The Hymn For Someone Else

“They thought they were sparing me,” she said. “That was the way then. Dewitt was grieving too, in his way. When I could walk, he set his jaw and said, ‘Barbara, I will not have it talked about,’ and I was twenty-one and did not know any better than to obey.”

“Where is she?” my mother asked. Her voice cracked in the middle of it.

“North fence. Back corner of the Haverly cemetery, in the row where they put the babies. There’s a fieldstone with an N scratched in it. Joyce showed me, the spring after. I go every Decoration Day. I have gone every year for sixty-eight years, and I have never taken a soul.”

“All those years, you went alone?” Bev said.

“I told you I was going to look at the peonies at the Voigt place. I was telling a fib, Beverly. Pastor Amos would have forgiven it.” Gran almost smiled. “Only thing I never could work out is the grass. I’d come out in May with my trowel and a pot of petunias, expecting weeds up to the fence rail, and every year it was cut down close around that stone and nowhere else along the row. I figured the sexton took pity. I never asked him.”

I tried to say something. I could not. I looked at my hands, and they would not make a fist.

“I had you the next year, Lorene,” Gran said, turning her head on the pillow toward my mother. “February of fifty-nine. I held on to you so hard you complained about it your whole childhood. Now you know why.”

My mother crossed the two steps to the bed and folded herself down onto the quilt and put her face against her mother’s shoulder. My grandmother lifted her thin arm and held her there.

“I never had anyone to sing it with,” Gran said into her hair. “That’s all. I never believed God took her to punish me. I never believed that for a minute. I believed He had her. I just wanted somebody to say so, out loud, one time, in the same room as me. I’ve waited since I was twenty-one.”

She turned her eyes to me over my mother’s head.

“I wanted you to play it first,” she said, “because if I’d told you why, you’d have played it like a funeral. I wanted it played like Joyce sang it. Like a hymn. Like somebody meant it. You stopped in the same place she did, and I didn’t tell you where.”

“I didn’t know where.”

“I know you didn’t.” Gran closed her eyes. “Now start it over. From the top, and slow. This time don’t you stop. Joyce didn’t.”

So I sat up straight at the Kimball and began again.