The Organ The New Pastor Sold

Then he said the thing I will hear for the rest of my life. He said it gently, the way you would explain to a child why the dog had to be put down.

“I know it meant a lot to your generation, Marion. But we cannot let a piece of furniture stand between this church and its future.”

A piece of furniture.

The heavyset man in the work coat had the decency to look at the floor.

I want to tell you that I let him have it. That I am the kind of woman who, when she is pushed, pushes back twice as hard, and that I stood in that fellowship hall and told Pastor Garrett Shaw exactly what forty years of my husband’s Saturdays were worth and exactly what I thought of a man who would sell them for a drum kit while the woman who made his rhubarb bars was out in the parking lot.

I did not do that. I have thought a thousand times about why I did not, and I think the truth is that my Eldon was standing right there with me, the way he still does sometimes, and Eldon never raised his voice to anyone in his life. He used to say that a man who has to shout has already lost the argument. So I did not shout.

I asked one question, and I asked it quiet.

“How much did you get for it.”

He did not want to say. The dealer said it, from across the room, because dealers are not ashamed of numbers. Four thousand dollars.

Four thousand dollars for a 1921 Wicks that a church in Rochester would have paid ten times that to restore and take whole. I learned that later. In the moment all I knew was that the number was small and ugly and that they had spent eighteen thousand on the band gear, which Pastor Garrett volunteered as though the bigger number proved how serious and faithful the whole thing was.

I did not argue with the number. I have learned that you cannot argue a person out of a thing they have already done. You can only decide what you are going to do next.

So I did one thing, and it is the thing that turned out to matter most, though I did not know it then. I asked the dealer, whose name I came to learn was Roy Teagarden out of Cedar Rapids, whether he wanted the organ bench.