The Pastor’s Wife Gave My Seat On The Mission Trip To Her Niece Because I Was “Too Old To Be Useful.” Then The Village Sent The Church One Request: The Woman Who Had Written Them Letters For Twenty Years

The sign-up sheet went up on the bulletin board outside the fellowship hall at Cedar Grove Baptist Church on the second Sunday of September, right between the nursery schedule and a flyer for the Wilson County Fair.

It said, in Charlene Whitfield’s tidy blue marker: LOS ENCINOS, GUATEMALA — 20TH ANNIVERSARY TEAM. MARCH 7–15. TEN SEATS.

I stood in front of that clipboard in my Sunday coat with my pocketbook over my arm for a good long minute. Then I took the pen off its little string and wrote my name on line four.

Margaret Ellison.

My hand shook, and not from age. I’m seventy-two years old. I have lived in Lebanon, Tennessee, my whole life, and I had never been farther from home than a bus trip to Pigeon Forge with the senior adults. I had gotten my first passport that summer. I’d sat in the Lebanon post office in a plastic chair while a young man took my picture against a white screen, and I’d told him, “Don’t you make me look like a wanted woman.”

He laughed and said, “Ma’am, you look like somebody’s grandmother.”

“I’m about to be somebody’s grandmother in Guatemala,” I told him, which made no sense to him at all. It made perfect sense to me.

The next Sunday I put a check for the four-hundred-dollar deposit in the offering plate, in an envelope marked MISSIONS. I had been saving it out of my Social Security in a Folgers can since Easter.

Two Hundred and Thirty-Eight Letters

You have to understand where those letters started, or none of the rest of it means anything.

In the spring of 2006 our church sent its very first mission team to Guatemala. Eleven men and two women flew out of Nashville to a mountain village called Los Encinos, up above Lake Atitlán, to help pour the floor and raise the cinder-block walls of a one-room schoolhouse.

My husband Walt was supposed to go. He’d laid block for thirty years. But that February he ruptured a disc in his back lifting a deer stand, and he spent the spring flat on a heating pad in the recliner, and I stayed home with him.

When the team came back, they showed slides in the fellowship hall. A tin roof. Children in bright woven skirts sitting on the bare floor because there were no desks yet. One little girl in the front row was holding a pencil stub no longer than my thumb.

Walt leaned over and whispered, “Peggy, that child is writing with a toothpick.”

I didn’t sleep that night. The next morning I went to the Lebanon library and checked out a set of Spanish cassette tapes with a lady’s voice on them who said everything twice. I played them in the Buick on the way to the Kroger and back.

My first letter took me four evenings at the kitchen table with a Spanish-English dictionary. It said, more or less: Dear children. My name is Margarita. I live in Tennessee. It is spring here. The dogwoods are white. I am sorry I could not come. I will write to you every month.

I folded a pressed dogwood blossom inside it and a five-dollar bill for pencils. I mailed it in care of the mission office in Guatemala City, and I didn’t really expect anything at all.

That was April of 2006. I never missed a month after that. Not when Walt had his bypass. Not the January the pipes froze. Not the month I buried him.

By that September there had been two hundred and thirty-eight letters.

Lucía

The first letter that came back arrived in August of 2006, five months after I’d sent mine. It was on lined paper torn out of a composition book, in pencil, with the letters pressed so hard they came through the back.

Querida Señora Margarita. My name is Lucía. I am 8 years old. Thank you for the pencils. Now we have 30 pencils. What is a dogwood?

Walt read it over my shoulder, and he said, “Well, you better tell her.”

So I did. I told her about dogwoods and lightning bugs and how Tennessee smells after it rains on hot asphalt. She told me about the volcano you could see from the schoolhouse door and how her mother wove huipiles on a backstrap loom tied to a post in their yard.

When she was eleven, her mother died of a fever, and Lucía wrote me one line. My mother is in heaven and I am the mother now for my brothers.

I cried over the sink. Then I wrote her back four pages. I told her I lost my own mother at nineteen. I told her that the people we lose keep going on inside the things we do with our hands. I told her that if she ever wanted to stop school to take care of her brothers, she should please, please not.

