thousand, two hundred forty dollars. And Pastor Calvin would apologize to her before the whole congregation.
Calvin tried to argue for a moment, and then my mother spoke from her chair. “Calvin Ezekiel Odom, I raised you better than this,” she said softly. “I taught you that a servant of the Lord is a servant to all, and that does not mean you make the servants of the Lord out of old women.” The pastor stood very still. In the doorway, the three young deacons looked at the floor. “Mama, I never meant it that way,” he said, his voice cracking. “I thought you wanted to be useful. You always said you did.” She nodded. “I do, son. But there is useful, and there is used. I am too old to know the difference.”
The youngest deacon, a boy of twenty six named Terrell, cleared his throat. “Mother Odom, I did not realize,” he said. “They told me you asked for it. They told me you loved it.” He took off his jacket and laid it over her shoulders. “I am ashamed. Please let me finish this floor.” He picked up the brush, rolled up his sleeves and knelt on the linoleum. A moment later, the other two followed. My mother watched the three of them scrubbing and said, to no one in particular, “Well, would you look at that. The Lord does answer prayers. He just takes his time.”
That Sunday, my brother stood in the pulpit in front of nine hundred members in their best clothes, and he told them everything. He did not soften it. He said that he had used the mother of the church as a cleaning woman, that he had been wrong, and that he was asking forgiveness first from her and then from them. There was a long silence. Then an old deacon in the back, Brother Lamar, stood up and began to clap. The whole sanctuary followed. My mother, in the front pew in her white hat, sat with her hands folded and tears running quietly down her cheeks.
The money consequences came in the form of a vote. The finance committee hired a cleaning company, approved the sixty dollar honorarium and voted unanimously to pay my mother the six thousand, two hundred forty dollars she was owed. She accepted it graciously and then put every cent in the building fund. Pastor Calvin sold his gold cufflinks at a pawn shop, and he donated the money to the youth group. He also began coming by the house of my mother every Tuesday afternoon, with a bucket of chicken and a long list of questions, and he never again asked her to lift anything heavier than a fork.
In the name of my father, Deacon Ezekiel Odom, who passed fourteen years ago and who kept the church boiler running for thirty winters, I started the Ezekiel Front Pew Fund. It pays for honoraria, paid custodians and rides to service for elderly church mothers and fathers in Caddo Parish who have given their lives to the work and are too often treated as free labor. In the first year, we supported forty six churches. A church mother of ninety, in a purple hat, sat in her new reserved pew and said, “Child, I have been in this building for seventy years and nobody ever saved me a seat.”
On the first Tuesday after the vote, my mother arrived at the fellowship hall at ten in the morning in her best white hat. A tray of coffee and pound cake waited on the long table, set out by the three young deacons, who stood at attention beside it in clean white shirts. A banner on the wall read, WELCOME, MOTHER ODOM. She sat down in the head chair, the one she had never once been offered, and took a slow sip of coffee. “Boys,” she said, with a twinkle, “you missed a spot.” The deacons looked at the floor, and she laughed until she had to wipe her eyes.
