The Choir That Sang From the Pasture

An old farmer in the back row took off his cap and held it against his coat. Two women I had gone to school with held hands.

The casket started down on the third verse. Mr. Purcell lowered it slow, the way he does, and it went down by inches while eleven old voices sang about sin being nailed to the cross. I watched it go. I watched Gwyn.

She did not move. Not on the first verse. Not on the second or the third.

Her hands stayed folded in her lap and her back stayed straight and her face stayed toward the grave.

On the fourth verse, the one about the trumpet, I saw her shoulders start to shake.

They finished. Hattie held the last note a little longer than the hymnal says to, the way she always did for Dad.

Then it was over, and it was quiet. Just the wind in the dry grass and the tent snapping and somebody’s car door way out on the road.

Then Gwyn stood up.

She did not go back toward the funeral car. She walked out from under the tent and turned and came straight across the cemetery toward us, between the old headstones, stepping careful in her good shoes on the uneven ground.

The whole crowd under the tent watched her come. So did we.

Alan moved a half step closer to my shoulder without saying anything. Pastor Orrin unfolded his hands. Hattie did not move one inch.

Gwyn stopped at the fence, right in front of Hattie, with the barbed wire between them.

She put both hands on top of the cedar post, the same one Clarence had been leaning on. Her eyes were red all the way around and her mouth was pressed flat.

For a long moment, she looked at Hattie and Hattie looked at her, two women past sixty in dark coats with a barbed-wire fence and six years between them.

“Would you sing it again,” Gwyn said. It was not quite a question.

Her voice came out small and cracked down the middle. “Please. I wasn’t listening the first time. I never once listened.”

Nobody breathed. Then Hattie nodded, like this was the most ordinary request in the world, like people came to the fence and asked her for second verses every Tuesday.

“Of course we will, honey,” she said. And then she did something I will remember the rest of my life.

She reached into her big black purse and brought out a hymnal, an old one, the cover worn white at the corners.

“This was Walter’s,” Hattie said. “From his folder in the loft. I meant to give it to Melissa. I think it ought to be yours.”

She passed it across the top wire, careful of the barbs, and Gwyn took it in both hands.

It was the same Methodist hymnal everybody has, but it fell open on its own to number 377, the spine broken in that one place from thirty-some years of Thursdays.

Every bass note in the echo was circled in pencil. Dad had a habit of circling the notes he loved.

In the margin, in his big square carpenter’s handwriting, he had written dates. Mom’s funeral. My wedding. The day my son was baptized.