Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
The Prayer That Types Itself
Each Monday the chapel caretaker sets the notice-board prayer on the old machine, and the board keeps returning it one line longer.
- dated: "the visiting weeks"
- narrator: "Cath Ripley, chapel caretaker"
The visiting weeks — the first Monday.
I set the notice-board sheet tonight on the vestry's old portable, the one the port mission left behind: PRAYERS FOR THE WEEK, then the week's lines. I type the fair copy for the board and a file copy through the carbon, both from one sitting, and lock the cover down, and out at nine.
The visiting weeks — the second Monday.
When I came to change the board, the sheet had a line I did not type: "…and for those already given over, that their names be kept plainly." Same voice, same type, no smudge, set into the prayer like a verse that had always lived there. The ribbon had moved on one line. The cover was down and the dust on it unbroken. The vestry keys are mine and the lockman's — Mr Denholm's — and boilers are seen to at odd hours, so there is an explanation a warden would accept, and I wrote the warden's explanation into the file and did not cross it out.
The visiting weeks — the third Monday.
Another line, and none of mine: "…that the count be true, and the count kept." I ran a plain sheet through at ten past midnight to take the machine's temperature, so to speak, and it typed PRAYERS FOR THE WEEK and stopped where I stopped. So whatever else is at work here keeps office hours with the calendar, the same as the rest of us. The file copy now runs one line short of the board copy every week, and I keep two columns for it in my own book: mine, the board's, the difference. The difference is always one. The vicar, Mr Loxley, read the board on Sunday without a hitch, and nobody in the pews stirred, and I did not stir either.
The visiting weeks — the fifth Monday.
Five lines that are not mine now, and good lines, I will say that plainly: they ask for the names kept, the count kept, the waiting kept. Somebody kind is building a longer prayer out of my shorter one, a line a Monday, and I have begun to read it whole. What I cannot square in the file is the road those lines travel: between the machine and the board there is a second setting and a second ribbon at work, and no key of mine or Mr Denholm's opens that road. Whose hand is at the keys on the nights my hands are still — and what is it, five Mondays running, that needs so carefully to be counted?