The Choir That Sang Under My Window

“Blessed Assurance”

It is an old hymn and a plain one, written in 1873 by a woman named Fanny Crosby, who was blind and wrote more than eight thousand of them. Every person in my church has sung it since they could hold a hymnal. “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.” It goes up and down like a woman climbing stairs with a basket.

They sang it outdoors in eleven degrees, to a house that looked empty.

I put my hand flat on the cold glass.

And something was wrong with the sound.

It took me all of the first verse to hear what it was. It was true, and it was in tune, and Marlene’s hands were as clean as they had ever been. But it was thin. It had the sound of a table with one leg gone. The notes were all standing up, and nothing was under them.

I knew exactly what was missing. I had been missing it myself since October.

When the verse ended, they did not start the second one.

They all stopped together. Eight people in maroon robes stood in the dead brown grass with their breath rising, and not one of them said a word. Marlene’s hands stayed up in the air at the end of the beat. Gordy shifted his weight off his bad knee. Somewhere down the road a dog barked twice and quit.

Then every one of them lifted a face toward my window, and Wilma Dettmer looked straight at my curtain.

I had a second to understand it.

In Marlene’s arrangement, the second verse opens on the low alto, a half measure ahead of everyone else, the way a hostess goes through the kitchen door first with the platter. For sixty-one years of Sundays that entrance had been mine. It is the one place in the hymn where the part underneath gets to walk out in front.

And the choir had stood out there in the cold and held the door open for me, the way you hold a door for a woman with her arms full.

They had not come to see whether I was all right. They had come to my yard and stopped on the one measure that was mine, and waited for me to come in.

What I did, which was nothing

I did not sing.

I want to tell you why, because it is the part I am least proud of, and I have never told it to anybody until now.

I had tried. All through December, at the kitchen table, I had tried that line with the hymnal open, and my voice came out like a screen door in a high wind. It had a rattle in it. It was an old woman’s voice, thin and cracked at the edges, and four notes in I needed a breath the machine could not deliver fast enough. I would get three or four words out and have to stop and wait for the oxygen to catch up with me.

I had been the steady one. I had been the voice that held up the floor. I did not want eight people I loved to hear what had become of it.

So I stood behind my curtain with my hand on the glass and said nothing.

The pause went on a long time. I would guess ten or twelve seconds, which on a cold morning, with your breath going up in front of you, is a very long time.

Then Wilma Dettmer, who is seventy-seven and has a good heart and a worse hip, took a breath, and she sang the opening of the second verse alone.