The preacher got there early. He was wearing his Sunday clothes. Necktie.
His truck came roaring into the driveway of an ugly old house.
The preacher slid out of the cab. He was old and bent. Hair the color of a retired dandelion. He brought to mind Walter Mathau after a long night.
The elderly cleric grabbed his Bible. He knocked on the front door, straightening his collar.
A young mother answered. Little girl on her hip.
“Thank you for doing this,” the mama said.
He followed her through the dingy house. They were poor, but the house was in perfect order. A lot of people think the poor don’t keep clean houses. This is a Hollywood myth. “You don’t have to be rich to own a dustrag,” the author’s grandmother used to say.
The poor are often proud.
The preacher passed through the den. Tonka trucks littered the floor. A few GI Joes, fallen in the line of duty.
He arrived in the backyard, where he met the Tonka truck owner. A little boy, with a shovel in his
hands. The boy smelled like little-kid sweat. His cheeks, flushed from manual labor.
There was a newly dug hole in the earth beside the boy. There was an object beside the hole, wrapped in a bedsheet. A canine tail poking from beneath the sheet.
The preacher removed his jacket. “You lift her from one side, son, I’ll get the other.”
The boy was strong for his size. And there were holes in his little shoes. It took some doing, but together they placed the heavy remains of Boy’s Best Friend into the ground.
“What do we do now?” asked the boy.
“Now it’s my turn.”
The old man put on his jacket.
The pulpiteer opened his leatherbound book. He read some. He read the one about the Lord being a shepherd, and about the Valley of the Shadow of Death,…