Sing for Me (8 page)

I look down at Sophy. Her head is a warm weight in my lap. She is draped in her white, Sunday-best afghan, crocheted by Mother when Mother could afford to buy silk thread. Poking out of the bottom edge of the afghan are Sophy’s feet, which rest comfortably in Andreas’s lap. At six feet six inches, Andreas
looks quite the giant looming beside her—a gentle giant cushioning his little sister’s feet. A fair giant with a fleshy nose. Last summer, when Andreas worked on Aunt Astrid’s farm, he got so sunburned that his nose swelled up and turned strawberry red. It stayed that way. Dad sometimes calls him W. C. Fields, which drives Andreas crazy, I can tell. (W. C. Fields bills himself as a drunk, and Andreas would remain a teetotaler under torture.) But Andreas is too mindful of the Ten Commandments to talk back to Dad, or even calmly tell Dad how he feels. With his full-ride scholarship to Moody Bible Institute, Andreas is nothing if not Commandment-abiding. He is steeped in the Commandments of the Old Testament and the Beatitudes of the New. He can memorize whole books of the Bible, and he even knows his favorite passages in Hebrew and Greek. Andreas can recite the doctrinal stance of any Protestant denomination, and he evangelizes with the best of them. In fact, he recruited many of the newest members of our church. He’ll certainly be a wonderful pastor. He might even be a missionary. Just look at him, taking notes on Pastor Riis’s sermon in the margins of his church bulletin. It’s hard to see where the bulletin’s type ends and Andreas’s careful writing begins.

I glance down at my own bulletin, which rests open on Sophy’s middle. Shows how closely I’ve been listening—I have to read the sermon’s title to remember Pastor’s topic for today:
The Call to Service
.

“ ‘As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said . . . ’ ” Pastor Riis pauses for emphasis. He plants his hands on either side of the pulpit and bows his head. Pastor is nearly eighty. His wide, deeply lined face is covered with liver spots. His voice, however, has the strength of a robust man in the
prime of his life. “ ‘Separate me, Barnabas, and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.’ ”

To my right, Mother stretches her legs into the aisle. Balancing her Bible on her lap, she underlines the passage Pastor just read. She is wearing fur-lined winter boots. The seams are splitting at the toes. We could never afford to replace those boots now. Or the fur coat, draped so elegantly over her shoulders. She makes a little note in Danish in the margin beside Acts, chapter thirteen. I can’t read what she’s written; her script is too small, and it’s gotten horribly messy, what with the arthritis affecting her hands. As for the verse in Acts, I recognize none of the Danish words.

If I took that singing job, would I be able to buy new boots for Mother? Maybe not fur-lined ones, but sturdy, with treads to keep her steady on the ice? Say I was able to squirrel away a dollar a week. (Cleaning, I’m lucky if I can pocket anything.) How many weeks would I have to sing before Mother could have warm, dry feet again? How many weeks would I
get
to sing?

I press my lips together tightly, lest the wrong kind of singing slip out. It’s one thing to dream of singing for provision. It’s another thing altogether to dream of singing for pleasure. Besides, sometimes I am able to sing for pleasure. For God’s pleasure, and for the pleasure of this congregation, and for my pleasure, too. I’ll be singing the offertory next week, for instance. I’m on the schedule. They’re counting on me. I must choose a hymn.

Pastor Riis is elaborating more fully on the Scripture passage now. The Holy Spirit is the Great Executive of the Church, Pastor explains, laying plans and taking measures to carry them out. To do so, the Holy Spirit must select men, set them apart, and send them forth.

And women, too, I suppose.

“It is of the utmost importance that we have a call,” Pastor Riis says. “We were born to serve God in a way that He has ordained for us.”

I’ve accepted my calling: my sister. As for my singing . . . I wasn’t born for it, and Sophy almost died because of it.

My singing almost killed her.

I try not to think about that winter night in Luck, Wisconsin—fourteen years ago just like yesterday—but I can’t stop myself. I never can.

Rob was there that night, too, and Mother and Dad, and, of course, Sophy. But Rob is the only one among us who directly refers to the event.

You know, if you’d just let ’er rip, your voice could very well bring people to their knees. You’ve just got to believe, Laerke. You’ve just got to get past the past.

I was seven years old that winter night. But I remember every breath, taken and not taken. Every moment. I could tally them all. I could arrange rooms in my mind to exactly mirror the layout of Aunt Astrid’s weathered farmhouse. I could traverse them mentally, taking in the place. But I don’t. I go straight to my mistake, and the room that contained it. I go to the drafty upstairs bedroom where Sophy, newly born, lay in a cradle and under diminutive flannel blankets that until a few moments prior had belonged to my doll.

My doll lay on the floor, her yarn hair caught beneath Dad’s boot.

It had been a long, cold night at the end of a long, cold day at the end of the series of long, cold days that contained Mother’s
labor. After delivering Sophy six weeks early, Aunt Astrid and the doctor were suddenly somewhere else. Rob was staying out of the way, watching from a shadowy corner. Mother lay in the bed, frighteningly silent and still. Dad kneeled over my doll’s cradle. He touched the deep indentations in Sophy’s skull, where the doctor’s forceps had left their mark. “She’s breathing now,” Dad was saying, and in the next moment, “Oh, no. Oh, daughter, breathe. Oh, apple of my eye, light of my life,
live
.”

Up until that night, I had been the apple of Dad’s eye. Now this blue-tinged baby had taken possession not only of that distinction but also of my doll’s cradle.

