The Organ The New Pastor Sold

He looked at his list. The bench was not on it. He had bought the pipes and the console and the blower, he said, the working parts. The bench was just an old oak box with a hinged lid, the kind every organ has, the kind the organist keeps her music in. Verna had kept sixty years of marked-up hymnals and funeral folders in that bench. Nobody had cleaned it out. In all the hurry of hauling an instrument out of a church in one morning, a plain old bench full of a dead woman’s paper was the one thing nobody wanted.

“Take it if you want it, hon,” Roy said. “Saves me hauling it.”

Two of the younger men carried it out to my car and set it in the back of my station wagon, and I drove it home and I set it in the middle of my living room floor, and then I went back and I served hotdish to the people who came to bury Clara Boyd, because that is what you do, and nobody at that luncheon but me knew that the organ that had played Clara into the world and would not be playing her out of it was lying in pieces in a truck with Iowa plates, headed south.

That night I opened the bench.

I had not planned to. I was going to clean Verna’s music out of it in the morning and drive it over to her at the care home so she would have her funeral folders. But I could not sleep, and around midnight I came downstairs in my robe and I lifted the lid, and I started taking the hymnals out one at a time.

They were Verna’s, all right. Sixty years of pencil marks, little notes to herself in the margins, slower here, watch the bride, the dates of weddings written at the tops of pages in her tiny hand. Under the hymnals was a stack of funeral folders going back to the sixties, people I had known my whole life, the little paper programs with their photographs going brown.

And under all of that, flat against the bottom of the bench, was a padded envelope, the kind you mail a book in, soft with age. On the front, in pencil, in my husband’s blocky hand, the hand I would know anywhere, it said one word.

Marion.

I sat down on the floor.

Eldon had been gone two years. I had cleaned out his side of the closet and his workbench in the garage and the glovebox of his truck. I thought I had found every last word he ever left for me. And here was one more, tucked into the bottom of an organ bench where he knew I would never look, because why on earth would I ever open an organ bench, unless.

Unless the one thing I would never have believed could happen, happened. Unless somebody tried to take the organ away. He must have known. Not that it would be sold, he could never have dreamed that, but that someday, when he was gone and could not climb that ladder anymore, the time would come when somebody young and in a hurry would look at that beautiful old instrument and see a piece of furniture. And he left me something for that day.

Inside the envelope were two things.