The Girl the Hymns Couldn’t Hold

The Girl the Hymns Couldn't Hold

by Chenel Sanders

I can still smell the old schoolhouse if I close my eyes. 

Not the kind of smell you’d find in a newer building with shiny hallways and  bright lights. This was something older, like chalk dust that clung to your sleeves, oiled wood floors that shone dull under winter sun, and a faint sweetness from the iron stove that did its best to keep the cold from crawling in under the door. I was six years old in 1952, and that one-room schoolhouse was my whole world. It sat half a mile from our farm, and the walk there and back was a lesson in the seasons that ushered in, crunching snow in winter, muddy boots in spring, and the playful scent of fallen leaves in autumn. 

My aunt, Mrs. Schumann, was my favorite teacher. She stood straight as a fencepost and looked over a room like she was responsible for every kid in her classroom. I spent my time proving I was well behaved. Of course I was. If you did anything out of line, it didn’t take more than a day before your mother heard about  it. 

Because my mother heard everything. 

My aunt was her sister-in-law. That was the kind of system you didn’t argue with. There wasn’t any escaping it, and honestly, I didn’t want to. The farm had its rules, school had its rules, and the gospel had its rules. Those things weren’t separate. They wove together like the strands of rope my dad used for baling.

Between the farm, the school, and the church, my life found its rhythm. Soil for my hands that would grow to be as skilled as my father's. Lessons for my mind, and faith to nourish my spirit.  

We went into town three or four times a month for groceries flour, sugar, coffee, and canned peaches if we were feeling fancy. Otherwise, Sauk Rapids was something we looked at from a distance, like lights on the horizon. I knew the  church pews by the feel of the wood under my fingers. I knew the hymns before I  understood all the words. And I knew my grandmother’s hands small, steady, always warm, even in the winter time. 

Grandma was devout in a way that made me feel safe. Like the world could shake and the roof could lift right off the house, but her faith would still be holding everything down. God called her home. When I was eight. I didn’t understand it then, not really. I just knew the house felt quieter afterward, like someone had  taken the music out of it. 

In our family, the feminine presence was a gift. From my mother’s gentle voice, to my aunt’s strong one, and the hope-filled resonance of my grandmas’ prayers. I think that’s why I’ve been drawn to women with a soft, steady light in them--the kind that feels like home. 

I have one brother younger than me, always trying to keep up. And I had a sister too, but only in stories. She’d passed away before I was born, so she was a shadow in photographs and a softness in my mother’s eyes. In a family like ours, you didn’t forget people. You carried them in your heart.

By the time I reached seventh grade, the world decided to widen. 

That’s when I journeyed into Sauk Rapids Junior High. 

If you’ve never walked from a one-room schoolhouse into a building full of students, you don’t understand what it means to feel odd.  

That’s the best word I’ve ever had for it. Odd. Like I’d stepped into someone else’s life and was wearing their coat, and I needed to grow into it. The halls echoed with laughter and voices bounced off the walls. There were more people than I’d ever been around at once, and I had no idea where to look or how to stand. 

In the country schoolhouse, you knew everybody: their handwriting, their shoes,  the way they laughed, the way they cried. In junior high, faces moved like a crowd  at the fair. The girls wore their hair in styles I’d only seen in magazines. The boys had cologne sometimes, sharp and clean, as if they’d already become men and  were just pretending to still be kids. 

I remember thinking: If the Lord wanted me here, He’d better give me a map. Maybe he did, just not the kind I expected. 

By the time I started high school, I’d settled into the noise. I’d learned the rhythm  of bells and passing periods, learned to laugh when you were supposed to laugh, learned how to keep your shoulders squared even if you were feeling small inside. 

It helped that I’d found music.

Music didn’t care where you came from. It didn’t care whether your hands had callouses from farm work or whether your boots still carried dust from a gravel road. Music just asked you to show up and breathe and sing. 

The first day of high school, my cousin pulled me aside. He was older, already  walking the halls like he belonged there, like the school had been built around him. 

He grinned like he was letting me in on a secret. 

“Shorty,” he said, and when he said my nickname, it sounded like I could be somebody fun. Somebody known. 

“There are three girls you need to meet.” 

I didn’t know what to do with that information. I’d been raised in a world where you didn’t go around meeting girls like it was a hobby. 

My cousin leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Trust me. You’ll thank me later.” He gave me three names like he was handing over directions. 

I tucked them away in my mind like seeds. 

And then I joined choir. 

Now, I didn’t join because I was hunting for girls, not at first anyway. I joined because singing was something my heart understood. It reminded me of church. 

