And I had to sit down on the piano bench, because it was paper. A whole life of it, packed down into the body of that piano where the tuner swore no sound could ever get out.
Little folded notes, hundreds of them, some on ruled tablet paper, some on the backs of old church bulletins, some drawn in crayon by a hand that could barely hold one. Every last one was a thank-you. To Mr. Kovalik. I knew the name before I even had to reach for it. Old Mr. Kovalik played that piano at St. Mary and taught half of Wilkes-Barre to sing, going back before I was born, for nothing, never charged a dime. I had forgotten him the way you forget the furniture of your childhood, and here he was in my two hands.
Some of the notes were fifty years old, the ink gone brown. Thank you for teaching me Silent Night. Thank you for not laughing when I froze at the recital. Thank you for the lessons my mama could not pay for. He had no wife, no children, buried his own people young, and he took every scrap of love those kids ever handed him and folded it down into the one thing that was truly his, the piano he played every Sunday of his life. He sat on all of it, all those years, and thought he was just the quiet old man who played the hymns.
One note, printed in crayon by a very small hand, said only this. You make Sundays not scary. Love, Annie.
Mr. Kovalik passed two years back, which is about when they boarded up St. Mary for good. He is buried out in the parish cemetery under a stone that gives just his name and his dates, because there was nobody left to say more. So I decided somebody would.
A lot of those notes were signed, and a signed first name in a town like this is a thread you can pull. I found them. Grown men and women now, some with grandkids of their own, scattered from here to Scranton and beyond, and near every one of them remembered exactly who Mr. Kovalik was the second I said the name. We got a good crowd of them together the Sunday before the diocese sold the last of the building. My daughter, who is nine and knows about four songs, sat down at that fifty-dollar piano in the empty church and picked her way through Silent Night, slow and wrong in a couple of spots, and I have never heard anything better in my life. Then the old students sang, every one of them, filling that empty church up to the rafters one last time, for the man who taught them how.
The piano is in my front room now and my girl practices on it every day. I never did get the whole story of every note out of it. But I know this much. A humble man can spend his whole quiet life sure he was nothing much, and be carrying more love folded up inside him than a church can hold.