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inevitable, surprise path, mottled with minor patches and sudden bright light. The entwined lines outgrow their bounds, spilling over into their successors, joy on the loose, ingenuity reaching anywhere it needs to go.
    Eight bars of cello, and Jonah’s voice sailed out from the back of the church. He sang as easily as the rest of the world chatted. His voice cut through the Cold War gloom and fell without warning on the morning service. Then Lois entered, spurred on to match the boy’s pinpoint clarity, singing with a brilliance she hadn’t owned since her own confirmation. We rush with faint but earnest footsteps. Ach, höre. Ah, hear!
    But where were we rushing? That mystery, at age nine, lay beyond my ability to solve. Rushing to aid this Jesu. But then we lifted our voices to ask for his help. As far as I could hear, the song reversed itself, as split as my brother, unable to say who helped whom. Someone must have botched the English translation, and I couldn’t follow the original. Mama spoke only voice-student German, and Da, who’d escaped just before the war, never bothered to teach us more of his language than we sang together around the piano.
    But the German was lost in that beam of light that hung above the congregation. My brother’s voice washed over the well-heeled pews, and years of pale, northern cultivation dissolved in the sound. People turned to look, despite Jesus’ order to believe without seeing. Lois and my brother sailed along in lockstep, their finely lathed ornaments taken up into the heart of the twisting tune. They leapfrogged and doubled each other, a melancholy mention of the sick and wayward before brightening toward home, while all the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space. Zu dir.
    Zu dir. Zu dir. Even Mr. Peirson fought to keep his lower lip from quivering. After the first stanza, he stopped trying.
    When the cello did its final da capo and the high-voiced tandem toboggan took its last banked turn, the song wound up where all songs do: perfected in silence. A few stricken listeners even committed that worst of Lutheran sins and clapped in church. Communion, that day, was an anticlimax.
    In the chaos after the service, I searched out my brother. Lois Helmer was kissing him. He stared me down, cutting off even a snicker. He abided Miss Helmer, who hugged him to her, then let him go. She seemed completed. Already dead.
    Our family scooted out to the street, doing its traditional disappearing act. But the crowd found my brother. Strangers came up and pressed him to them. One old man—out for his last Sunday on God’s earth—fixed Jonah with a knowing stare and held on to his hand for dear life. “That was the most beautiful Handel I ever heard.”
    We escaped and cackled as we ran. Two ladies snagged us in midflight. They had something momentous to say, some secret they weren’t supposed to tell, but, like girls our age, they couldn’t help themselves.
    “Young man,” the taller one said. “We just want you to know what an honor it is for us to have…a voice like yours in the service of our church.” Like yours. Some sinful Easter egg we were supposed to discover. “And I just can’t tell you…” The words caught in her throat. Her friend put a white-gloved hand on her arm to encourage her. “I just can’t tell you how much it means to me, personally, to have a little Negro boy singing like that. In our church. For us.”
    Her voice broke with pride, and her eyes watered. My brother and I traded smirks. Jonah smiled at the ladies, forgiving their ignorance. “Oh, ma’am, we’re not real Negroes. But our mother is!”
    Now the adults passed a look between them. The gloved one patted Jonah’s amber-colored head. They stepped away and faced each other, brows up, clutching each other’s elbows, searching for the right way to break the news to us. But at that moment, our father, fed up with crowds and Christians, even academic