Part 1
The first Sunday in September, I found the gap in row six, and for the first time in my life I was told by a grown man not to clean something.
I had been volunteering at Alden Chapel since April. The church sat on a low rise above the Mississinewa River in Alden, Indiana, a white frame building with a steeple that had been repainted every decade since the Eisenhower administration and a sanctuary that smelled of lemon oil, old hymnals, and the coffee urn in the fellowship hall. I was thirty-eight, a freelance bookbinder with a shop above the feed store on Main Street, and the pastor had asked me to help with the pews because I had mentioned, over a coffee after the service, that I knew how to clean old leather without ruining it.
The pew Bibles were the only leather in the room. There were thirty-two of them, one in each pew, in dark maroon boards gone soft and black at the corners from more than seventy years of hands. They had been bought in 1954, when the congregation put in the new pews, and each one had a number stamped in gold on the spine. I had been asked to dust the covers and wipe down the edge of the pews, nothing more.
On my second Sunday, I had lifted the cover of Bible 9 to wipe the brass hinge, and I saw the names.
They were written in pencil, on the inside front board, in a column that ran down the endpaper like a list of guests. Some were in cursive, some in print, some so faint I had to tilt the book to the window. Each name had a date beside it, and each date was a little later than the one before. I had started to wipe the first one, out of habit, with the damp cloth I used for the pews.
Arthur Dell, the head usher, had come down the aisle at that moment and taken the Bible out of my hands. He was eighty-one, a retired railroad signalman with a voice like a cow bell and a habit of standing in doorways so that nobody could leave without being greeted.
“Not the covers,” he said. He said it gently, but he did not give the book back.
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not the church’s.” He looked at me for a moment longer, then closed the cover and set it carefully on the pew. “The church owns the book, Miss Lowe. Not the names inside it.”
That was all he would say that morning. I learned the rest of it the way you learn most things in a small town: slowly, from people who didn’t mean to tell me, and then all at once.
The names were the readers. Every Bible in the chapel had been read by somebody, and whoever read it had written their name on the inside cover, one line per reader, in pencil, with the year beside it. Nobody had ever announced the custom. Nobody taught it. There was no sign in the narthex, no line in the bulletin, no paragraph in the church bylaws. The ushers simply didn’t clean the covers, and the new members simply noticed, and after a year or two they began to add their own names when they took a Bible home for a week, or read one in the pew during a long sermon, or sat up with one through a sleepless night.
Bible 14 had been in row six, on the left aisle, since 1954. It had eleven names.
I had seen them once, in June, while Arthur was off talking to the Methodist minister in the vestibule. The first was Ezra Alden, 1889, in fading brown ink. The last was in a child’s handwriting, large and crooked, with the letters running uphill: marcy, 6 years old, read it all.
When I came to clean row six on the first Sunday in September, the pew Bible was gone.
There was a clean space on the pew shelf where it had been, and a thin dust line that showed the outline of the book’s spine. The pew cushion had been pushed back, as if someone had sat there and then stood up in a hurry.
I stood in the aisle and stared at the empty shelf. Then I looked around the sanctuary. The congregation was filing in, slowly, a few of them stopping to greet one another in the aisle. Nobody else seemed to have noticed the gap. Or if they had, they weren’t going to say so.
Marcy Tolan was sitting in the back pew, the one nearest the door, with her hands folded in her lap. She was sixty-nine, small and straight-backed, with short white hair and a soft grey cardigan. She had been a schoolteacher for thirty-four years. She sang alto in the choir and never once missed the Sunday she was asked to read the lesson. She looked up when I caught her eye, and she gave me a small, unreadable smile.
“It’ll come home,” she said quietly, as if she had been waiting for someone to ask.
Part 2
It took me three weeks to learn the rest, and I learned most of it from the names themselves.
I started by reading all thirty-two Bibles, one at a time, in the sanctuary after the evening choir practice when the building was empty. I was not supposed to remove them, but I was allowed to read them where they sat, and I did, with the lights low and the radiator ticking under the windows. I copied the names onto index cards, one card per Bible, with the year and the number. I did not copy the notes that some readers had written in the margins, because those seemed private, and I did not copy the verses that had been underlined in pencil, though some of them were the most beautiful things I had ever seen in my life.
Bible 14 was the longest list. Ezra Alden, 1889, and then a gap of forty years before the next name: Ida Shaw, 1931. Then Walter Shaw, 1936, Eleanor Shaw, 1941, and five more names I did not recognize, all Shaws or Aldens or married into one or the other, in the same brown ink and the same careful hand. In 1954, after the new pews came, somebody had written Ida Shaw, 1954, a second time beneath her first name, and underlined it.
