The next Sunday I took the second verse, and my voice broke twice but I got through it, and after service Brother Willis put that old red hymnal in my hands, and I sat in the front pew of Greater Mount Zion and opened it to the ribbon.
It fell open to His Eye Is on the Sparrow. The very hymn I sang walking down that aisle to Clarence in 1972, my own voice instead of an organ. And down the margin, in Clarences small tight hand, in ink that had aged different shades over years, were dates. Dozens of them.
Every date was a Sunday I had sung a solo. Beside each one he had written a word or two. 1978, she was scared, she was perfect. 1984, cried on the second verse, so did I. 1991, the year we buried Mama, she sang anyway. He had been keeping a record, secret, for over thirty years, in the margin of a hymnal he tucked away, of every time my voice filled that church.
My husband had turned a discarded old hymnal into a hidden diary of my singing, thirty years of Sundays written down in the margins, because he said he wanted proof one day that he had heard every note I ever gave the Lord.
At the bottom of the page, dated 2009, the year he gave the book to Brother Willis, he wrote the reason. Ruth, he wrote, one day I will be gone and you will not want to sing, and that is the day I am most afraid of, because your voice is the best thing God ever put in my life and I cannot bear the thought of it going quiet in the ground with me still up in it.
So he made a rule. Brother Willis was not to give me the book until I sang in that church again. Because Clarence knew grief, and he knew that if he made the hymnal a reward for singing, I would have to sing to get it, and singing would bring me back to life. He tricked me, the sweet old fool, into healing.
I sing every Sunday now. I take the solos again. And I keep that red hymnal in my lap while I do, open to the ribbon, and when my voice reaches for the high part of Sparrow I know that somewhere Clarence is adding one more date to the margin, in ink I cannot see, of the day his widow sang her way back to the living.