The Hymn For Someone Else

I do not know how I got through it. I played the first verse and the second, and when I came to the place where I had stopped, my hands went through it as if the road had always been there. I could hear Bev breathing hard in the rocker. I did not look up. On the third verse, Wait till the night is o’er, my mother lifted her head from her own mother’s shoulder and began to sing. She does not sing. She stood in church every Sunday of my life with her mouth shut. Her voice came out low and rough, like a rope pulled tight, and she did not look at anyone, and she sang it to the end.

Gran did not sing. She lay with her eyes closed and her mouth moving along with the words, and her two fingers were patting the sheet, one beat to a note, and I watched them until the last chord was gone.

My mother said it then. She said it to the room, as if she were testing whether the floor would hold.

“Naomi Joy.”

Nobody else said it. Herb nodded once, and Bev reached over and put her hand on my mother’s back. That was enough. In our family that counts as a conversation.

My grandmother opened her eyes. She looked at each of us, one at a time, the way you count your children at a school door. Then she said, in a voice as light as breath, “That’ll do.”

She slept all that evening. Nobody wanted to leave the house, so we ate Bev’s Bundt cake after all, standing around the kitchen in our coats. Around ten o’clock Herb went out to the porch and I went after him, and found him sitting on the top step with his cap on his knee.

“Sixty-eight years,” he said. “I ran that farm beside him for thirty. He never said one word. I’d have walked through fire for that man, Rochelle, and he never said.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t she tell us after Dad died?”

“I think she didn’t know how,” I said. “I think she was waiting for somebody who could play it.”

He laughed, wetly, and we sat there a while, looking at the yard light and the dark rows of corn stubble beyond it, and neither of us said anything more.

She asked for the hymn once more the next day, and my mother sat on the bench beside me while I played it, turning pages that did not need turning. She asked for it again Sunday, and Aunt Bev sang the alto. Gran did not speak much after that.

Barbara Fairchild died the following Wednesday, at about a quarter to six in the morning, with the window open an inch to let in the smell of the stubble fields. My mother was holding one hand and Aunt Bev the other. I was in the kitchen making coffee for people who would not drink it, and I heard the whole house go quiet, and I knew.

Herb was the first one to sit down at the piano afterward. He does not play. He picked out the first four notes of the hymn with one finger, and then he stopped, and I came and sat down next to him and finished the line.