The Organ The New Pastor Sold

Here is how I found out instead.

It was a Tuesday in April. Cold still, the kind of April we get up here where the snow is gone but the wind off the fields has not forgiven you yet. Clara Boyd had passed the week before, ninety-three years old, and her funeral luncheon was that afternoon in the fellowship hall. I had made two pans of my hotdish and a plate of lemon bars, the way you do, and I drove over to the church around ten in the morning to get them into the kitchen refrigerator before the crowd.

There was a box truck backed up to the fellowship hall doors. A plain white box truck with Iowa plates and the name of a company I did not know painted small on the door. The doors of the hall were propped open with those rubber wedges we use for the rummage sale, and two men I had never seen in my life were carrying something long and metal and wrapped in a moving blanket out to the truck.

I did not understand it at first. Your mind does not want to understand a thing like that. I thought maybe they were taking the old tables, or the broken piano from the Sunday school wing. I parked and I carried my pans up the sidewalk and I looked through the propped doors, and I saw them.

The pipes. My Eldon’s pipes, pulled from the chamber and laid out in rows on the fellowship hall floor on moving pads, the big wooden ones and the little bright metal ones, hundreds of them, like a body laid out on a table. The console, the keyboard and the bench and the whole beautiful oak face of it that Eldon used to run a dust rag over before every service, was already strapped to a dolly by the door.

Pastor Garrett was standing right there in the middle of it with a clipboard, in his sneakers, talking to a heavyset man in a canvas work coat. He saw me. I know he saw me, because he got a look on his face like a boy caught with the cookie tin, and then he smoothed it right out and came toward me with his hand up in a little wave.

I set my pans down on the serving counter because I did not trust myself to hold them.

“Marion,” he said. “Hi. I did not expect to see anybody until this afternoon.”

“What is this,” I said. I do not think it came out as a question. I could not make it go up at the end.

He told me. He was not even ashamed, not really, not once the first surprise passed. He told me the council had approved a worship modernization initiative, those were his words, and that the organ had not been reliable, which was a lie because it had never once failed in forty years that Eldon kept it, and that the repairs it would someday need would cost more than the congregation could bear, and that a dealer had made a fair offer, and that the money, along with some already in the building fund, would go toward a proper sound system and a worship set. He used the phrase good stewardship. He said the Lord was doing a new thing at Immanuel.