Then came Marcy’s line.
marcy, 6 years old, read it all.
The year beside it was 1963. Below that, the endpaper was blank. No name had been added in sixty-three years.
I took the card to the fellowship hall that Thursday and asked Arthur about it over coffee.
“Ida was Marcy’s grandmother,” he said. He stirred his cup slowly, the spoon clicking against the rim. “She was a librarian in Muncie for twenty years. She read the whole King James Bible twice before she was forty, and then she came home and read it to every child on Sunday afternoons. Marcy was the youngest. Ida promised her a dime for every book she finished.”
“Did she get paid?”
“Oh, she got paid.” Arthur smiled. “But she didn’t stop. She read all sixty-six books that year, and she read them out loud to her grandmother at the kitchen table, and then she came into this sanctuary on a Sunday in March and asked Ida to let her sign the Bible. Ida said she could sign it if she’d read every word. And Marcy said, I did, Gran, I read all of it, and wrote her name right there, in the pew, with a stub of carpenter’s pencil from her coat pocket.”
“And nobody has added a name since.”
“Nobody has read it since.” Arthur set his cup down. “Not all the way through. People start it. They get to Leviticus and quit. Or they go to the end of Revelation and say they’ll come back for the rest. That book’s been sitting in row six for sixty-three years waiting for somebody to finish what Marcy started.” He looked at me. “Nobody’s been brave enough to take it.”
“And so it went missing.”
“Somebody took it,” Arthur said. “I didn’t say they were brave.”
I went to see Marcy the following Saturday. She lived in a small brick house on Cedar Street with a porch swing and a row of tomato plants that had gone to seed in the September heat. Her husband, Dale, had died in August, of a stroke, at the kitchen table, with a glass of iced tea in front of him. His funeral had been in the chapel the last Saturday of August. I had sung in the choir for it, and I remembered the lesson: Dale had asked, years before, for the Psalms of Ascent, and his brother Carl had read them from the lectern while Marcy sat in row six with her hands in her lap.
The Bible had been on the lectern that morning. It had been carried up from row six by the ushers, as it always was for a reading, and carried back down afterward.
Marcy opened the screen door before I knocked. She did not look surprised to see me.
“You’re the bookbinder,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You want to ask me about the Bible.”
“Yes.”
She held the door a little wider. “Come in. I’ll put the kettle on. I’m not going to tell you where it is, Miss Lowe. But you can see the kitchen.”
Part 3
The congregation found out about the missing Bible two Sundays later, when Pastor Greer stood at the lectern for the announcements and said, quite plainly, that Bible 14 had been taken from row six and that he would be grateful if whoever had it would bring it back.
Nobody moved. Nobody coughed. The silence in the sanctuary went on so long that the organist stopped playing her soft prelude in the middle of a chord and sat with her hands above the keys.
Then a man in the third pew stood up. He was Ron Hendrix, who owned the hardware store on Main Street and sat on the church council. He had a loud voice and a practical mind, and he had been waiting, I think, for an excuse to say something.
“We need a sign-out sheet,” Ron said. “And a lock on the rack. And a rule that the Bibles stay in the pews. Otherwise we’re going to lose all of them.”
There was a murmur of agreement from the middle rows.
Pastor Greer did not reply at once. He looked down the length of the sanctuary toward row six, where the empty shelf stood under the window with a faint outline of dust still visible. Then he looked toward the back pew, where Marcy Tolan sat with her hands folded in her lap, and he said quietly, “Ron, I don’t think the Bibles are ours to lock.”
That started it.
The council met on the Thursday after, in the fellowship hall, under the buzzing fluorescent lights. I was there because Pastor Greer had asked me to take minutes, and because I was the only one who had read all thirty-two names. Ron put his motion on the table: a sign-out sheet, a lock on the pew rack, and a penalty for removing a Bible from the building. Two council members said they agreed. Two said they did not understand why anyone would need a penalty. Arthur Dell said nothing at all, but he sat with his arms folded and his eyes on Ron until Ron finally sat down.
“There’s something nobody’s told you,” Arthur said at last.
He told them about Ida Shaw and the dime, and Marcy at six with a carpenter’s pencil in her coat, and the lines that had been added in every generation since 1889. He did not tell them anything about the Bible’s current location, and nobody asked him to. When he finished, the room was silent except for the buzzing lights.
