The Choir That Sang From the Pasture

All the times the choir had sung that hymn for somebody, he had marked it down like a man keeping a tally in a stock book.

Gwyn turned a few pages with a shaking thumb, and stopped. I was close enough to see it.

Next to “In the Garden,” number 314, there was a penciled note, and the date was six years old.

“Gwyn hums this when she does the dishes. Ask Hattie if we can sing it some Sunday. Maybe she’ll come.”

Gwyn put her hand flat over the page like she was keeping it from blowing away. She did not make a sound.

Her shoulders shook and she bent her head down over that book until her forehead nearly touched the post.

Hattie reached across the wire and laid her hand on top of Gwyn’s. Hattie is not a toucher.

I had known her my whole life and I had never seen her do that to anybody who was not dying.

“He asked me that summer,” Hattie said quietly. “Six years ago. I said yes. We picked a Sunday. You never came back, honey, and he never asked again. I think he was afraid to push you.”

So they sang it again. “It Is Well,” all four verses, for Gwyn this time, with Gwyn standing at the fence holding Dad’s hymnal open in the wind.

She did not sing. She read along with her finger under the words like a child.

On the second chorus, when the basses came in on the echo, Clarence sang it, and I heard a second voice go down there with him.

It was Alan. My husband, who does not sing in public, who mouths the words at Christmas Eve service.

He stood behind me and sang “it is well” in a voice I had not heard in nineteen years of marriage, and it was not good, and it was perfect.

When it was over the second time, people started drifting out from under the tent. Some went to their cars. A lot of them came to the fence.

They shook hands across the wire with the choir. They hugged old Clarence over the top strand, carefully. Bernice passed pecan cookies through the fence.

Some of them spoke to Gwyn too, and I will not pretend it was all easy. A woman I won’t name said, loud enough, “Well. Better late.”

Gwyn heard it. Her face went red and she did not answer. That was the price, and she paid it standing right there in front of the whole county.

I did not say anything to that woman. I did not say anything to Gwyn, either, at first.

I had nothing in me that was smart enough for the moment, and Mom always told me that when you have nothing smart, keep your mouth shut and hand somebody a cookie.

So I took one of Bernice’s cookies and held it across the wire. Gwyn looked at it, and then at me, and took it.

She did not eat it. She just held it, with the hymnal pressed to her chest in her other arm.

“Can I say something to you,” she said. “Not here. Away from all these people.”