The Hymn For Someone Else

The funeral was at the Haverly United Methodist Church on a bright cold Saturday, with the wind coming across the flats from the north. Pastor Nolan read the Twenty-third Psalm and said some kind things about a woman who had run that church’s kitchen for fifty-one years and never once let a coffee pot go dry. Then he said, because my mother had asked him to, that the family would like the last hymn to be one that Barbara had chosen.

He did not explain. I played it slow, the way I had been taught. Most of the church did not know it. I could hear the pages turning as they hunted for it in the hymnal. But in the last row, on the aisle, a small woman with thick white hair sat with a walker parked beside her, and I saw her lips moving before I saw anything else.

I did not stop in the middle of a line. Not that day.

Afterward, in the church basement, over the ham sandwiches and the green Jell-O and the sheet cake the women of the Circle had made, that same woman worked her way over to my mother and me with her walker. She was small and square, in a navy church dress, with big red hands crooked with arthritis.

“You are Barbara’s daughter,” she said to my mother. “And you are the one who played.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“I’m Marva Emerson. I was a Voigt.” She held onto my wrist. Her grip was stronger than I expected. “Joyce was my mother.”

I had to sit down on a folding chair.

“Mother told me about it when I was nineteen,” Marva said. “She said it was the hardest morning of her life, and she had never sung out loud alone in front of another person before or since. She said she sang that hymn like a crow, and begged God to forgive the noise.” She smiled, and her eyes filled. “She also said Barbara Fairchild told her not to stop, and she did not stop, and it was the best thing she ever did with her voice. When she died, in nineteen seventy-nine, we sang it for her at the house. Nobody else but family.”

My mother had not said a word. She was holding a paper plate she had forgotten to eat from.

“And the grass,” Marva said.

“The grass,” my mother said.

“Mother mowed around that stone every Decoration Day with a pair of hand shears, and she took me out there when I was twelve to learn how, because it needed doing and nobody else knew it was there. She said not to speak of it unless Barbara herself asked. And Barbara never asked, so I never spoke.” Marva’s mouth worked. “I went out in the first week of May, every year, before the church ladies came. I never once crossed paths with her. I used to see the pot of petunias sitting there, and I knew.”

“Sixty-eight years,” my mother said. “She thought it was the sexton.”