February
Alvah went into the hospital in Huron on the tenth of February last year with a cough he had called “nothing” for two weeks. It was pneumonia, and it was bad. They kept him nine days, and on the sixth day a young doctor with kind eyes took me out in the hall and said some things with her mouth, and I read every one of them, and I did not say that I had to read them. I had been reading mouths for two years by then. I was very good.
He came home thin and gray and sat in his chair with a blanket, and I fed him broth and thought that was the worst of it.
The first Sunday he felt up to church was the twenty-third of March, and we sat in pew four where we had sat for fifty-one years. The organ played the opening hymn. The congregation stood. I had my hymnal open, and I could read the music, because I read music before I read well, and I stood with my mouth open to sing.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
And there was nothing under me.
A hymn in a full church is a wall of noise to me now, a smear I cannot sort. But under it, always, since the fall of 1973, there had been one low line coming up through the pew back and the floorboards into my feet and ribs, and I had been singing off it for two years after the rest of the church went to smear. It was the only part of the service I still had.
That Sunday he stood with his hymnal and opened his mouth, and what came out was a sound like a boot on gravel. A rasp. A crack, and then air. He closed his mouth. I felt him go quiet, and I felt the plank of the pew under my hands go from a thing that hummed to a thing that did not. It was just a board.
He mouthed the rest of that service. He has mouthed every hymn since. I think he believed he was sparing me, because the rasp was ugly and I have hearing aids that whistle. I think he also believed that I did not notice, because I have told him for three years that I get the gist.