She knew every word. My dad used to sing it to her when she sat on his lap, and after he died, Abner played it for her in the car on the way to school. She sang it all through first grade.
Her voice was thin and a little off key and so brave I can still hear it. She sang straight at me, like she was handing me something.
Then Dad’s old friend Augie, who ran the scale at the grain elevator for thirty years, started singing with her.
He has a big low voice, the kind you hear in the back pew. Then the two men standing next to him joined in.
Then my mother. Then Abner. Then my bridesmaids, all six of them, holding their shoes.
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Then the whole back row by the tent, people I had only met that afternoon, Whit’s cousins from Shelbyville and the lady who did our cake.
In about half a minute, two hundred people were singing my dad’s song on my mother’s lawn under the string lights, with no music at all, just their voices and the crickets.
Uncle Woody squeezed my hand and started us moving again. He is not a dancer. He counts under his breath.
But he had practiced in his garage with Aunt Esther for three weeks, and he did not miss a step.
I danced the whole song with him. Every verse. Nobody rushed it.
When they got to the part where the song builds, the whole yard got louder, and some of the farmers in the back were stomping on the grass to keep the beat.
I looked up at Uncle Woody and he was crying, which I had never seen in my life, not even at Dad’s funeral.
He just let the tears go down into his beard and kept counting.
When it ended, nobody clapped. It did not feel like the kind of thing you clap for.
People just stood there quiet, and then somebody near the pie table said, “Amen, Wiley,” and a few others said it too.