The Hymn My Mother Still Knew

Her name is Dorothy. She is eighty-eight. She grew up on a dairy farm north of town, and at nineteen she started playing the piano for the Sunday school at the little white country church where she was baptized. That same fall the woman who had the children’s choir moved to Waterloo. The pastor asked the congregation who would take it, and nobody put a hand up, and Dorothy did.

She had it for forty years.

She taught piano lessons on the side that whole time, first in the church basement and then in our front room on a walnut spinet my father bought her used the year they were married. In the early days she charged fifty cents a lesson. I have heard that a dozen eggs counted too, and once a goose.

She was not a soft teacher. She was a fair one. She kept a pencil behind her ear and a wind-up metronome on top of the piano, and she had sayings. “Curve your fingers, you’re not petting a cat.” “Slow is not wrong. Wrong is wrong.” “Sit like you mean it.”

And in the choir she had a rule, which I had forgotten entirely until last week. Every child learned every verse.

She could not stand a congregation that sang the first verse loud and mumbled the rest with their noses in the book. “Anybody can sing a first verse,” she would say. “The fourth verse is where they put the point.”

I came late. She was forty-one when I was born, and she had long since quit expecting me. She was my teacher too, and I was her worst pupil. I say that fondly. I quit at twelve. I had my father’s hands and my father’s patience for sitting still, which was none, and one day she closed the lesson book and said, “Anne, I love you too much to do this to either one of us.” We both laughed, and that was the end of my lessons. She never held it against me.

But she played at my wedding.

Pete and I were married in that country church twenty-three years ago in June. It was ninety degrees and every window was propped open with a hymnal. My mother was the mother of the bride, with a corsage and a new blue dress, and she would not hear of anyone else at that piano. She walked up the aisle on my cousin’s arm, sat down in the front pew for about four minutes, and then got up in front of everybody and went to the piano bench in her good shoes.

We had one hymn. I picked it. I picked hers.

She played it and the whole church sang, and I stood up front in my dress next to Pete and watched my mother’s back while she played. My father stood beside me. He had just walked me down, and he sang it from memory, bass, a little flat, with his eyes shut.

Dad has been gone six years this November. His heart quit in the machine shed on a Thursday morning, quick, with his gloves on. Mom was already slipping some by then. She was losing her glasses and paying the light bill twice. He had been covering for her better than any of us knew. After the funeral there was nobody to cover.

Pete and I kept her in her own house as long as we could. Then came the January night she walked down to the mailbox at two in the morning in her nightgown, looking for the school bus, and our neighbor found her on his way in from a calving. After that we knew.