“So you’re saying the book can’t be locked,” Ron said slowly, “because it’s got a history?”
“I’m saying it’s not a library book,” Arthur said. “It’s a reading. You don’t check out a reading.”
Ron looked around the table for support, and he did not find it. He sighed, a long and heavy sound, and rubbed his eyes.
“Fine,” he said. “Then what do we do?”
Nobody answered. The council meeting ended without a vote.
On the following Sunday, something happened that the bylaws did not cover. When the service ended and the congregation rose to leave, nobody moved toward the doors. The organist started to play a quiet postlude, and people began to sit back down. First the ushers, then the choir, then a few of the older members in the front pews, until the whole sanctuary was full of people sitting in silence, facing forward, in front of pews with their Bibles closed on the shelves.
Row six remained empty. Marcy Tolan walked down the aisle and sat in it. She sat in the space where Bible 14 had been, with her hands folded, and her back very straight, and she did not look up.
Nobody spoke for a long time. Then, one at a time, people began to open the pew Bibles in front of them. They turned the covers carefully, very gently, and looked at the names inside. Some of them read aloud, quietly, under their breath. Some of them only looked. Nobody touched the pencil.
I sat in row four, beside Arthur Dell, and felt the heat rise in my face. The silence was the loudest thing I had ever heard in a church.
“That’s the rule,” Arthur whispered to me, without moving his head. “Nobody ever taught it. But when somebody’s missing, you sit with the space. You don’t cover it up. You let the people who know the book take a turn being quiet with it.”
“How long does it last?”
“Until it comes home,” Arthur said. “Or until somebody’s ready to say why it didn’t.”
Part 4
I found out where the Bible was on the last Tuesday in October, when Marcy Tolan called the fellowship hall and asked whether I could come to the house on Cedar Street that evening, alone.
She was sitting at the kitchen table when I came in, with the lights off except for the small lamp above the sink. The room smelled of coffee and tomatoes and the faint dust of a house that had been kept clean for decades by someone who did not like to be disturbed. Bible 14 lay open on the table in front of her, its maroon boards cracked along the spine, its gilt edges dulled by hands.
The blank endpaper at the back was covered in pencil.
“I didn’t mean to take it,” Marcy said, without preamble. “I want you to understand that. Carl read from it at the funeral, and I thought, I haven’t read that book since I was six. I sat in the car after the service with it in my lap, and I thought, If I don’t finish it now, I never will. So I took it home.”
“Why didn’t you ask anyone?”
She smiled faintly. “Because I’m a schoolteacher, honey. If I’d asked, they’d have said yes, and then I’d have had to read it in public. I wanted to read it alone. The way I did when I was six, under the kitchen table, with Gran’s flashlight.”
“How far have you got?”
“Revelation.” She turned a page, carefully, the way you would turn the leaves of a fragile flower. “I started in August, the week after Dale. I read a chapter every night. Some nights I read two. I read Leviticus out loud, to the salt shaker, because it was the only thing in the house that didn’t need comforting.” She laughed, a short wet sound. “I got through it. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone.”
I looked at the blank endpaper. “Did you write anything?”
“Not yet.” She put her hand flat on the page, on the empty space below her six-year-old’s line. “That’s what I wanted you for. When I finish, I’m supposed to add a name. That’s the rule, isn’t it? You read it, you sign it. But I don’t know what to write. My name is already there, in a child’s hand. Dale’s name isn’t in any of them, because he never read a Bible from front to back in his life. He just liked hearing the Psalms.”
“And the congregation?”
“I know what they’re doing,” Marcy said. “Arthur told me on Sunday. They sit in my pew every week now and open their own Bibles and don’t say a word. Ron Hendrix came up to me in the parking lot and said he was sorry, and then he said he’d never read the whole book either, and he was ashamed of it.” She looked at me directly. “Thirty-two Bibles in that sanctuary, Miss Lowe, and every one of them has a name in it. Half of them only have one line. The rest of us have been too busy to finish.”
“Why did you tell me?”
“Because you’re the one who wiped the first name,” Marcy said. “You started to clean it, and Arthur stopped you. And I think you were the only one who was really looking at what the names were for.”
She closed the book gently and pushed it across the table toward me.
“I’m on the last page,” she said. “I want to finish it. I want to write my line, and I want to put it back in row six myself, and then I want everybody to stop sitting in that pew like it’s a grave. But I can’t decide what the line should say. Do I write read it all again? Do I write Dale read the Psalms? Do I write I’m sorry I took it? Every version sounds like a lie, or like a child.”
