“Ahhhh,” he exhaled. “Old, old, old.”

I bet you could still do a helluva sermon.

He grabbed the walker’s handles. He paused.

“You think so?” he asked, softly.

Yeah, I said. No question.

In the basement of his house there are old film reels of the Reb, Sarah, and their family:

Here they are in the early 1950s, bouncing their first child, Shalom.

Here they are a few years later with their twin girls, Orah and Rinah.

Here they are in 1960, pushing Gilah, their youngest, in her baby carriage.

Although the footage is grainy, the expressions of delight on the Reb’s face-holding, hugging, and kissing his children-are unmistakable. He seems predestined to raise a family. He never hits his kids. He rarely raises his voice. He makes memories in small, loving bites: slow afternoon walks home from temple, nights doing homework with his daughters, long Sabbath dinners of family conversation, summer days throwing a baseball backward over his head to his son.

Once, he drives Shalom and a few of his young friends over the bridge from Philadelphia. As they approach the toll booth, he asks if the boys have their passports.

“Passports?” they say.

“You mean you don’t have your passports-and you expect to get into New Jersey?” he cries. “Quick! Hide under that blanket! Don’t breathe! Don’t make a sound!”

Later, he teases them about the whole thing. But under that blanket, in the back of a car, another family story is forged, one that father and son will laugh about for decades. This is how a legacy is built. One memory at a time.

His kids are grown now. His son is an established rabbi. His oldest daughter is a library director; his youngest, a teacher. They each have children of their own.

“We have this photograph, all of us together,” the Reb says. “Whenever I feel the spirit of death hovering, I look at that picture, the whole family smiling at the camera. And I say, ‘Al, you done okay.

“This is your immortality.’”

As I entered the church, a thin man with a high forehead nodded and gave me a small white envelope in case I wished to make a donation. He motioned for me to take a seat anywhere. The weather had turned to a blowing rain, and the hole in the ceiling loomed overhead, dark and dripping, the red buckets on plywood planks to catch the incoming water.

The pews were mostly empty. Up front, near the altar, a man sat behind a portable organ and occasionally hit a chord, which was punctuated with a rim shot-pwock!-by a drummer. Their small music echoed in the big room.

Standing to the side was Pastor Henry, in a long blue robe, swaying back and forth. After several of his entreaties, I had come to a service. I’m not sure why. Maybe curiosity. Maybe, to be blunt, to see if I trusted him for the charity contribution. We had spoken several times now. He had spared no detail of his criminal history-the drugs, the guns, the jail time-and while it was nice that he was honest, if you went strictly on his past, there might be no reason to invest in his future.

But there was also something sad and confessional in his face, something weary in his voice, as if he’d had enough of the world, or at least certain parts of it. And while I couldn’t help but think of that old expression “Never trust a fat preacher,” I had little concern that Henry Covington was siphoning profits from his congregation. There were none to be had.

He looked up from his meditation and saw me. Then he continued praying.

Henry Covington was sent to Detroit in 1992 by Bishop Roy Brown of the Pilgrim Assemblies International in New York. Brown had discovered Henry in his church, had heard his testimony, and had taken him to prisons and watched the way inmates reacted to his story. Eventually, after training him, teaching him, and ordaining him a deacon, he asked Henry to go to the Motor City.

Henry would have done anything for Brown. He moved his family into a Ramada Inn in downtown Detroit and was paid three hundred dollars a week to help build a new Pilgrim ministry. His transportation was an old black limousine that Bishop Brown granted him, in part to ferry the man around when he came to town for weekend services.

Over the years, Henry served under three different pastors, and each one noted his devotion to study and his easy connection to people in the neighborhood. They elevated him to elder and finally pastor. But eventually the Pilgrim interest faded, Bishop Brown stopped coming, and so did Henry’s money.

He had to sink or swim on his own.

His house went into foreclosure. The sheriffs put a sign on the door. His water and electricity were turned off. Meanwhile, the ignored church had a busted boiler and cracked pipes. There were local drug dealers who let it be known that if Henry let the place serve as a secret distribution center, his financial woes could go away.

But Henry was done with that life.

So he dug in. He formed the I Am My Brother’s Keeper Ministry, he asked God for guidance, and he did whatever he could to keep his church and his family afloat.

Now, as the organ played, someone hobbled forward on crutches. It was the one-legged man from my first visit. His nickname was Cass, short for Anthony Castelow. It turned out he was a church elder.

“Thank you, thank you, Lord,” he began, his eyes nearly closed, “thank you, thank you, thank you…”

Someone clapped. Someone yelled, “Well…,” which came out more like “Way-elll.” You could hear the traffic noise through the doors when they opened.

“Thank you, Jesus…thank you for our pastor, thank you for the day…”

I counted twenty-six people, all African-American, mostly female. I sat behind an older woman who wore a dress the color of a Caribbean sea, with a wide hat to match. As crowds went, it was a far cry from those megachurches in California, or even a suburban synagogue.

“Thank you for this day, thank you, Jesus…”

When Elder Cass finished, he turned to go, but the cord got caught in his crutch and the microphone hit the floor with an amplified phwock.

A woman quickly put it right.

Then the sanctuary quieted.

And with his cheeks and forehead already shiny with perspiration, Pastor Henry came forward.

The moment a cleric rises for a sermon is, for me, a time for the body to ease in, as if the good listening is about to start. I had always done this with the Reb, and, out of habit, I slid down in the wooden pew as the organist held the last chords of “Amazing Grace.”

Henry leaned forward toward the people. He held there, for a moment, as if pondering one last thought. Then he spoke.

“Amazing grace…,” he said, shaking his head. “…Amaaaa-zing grace.”

Someone repeated, “Amazing grace!” Others clapped. Clearly, this wasn’t going to be the quiet, reflective audience I was used to.

“Amaaaazing grace,” Henry bellowed. “I coulda been dead.”

“Mmm-hmm!”

“Shoulda been dead!”

“Mmm-hmm!”

“Woulda been dead!…But his grace!”

“Yes!”

“His grace…saved a wretch. And I was a wretch. You know what a wretch is? I was a crackhead, an alcoholic, I was a heroin addict, a liar, a thief. I was all those things. But then came Jesus-”

“Jesus!”

“I call him the greatest recycler I know!…Jesus…he lifts me up. He rearranges me. He repositions me. By myself, I’m no good-”

“Way-ell-”

“But he makes all the difference!”

“Amen to that!”

“Now, yesterday…yesterday, friends, a portion of the ceiling done fell down. It was leaking in the sanctuary. But you know-”

“Tell it, Rev-”

“You know-you-know-you-know…how that song go…Hallelujah-”

“Hallelujah!”