The Choir That Sang Under My Window

“Don’t make me a project”

Pastor Ned Brauer came out to the house the first week in November. He is a tall, slow-talking man, fifty-some years old, who came to us from a church in Minnesota nine years ago and still, I think, does not entirely trust our winters.

He sat in Harold’s chair with his hat on his knee and asked how I was, and I told him the truth in about four sentences. Then he said the church would do anything I needed. Meals, rides, a prayer chain, a ramp from the men’s group. He meant every word.

“Pastor,” I said, “I’ll ask you for one thing.”

“Anything.”

“Don’t make me a project.”

He looked at me for a while.

I have watched a good many church people find their way into a house where someone is failing. There is a look they get, and a tilt of the head, and a way of saying your name that goes up at the end like a question. I did not want to be on the receiving end of it. I wanted to be Lavina Trout in her own chair, not Lavina Trout, our shut-in.

“All right,” Ned said. “I won’t.”

And I will give him this. He didn’t. He brought communion on the first Sunday of every month, in a little black case that opened like a tackle box, and he sat with me ten minutes after, and he talked about the Twins or the price of corn, and then he put his hat on and went. Not once did he tilt his head.

The other Sundays I listened to the service on the radio.

The station out of Elkader hangs one microphone by the pulpit. It is set for a preacher’s voice, which is a fine voice for a microphone, low and steady and made for a room. A choir is a different animal. When Marlene Hoppe’s choir sang, through that one microphone, in that one farmhouse front room, it sounded like bees in a barn two farms over.

I could hear that they were singing. I could not hear what.

So I sang along anyway. I would sit at my kitchen table with the green hymnal open and the radio turned low, and I sang the alto line out loud, to nobody, with my finger under the notes. It did not feel like church. It felt like talking to someone in a room where the telephone has gone dead.

The first Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve at Bethel is candlelight. The ushers pass the flame down the pews from one small taper to the next, and the whole room sings “Silent Night” with the lights off. In the loft, I had carried a candle sixty-one times.

That year I sat at my kitchen table at seven o’clock with the radio on. I could hear the bees in the barn begin “Silent Night,” and I could not hear a single word of it.

At the end the radio announcer said “Merry Christmas from Bethel Lutheran,” and then there was only the sound of the machine.

I did not cry. I was in the frame of mind of a woman cleaning up after a party she was not invited to, which is a quiet and orderly frame of mind.

I washed my cup and went to bed at eight o’clock. Dale’s family came the next morning with ham and the good rolls, and I was cheerful the entire day. That is a talent I have.