The Hymn For Someone Else

The first verse went fine.

I had practiced it for nineteen days, on the upright in Gran’s bedroom and on the little keyboard in the spare room where I had been sleeping, and by the time I sat down on the bench that Friday afternoon my hands knew the first verse the way they know the stairs in the dark.

The family was in her bedroom. My mother stood at the foot of the hospice bed with her arms folded tight. Aunt Bev sat in the rocker with a box of tissues she had not opened. Uncle Herb leaned against the dresser in his feed-mill jacket, turning his cap around and around. My husband Travis stood by the door, the way he stands at anything that is not his to run.

Gran lay propped on three pillows with her eyes closed. The lace curtain behind her let in the October light, plain and flat, and it lay across the quilt like a folded sheet.

“Whenever you’re ready, honey,” she said, without opening her eyes.

I played the introduction. I sang the first line.

Safe in the arms of Jesus, safe on His gentle breast.

My voice is nothing special. It is a church voice, flat on the low notes and stubborn on the high ones. But Gran’s mouth had started to move, though no sound came out, and I kept going, because that was what she had asked of me.

Let me back up to how I got to that bench.

Three weeks before, the hospice nurse had sat at the kitchen table in Gran’s farmhouse with my mother and said the thing nurses say. Her name was Valerie, and she had a kind, tired face, and she said, “I would plan on about three weeks. Could be a little more. Could be a little less.”

My grandmother was ninety years old. Her name was Barbara Fairchild, and she had lived on the same piece of ground outside Haverly, Ohio, since she married my grandfather Dewitt in 1956. She had raised three children and buried a husband and run the kitchen at the Haverly United Methodist Church for fifty-one years, and her heart had been giving out by inches since the summer.

I drove up from Zanesville that Sunday after church with a pan of scalloped potatoes on the passenger seat, because that is what you do. I did not know what else to bring. I had my vacation days saved, and when those ran out I would take the unpaid ones, and the school office could find somebody else to answer the phones.

She was awake when I came in. They had moved the hospice bed into her own bedroom, the one with the cedar chest and the picture of the covered bridge over the dresser, and she looked small in it, like somebody had folded her.

“Rochelle,” she said. “Come sit by me.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. She took my hand. Her skin felt like paper that had been left out in the rain and dried again.

“There’s a hymn I want you to learn,” she said.