The Choir That Sang From the Pasture

Three years after Mom passed, he met Gwyn at a pancake supper the Lions Club put on in Okmulgee.

She was a widow too, from over by Henryetta, a retired cafeteria cook with a little red car and a laugh that surprised you. He was seventy. She was fifty-eight.

They married at the courthouse on a Friday in early summer. Alan and I were the witnesses.

Gwyn wore a blue dress and Dad wore the brown suit he sang in, and afterward we all ate catfish at a place on the highway, and I told myself I was happy for him.

I will be honest here, because the rest of this does not make sense if I am not. I was polite to Gwyn.

I was never warm. I kept Mom’s things in my head like a fence, and I made sure Gwyn knew where the posts were.

Alan was in the driveway when I got home that day, under the hood of his truck.

He is a lineman for the electric co-op, forty-seven years old, and he has never once in our marriage told me what to feel. He wiped his hands and waited.

“She said no choir,” I told him. “She called it that noise. Right there in front of Mr. Purcell, with Mom twelve feet away.”

He leaned on the fender for a while. Alan thinks before he talks, which drives me crazy and has saved us more than once. “Can you stop her?” he finally asked.

“No,” I said. “She’s his wife. In Oklahoma the spouse decides about the burial. Mr. Purcell told me that years ago when we were doing Mom’s. It is hers to decide, not mine.”

“You could fight it,” he said. Not pushing. Just laying it on the tailgate so I could look at it.

“I am not going to stand in a funeral home office and argue with my father’s widow over his grave,” I said.

“He would hate that. He would hate it more than anything she did.”

Alan nodded like he had expected that answer. “Then we’ll think of something else,” he said, and went back under the hood.

That is about as close to a speech as he gets.

Hattie Henson came out to the house that evening. She did not call first. Nobody in Morris over seventy calls first.

I heard her car door, then her cane on the walk, and I went out and found her already lowering herself onto my front porch steps.

Hattie is eighty-one. She has sung alto at Grace Methodist since Eisenhower, and she has led the choir for the last twenty years because nobody else wanted to argue with her.

She wore her navy coat buttoned to the throat and laid the cane across her knees.

“Mr. Purcell’s wife sings with us,” she said, before I could ask how she knew.

“Don’t be mad at him. He was upset. He said he’s never had a family turn down a choir.”

“I’m sorry, Hattie,” I said. I sat down beside her on the cold concrete. “I don’t know what to tell the others. Clarence was going to ride out with his grandson.”

“Honey, I didn’t come for you to tell me anything,” she said.