I did not know what to tell her. I looked at the open page, at the child’s uphill letters, at the blank space beneath them, and I thought about Ida Shaw sitting in a kitchen in Muncie with a flashlight, promising a dime for every book.
“Marcy,” I said slowly, “what did Ida say to you the day you signed it?”
She went very still. The lamp above the sink hummed faintly. Outside, a car went by on Cedar Street, its headlights washing across the kitchen wall and then gone.
“She said, Now you have to keep it,” Marcy whispered. “And I said, Keep what, Gran? And she laughed and said, Keep the book, honey. Somebody has to read it next.“
“And nobody has,” I said.
“Nobody has,” Marcy agreed. Her voice was almost steady. “Not in sixty-three years. And I’m sixty-nine, and I’ve got one page left, and I’m afraid that if I write the next name, it’ll be the last one.”
She stood up, went to the sink, and turned off the lamp. In the dark kitchen, the only light came from the streetlamp outside, falling through the lace curtain in soft grey squares across the table, across the open book, across the blank page that was waiting for her.
“Come back on Sunday,” she said quietly. “I’ll have finished by then. Or I won’t. Either way, you’ll see what I decide.”
Part 5
On the first Sunday in November, the sky over Alden was grey and low, and the wind came off the river with a damp chill that got into the stone steps of the church. I came early, before the ushers had turned on the furnace. The sanctuary was cold and dim, lit only by the grey light through the tall windows, and the pews stood in their neat rows, each one with its Bible closed on the shelf.
Row six was still empty. The clean space on the shelf was still there, with its faint outline of dust.
Arthur Dell was in the vestibule, standing in the doorway with his hands in his coat pockets, watching the street. When he saw me, he nodded and stepped aside.
“She’s in there,” he said. “Been there since six. Didn’t want the lights on.”
I went down the aisle quietly. Marcy Tolan was sitting in row six, in the pew with the empty shelf, with Bible 14 open on her knees. She was wearing her grey cardigan and a pair of reading glasses on a chain. Her face, in the dim light, was calm and very tired.
She did not look up when I sat down beside her. She only turned the Bible a little, so I could see the endpaper.
The blank space at the bottom was no longer blank.
It held a single line, in pencil, written in a careful schoolteacher’s hand, neat and upright, nothing like the uphill letters above it:
Marcy Tolan, 69. Read it all again. Dale asked for the Psalms, and I read them to him.
Below that, in smaller letters, she had added one more line, and the pencil had pressed hard enough to dent the board:
Ida Shaw, you were right. Somebody has to read it next.
“I finished on Thursday,” Marcy said softly. “I sat up with it until four in the morning, with the kitchen light on. When I got to the end, I realized I’d been reading it the way Gran taught me, for the dime. Waiting for someone to say I’d earned it.” She touched the pencil lines with one finger, very lightly. “Then I thought, no, that’s not the point. The point is that you keep the names going. So I wrote mine. And I wrote Dale’s, too, because he listened to every word I read to him, every night for thirty-one years, and he never once asked for a dime.”
“Marcy,” I said, and my voice was not steady.
“I’m going to put it back now,” she said.
She stood up, very carefully, and closed the cover. She held the Bible for a moment against her chest, the way you would hold a child, and then she set it on the shelf of row six, in the clean space where it had always been, squared neatly against the edge.
Outside, the first bell began to ring, low and slow across the river. Doors opened in the vestibule. The ushers came down the side aisles, one by one, switching on the lights, and the congregation began to file in, murmuring, shaking out umbrellas and wiping their feet.
Nobody spoke to Marcy. Nobody needed to. Ron Hendrix walked past row six and stopped, and he looked down at the Bible on the shelf for a long moment, and then he sat down in the pew behind her and opened his own copy, very slowly, and began to read.
I sat beside Marcy and did not open anything. I only watched the others take their places, one by one, opening the covers and looking at the names inside, and leaving them unwiped, unspoken, unchanged.
When the organist began the first hymn, Marcy stood, found the page, and sang the alto line in a voice that was thinner now but steady and clear. Halfway through the second verse, I saw Arthur Dell in the back of the sanctuary, leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded, and I saw him take off his cap.
Marcy did not look up from the hymnal. She only reached out, without turning her head, and set one hand flat on the closed cover of Bible 14, the way you would rest your palm on the warm flank of a horse you had finally brought home.
Then she closed her eyes and sang the rest of the verse, and nobody wiped the pencil.