She didn’t. She was the first girl from Los Encinos to finish the sixth grade. Then the ninth. The mission paid for some of it. I paid for some of it, out of the Folgers can, and never told anybody at church.

When Walt died in October of 2019, I didn’t mean to tell her. I wrote the letter about the weather and the Titans losing again. But somehow at the bottom I wrote, My husband went home to the Lord on Tuesday. I am very tired.

In December a padded envelope came. Inside was a small woven square, red and blue, and a card. Señora, we pray for you in the classroom every morning. You are not alone. You have forty children here. —Maestra Lucía.

Maestra. Teacher. She was twenty-one years old, and she had come back to teach in the same room where she’d once held a pencil stub.

I kept that card propped against the sugar canister for six years.

The Office Behind the Fellowship Hall

Charlene Whitfield caught me after Wednesday night supper in early November, while I was scraping the green bean casserole into a Cool Whip tub for the shut-ins.

“Miss Peggy, do you have a minute? Come on back to the office.”

Charlene is our pastor’s wife. Brother Dale Whitfield has preached at Cedar Grove for eighteen years, and Charlene has run the Women’s Missionary Union, the mission committee, the Vacation Bible School and, if we’re honest, most of everything else, for all eighteen of them. She is fifty-eight, trim, with her hair frosted and sprayed so it doesn’t move in a wind. She can organize a funeral dinner for two hundred people in an afternoon. I have always admired that about her.

The office was the little room behind the fellowship hall with the copy machine and the church van keys hanging on a pegboard. She shut the door. She sat on the edge of the desk, and I stayed standing because there was only one chair and it had the box of Christmas offering envelopes on it.

“I’m going to be honest with you, because I respect you,” she said. “This trip is a work trip. We’re replacing that whole roof and building two new classrooms. We need people who can haul block and mix concrete at seven thousand feet.”

“I know that,” I said. “I can cook. I can sort supplies. I can sit with the children while the men work.”

“There’s a two-hour drive up the mountain on a dirt road. There’s no hospital. If you fell, Miss Peggy, if you had a spell, we’d have to send two men down with you, and that’s two men off the roof.”

“I don’t have spells.”

She folded her hands. She looked almost sorry. Almost.

“Honey, at your age you’d be a liability up there. I hate to say it plain. But you’d be too old to be useful.”

She slid an envelope across the desk. Inside was a church check for four hundred dollars, made out to me, signed by the treasurer. Already written. Already signed.

“I gave the seat to my niece Kaylee,” she said. “She’s at Belmont. She does social media for a nonprofit. She’s going to document the whole trip so we can raise money for the next one. That’s how you help a mission now. Pictures.”

I stood there holding the check. Somewhere on the other side of the wall, the dishwasher in the kitchen kicked into its rinse cycle.

“I write the letters,” I said. It came out small.

“And that’s a beautiful ministry,” Charlene said, standing up, and she patted my arm like you’d pat a dog that had done nothing wrong. “You keep right on doing that.”

Kaylee

I didn’t tell anybody for nine days. I’m not proud of that, but I’m not ashamed of it either. At seventy-two you learn that a hurt you say out loud gets bigger before it gets smaller, and I wasn’t ready for bigger.

I went to the next team meeting anyway. Charlene had sent the email to the whole list, and nobody had taken me off it.

The team sat at two folding tables pushed together in the fellowship hall. Gary Pettus, who ran the hardware store on South Cumberland. The two Haskins brothers. A couple of young married men from the contemporary service. And at the end, a pretty girl with long honey-colored hair and a ring light clipped to her phone, filming the box of donated work gloves.

“Y’all, say hi to Grace for the Nations!” she said to the phone, and Gary Pettus waved like a man being held at gunpoint.

That was Kaylee.

She saw me in the doorway. She didn’t know me from Adam’s housecat, so she smiled, sweet as anything, and said, “Oh, are you here to drop off donations? You can put them right on that table.”

Charlene looked up from her binder. Our eyes met. She looked back down.

I set the two grocery sacks I’d brought on the table. Forty-eight yellow No. 2 pencils, a stack of composition books, and a bag of Dum Dums from the Dollar General. I’d bought them for the trip.

“These are for the children,” I said. “The pencils are already sharpened. They like them sharpened.”