“Help her,” Dad cried, even as, with his finger and his thumb, he pried open Sophy’s fingernail-thin lips. He bowed low and covered her tiny mouth with his own. He blew air down her throat, into her lungs. Moments, breaths, passed. Then Dad sat back on the heels of his boots, ripping strands of hair from my doll’s head.

“She’s all right,” he said, gasping. “She’s all right now, Tekla. She’s breathing again.”

Mother didn’t respond.

I wanted someone’s attention, preferably Dad’s, with Mother the way she was and Rob a shadow in the corner. So I knelt beside the cradle. I leaned over my newborn sister. I began to sing. I sang
la, la, la
, and
lu, lu, lay
. I sang pretty nonsense. I tried to be the apple of Dad’s eye, the light of his life.

Instead, I woke the baby. Sophy, scarcely bigger than Dad’s hand, arched her back, rocking my doll’s cradle. She writhed, twisting the little blankets that Mother had stitched from Dad’s old handkerchiefs, which had been stitched from his even older shirts.

“Stop it, Rose! Don’t you see what you’re doing? Stop singing! Be quiet!”

Dad blamed me for Sophy’s first fit.

Months later, and repeatedly throughout the years since, Mother, in her own way, blamed me, too. “Who knows what caused Sophy’s trauma? The forceps, maybe. Or maybe it was that episode she had just after her birth. If she’d just stayed sleeping, she might have gathered the strength she so badly needed to restore her health. But once that episode started, there was no turning back.”

Stop it, Rose! Don’t you see what you’re doing? Stop singing! Be quiet!

There was no turning back.

Somehow over the years I remembered my voice, approaching song as one might approach a wild animal. Sophy, during her baths, was the first person to hear me softly sing. Later, Rob. Then Mother heard me, and she told Pastor Riis, who asked to hear me, too, and when he did, he called the choir director, Mr. Helt, long dead now, who gave me a hymnal and asked me to sing “Away in a Manger,” and then proceeded to give me free lessons, twice a week, for several years. Mr. Helt was a kind old man with crooked, broken teeth who was prone to cry when a song touched his heart. I learned to ignore his weeping; I simply did what he told me to do and kept singing, even as the tears rolled down his fleshy cheeks. I learned to drop my jaw, control my breathing, extend my range, transpose a song. Under Mr. Helt’s tutelage I learned my deep love for songs written in a minor key.

It was Christmas Eve when I sang my first solo in church. I was nine years old, still getting used to Oak Park, still missing Aunt Astrid’s farm, and the praise I received afterward made me
feel finally at home. By the time Mr. Helt died, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, singing anything other than hymns and sacred songs. I was fourteen. I was sure of the way the world worked, and of myself in it. And then one day only a few years later, I heard as if for the first time the music in alleys, on streets, from open windows, in shops. I couldn’t get these new songs, these worldly songs, out of my head; they held me in their sway. I started singing them when I thought no one else was around, only to look up and see Rob and, sometimes, Sophy, watching me wide-eyed, open-mouthed, delighted and amazed.

Only Rob and Sophy have known about the wild animal, the late-blooming love that lurks inside me, deep beneath the surface of my every night and day. As of Friday night, Zane has a hint, too. But I think of all the people I know, only the man at Calliope’s, the man who knows my name, might truly understand what this love means to me and why, try as I might, I just can’t turn away from it. I just can’t let it go.

I have taken hold of a lock of Sophy’s hair. She winces; as my thoughts got the better of me, I twisted her hair too tightly around my finger. Quickly, I let the little lock fall free. Quickly, quickly, I stroke her hair just the way she likes it. We’re moving into the altar call now. As the organist softly plays “Just as I Am,” Pastor Riis describes our human condition.

“Come, all who are heavy laden. There’s no better time to give your life to Jesus. Accept His life-giving salvation and be received in baptism.”

“Bap—” Sophy clears phlegm from her throat. I hold out a handkerchief and she spits into it, then hoarsely whispers, “tism.”

There’s urgency in her voice. I smooth her hair, trying to calm her, but she bats my hand away.

“Easter!”

“Yes, you’ll be baptized this Easter, Sophy,” I whisper. “Hush, now.”

Sophy’s expression relaxes. A man I’ve never seen before stirs in the pew across the way. Now he stumbles up the aisle toward Pastor.

“He looks like he’s just off the bread lines,” Mother murmurs. “At least he’ll receive spiritual food today.”

“Coffee,” Sophy says meaningfully.

There’s always food at coffee hour. She wants to make sure he receives some of that, too.

Mother nods and smiles. “I’ll invite him downstairs.”

I open the hymnal to number 348, “Just as I Am.” I’m adjusting the hymnal so Sophy can see the words when Mother nudges me. I look up to see mustachioed Mr. Lund, who’s an usher today, beckoning to me from the end of the pew. “Go,” Mother says, so I ease myself from beneath Sophy. Mother slips into my place as I step into the aisle, still holding the hymnal.

“Pastor asked that you lead the congregation in song, singing every other verse of the hymn as a solo,” Mr. Lund whispers through the long white strands of his mustache.

Mother nods at me. She likes it when I sing in church. I like it, too, when I’ve had a little time to prepare. Good thing I know “Just as I Am” as well as I know the alphabet. I wouldn’t have opened the hymnal if it hadn’t been for Sophy.

Mr. Lund steps aside, and I walk down the aisle and up to the podium. I raise my hands to lead the congregation in the first verse of “Just as I Am” and then see Rob sitting in the second row.

“Tuesday night,” he mouths. “Calliope’s.”

Worldly songs. Those are the only songs I’m thinking of now.

I bring my hands down and, God bless the congregation, they sing the right words:

Just as I am, without one plea,

But that Thy blood was shed for me,