The Choir That Sang From the Pasture

I picked up the van at noon and started my route. Eleven singers in all. The youngest was Mae Fuller, at sixty-six.

The oldest was Clarence Beal, at eighty-eight, who had sung bass beside my father for thirty years.

Clarence lives alone on a dirt road west of town.

He was waiting at the end of his drive in a dark overcoat and a hat, with his cane in one hand and his hymnal in the other.

He had been standing there, he told me, since eleven thirty.

“I didn’t want to make you wait,” he said. Alan got out and walked him to the van on his arm, and Clarence held on to that arm with the kind of grip old farmers keep their whole lives.

Then Nell Lyman, eighty-four, who has a tremor in both hands and has not missed a Sunday in her life.

Then Bernice Fuller, Mae’s sister-in-law, who brought a tin of pecan cookies “for after.” Then the Lewis brothers, both retired from the county road crew.

Two of them had not been out of the house since August except to the doctor.

Hattie made me stop at her place last, so she could ride up front and tell me how to drive.

She got in, settled her navy coat, and looked back over the seats at all of them.

“Everybody got their hymnal?” she asked. Eleven old hands went up holding eleven old books. “Good. Nobody sings flat. Walter will know.”

The van was quiet for a few miles after that.

Then Bernice started telling about the year Dad’s voice cracked on the low note at the Christmas cantata, and how he laughed so hard he had to sit down in the choir loft, and by the time we turned south off the highway everybody was laughing.

Virgil had done exactly what he said. The cows were a black line against the far north fence, and there was a fresh strip of mowed grass along the cemetery side, wide enough to stand on without stumbling. The gate stood open.

I parked the van behind the fence at one forty.

Alan helped everybody down the step one at a time, the way you would help somebody off a horse, slow and with no fuss.

Pastor Orrin was already there, standing a little way off with his hands folded.

The pasture grass was winter brown and dry, flattened where Virgil had dragged it.

Across the wire, maybe forty yards off, the funeral home’s green tent snapped in the wind over the open grave, with a row of folding chairs underneath and a spray of white flowers on the casket.

Cars were coming in from the county road. People in dark coats walked across the grass to the tent.

A few of them looked our way and stopped walking. Somebody waved, a small wave, down low by her hip, like you would wave in church.

Hattie lined us up along the fence the way she lines us up in the loft. Sopranos on her left. Altos beside her. Then tenors.

Then the basses on the end, where Dad always stood. She left one space open next to Clarence. Nobody said anything about it. Everybody saw it.