Somebody at That Old Church Is Still Answering the Phone

We found it tucked between the lath and the plaster, folded into thirds inside a wax paper sleeve like someone had packed it carefully and deliberately, the way you'd pack something you intended to retrieve. A church directory. Pale green card stock, mimeographed text, the ink still legible in that faded purple-gray that old mimeograph machines produced. Calvary Fellowship of Renner County. Directory of Congregation, 1947. My husband wanted to throw it out. I put it on the kitchen counter instead and left it there for a week, the way you leave things you're not ready to make a decision about.

Photo: Renner County, via mesmusiquesperso.m.e.pic.centerblog.net

Photo: Calvary Fellowship of Renner County, via www.soundcph.dk

The renovation was supposed to be simple. Gut the upstairs bathroom, replace the cast iron drain stack, retile. The house is from 1921, and old houses always have opinions about renovation. This one expressed its opinion through a wall cavity that shouldn't have existed — too deep, too dry, sealed with care. The directory was the only thing inside it. No insulation, no newspaper stuffing, just the sleeve and the document and the smell of something that wasn't quite mold.

I started dialing on a Thursday night because I had a glass of wine and nothing pressing and the names in the directory kept snagging my attention. Hargrove. Pruett. Mabry. My grandmother's maiden name was Mabry, and I'd never heard of any Mabrys in this county before we moved here. Coincidence, probably. The kind of thing you notice because you want to notice it.

The first number I called connected on the second ring. I expected a disconnected tone, the triple beep and the recorded voice. Instead there was a pause, a breath, and then a woman said hello in the way people used to answer the phone before caller ID, fully present, expecting nothing specific. I apologized, said I'd probably dialed wrong, gave her the name from the directory — Hargrove, Edna — and there was a silence that lasted long enough to make me check if the call had dropped. Then she said, quietly, that Edna had been her aunt. She asked where I was calling from.

I told her the address. She said she knew the house. She said her aunt had loved that house, had spoken of it often. I said that was a nice thing to hear. She said, less warmly, that her aunt had also warned her about it. I asked what she meant by that. She said she hoped we'd been careful with the basement. I told her we hadn't touched the basement yet. Another pause. She said that was probably for the best, and then the call ended — not a hang-up exactly, more like the connection simply ceased, the way old calls used to fade out on bad lines.

I should have stopped there. I want to be clear that I knew, sitting at that kitchen counter, that I should put the directory away. Instead I dialed the next number.

The second call went to voicemail, and the voicemail was a man's voice reciting a Bible verse I didn't recognize, slowly, as though he wanted to make sure whoever was listening could write it down. I didn't write it down. I've since tried to find it and I can't locate the passage anywhere I've looked, which may mean I misheard it or may mean something else.

The third call is the one I keep coming back to. A woman answered — different voice, older, deliberate — and before I could say anything she used my grandmother's name. Not Mabry, her first name, the one that appears nowhere in the directory. She asked how Ruth was getting along and whether the hip had healed. My grandmother broke her hip in 2019. She died eight months later. I did not tell this woman any of that. I didn't say anything for a long time, and she didn't fill the silence, just waited. When I finally asked who she was, she said she was a member of the congregation, said it the way you'd say something obvious. I asked which congregation. She said I already knew.

Then she asked how the house was holding up after what happened in the basement.

I hung up and I sat there and I looked at the directory and I thought about all the reasonable explanations, and I found a few that almost worked, and then I turned to the last page.

Church directories from that era had a members section and then, at the back, a section for what they called Friends of the Congregation — people adjacent to the community, people who weren't full members but who were known. The friends section of this directory has seven entries. Six of them are surnames I don't recognize. The seventh entry is my last name. Not my husband's name, not a previous owner's name. My name, my current legal surname, printed in that same faded purple-gray ink, with a phone number beneath it.

The phone number is our landline. We've had it for three years. The directory was printed in 1947.

I haven't called the remaining numbers. I haven't gone into the basement. I put the directory back in the wax paper sleeve, and I've been trying to decide what to do with it, and in the meantime I keep thinking about the woman on that third call — the patience in her voice, the way she waited. The way she sounded like someone who had been expecting me to dial eventually and was entirely prepared to keep waiting until I did.

The renovation is on hold.