The Choir That Sang Under My Window

The communion Sunday

On the first Sunday of February, Pastor Ned Brauer came out in the afternoon with his black case and his hat.

He gave me communion in the front room. We took it quietly, as we always had, and afterward he sat in Harold’s chair with his hat on his knee.

“They tell me the choir has been out here,” he said.

“They tell you.”

“I get all the news eventually.” There was something almost shy in his face, and I decided to be merciful.

“Did you send them?” I said.

He considered it. He is a man who considers things, and it is the best and worst of him.

“I did not,” he said. “I want to be clear about that, because you asked me for something in November and I meant to keep it. Wilma came to me the first week of January. I told her what you had said. That you didn’t want to be a project. That is the whole of what I told her.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said, ‘Then it won’t be a project.’ And I said all right.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s the one I have. You’ll have to ask Wilma the rest.” He turned the hat a quarter turn on his knee.

After he left I called Wilma Dettmer on the telephone, which I had not done since Christmas. She answered on the second ring, like a woman who had been sitting beside it.

“Come in Sunday,” I said. “After. Just you. I’ll have coffee.”

There was a long pause on the line.

“I’d be glad to,” Wilma said.

What Wilma told me

She came the second Sunday in February, alone, with the choir’s cars pulling out behind her. She stood on the porch in her robe and her good wool coat and wiped her feet three times on a mat that did not need it.

I had Dale set out the blue cups and a coffee cake from the freezer. Wilma sat across from me in Dale’s chair with her pitch pipe making a lump in her coat pocket. I had known that woman forty-three years, and I could not remember her being shy of me even once.

“I’ll tell you plain, Lavina,” she said. “And you can think what you want.”

“Go ahead.”

“The first Sunday in January we had practice before service. Marlene raised her hands on ‘Blessed Assurance.’ We had the music up. And she stopped, right at the start of the second verse, and she said, ‘That’s not right.’ And she was right. It sounded like somebody had taken the middle out of a loaf of bread.”

“I could hear that from the yard,” I said.

“We all could. We had been hearing it since October. Nobody would say. You can sit next to a hole for ten weeks and keep your mouth shut about it, because to name it feels like you’re burying somebody.” She looked at the blue cup. “Marlene said, ‘We’re not a complete choir.’ And I said, ‘Marlene, we aren’t, and we don’t need to be told.’ And then I thought, well, where is the rest of it? It’s out on the county road in a farmhouse. So we’ll go sing where the section is.”

“That’s a poor way to run a choir,” I said. “Eight people in a yard.”

“It was the only way I knew to rehearse with the whole section,” Wilma said.

I looked at her.