The Choir That Sang From the Pasture

“I came because I had an idea on the way over, and I’m too old to sit on an idea overnight.”

She pointed her cane south, like she could see all the way to the cemetery from my porch. “What’s on the back side of that graveyard?”

I had to think. “A fence. Woven wire with barbed on top. Then pasture. Somebody runs cattle on it.”

“Virgil Haney,” Hattie said. “His folks are buried in the far corner. Melissa, we don’t have to be at the grave. We just have to be where Walter can hear us.”

I looked at her a long time. Then I laughed, the first time since the hospital called, and it came out more like crying.

She patted my knee with a hand that was mostly bones and rings.

“She can say who stands under the tent,” Hattie said.

“She can’t say who stands in Virgil’s pasture. That belongs to Virgil, and Virgil belongs to the Lord, and the Lord likes a bass line.”

Alan drove out to the Haney place early Saturday. I went with him, because I needed to hear Virgil say yes with my own ears.

The sky was low and gray, and the post oaks along the creek still had their brown leaves hanging on.

Virgil was feeding hay. He had a round bale on the spear of his tractor and about forty black cows strung out behind him, bawling like they had not eaten in a week.

He waved us to the gate and finished the job before he climbed down.

He is somewhere in his seventies, lean as a fence post, with a feed store cap that has seen several presidents.

Alan explained it plainly. The burial, Tuesday at two. The choir. Gwyn’s decision. Hattie’s idea.

Virgil listened all the way through without interrupting. Then he took off his cap and turned it over in his hands like he was reading the inside of it.

“Your dad sang at my mother’s funeral,” he told Alan, then looked at me.

“Nineteen ninety-one. February. It sleeted. He stood out there in the sleet and sang ‘Beulah Land’ with his hat in his hand, and I never thanked him for it.”

“You don’t have to do this,” I told him. “If it causes you trouble with anybody, we’ll understand.”

“Trouble,” Virgil said, like he was tasting the word. “Young lady, I’m seventy-four years old. I’ll move the cows to the north side Monday and drag that strip along the fence so nobody turns an ankle. Park wherever you want. Leave the gate open when you go.”

Alan shook his hand. Men like Alan and Virgil do not say much in a handshake, but that one went on for a while.

On the drive home Alan said, “Good man,” and nothing else for six miles.

Pastor Orrin met me in the church parking lot on Sunday afternoon.

He is younger than me, maybe forty, a tall Methodist preacher with a Texas accent who came to Morris three years ago and had learned everybody’s name inside of a month.

He already knew. In a town of thirteen hundred people, everybody already knew.

He had his hands in his jacket pockets and he looked about as unhappy as I had ever seen a preacher look.