Chapter 4 #2
Roach put an arm around him. "You have a beautiful soul."
"I will put you in that ditch."
"You've been transformed."
"Jonah, if he says one more word—"
"He's going to say more words, Bear."
"I sat next to Miss Ida," Bear said, to nobody, still stunned. "She shared her book with me. She held one side and I held the other side. And I got to the fourth verse and I'll be honest with you, I didn't know a man could feel like that at eleven in the morning."
"Did she say anything to you?" I asked.
"She said, 'You've got a voice on you, Mr. Hebert.'"
"She called you Mr. Hebert?"
"Nobody has called me Mr. Hebert since my mother," Bear said, and had to go stand by a truck for a minute.
Everyone stopped.
"Bear," I said. "There is no fourth verse."
"Sure there is. Everybody sang it."
"Miss Ida cut it in 1979."
"Then somebody's put it back," Bear said, "'cause I heard it in stereo, and I want to say for the record that it's the good one."
That night I sat on the floor of my grandmother's shed with her notebooks.
There are nineteen of them. The oldest is 1911. They are not a grimoire, whatever Delphine's family had — they're work logs. Weather, salt weight, hours, mileage, complaints. My great-grandmother complained about her knees for four hundred pages.
I found it in the 1931 book, in a hand so small she must have been writing with the book on her lap.
Everybody keeps calling it the wall. It is not a wall. A wall keeps everything out and we would be dead in a season without what comes in — I have written this three times now and Father will not read it.
It is a strainer. It lets the thin things through and holds the thick ones. That is why the order matters. That is why it has to be re-laid and not repaired. You cannot patch a strainer with a plate.
There was more, three pages on, in a steadier hand and a worse mood.
Told the club today. Wallace Pike listened. The rest sat there like a row of gateposts and then voted that it was a family matter, which is what men call a thing when they want the good of it and none of the carrying.
Fine. Let it be a family matter. I will not ask twice.
But I will write this down where the next one will find it: the line has a debt in it. Four generations, four women, and it has never once been laid by a hand that was not owed something. It knows who does the work. One day it will be asked to pay and I would not care to be standing near it.
Under that, in my grandmother's writing, in different ink, forty years later:
Read this at nineteen. Read it again at fifty-eight. Still don't know what she meant. — E.T.
And under that, in my mother's hand, which I had not seen since I was twenty-nine, and which stopped my breath for about four seconds:
I know what she meant. W — if you are reading this and I am not here, go and look at mile five.
I sat back against the wall of that shed with my heart going.
A filter. Eleven miles of the most laborious thing my family does, four generations of split hands, and it was never a wall.
Which meant a hole in it wasn't a breach.
It was a setting.
Saturday night I couldn't sleep and neither could Jonah, so we sat on the clubhouse steps until three like a pair of teenagers with worse problems.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow."
"If it's there—"
"If it's there we do nothing," I said. "We look, we count, we write it down. Nobody moves. That's the whole plan and I want you to say it back to me."
"We do nothing."
"Say the rest."
"Nobody moves."
"You," I said, "specifically. Because there are two hundred people in that room and you are the largest object in this parish and if you stand up in a balcony, three hundred years of Baptist and Methodist history are going to turn around and look at you instead of at it."
"We're Methodist."
"Jonah."
"I'm agreeing with you," he said. "I'm just also Methodist."
Sunday came.
We were in the balcony, Jonah and me and Roach, with the rail in front of us and two hundred and eleven people below in their good clothes.
Combined service. Beulah Grove came over on a bus. Miss Ida had a fan going like a hummingbird.
"Count," Jonah said.
"Two ten," Roach said. "Two eleven with the organist."
The service started. It went the way services go. Announcements, a baby that had opinions, a reading, a long prayer that Preacher's cousin did not shorten.
And then the hymn.
They stood up. Two hundred people stood up in one wave the way a field goes over in wind, and the organ came in, and they sang.
Jonah started counting the pews out loud, low, under it. Row by row. Left, then right.
"Six. Fourteen. Eleven. Nine."
I was watching Miss Eulalie's white head down there in the fourth row from the front.
"Twelve. Eight. Fifteen—"
The second verse.
"—nine, four, eleven, seven—"
The third.
And then the organ went down a step into something older, and the whole congregation, two hundred and ten people who have not sung it since 1979, opened their mouths and went into the fourth verse like they'd been rehearsing.
Every one of them. Miss Ida. The bus from Beulah Grove. The baby's mother.
Jonah's voice stopped.
"Jonah."
"Thirteen," he said.
"What?"
"Back left. Last pew." He hadn't moved. "There were twelve in that row when I started."
I found it.
Last pew, back left, on the aisle, a woman standing with her hymnal open and her head slightly tilted, singing the fourth verse in a dress the color of dry grass.
And I knew the set of those shoulders before she turned around, because I had spent nineteen years of my life looking at them from behind in a truck, in a kitchen, at a stove, in a church.
She turned around.
She looked up into the balcony, straight at me, and she smiled with my mother's mouth.
My mother has been dead for eleven years.
Or so I was told. By six people. All of whom were at that funeral, and none of whom, I realized as I stood there gripping a rail in a building full of singing, had ever once said the words I saw her body.