It reminded me that there was more to a person than chores and homework and  growing up. 

But the moment I walked into that choir room, I saw her. 

It was like my eyes, ears and even my heartbeat noticed her before I did. She was standing near the risers, laughing with two other girls. Her hair was blond, bright as wheat in July. Soft natural, with a loose playfulness to it. Her eyes were  blue, and not a shy blue either more like the sky on a cold morning when  everything feels sharp and honest. 

Someone called her name, and she turned. 

“Janelle,” they said. 

But then, someone else maybe a friend called out, “Janey!” 

Janey. That fit her better. Like she knew where she belonged, not just a name on  the roll sheet. 

I stood there a second too long, staring like a kid putting together the outside of the  puzzle first, until Mr. Larson, the choir director, clapped his hands. 

“Gentlemen, and young ladies let’s find our places.” 

I found my place, but I never stopped noticing hers.

Later, in the quiet after rehearsal, when students were stacking chairs and swinging  coats over their shoulders, I saw the three girls together again. The ones my cousin  had named. 

One of them looked right at me. 

And Janey smiled. 

Not a big smile, not some practiced thing. It was quick and easy, like she’d known  me longer than five minutes. Like the world wasn’t so odd after all. 

That night, I lay in bed aware of the quietness of our house, listening to the wind  tap at the window. I thought about her laugh. I thought about the way she held on  to the notes, giving a little extra life to each one. 

And I realized something that startled me. 

I wanted to be part of her life. 

High school was a busy place. Every day felt like a shuffle of books and bells and  voices, but music gave it all a center. In choir, we rehearsed Christmas songs as the  snow began to fall outside. Rudolph, Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, away in a Manger,  Silver Bells. The room would fill with the clean scent of paper and the faint  warmth of bodies packed close together. 

When you sang those songs as a kid, you weren’t thinking about the words. You  were just trying to hit your notes. When I sang them in high school, standing near 

Janey, I felt something deeper: the sense that life was moving forward whether I was ready or not, and I needed to decide what kind of man I was going to be. 

That’s where the conflict started for me. 

It wasn’t about whether I liked her. 

That was settled. 

It was about what it meant to like her. 

Janey was fun. She laughed easily. She made friends as if people were magnets and  she was made of iron. She played the guitar she’d bring it to practice sometimes; she listened to the radio and knew the songs everybody else knew but somehow  better, the kind of music that made your fingers snap and your foot tap before your  mind even caught up. She could carry a tune like she was born doing it. 

Some of the things happening in the world back then felt loud and fast. Hair got  longer. Skirts got shorter. People talked like rules were meant to be tested. Even in  our small town, you could feel it. Like the wind had shifted direction. 

Part of me wanted to hold on tight to the values I’d grown up with, the gospel, the steadiness, the respect. 

And part of me wanted to step into the bright, laughing world Janey seemed to live  in and not be afraid of it.

I didn’t know how to do both at once. 

But I tried. 

The first time I really talked to her, really talked, we were putting away sheet  music after rehearsal. I was stacking folders, and she was humming like she  couldn’t turn the music off. 

“You’re Shorty, right?” she asked. 

I glanced up, startled she knew my nickname. “That’s what people call me.” “I like it,” she said. “It sounds like someone who’s fun.” 

That made me laugh because I wasn’t sure anyone had ever accused me of being  fun in my entire life. 

She held out her hand, like a grown-up. “I’m Janelle, but everyone calls me Janey.” 

“I know,” I said, and then immediately wondered if that sounded creepy, like I’d  been studying her. 

She just smiled again. “You’re quiet.” 

“I’m thinking,” I said. 

“Well,” she said, “think out loud sometimes. It makes life more interesting.”

That was Janey. She didn’t push exactly. She invited. 

Over the next weeks, I found myself watching the schedule board and making sure  I was in the same classes she took. 

Some people might call it sneaky. I called it strategic. 

English. History. Music. Even a study hall where I didn’t need help studying, I just  needed a reason to sit in the same room. 

She noticed, of course. Janey noticed everything. 

One day, after band practice, she bumped my shoulder with hers and said, “Do you  ever pick classes because you actually like them?” 

I pretended to think hard. “Sometimes.” 

“And the other times?” 

I didn’t answer, but I didn’t have to. Her laugh said she already knew. 

We did musicals together. We did Christmas plays too Scrooge was the big one, the  kind where parents stayed up late sewing costumes and hammering stage boards  together. The school gym would smell like sawdust and fabric and hot cocoa. The  stage lights were warm, making everything look like a dream.  

