The Hymnal Ida Marked in Pencil

The Drawer

At a quarter past six on Thursday evening I took a green hymnal out of the bottom drawer of my dresser, from under the winter nightgowns where it had lain since the middle of May, and I stood in my own bedroom with it held flat against my chest and could not make my feet go to the kitchen.

I am Idalene Vanderhoef. Ida. I am seventy-four, and I have been married to Alvah for fifty-two years, and you have already heard from him what happened in that kitchen. He told it straight. He told you about the book, the beans, the mirror, the dog, the eleven mornings, and the pencil, and he left nothing out that he knew. But a man can only tell what he knows, and my husband did not know the half of what I knew. For two hundred and twelve days I let him not know it. I want to tell you why, and I want to tell you what was in my hands, because it was not what he thought it was.

What Goes First

Alvah told you the high sounds went first. That is true, and it is the doctor’s way of saying it. The doctor in Huron put a chart in front of me three years ago, a slope like the side of a gravel pit, and ran his pencil down it. “Here’s where you are, Mrs. Vanderhoef. And here’s where you were.” Kettle, wrens, a child’s voice, the end of every word a person says. All of it slides off the high side of the hill and into the creek.

But he said one more thing, and I do not think Alvah ever heard me repeat it, because I did not repeat it to anyone. He said the low end holds on longest. “You’ll keep the bottom of things last,” he said. “Thunder, a truck on the road, a man’s voice if it’s deep enough.”

I thought nothing of it. I was busy being offended by the chart.

Here is the other half that nobody knows. I met my husband by his voice before I ever looked at his face. It was September of 1973, the first Wednesday choir practice of the fall at Ludeman Lutheran, and I was twenty-one and an alto with a good ear and a bad opinion of most men my age. I came in late, and the basses were already warming up, and from somewhere behind the pillar there came a sound like a cellar door opening onto a very large cellar. I found my note off it. I did not need to be given a pitch. I stood there with my hymnal open and my mouth open and I found my note right off the bottom of that man, the way a vine finds a post.

When I turned around it was Alvah Vanderhoef, twenty-three, a county highway department hire with a sunburned neck and ears that stuck out, and he was looking at the floor like he had been caught at something. We were married the first of June, 1974, a Saturday, in that same church, and the hymn we had was “Now Thank We All Our God.” He sang all three verses to me from the front of the church when the pastor said we might. He cracked on the third verse. I have never been so happy to hear a man crack.

For fifty-two years I have been tuned to that voice, and I did not know it the way you do not know what holds your house up until a beam goes.