Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

My heart is sore.

Come, Treasure, and heal it!

Your black-brown eyes

Have wounded me.

Your rosy mouth

Makes hearts healthy,

Makes boys wise,

Makes the dead live…

Who, then, thought up this pretty little song?

Three geese carried it over the water,

Two gray and one white.

And for those who can’t sing this little song,

These geese will whistle it.

I pressed the keys that her fingers once had pressed, in the same order she’d once pressed them. Jonah whistled his way through the tune, inventing it in midflight. I stayed with him, beat for beat. The extra octave in his thickened cords disappeared. He sang the way others only thought to themselves. His voice came to the notes like a bee to a flower, amazed by the precision of its own flight: light, true, unthinking, doomed. Everything was over in a minute and a half.

Your voice is so beautiful. I want you to sing at my wedding.She never knew how much the joke terrified me. So I’m married already. That can’t stop me from wanting you to sing at my wedding! Maybe even being dead would not stop her wanting. Maybe this was the wedding she wanted us to sing for.

Her brown-black eyes might have made us healthy, might have made us wise. Might have raised us all from the dead, had she not died first. Who can say why she loved that pretty little song? It wasn’t hers. It was some other world’s. This life wouldn’t let her sing it. Mama’s three geese — two gray and one white — carried the song back over the water for her, to the place where she never got to live.

I played once more that day, a final accompaniment to finish out the service. Throughout all the speeches and songs, Rootie sat on the wooden chair next to Da, picking at her stocking knees, peeling her shoe soles, her wayward hands daring her mother to come from out of the burning house and slap them. For nights after the fire, Ruth had gone to bed wailing and awakened in screams. She’d choke on her spittle, demanding to know where Mama was. She wouldn’t stop weeping until I told her no one knew. After a week, my sister settled into a hard, safe cyst, turning her secret over and over. The world was lying to her. For unknown reasons, no one would tell her what had really happened. The grown-ups were setting her a task, a test for which she was completely on her own.

Even at the memorial, Ruth was already working on that mystery. She sat in her chair, twisting her hem into ribbons, turning over the evidence. Daytime, at home, and everyone escaped but one. Ruth knew Mama. Mama would never have been caught like that. All during the remembrances, Rootie kept up a steady subvocal dialogue, quizzing and tea-partying with her now-vaporized dolls. Now and then, she scribbled into the palm of her hand with her index finger, indelible notes to herself on her ready skin, all the things she must never forget. I leaned down to hear what she was whispering to herself. In the smallest voice, she was repeating, “I’ll make them find you.”

However unforgivable, we saved my sister for last. Ruth was our mother’s best memory, the thing most like Mama in the world. At ten, she’d already begun to show the voice Mama had. Ruth had all the goods — a pitch that matched Jonah’s, Mama’s richness, a feel for phrase beyond anything I could produce. She might have gone beyond us all in music, given a different world.

She sang that learner’s song, by Bach and not by Bach, the simplest tune in the world, too simple for Bach himself to have written it without help. The tune appeared in Bach’s wife’s notebook, the place where she scribbled down all her lessons. Ruth had learned it from Mama, without a lesson at all.

Bist du bei mir, geh’ ich mit Freuden

zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh’.

Ach, wie vergnügt wär’ so mein Ende,

es drückten deine lieben Hände

mir die getreuen Augen zu!

If you are with me, I’ll go gladly

to my death and to my rest.

Ah, how pleasant will my end be,

with your dear hands pressing

Shut my faithful eyes!

Root sang as if she and I were the only two souls left alive. Her sound was small but as clear as a music box. I kept off the sustain pedal, sounding each chord almost tentatively, not with the press of my fingers but with the release. Her held lines floated above my stepwise modulations like moonlight on a lost, small craft. I tried not to listen, except to stay inside the throw of her beam.

The simplest tune in the world, as simple and strange as breathing. Who knows what the room heard? I’m not even sure Rootie understood the words. They may have been meant originally for God. But that’s not where Ruth sent them.

We sat down to a silent room. Ruth never again sang in her father’s language, never again performed her mother’s beloved European music in public. Never again, until she had to.

The room sang itself out with “On That Great Gettin’ Up Morning.” The song wasn’t listed in the program, but it came off almost as if by plan. My mother’s friends let loose with the sunniest syncopated major. One exchange of glances was enough to set the send-off tempo. Voices with voices, rich, rolling, knowing we’d never have any other account but this. The ad libs grew dizzy, and I checked Jonah to see if we might add some ornaments to the fray. He just looked at me, swollen, and said, “Take it away, if you want.”

Afterward, the group visited over little square-cut sandwiches, tucking into the food with an appetite that made me hate them all. The few children in attendance sniffed out Ruth, who couldn’t bring herself either to play or stand off. Jonah and I held up the wall, just watching people smile and enjoy one another. When anyone came by to say how sorry they were, Jonah thanked them mechanically and I told them it wasn’t their fault.

A man came up to us. I hadn’t seen him during the service. He seemed as negligent with age as any adult. He was in his early thirties, ten years older than was decent in anyone. He seemed to me the perfect color, just the cinnamon side of clove. He walked up to us, shy, certain, curious, his eyes rimmed with red. “You boys cook,” he said. His voice struggled. “You boys really hum.”

He couldn’t smile. He kept looking around the room, ready to bolt. I couldn’t understand how someone I didn’t know could feel such grief for my mother.

“Is that good or bad?” Jonah asked.

“Real good. Good as it gets. You remember I told you that.” He bent down, his blood-streaked eyes at our level. He stared at us, himself remembering. “You,” he accused Jonah, index finger out. “You sound like her. But you.” His hand swung around in a slow quarter circle. “You are like her. And I’m not talking shade.”

The man straightened up and peered down on us. I felt Jonah turn fierce, even before I heard him. “How would you know? Do you even know us?”

The man held up his disarmed palms. They looked like mine. His palms would have looked no different had he been white.

“Hey, hey. Keep cool, cat.” He sounded like what Thad and Earl would have died to be able to imitate. “I just know is how I know.”

Jonah heard it, too. “You were close to her or something?”

The man only looked at us, his head sliding from side to side. We amazed him, and I couldn’t say how. He couldn’t accept our being, but he found it wonderful, even comic. He put his hands on each of our heads. I let him. Jonah shook free.

The man backed off, still shaking his head, filled with sad wonder. “You two really hum. Remember that.” He looked around the room again, afraid of being caught, or maybe wanting to be. “You say hello to that Da of yours. From Michael, okay?” Then he turned from the sorrowing party and left.