The Quartet on the Flatbed at the Gate

The Hymn

“This next one,” Dad said into the microphone, and his voice was very quiet, “I am going to sing by myself, if the boys will let me. It was my wife’s favorite.”

Burnis and Orvin and Haskel stepped back a half step. Nobody had told them he was going to do it. They just knew.

Four years ago this past spring, Mom was in a hospital bed in their living room, the one hospice brought, right by the front window so she could see the cows. She had been asleep for most of two days.

The afternoon before she passed, the quartet came, with the sun coming in that front window.

All four of them stood around her bed in their work clothes, because nobody had thought about putting on a pressed shirt. They sang very softly for about an hour.

The last one Dad sang alone. He sat down on the edge of the bed and held her hand and sang “In the Sweet By and By,” the whole thing, in that deep low voice that sounds like it is coming up out of the ground.

Mom opened her eyes for the first time in two days. She looked at him and squeezed his hand. Then she closed them again. That was the last time any of us saw her awake.

I was in the room. Kirby was not. He was standing in the kitchen with his back against the refrigerator, and he could not come in.

I went out afterward and found him there, and he would not look at me.

Now, at the fairgrounds gate, with three hundred people sitting on hay bales and lawn chairs, Dad sang that hymn again. By himself. He did not close his eyes the way he usually does.

He sang it looking straight at Kirby.

“In the sweet by and by,” Dad sang, “we shall meet on that beautiful shore.” The whole crowd went quiet. Even the kids. You could hear a horse trailer rattling somewhere back in the parking lot.

Kirby did not move. He stood at the back of the crowd with his badge around his neck and his radio going on his hip, and I watched his face come apart a little at a time, the way a dam goes.

His daughter got up off the gravel and went to him. She took his hand and pulled.

He let her pull him, one step and then another, right down the middle of the hay bales until he was standing at the foot of the trailer.

When Dad finished, nobody clapped for a long time. Then they did, all of them, standing up.

The Low Part

Haskel waited for it to quiet down. Then he leaned to the microphone again, and he looked down at my brother standing there with his girl hanging on his hand.

“Kirby,” Haskel said, “we’re going to do one more, and we’re short a low part on this last one. Your daddy’s had a long day. You still remember the baritone on ‘Shall We Gather at the River’?”

It was not true that they were short. Burnis had the baritone right there.

Burnis just smiled and stepped to the side and held out the cane he was keeping for Haskel, like it was a door.

Kirby looked up at Haskel. Then at Burnis. Then at Dad.

“I haven’t sung in front of people since I was twelve,” he said. Not into the microphone. Just to them. But it was quiet enough that half the crowd heard him.

“I know it,” Dad said. “I was there. You were good.”

Kirby stood there a long moment. Then he unclipped his radio and handed it to me.

He did not say anything when he did it. He took his badge off over his head and gave me that too.

He climbed up the steps the boy from the mill had built. He took the place on the end where Burnis had stepped back, next to Dad.

Orvin blew the pitch pipe.

They sang “Shall We Gather at the River,” five men on a hay trailer, the four of them in their pressed shirts and my brother in his fair polo shirt, sweating, holding the rail.

His voice cracked on the first line. Dad put a hand on his shoulder and kept singing, and by the second verse Kirby had it.

Steady and clear. The same voice he had at twelve, just lower.

The crowd sang the chorus with them. His girl sang it from the foot of the trailer, with her little brother on her hip. My sister-in-law had her face in her hands.

I stood by the trailer holding my brother’s radio and his badge. I did not cheer.

I did not say “I told you so” to anybody. I did not have to. Everybody there had seen it.