“That is so sweet,” Kaylee said, and took a picture of the sack.

I drove home on Highway 70 with the radio off. When I got to my kitchen, Lucía’s card was still propped against the sugar canister. You are not alone. You have forty children here.

I sat down in Walt’s chair at the table and laughed until it turned into the other thing.

Letter Two Hundred and Forty

I wrote the December letter anyway, because I had never missed a month and I was not about to let Charlene Whitfield be the reason I started.

It was the hardest letter I’d written since the one about Walt. I had told Lucía in September that I was coming. I had told her in October that I’d bought new walking shoes at the Shoe Carnival and was breaking them in on the track at the high school every morning. I had told her in November that I was practicing my Spanish out loud so I wouldn’t embarrass her in front of her students.

Now I had to write the other thing.

Querida Lucía. I am sorry. I will not be coming in March after all. The church needs younger people who can build. I understand. I am old, and I would only be in the way. But the team will bring you pencils from me. They are sharpened. I will keep writing every month, as always. With love, your Margarita.

I tucked in a pressed red maple leaf and a twenty-dollar bill, which was more than I should have, and I mailed it from the post office on West Main.

That Sunday my friend Opal Gentry sat down beside me in our Sunday school class, the Faithful Women, which is ten ladies over seventy and one over ninety. Opal has been my friend since we were in the fourth grade at Castle Heights.

“You’ve been crying in the car,” she said. “Your mascara’s got a sideways streak. You only get that leaning on the steering wheel.”

So I told her. All of it. The office, the check, too old to be useful.

Opal is not a quiet woman. She put her Bible down on the table so hard that Miss Ida, who is ninety-three, woke up.

“Too old to be useful,” Opal said. “Peggy Ellison, you have done more for that village with a pencil and a stamp than that whole team has done with a cement mixer.”

“Don’t make a fuss,” I said. “I mean it, Opal. It’s Brother Dale’s wife.”

“I don’t care if it’s the Queen of Sheba’s wife,” Opal said. But she didn’t make a fuss. Not then.

The Email

It was the third week of January when Donna Akins called me at home.

Donna has been the church secretary at Cedar Grove for twenty-six years. She types the bulletin, she answers the phone, and she knows where every body in the congregation is buried, both kinds.

“Peggy, are you sitting down?” she said.

“I’m standing at the stove with a skillet of cornbread.”

“Turn it off and sit down. An email came in to the church account this morning. It’s from Guatemala. It’s from the schoolteacher in Los Encinos. Peggy, it’s addressed to the whole church, but it’s about you.”

I turned off the burner. I sat down in Walt’s chair.

“Read it to me,” I said.

Donna cleared her throat. I could hear the copy machine humming behind her.

“‘To the church of Cedar Grove in Tennessee. My name is Lucía Xoc Tum. I am the teacher at the school in Los Encinos that your church built twenty years ago. Thank you for coming again in March. Our children are very happy. Our village council has met, and we wish to ask you for only one thing.'”

Donna stopped.

“Go on,” I said.

“‘For twenty years, a woman from your church has written to our school every month. Two hundred and forty letters. We have kept every one. Many of the children of Los Encinos learned to read with her letters. I was one of them. She paid for my school when my mother died. She does not know that we know this, but the mission office told us. Her name is Señora Margaret Ellison. We call her Margarita.'”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“‘Her last letter says she will not come because she is too old and would be in the way. Please tell her she is not in the way. Please tell her she is the reason. We do not need a new roof as much as we need to say thank you to her face. If she cannot come, we understand. But this is our only request. Please bring the woman who wrote us the letters.'”

Neither of us said anything for a while.

“Donna,” I finally said. “Who else has seen this?”

“I forwarded it to Charlene at 8:15, because she’s over missions,” Donna said. “And then at 8:16 I forwarded it to Brother Dale, because I’ve been doing this job for twenty-six years and I am not a fool.”

Sunday Morning

Brother Dale didn’t call me. I’ve thought about that since, and I believe he didn’t call because he knew I’d ask him not to do what he was about to do.

That Sunday, after the second hymn and before the offering, he stood up in the pulpit with a sheet of paper in his hand instead of his Bible.

