The Organ The New Pastor Sold

The first was a cassette tape. A plain one, the kind we used to buy in packs of three at the drugstore, with a white label on the spine, and on the label, in his pencil, it said: Eldon at Immanuel, Saturday evenings. For my Marion, for when you need it.

The second was a letter, two pages, written on the lined paper from the pad he kept by the telephone.

I will not give you all of it. Some of it is mine. But I will give you the part that matters for this story, because without it you will not understand what I did next, or why the whole town did what it did.

He wrote that for forty years, on the Saturday evenings when he finished tuning and the church was empty and the light was going gold through the west windows, he would sit down at that organ by himself and play. Not for anybody. He was not a trained player like Verna, he said, he only knew the hymns and he played them slow and sometimes he lost his place, but it was the closest thing to prayer he had, sitting alone in that empty church making that old instrument sing. He said he had been recording himself, a few Saturdays a year, on a little tape recorder he kept in the bench, for twenty years. One cassette, added to a little at a time. He said he did it because he knew the organ would outlast him but he would not outlast the organ, and he wanted me to have the sound of it, and the sound of him, for after.

Then he wrote the part I have read so many times the paper is going soft at the fold.

He wrote: “An organ is just pipes and wind, Marion. It cannot pray on its own. It only ever meant anything because the people in those pews opened their mouths and sang along with it. If it is ever gone, remember that the music was never in the machine. It was in them. It was in you. Go sing, honey. You do not need the organ to do it. You never did.”

I sat on my living room floor until the sky went gray in the east, holding a cassette tape and a letter from a dead man, and somewhere south of me on a dark interstate a truck was carrying his organ to Iowa to be sold for parts.

And I made up my mind.

I did not call a lawyer. I thought about it for about ten minutes the next morning and then I let it go, because Eldon’s letter had already told me where the fight really was. It was not in a courtroom. It was not even in getting the organ back, though that mattered. It was in the pews. It was in whether the people of Immanuel Lutheran would open their mouths.

So I spent the rest of that week on the telephone.