Here is the part that I have never told anyone, and he is hearing it now with the rest of you. On cold mornings, that window glass hummed.
It was a very small thing. When he stood out there in the shed at five, working, a man alone with his hands busy and his mind far off, he hummed. He did not know. Men do not. It was one low note, back and forth, a hymn he has hummed under every job since 1974, and the shed is steel and the air in November is dry and still, and it came eighty feet across the yard and into the glass of my window. I could feel it with my forehead. I could hear it, if you want the word, in my teeth.
In February of last year he came out of the hospital with a rasp. By this June, standing at that window, I could feel that the rasp was going. Not smooth. He will never be smooth again. But the crack had turned to gravel, a good road gravel, rough and solid and low, and it was humming through a window pane at five in the morning.
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The Hymnal
You will want to know about the hymnal. I have been getting to it.
On the seventeenth of May, a Sunday, Ludeman Lutheran sang out of the old green books for the last time. The congregation had voted to buy the new ones, and the old ones were to be boxed and given away or sold at the rummage in the fall. I was not there. But on Monday the eighteenth, in the middle of the afternoon, Rhonda Vanderhoef was standing on my porch.
She had a plastic grocery sack in one hand and a pan of bars in the other. She stood very straight, with a face the color of a boiled egg. Rhonda is on the altar guild, and I knew before she said it that she had been in the box.
“I thought you should have the one from your pew,” she said. She was looking right at me, with her chin up, and the thing I noticed is that she was speaking slowly and plainly, with her face turned straight to the light. I did not have to read her. She was speaking to be read.
I took the sack. I took the pan.
“Ida,” she said, “I said something in the mudroom on Easter.”
“I know, dear,” I said.
I will never forget her face. It went the way a sheet goes when you shake it out, all at once, white and flat. “You couldn’t have heard,” she said. “You were in the front room. You couldn’t have.”
“I didn’t hear a word,” I said, and that was true. “Leave it be, Rhonda. Alvah doesn’t know I know, and he doesn’t need to. Let a man have his shame the way he likes it, quietly, and let me have mine.”