“Church, before I preach, I need to read you something that came to us this week from Los Encinos,” he said. “I’ve read it about thirty times. I haven’t gotten through it dry yet, so y’all bear with me.”

He read the whole thing. Every word. When he got to two hundred and forty letters, a sound went through the sanctuary, a sort of soft ripple, like wind in a soybean field.

When he got to Señora Margaret Ellison, every head in the room turned around and found me in the fourth pew on the left side, where Walt and I sat for forty-one years.

I looked at my lap. I had on my navy church dress and my good brooch, and I studied that brooch like it was the most interesting thing in Wilson County.

When Brother Dale finished, he set the paper down on the pulpit and took off his reading glasses.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “Twenty years, and I didn’t know. Miss Peggy, I’m sorry. Your pastor ought to have known.”

Then he looked at the front pew on the right side. That’s where Charlene always sits, with her Bible and her binder.

She was sitting very straight. Her face had gone the color of a church candle. Kaylee was beside her with her phone face-down in her lap for the first time since I’d met her.

The Pickle Jar

Opal Gentry stood up before the organist could even find her place.

“Brother Dale, how much does a seat cost?”

“Opal, we can talk about that after the—”

“How much?”

He sighed. “About twenty-two hundred dollars. Airfare, lodging, the truck up the mountain.”

Opal reached into her pocketbook and pulled out an empty Mt. Olive pickle jar. I am not making this up. To this day I do not know why Opal Gentry had an empty pickle jar in her pocketbook on a Sunday morning. She has never explained it, and I have stopped asking.

She took a twenty out of her wallet and put it in the jar. Then she handed the jar to Miss Ida beside her.

Miss Ida is ninety-three and lives on a widow’s pension. She put in a five, and then, after a minute, she took off one of her clip-on earrings and put that in too.

The jar went down the pew and across the aisle. It went to the Haskins brothers, who each put in a fifty. It went to the young couples in the back, and to the teenagers, and to Gary Pettus, who put in a check he wrote on his knee. It went past the deacons. It went everywhere.

Nobody passed the offering plates that morning. Brother Dale just stood up there in the pulpit and let it happen, with his glasses in his hand.

When the jar came to the front pew, Charlene held it for a long moment. Then she put in an envelope and passed it on without looking at anybody.

Donna counted it in the office afterward with the door open, and half the congregation stood around in the hall to watch.

Three thousand, one hundred and sixty dollars. And one clip-on earring.

“That’s enough for her seat,” Donna announced, “and her a hotel room in Guatemala City on both ends so she doesn’t have to sleep in the airport, and a new suitcase, because I’ve seen the one she’s got.”

I sat on the bench in the hallway with my face in my hands, and Opal patted my back the whole time and said, “I told you. I told you, Peggy.”

Charlene on My Porch

Charlene Whitfield came to my house on a Tuesday afternoon, the first week of February. I saw her silver Tahoe pull into the driveway from my kitchen window, and I thought about not answering the door. Then I thought about what Walt would say, which was, Peggy, open the door. It’s cold out.

She was standing on my porch holding a pie from the Cracker Barrel in a plastic dome. She didn’t look sprayed or frosted that day. She looked tired.

“I’m not here because Dale sent me,” she said. “I want you to know that first.”

I let her in. I made coffee. We sat at the kitchen table, and she looked at Lucía’s card against the sugar canister for a long time.

“I’ve run that mission for fifteen years,” she said. “I’ve organized nine trips. I’ve raised the money. I’ve booked the flights. I’ve done the spreadsheets and the passports and the vaccinations. I have stood on that mountain nine times.”

She turned her coffee cup around and around on the table.

“And nobody in Los Encinos knows my name, Peggy. Not one child. They call me la señora del cuaderno. The lady with the notebook.”

I didn’t say anything.

“When that email came in, I read it in my car in the Kroger parking lot. And my first thought—” She stopped. Her chin went funny. “My first thought was, why not me? What did she do that I didn’t do? And I sat there and I knew exactly what. You wrote to them like they were people. I wrote to them like they were a project.”

She wiped her eyes with a Cracker Barrel napkin.

