The Piano Six Men Carried Home

Men and women were standing in the yard in their church clothes. Some of them I knew. A few I had never seen. Word had gone around the way it does in a county that small, from the feed store to the beauty shop to the Wednesday supper table. Nobody had planned a thing.

“It’s just a few people from church,” I said. “They came to welcome you.”

“All of them?” Grandma said. “My goodness. I haven’t got enough coffee.”

Mrs. Tilden, who had not left her lawn chair in four days, called over the fence, “I brought the coffee, Ramona.”

People laughed. Grandma laughed too, and wiped her eye with the back of her hand.

I pushed her up the ramp. Gus held the screen door. I had propped it open with the flowerpot, just as it had been the Saturday before.

Across the front room, in the middle of the wall, in the light from the south window, the upright stood in its pale yellow rectangle. The doily was gone. The plant was gone. The lid was up.

Grandma did not say anything for a long time. Her hand came up to her mouth, and I saw her wrist tremble.

“Hannah,” she whispered.

“I found the man,” I said. “He’s a nice man. His granddaughter said to tell you the C sticks.”

Grandma laughed, a small cracked sound that turned halfway into something else.

“Roll me in,” she said.

I wheeled her across the floor. She said, “Stop,” about three feet from the keys, and I stopped.

She sat and looked at it.

The yard had gone quiet behind us. Through the screen door and the open windows, I could see the whole crowd standing with their hats in their hands, the way people stand outside a sickroom.

“Somebody bring me the bench,” Grandma said.

Floyd was there before anyone else. He pulled the bench out from under the keys with both hands, as if it might break, and set it at an angle. Gus and Grant lifted her out of the chair and onto it, slowly, one under each arm, and she gripped Gus’s sleeve for balance and did not let go until she was sure of her seat.

For a minute she did not play. She looked at the keys. She touched the middle C and it stuck, and she smiled at it, the way you smile at a friend who has not changed.

She set her feet. She put her left hand down and then her right, and she pressed the soft pedal. She started to play.

It was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” It was the hymn she had played on her wedding day in 1961, in the church basement, with her mother’s pearls on, and it was the one I had heard coming up through the floorboards every morning of my childhood summers.

She played slowly. Her fingers were stiff and the notes were not all clean. The C stuck twice, and each time she let it rise and tried again.