/O Night Devine! 

O Night Devine! 

By Iim Poling Sr.

Many Christmas Eves have passed since the one years ago when I heard the voice of an angel. It was a voice I can never forget; a voice that gave me the best Christmas present ever.

Fresh-fallen snow protested beneath my gumboots breaking trail down the unplowed lane as I walked home that Christmas Eve. Dry sharp squeaks not unlike the cries of cheap chalk scraped against too clean a blackboard.

Skuur-eek skuur-eek.

The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle-deep snow.

From each side of the lane drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows dropped there by an impatient blizzard just passed through. Their crests were indistinguishable against the white stucco walls but nearly reached tufted piles of fluffy snow clinging nervously to windowsills and eavestrough lips.

The squeaks flew through the still night air dodging fat snowflakes that fell heavily onto my cap bill occasionally splashing into my face flushed warm from the walk.

Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window.

I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars and the frosty moon.

The music was the Christmas carol O Holy Night and the notes came from the window in my grandmother’s room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then and cracked a window at gatherings to thin the smoke. They sang the first verse and when they reached the seventh line the other voices ceased and a single voice carried on alone:

“Fall on your knees! Oh hear the angel voices! O Niiii … iiight Diii…vine! …”

That’s the part where the voice rises higher and higher until the singer reaches a stratospheric note.

The solo voice belonged to Louise LaFrance my grandmother and I knew she was hitting that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that had been her prison for 16 years. She was crippled with limb-twisting rheumatoid arthritis and suffered searing pain and the challenge of being bedridden one that included needing a bedpan to relieve herself and having her son-in-law lift her into the bathtub.

She had taken up smoking to help ease the pain but had trouble holding a cigarette between her gnarled fingers.

She never complained or questioned why she had to bear the pain and despite her frailty she was a leader in our house. We brought our problems to her. When we hurt we ran to her and she draped her twisted arms around us and absorbed our pain because she believed it was better that she have it than us.

The others had stopped singing to listen to her. A shiver danced on my spine the second time she hit the high notes at the words “O Night Divine.”

When she finished singing O Holy Night the other voices started up again this time with Silent Night and other favourite carols.

I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants — my mom dad and some neighbours — crowded into the 10-by-10 bedroom that was my grandmother’s world. They sang long into the night mostly in French because the neighbours were the Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and my mother.

After the singing ended my mother served tourtière which I slathered with mustard and devoured as only a teenager can. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts.

I have long forgotten what I got and it doesn’t matter because my real gift was the understanding that those high notes were not solely the products of my grandmother’s lungs.

They came from a strength far beyond anything that mere human flesh can produce. They were high notes driven by something far stronger — an unbreakable spirit.

It was my grandmother’s last Christmas. But the memory of her high notes and unbreakable spirit brings her back every Christmas.