“I said you were too old to be useful because I was scared you’d be useful in a way I wasn’t. That’s the truth. I’m fifty-eight, and some days I’m terrified that when I can’t run things anymore, nobody’s going to need me at all.”

I reached across the table and put my hand on top of hers. Her hand was cold from the steering wheel.

“Charlene,” I said. “Nobody needs you to run things. They just need you to write back.”

She laughed, a wet laugh, and she said, “Will you teach me how?”

Atlanta to Guatemala City

We flew out of Nashville on March seventh at six in the morning, through Atlanta, and landed in Guatemala City at a quarter past one in the afternoon. I had never been on an airplane bigger than the little one Walt and I took to his brother’s in Charlotte in 1994.

Kaylee sat beside me on both flights. She’d asked to.

Somewhere over the Gulf, she put her phone away in the seat pocket and said, “Miss Peggy, can I ask you something? What did you write about? For twenty years. What do you even say?”

“Whatever was true,” I told her. “What the weather was doing. What I fixed for supper. What I was afraid of. Children can always tell when you’re making something up, so I never did.”

She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever written anybody a real letter in my life.”

“Well,” I said, “you’ve got a pen in your purse. It’s a long flight.”

The truck ride up the mountain took two hours and forty minutes on a dirt road with switchbacks that made the Haskins brothers pray out loud. Charlene sat in the cab with me and held my elbow on every curve. Gary Pettus kept saying, “You doing all right, Miss Peggy?” and I kept saying, “Gary, I have birthed two babies and buried a husband. I can ride in a truck.”

Then the road came around one last bend and flattened out, and there it was. The schoolhouse. Cinder block painted sky blue, with a tin roof that had rusted orange at the edges. The volcano behind it, just like Lucía said, blue and enormous, wearing a little hat of cloud.

And in front of it, standing in two crooked lines in the dirt yard, forty-three children in white shirts, every one of them holding a sharpened yellow pencil straight up in the air like a candle.

A young woman stood in front of them with her long black hair braided down her back. She was wearing a red and blue huipil, the same colors as the square she’d sent me in 2019.

I got out of the truck. Charlene had to help me. My knees had quit on me entirely.

“Señora Margarita?” the young woman said.

“Lucía,” I said. “Honey. You’re all grown up.”

She crossed that dirt yard in about four steps, and she held onto me, and the children started clapping before anybody told them to.

The Wall

She took me inside the schoolhouse before anybody unloaded a single bag of cement.

It was one room, cool and dim after the sunshine, with a concrete floor that I knew had been poured by men from my church in 2006. There were desks now, wooden ones, and a chalkboard, and a little shelf of books with their spines taped.

But it was the walls I couldn’t stop looking at.

They were covered. All four of them. From waist-high to as far up as a grown woman could reach on a chair. Sheet after sheet of lined paper and church stationery and the backs of Kroger receipts, pinned up in neat rows with thumbtacks and clothespins on strings.

My letters. Every one.

The early ones were yellowed and soft, curling at the corners. Some of them still had the little pressed dogwood blossoms taped beside them, gone brown as tea. Down near the door, someone had painted a number on the wall above each year in white paint. 2006. 2007. 2008.All the way around the room to 2026.

“The children read one every morning,” Lucía said. “Before the lesson. We start at the beginning and go around. When we come to the end, we start over again.”

“Twenty years of my bad Spanish,” I said.

“Twenty years of the dogwoods,” she said. “Most of these children have never seen one. But they can all tell you what color they are.”

Behind me, I heard Charlene take a breath like she’d been hit. Kaylee had her phone up, but she wasn’t filming. She just held it there, and then she put it down.

Lucía walked me to the far corner, by the window, where the light came in. At about the height of a child’s eyes, there was one letter pinned all by itself, with a little ring of thumbtacks around it like a frame.

It was the first one. April 2006. In my handwriting from back when my hand was steady.

Dear children. My name is Margarita. I live in Tennessee. It is spring here. The dogwoods are white.

Beside it, someone had pinned an empty space. Just a bare rectangle of blue cinder block, with four new thumbtacks waiting in the corners.

“For the next one,” Lucía said.

I opened my pocketbook. I’d written it on the airplane, somewhere over the Gulf, while Kaylee wrote hers.

I handed it to her, and she pinned it up.

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