legends · 4 min read ·
Errata
The errata page of a parish bulletin keeps correcting a number that a ghost keeps adding to.
**St. Brendan's Parish — Sunday Bulletin, 26 October**
*Please turn off mobile phones. Corrections to last week's bulletin appear below.*
**Hymn:** 214 — "Lord, Keep Us in the Ordinary Light"
**Reading:** Ecclesiastes 3, 1–8
**Notices:** Flower rota has changed. Please see Mrs. Gale. The hall roof will be surveyed on Thursday.
· · ·
**Correction, page 2:** The hymn number printed last week (219) should read 214. We apologise for the error.
**Correction, page 3:** The parish council has asked that the phrase "the bell will ring for you" be removed from the Christmas notice. It was printed in error. The bell does not ring for anyone.
**Correction, page 4:** Last week's reading was given as Psalm 90. It should read Psalm 91. Those who heard the reading aloud on Sunday are asked to disregard the word "counted" in verse 4.
· · ·
The organist, Miriam Fenn, had been playing at St. Brendan's for thirty-one years. She knew the hymn book the way a postman knows the streets he walks. So when the new numbers started coming back to her in the margins of her own copy, she assumed a typesetter had made a mistake, and she corrected them in pencil, one by one, and kept on playing.
On the Sunday after the first correction, the hymn board at the back of the church showed 214. The congregation sang it without hesitation. The verses were the same. But in the last verse, where the hymn book had always printed *and the light will know us by our names*, the line had a small pencil mark beside it, and the sung words came out as *and the light will count us in*.
Miriam kept playing. She did not look up. She had learned to play through the things the congregation did with their voices.
· · ·
**Letter to the editor, received by the parish office (unsigned)**
*Dear St. Brendan's,*
*I have been coming to your Sunday service for six years. I sit in the third pew, on the aisle, next to a man who always hums under his breath during the hymns. I have never asked his name. This week I noticed that the bulletin gives a count of attendance every Sunday, at the bottom of the back page, and I have always been told the number is "approximately ninety."*
*Last Sunday it said "ninety-one." I counted the congregation myself. There were ninety. I looked for the one who was not on the list, and I could not find them, but I could hear them. They were humming in time with the organ, a half-beat behind, the way you'd join in a song you didn't know the words to.*
*I would like the number corrected. I would also like to know who is keeping it.*
· · ·
**Parish office note, pinned to the noticeboard**
Re: attendance correction. The number in last week's bulletin has been checked by the verger, who counted the pews twice. The count was ninety. The bulletin has been amended to read "ninety, plus the one who has been asked to remain."
Please do not look for the one who has been asked to remain. The verger reports that the third pew on the aisle is always fully occupied, and that the man sitting in it has never once been reported missing from the list.
· · ·
**Correction, back page:** The attendance figure printed last week was incorrect. The correct figure is "ninety, plus the one who has been asked to remain." We apologise for any confusion.
**Correction, back page, second notice:** The phrase "plus the one who has been asked to remain" should not be repeated aloud during the service. It has been printed in error. The congregation is asked to stop counting.
· · ·
On the last Sunday of October, Miriam played the closing voluntary and looked up from the keys. The pews were full, as they always were. In the third row, on the aisle, a man sat with his head bowed and his hands folded over his hymn book. He was humming. The tune was the one she had been playing all morning, and he was a half-beat ahead of her, and he did not stop when she stopped.
She took her hands off the keys and turned to face the congregation, and she counted them, the way she had been asked to count them for thirty-one years, one row at a time.
Ninety.
She counted again. Ninety-one. The extra one was the man in the third pew, and he had lifted his head, and he was smiling at her with the calm of someone who has been listening a long time for the organist to finish the hymn so he can say the last line.
*And the light will count us in.*
She did not sing it. She put her hands back on the keys and played the final chord, and somewhere under the nave a bell that had not rung in decades gave one soft, careful note, exactly on the beat, to show that the number had been checked.