The Choir That Sang Under My Window

Eight of them, in the cold

Church lets out at half past ten at Bethel. I know that clock better than I know my own birthday. The home place is twelve miles out, and Marlene Hoppe drives like a woman who has a casserole in the oven, so that explains the ten minutes to eleven.

They had come straight from the benediction. I could tell by the robes.

Marlene stood by the front fender of her Buick with no gloves on, because she cannot keep time in gloves. She taught music in the Elkader schools for thirty-four years, and she is sixty-eight, and she has a way of standing that makes a sixth grader sit up straight at fifty paces.

Wilma Dettmer stood a little in front of the others with her pitch pipe in her fist. Beside her was Doreen Kuhlman, and Pearl Hanson, who has sung soprano like a teakettle since the Eisenhower administration. Tess Brandt, thirty-four and the baby of the choir, had a diaper bag over one shoulder under her robe. Arlan Meyer and Rodney Ihde were the basses, and Gordy Fosse, who has a bad knee and sings tenor anyway, was holding the hymnal pages flat against a wind that wanted them.

They arranged themselves in the yard in two rows, under my east window, in the order they stand in the loft. I looked at the place where the second alto would stand, and there was a space of about two feet. Nobody had filled it.

I did not move.

Nobody walked toward the house. Nobody knocked, and nobody so much as looked at my door.

I understood that this was on purpose. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for me since November, and it took me a long time to see it. They had come to my house and left it entirely my decision whether I was there.

Wilma blew a single note on her pitch pipe. It hung in the cold air like a thread.

Then they began.