The Hymn For Someone Else

So there I sat, on the bench, in the October light, and I got through verse one.

I started the second verse. Safe in the arms of Jesus, safe from corroding care. The room had gone as quiet as a held breath. Somewhere in the kitchen the refrigerator kicked on and I hated it.

Free from the blight of sorrow, I sang, and then I looked at Gran.

Her eyes were still closed. But her right arm had come out from under the quilt, and her left was crooked up against her ribs, and she was holding nothing. The sheet was rounded under her elbow, as if there was something there. Two fingers of her right hand were patting the air above it, slow, one beat to a note, the way you pat a baby’s back at two in the morning. I had seen my mother do it with my cousin’s girls. I had seen myself do it, with a pillow, practicing for a child that never came.

She was keeping time. Not with the hymn. With a baby.

Free from my doubts and

I did not finish the line. My hands came off the keys.

Nobody said a word. The last chord I had struck went on humming in the Kimball, and then it stopped, and I sat there with my fingers in my lap, understanding one thing and none of the rest. This was not a hymn about heaven for a woman about to go there. This was a lullaby. Somebody had been sung to, in this house, to this tune, and Gran had been rocking her ever since.

Gran opened her eyes. She did not look surprised.

“That’s right,” she said. “Don’t be sorry. That’s about where Joyce had to stop, too, the first time through.”

“Mama,” Bev said.

“Hush, Beverly.” Gran looked at the ceiling. “Rochelle. You asked me why.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lorene, look at me.”

My mother looked at her.

“Now I’ll tell you,” my grandmother said.

“It was a Sunday. February the ninth, nineteen fifty-eight. A bad snow. I was twenty-one years old and seven months along, and Dewitt had been gone since eleven the night before, out on the tractor with the chains to get Doc Pelham, because the pains had started and the car would not go and the road to town was drifted over higher than the fence posts.”

Nobody moved. On the porch, one of the little girls laughed at something and was hushed.

“It was just me and Joyce Voigt,” Gran said. “Joyce lived two miles east and she came through that snow on a sled behind her husband’s team of Belgians, in the dark, because she had delivered half the babies in the township and she knew by the light in our kitchen window that something was wrong. She was fifty-one. She had big red hands and she never said a pretty thing in her life. She got me onto the kitchen table because it was nearest the stove.”