The Organ The New Pastor Sold
I am seventy-one years old, and until this spring I believed there were some things in a small town that simply could not be taken from you. The war memorial on the courthouse lawn. The grain elevator you can see from four miles out. The sound of a pipe organ filling Immanuel Lutheran on a Sunday morning in the town of Harlow, Minnesota, where I have lived my whole married life.
I was wrong about one of them. I want to tell you how I found out, and I want to tell you what happened the Sunday after, because the second part is the part I hold onto now when I cannot sleep.
My husband was Eldon Kruse. For forty years he was the man who kept that organ alive.
He was not the organist. That was Verna Dietz, who started playing for Immanuel the year she turned twenty-six and did not stop until her hands gave out at eighty-four. Eldon was the one who kept the instrument fit for her to play. Twice a year, and more if a cold snap or a wet summer called for it, he would climb the narrow ladder behind the choir loft into the organ chamber with his little canvas roll of tools and his tuning fork and a flashlight in his teeth, and he would spend a whole Saturday up there in the dust and the pigeon smell, coaxing that old thing back into tune.
It was a Wicks pipe organ, built in 1921 and shipped up from Illinois on a rail car and hauled the last nine miles by a team of horses, back when the congregation was mostly immigrant farmers who could not read the English hymnbook but knew every tune by heart. Six hundred and some pipes, from ones no longer than a pencil to the big wooden ones taller than Eldon himself. He knew every single one. He knew the low D that liked to stick in August. He knew the tremulant that wheezed if you did not keep the leather oiled. He knew which pipe a dead mouse would most likely turn up in, and he kept a bent coat hanger in his tool roll just for that.
I married him in 1974. I was a farm girl from two townships over, and the first time I ever heard that organ was at our own wedding, with Verna playing and Eldon sitting beside me in a borrowed suit, sweating, because he had been up in the chamber the night before making sure it would sound right for me. He did not tell me that until our tenth anniversary. That was the kind of man he was. He did the work and let the work speak and never once asked to be thanked.