I remember standing behind the curtain, hearing our parents talking in the 

audience, hearing the rustle of programs, and thinking: This is what it feels like to  belong to something bigger than yourself. 

Janey belonged to that world naturally. 

She’d step onto the stage and suddenly the air would change. Like someone had  opened a window and let life in. 

She was my inspiration a spark that ignited my own whenever she was near. I wanted to be remembered as someone fun-loving, someone who loved life.  That part of me was always there. 

Janey’s presence was the gentle tug that helped pull it out of me for everyone to  see. 

There was one night, I remember it clear as a photograph. 

A group of kids planned to go out to a lake after a football game. Someone had a  cooler in the trunk. Someone else had cigarettes. Somebody joked about how their  parents wouldn’t know. 

Janey didn’t drink. She wasn’t reckless. But she liked being where people were.  She liked the noise and the stories and the feeling of youth. 

“Come with us, Shorty,” she said, her blue eyes bright in the dark parking lot, the  stadium lights turning her hair pale as corn silk. “It’ll be fun.” 

And I wanted to. Lord, I wanted to. I wanted to be the guy who said yes.

So, I took a breath. 

“I’ll come,” I said, “but I’m not staying if it turns into something it shouldn’t.” Janey looked at me a long second. 

Then she nodded. 

“Fair,” she said, and she smiled like she respected me more for it. 

We sat near the water and listened to the radio playing from someone’s car The  Byrds, maybe, and then something softer, something slow. The night smelled like  lake weeds and gasoline and fall. People laughed. Someone tried to sing. Someone  threw pebbles into the dark water and made wishes they’d never say out loud. 

Then she surprised me. 

She stood up, lets head home she said. 

We walked away from the crowd, our shoes crunching gravel, the night air cold  enough to make our breath visible. 

“You didn’t have to leave,” I told her. 

“Yes, I did,” she said.

I turned to her. “Why?” 

She shrugged, but her voice softened. “Because I like who you are. And I was done  sharing you with everyone else. 

That landed inside me like a hymn note that doesn’t fade. A kind of certainty. 

We got in my car. The heater rattled and the windows fogged at the edges. For a  while, we didn’t speak. The radio played low, some old country song sliding into a  more upbeat tempo, the world blending together the same way my life was trying  to blend. 

Then Janey said, “Do you think we’re too different?” 

I looked at her hands, folded in her lap, the sleeves of her sweater pulled over her  wrists. I thought about Janey’s laughter, her guitar, her bright fearless way of  moving through the world. I gently put my forehead against hers. 

“We’re different,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t fit.” 

She looked at me and the blue of her eyes seemed deeper in the dim car light. 

“I’m glad,” she said quietly. “Because I think you’re the kind of boy who grows  into a good man.” 

I didn’t know then where my life would go.

I didn’t know I’d spend decades in the Army National Guard, learning discipline  and brotherhood and the weight of responsibility. I didn’t know I’d become a  sheriff, trying to keep my community safe, trying to do right by people even when  the world got messy. I didn’t know how much change I’d witness in a lifetime,  how often I’d have to choose between easy and right. 

But I knew something then, sitting in that car with the heater rattling and the radio  whispering. 

I knew I was going to marry her. 

Not because I was in a hurry. 

Because it felt like a decision made with my whole self. Like the Lord had placed  her in my life not to tempt me away from my values, but to help me live them with  joy. 

She was there, always there, the girl with blond hair and blue eyes, the one who  turned the noise of the world into something I could step into without losing my  way. 

Years later, people would ask what I’d tell young people. 

I always came back to the same truth: You have to be prepared to acknowledge  change. You have to reflect your values, and the values of the gospel. You have to  rely on your spiritual power to make good choices.  

God put you on this earth to do the best you can.

But if I’m being honest? 

If I’m telling my story the way it really felt? 

I’d tell them something else too. 

Hold on to the one who makes you want to be your best self, because that’s what  Janey did for me. 

She’s been gone a long time now. Cancer took her in 2004, and there are still days  when her name hits my heart like a sudden song. I’ve remarried in the last ten  years now, and happily. Life keeps going. That’s one of its great and painful truths. The Lord gives you more chapters than you think you’ll get. 

But when I look back, when I think about what mattered most 

I don’t start with the uniform or the badge. 

I start with a choir room. 

Our nights by Lake George, when the world tried to pull us into something easy,  and we chose something better. 

Together. 

That’s the kind of love worth writing down. 

That’s the kind of love that lasts, even after goodbye. 

***

This story is historical fiction inspired by an oral history interview; dialogue and many details are imagined by the author.