The Hymn For Someone Else

I did not tell her that half the time I listened because I was scared. I had been a nervous child. But it was true that I listened.

The hymnal was where she said it would be, under a stack of old sheet music in the bench, with a strip of cloth tape holding the spine together. The paper had gone the color of weak tea. I found the page easily, because the book fell open to it, the way a book will when it has been opened to one place for a long time.

Safe in the Arms of Jesus. Words by Fanny J. Crosby. Music by William H. Doane.

It was a gentle old tune, simple on the page, three verses and a chorus. The kind of hymn your grandmother’s grandmother would have known. The corner of the page was soft as flannel from being turned. There was nothing written in the margins, no date, no initials, no note. I looked, because I thought there might be a reason. There was only the page, handled by a thumb for a great many years.

That bothered me more than a note would have. A page does not wear out like that from being opened once a decade.

Travis and Uncle Herb moved the piano that Saturday.

The upright had stood in Gran’s front room since before I was born, a dark old Kimball with ivory keys gone yellow and one cracked in the middle. Gran’s bedroom was down the hall, and she could not get to the front room, and she would not have the hymn played at her bedside on a keyboard from the back of my car. So the two of them borrowed a furniture dolly from the church basement and took the wall photographs down, and Travis went ahead of it backward down the hall with his hands out like he was catching a calf.

Travis is a retired machinist, sixty-one, with a bad left shoulder from thirty-odd years of lifting castings at the plant in Newark. He did not once mention the shoulder. He just said, “Where do you want it, Gran?” and she pointed at the wall under the covered bridge, and that was that.

“Gerald can tune it Monday,” Herb said. “He’ll come over from Mansfield for eighty-five dollars, and I’ll pay it.”

“I’ll pay it,” my mother said.

“It’s my mother’s piano, Lorene.”

“It’s my mother’s house.”

“Stop it, both of you,” Gran called from the bed. “It’s a piano, not a will.”

Even Herb laughed at that. I was glad of it. We needed all the laughing we could get.

For the next two weeks I did the thing I had been asked to do. I sat on that bench in the small hours with the lamp on, and I learned the hymn.

It is not hard. That is the strange part. A good pianist could sight-read it. But it is slow, and it is tender in a way that does not forgive a rushed hand, and I kept wanting to play it the way I play the Wednesday hymns, cheerful and brisk, to get through.