The Hymn For Someone Else

I thought of the envelope in my purse. I thought, Voigt, and my face went hot.

“She was born at ten past four in the morning,” Gran said. “A girl. So small she lay in Joyce’s two hands like a loaf of bread. Joyce wrapped her in a dish towel and put her on my chest and said, ‘She’s yours as long as she’s here, Barbara.’ And I held her.”

Her voice did not shake. It was the steadiest I had heard it in weeks.

“I held her three hours and ten minutes. Dewitt could not get through. The snow had blown shut every road in the county. She breathed, and she had a little fist, and she never opened her eyes. And Joyce stood at the foot of that table with her hands folded, and when it was clear, when we both knew, she said, ‘Barbara, is there something you want?’ And I said, ‘I want somebody to sing to her.'”

Herb’s cap had stopped turning. His face had gone the gray of a barn board.

“Joyce said, ‘I do not sing.’ She was a Lutheran, she said, and she sang in church only because the pastor looked at her. But she looked at me, and she looked at that baby, and she opened her mouth. And what came out was that.” Gran’s chin tipped toward the piano. “Safe in the arms of Jesus. She sang it flat. She sang it like a hog caller. And somewhere in the second verse she ran out of breath and stopped, right where you did, and I said, ‘Go on.’ And she went on.”

“Mama,” my mother said. It was barely a sound.

“She sang it through three times. By the third time the baby was gone, and Joyce knew it, and I knew it, and I said, ‘Don’t stop.’ And she didn’t. She sang it clear to the end, with my girl in my arms already gone.”

The clock on the dresser said ten minutes to three. I remember because I could not look at anything else.

“Her name was Naomi,” my grandmother said. “Naomi Joy. At twenty past seven, by the stove clock. I never said it out loud to anyone but Joyce and the Lord. Not once since that morning.”

Herb said, thickly, “I never knew.”

“Nobody did, Herbert. Your father would not have it spoken of.”

And then she told us the rest, without bitterness, the way you recite a recipe you know by heart.

Dewitt and Doc Pelham got to the house at noon, on the tractor, with the doctor holding on behind. There was nothing left to do but see to Gran herself, who had bled more than she should have. She lay in that bed two weeks with a fever. By the time she could stand, it was over. The ground in the county was frozen three feet down that February, and the man who kept the cemetery burned straw on the plot a whole night to thaw it, and my grandfather and Pastor Amos Teller and Joyce’s husband Emory buried a little pine box that Dewitt had built out of a board from the granary. Three men and a Bible, on a Thursday. Gran was in bed, and nobody asked her.