The Hymnal Ida Marked in Pencil

Rhonda stood on my porch with her hands empty. Then she did a thing I have not stopped thinking of. She stepped forward and put her arms around me and held on, which she has never once done in twenty-two years, and I stood there with a sack of hymnal against my hip and let a forty-six-year-old woman hold me up.

When she let go, she said, “May I bring you the bulletin on Fridays?”

She has brought it every Friday since. She stands in my front hall and she faces me when she talks, and she has gotten so good at it that Cordell says she does it in the grocery store now, to strangers.

That is how I knew the hymns. The bulletin lists the four hymns for Sunday by number. And on Sunday mornings, when Alvah was at church sitting in pew four with his mouth closed and I was home with a bad hip I do not have, I sat down at the kitchen table at ten-thirty with the green hymnal and a number two pencil.

I could read the music. I could not hear it, but I could read it, as I told you. I found the hymn. And under every note of the bottom line, the bass line, my husband’s line, I drew a thin pencil mark. Slowly. I pressed down so that the page held the shape. I hummed it in my head the way I have hummed it for fifty-two years, off him, and I followed the line with the pencil the way I follow his mouth across a room.

I do not know how to tell you why. I did not plan it. I think I was learning his part of the music the way he was learning my part of the world, with nobody watching, at a table with the door shut. You hold a seat for a person in a hymn. It was the only way I had of being in church with him on Sundays, when I had told him I could not go.

Twenty-four Sundays, four hymns a Sunday. The wedding hymn is in there, the first one I did, in May, on a Wednesday because I could not wait. I drew the line under every note and when I got to the third verse I laid the pencil down and sat for a while.