Eshtine

mass

Mom and I walk to church. She's wearing a coat that looked black in the house but is purple in natural light; we get into an argument about the color. "It's red," she says. "Wine."
"Purple," I say. I tell her with it and the fake-fur hat she looks Russian. She laughs. "Is that a compliment?"
The walk is a cold one. The snow is still falling. "I betcha we don't have many in church today," Mom says, but as we get closer to it she points out the organist's car. Our organist has been in charge of music at St. Thomas since 1963. She's in her 90s now. She could have killed herself on these icy roads but there's no way to stop her. Who are we to stop her? Why should we? Coming here every week could be what's keeping her alive. I used to cringe when she'd play wrong notes (twenty years ago, when I was in grade school) and think that all those old songs she'd play were ridiculously out of date, but now I treasure seeing her and hearing songs I'll never hear anywhere else.
Mom points out the only other footprints in the snow coming from our direction. "Such small prints." They can only belong to Mrs. C., my kindergarten teacher and the one who does the readings and leads the songs. So we'll have music today even if no one else shows up.
For a while it seems like no one else will. When we walk into church we spot the organist (who plays a piano in the front now instead of climbing the steep steps to the choir loft) and Mrs. C. and an usher. The usher is in the pew furthest back. It's a smallish church but it's cavernous when it's so empty. We sit near the front and debate whether Mom should say the rosary aloud or not. She comes early to lead it every Sunday, but that's when there are people to say it with her. She read somewhere about the Jewish idea of a "minion," that you need at least ten men in attendance in order to do collective prayers, and now she likes to hold our church to that standard. "We don't have a minion today," she says.
I'm thinking of Vietnamese Mass, which also has a rosary recitation preceding it. The old women who dress in white lead the prayers in a chant whose tones fall strange on my ears. Still, they and Mom are in the same tribe, really. She proves it by starting up the Apostle's Creed while the organist and Mrs. C. practice their songs and I may be the only one who is listening.
"...from whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead." She pokes me, so I take up the rest of the prayer out loud while she says it softer: "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and live everlasting. Amen."
Then it's almost a comedy routine as she does the first half of the Our Fathers and Hail Marys while I do the second. We should be wearing signs; her sign would say "Leader" and mine would say "Congregation." But by the second decade, Mrs. C. has joined in on the "Congregation" bits, and the people (mostly Vietnamese) start filing in.
When the rosary is completed Mom jumps from her pew. I hear her go to the back of the church and coax, "Please, sit up closer, it looks so empty in here." Soon she has herded the entire congregation into the first few rows--no small feat in South St. Louis, where the same families have sat in the same pews for generations.
She's amazing.