I drove him home on Sundays

First service is at eight o'clock and I have ushered it since Reverend Dawes' father was still in that pulpit, so I'm there by a quarter after seven to unlock the side door onto the lot and set out the offering table. I'll be seventy-two in March. The knee is what it is, so I take the aisle seat, and nobody has ever said one word to me about it, because I've had that seat longer than most of them have been in the building.

I carried mail out of the Fifth Avenue station nineteen years and worked a window the rest of it, thirty-one years to the day I put my papers in. The knee is from the route. Everybody in that church wants to tell me about a doctor out in Merrillville and I am not having it cut on.

Brother Curtis Lyles directed our choir from 1979 until his kidneys made him sit down in 2011. He came to us from Antioch over in Hammond, on Sheffield. He never owned a car. Never learned to drive one either. He told me one time his daddy wouldn't let him near the truck and then after a while there wasn't a truck, and that was all he said about it.

I ushered the eight and then I'd sit through the eleven too. Dolores sang alto in that choir until Paulette was born, so I was in that building all morning anyway.

Second service started at eleven and it did not let out at any set time. Reverend Dawes could go to ten after one if the building was with him, and then you've got the benediction, and then Brother Curtis had to get his folders in order and see about the robes, so it would be a quarter to two before he came out that side door. I'd be out there with the engine running. In February that lot takes the wind right off the lake.

It was a 1977 LTD when this started, green over green with a vinyl roof. The passenger window would only come down about two thirds of the way. In 1986 my brother-in-law Ronald Pruitt sold me his Century for eleven hundred dollars because Earlene had her mind set on a wagon, and that's what I had after that, and that's the one Brother Curtis liked because the seat went back.

He lived on Van Buren, upstairs of a two-flat that belonged to his aunt. Out of the lot you go onto Twenty-first and Broadway is two blocks over. Straight up Broadway is nine minutes on a Sunday. There's nobody out. You can put your arm up on the door and steer it with two fingers.

We did not go straight up Broadway. There was a lounge on Twenty-fifth, half a block off, and Brother Curtis kept the piano in there in tune and played it Friday and Saturday nights for a man named Sonny Tibbs. The place didn't open Sundays until four. He had a key on account of the piano. There was an office in the back with a couch in it and a window unit we never once turned on because of the racket it made.

We used that room. Then I'd take him on to Van Buren and sit at the curb until the light came on upstairs, and I'd be in my own driveway by three.

Dolores and I bought the house on Jackson Street in 1974 and I'm still in it. She'd have the Bears on and my plate fixed and she'd ask did Brother Curtis get home all right, and I'd tell her he did. Cheryl came in 1976 and Paulette in 1979, so most of those Sundays I walked in the door to somebody needing something off me, and I'd get to it.

We were close.

In 1994 the kitchen decided the church needed a van. Earlene Pruitt and Vernita ran a fish fry every other Friday for the better part of a year, three dollars a plate, and they got a 1989 Dodge Ram Wagon off a lot in Merrillville. Maroon. Sister Earlene handed the keys to Deacon Coley at the anniversary service in October and the whole church stood up, and I stood up with them.

After that the van took the choir home. Brother Curtis was on the route.

I never said anything about it. There was not one thing wrong with that van and it ran until 2004.

From 1994 until he passed I saw that man every Sunday of my life and I don't believe the two of us were ever alone in a room again. We'd speak in the hallway by the water fountain. At the anniversary dinners I'd carry him a plate because he wouldn't get up for one himself. When my mother passed in 2003 he came and sat in the back. He wrote something in the book and left before the repast, and I still have that book.

His kidneys took him in the spring of 2015. His nephew Darnell had been running him to the clinic on Ridge Road Tuesdays and Fridays for four years by then. He was sixty-six.

I had the front left corner of the casket. The front is the heavy end and there's three steps up into that church. My knee was already no good. One of those young men came up on my side to take it off me and I shook my head at him.

The church van led the family out to the cemetery on Grant. Forty minutes with the flags on the cars, and Deacon Coley's boy drove it.

At the repast his sister, Yvonne Lyles Grier, took both my hands and said her brother thought the world of me. I said we were close. She said something else to me after that and I have forgotten what it was.

Dolores had my supper in the oven when I got home. She asked how the service went. I told her it was a nice service, and it was.

They had the choir in the maroon robes. They did I'm Going Up Yonder. The young woman who has that solo now takes it too fast. Brother Curtis would have had a word with her in the hallway about it.

Dolores went the next year, in September. I sit in her pew. Her sisters sit in it with me. Earlene and Vernita run that kitchen and my grandbabies get their plates from those two hands.

They painted the fellowship hall two summers ago and put every picture back on that wall except the 1988 choir anniversary, which I found leaned up in the closet behind the folding tables. I hung it back myself, further down toward the kitchen door where the ceiling light doesn't come off the glass so bad. He's in the front of it on the left, in the light blue robes they wore before the maroon.