The Choir That Sang Under My Window

Two inches of window

Dale came at ten o’clock on the third Sunday of January with a hacksaw and the handle off a broken push broom.

I watched him do it in the front room. He knelt by the east window and slid the storm pane down at the bottom, and then he lifted the inner sash and stood the handle on the sill underneath it. He had cut it to two inches, and he had sanded the end so it wouldn’t mark the wood. He set the sash down on it and checked it with the flat of his hand.

Cold air came in at once, sharp and clean, smelling of snow and woodsmoke and somebody’s cattle. It moved the lace.

“That’s two inches,” Dale said. “Is that enough?”

“For a hymn,” I said.

“Mama, you’ll want your coat.”

I put my coat on over the cardigan and the afghan over the coat. I had the tubing across my lap.

“I’ll be in the kitchen,” Dale said. He did not ask what I planned to do. He went and stood at the sink and ran the water, which he does when he wants to look busy, and I heard him not turning around.

At ten minutes to eleven the cars came up the drive. I did not lift the curtain. I knew where each of them was standing by the order of the car doors, and the boots on the gravel, and a cough that was Gordy’s.

Then Wilma’s pitch pipe, one note, thin as a hair.

They sang “Blessed Assurance.”

With the window open, it was a different hymn. I had not known how much of the sound was being held in by the glass. It came in over the sill in a body, soprano and tenor and the low bass under it all, and it filled the room, and it moved the afghan on my knees. For the first time in three months I was inside a hymn instead of beside one.

It was still thin in the middle. I could hear that. The hole was exactly the size of me.

The first verse ended. The choir stopped, and eight people stood in my yard with their breath going up, and not one of them moved.

I took a breath from the tube. It tasted of plastic and cold.

I will tell you the truth about the next part, because it is not a miracle and I do not want it to sound like one. I opened my mouth and the note that came out was not much. It was small, and it shook, and it was a half step flat on the first word. It lasted about as long as a sneeze.

But it went out through two inches of open window into eleven degrees, and I heard it go.