The Choir That Sang From the Pasture

Hattie took the front row herself and put me at her elbow, because she needs one hand for her cane and the wind kept turning her pages. Nell, whose hands shake, stood behind us with Bernice holding her book.

I was not singing. I was the music stand. That was fine with me.

Gwyn came at ten till two. She walked from the funeral home car to the front row of chairs without looking left or right, in a black coat, alone.

She sat down in the first chair and folded her hands in her lap.

Then she looked up, straight across the cemetery, and saw us. Eleven old people bundled up against the wind at a wire fence, holding hymnals. A white van behind them. Me.

She did not look away. I will give her that, then and now.

She looked right at us for a long time. Then she turned back toward the casket and did not move again.

The chaplain was a kind young man who had never met my father. He read the Twenty-third Psalm in a clear voice, and the wind took about half of it.

He read a few lines from John about many rooms. He said a prayer that was short and decent.

Then Mr. Purcell stepped to the head of the grave, where the lowering device sits on its frame, and put his hand on the lever.

In a graveside service out here, that is the moment. Everyone knows it. People stand up.

Hattie lifted her cane about an inch off the ground. That was all. Eleven people took one breath together.

“When peace like a river attendeth my way,” they sang, “when sorrows like sea billows roll.”

I had heard that hymn my whole life. I had never heard it in the open air, carried on a south wind across a cemetery, with nothing to hold it in.

It did not sound like a choir. It sounded like the prairie had learned how to sing.

Then the chorus came. In that hymn, the basses answer the melody.

The sopranos sing “It is well,” and the basses come in under them, “it is well,” like an echo off the bottom of a well.

That echo was Dad’s. For thirty-eight years that echo was my father.

The sopranos sang “It is well.” And there was a hole.

Just for half a beat, there was nothing where he used to be, and I felt Hattie’s arm go stiff against mine.

Then Clarence Beal, eighty-eight, who had left his cane in the van, leaned on the cedar fence post with one hand and sang it.

“It is well.” Low and rough and a little behind, but right there. He did not look at anybody. He just filled the hole.

I stood there in my black wool coat and held the hymnal open for Hattie, and I could not see the page anymore. It did not matter. Hattie had known the words since before I was born.

Alan had his phone up behind us. He took one picture, the front row of us at the wire: Hattie and me, and two of the others with their books open. It is the only picture anybody has of that afternoon.

Under the tent, people turned around in their folding chairs. Some of them stood up and faced the fence.