Faithful Enough
There is a silence a man can hold by putting his hands inside an engine. Noah Smith has been holding it for forty years — through the night his first wife was taken away, through Sunday services he never once missed, through kitchen tables where his sons waited for a father who was always in the other room. He is holding it still, in a place he would never have believed in, because the work is still the work, and the work is all he has.
Count the things. He was at every birth. He put six children through school. He kept a roof over the house through a business that twice nearly went under, a marriage that broke the year his second son was born, and a faith that asked him to leave his planet when the time came. He never once raised his voice at the dinner table. He never once failed to kneel at the bed at night. He carried his granddaughter's body out of the red dust when it came to that, and he did not drop her, and he did not stop.
By every measure he was taught, he was faithful enough. He still is. In the quiet before the day begins, it is the word he reaches for when he thinks of his life, and there is no one in the family who would tell him otherwise.
Stand at his shoulder at any of those dinners, any of those bedsides, any of those graves, and watch his face while he watches one of his children. His eyes are on the child. His mind is on the sacred thing. The child can feel the difference. They have always been able to feel it. None of them will ever tell him, because Noah already thinks he was there.
