She left. The heavy door closed.
Mofokeng did not move. His hands, gnarled from a lifetime of digging the hard Highveld soil, rested on the wooden pew. “Father, I am not here for the class.”
Mofokeng smiled. It was a tired, ancient smile. “No, Father. I had left it. I was trying to remember it as a thing. A set of notes. But a hymn is not a thing. It is a road you walk only when someone is lost beside you.” sotho hymn 63
Father Michael turned to the old man. “You said the hymn had left you.”
“No.” Mofokeng’s fist struck his own chest, a soft, hollow thump. “Not a trick. A theft. When my firstborn, Thabo, died in the mines at Welkom, I did not weep. I sang Hymn 63. When the drought ate our cattle and the children cried with hunger, I whispered Hymn 63 into the dirt. That song is my umbilical cord to my mother, who is thirty years dead. If the song is gone… then I am a stranger to myself.” She left
“Morena Jesu, ke rata ho phela… Le ho tsamaea le uena ka khotso…”
Inside, sixty-year-old Ntate Mofokeng knelt before the altar. He wasn’t praying. He was waiting. His hands, gnarled from a lifetime of digging
“The instrument is dead too,” Father Michael said.