The Choir That Sang From the Pasture

The wind was coming out of the south hard enough to rattle the funeral director’s clipboard, and my stepmother had to hold her scarf down with one hand while she told him what she wanted.

We were standing in the little country cemetery south of Morris, Oklahoma, on the spot where they would dig my father’s grave.

Mom was buried twelve feet away. I could see her name on the gray stone without turning my head.

“Graveside only,” Gwyn said. “Short. The funeral home’s chaplain can read something. I don’t want a big production.”

The funeral director, a quiet man named Mr. Purcell who had buried half of Okmulgee County, wrote that down.

Then he asked the question he probably asks every family. “Will there be any music, Mrs. Drake?”

I answered before she could, because I thought it was the easiest question of the morning.

“The choir will sing. Hattie already called me. They want to do ‘It Is Well With My Soul.’ That was his.”

Gwyn did not look at me. She looked at Mr. Purcell, and her voice stayed perfectly level, the way a person talks when she has already decided something in the dark the night before.

“No choir at the grave,” she said. “I don’t want that noise.”

Mr. Purcell looked down at his clipboard like there was something very important written on it.

A meadowlark went up out of the grass along the back fence. Nobody said anything for what felt like a full minute.

That noise. My father sang bass in the Grace Methodist choir in Morris from 1988 until the Sunday before he died.

Thirty-eight years. He missed practice for my wedding rehearsal, for Mom’s surgery, and for one ice storm. That was it.

I am Melissa Drake. I was forty-five that November, the bookkeeper for a little school district up the road, and I had buried my mother nine years earlier in that same ground.

I knew how to stand at a grave. I did not know how to stand next to Gwyn.

“Gwyn,” I said, as gently as I could make it come out. “Those people were his friends. Some of them have known him since before I was born.”

“I know exactly who they are,” she said. Then she thanked Mr. Purcell, walked back to her car, and drove off toward the highway with her scarf still in her fist.

My father, Walter Drake, was a big, slow-talking man who fixed lawn mowers in his shop behind the house for half the county and charged most of them nothing.

He had a voice that came up out of the floor.

When I was a girl I would sit in the third pew on Sunday mornings and wait for the place in a hymn where the basses come in alone.

I could feel it in the wood under my hands. Mom used to say Dad sang like a cello with a cold.

Mom was Annette. She played the piano for Wednesday night supper at church and sang in the choir beside him for twenty-some years, until the cancer.

After she died, Dad kept going to practice every Thursday because he said it was the only night of the week the house did not feel empty.