The Organ The New Pastor Sold

I want you to understand what that is like, because I will never forget it as long as I live. A church packed to the back wall, three hundred people and more, and a band playing its heart out up front, and not one single person in the pews opening their mouth. Not the old guard. Not the young families, because the young families looked around and saw their grandmothers sitting with their hands folded and their lips closed, and a thing happened in them, and they closed their mouths too. The band got through the first song to a silence you could have cut and served on a plate. Pastor Garrett’s smile started to come apart at the corners. The guitar player looked at him. He waved them into the second song, faster, louder, as though the problem was that it had not been loud enough.

Nobody sang the second one either.

And when that second song crashed to its end, and the last cymbal rang out and died, and the whole sanctuary sat in a silence so complete you could hear the furnace tick, that was when I stood up.

I walked up the center aisle with my boombox in both arms, seventy-one years old in my navy dress, and I climbed up onto that black carpet stage, and I set the boombox down right in front of Pastor Garrett’s microphone, and I pushed the button with my thumb.

And my Eldon began to play.

It came out tinny and small at first, a cheap drugstore cassette through a boombox speaker held up to a microphone, and then the sound man in the back, God bless him, a young fellow named Tyler who I found out later had been baptized at that organ, slid his fingers up the board and brought it up through the new speakers until it filled the whole room. Eldon playing How Great Thou Art, slow, the way he played, losing his place once and finding it again, the tremulant wheezing just a little the way it always did in the spring.

And I leaned into Pastor Garrett’s own microphone, and I said the only thing I had planned to say.

“My husband recorded this in this room, playing this hymn on the organ you sold. He is gone now. The organ is gone now. But we are still here. So let us sing.”

And Verna Dietz, down in the front pew, eighty-six years old, lifted up her cracked old voice on the second line, and Dale and Peg came in behind her, and the Hovde sisters, and Les Bauman, and the quilting circle, and then the whole church, three hundred voices rising up over a dead man’s tape through a sound system bought to replace him, singing every verse of How Great Thou Art without a note of accompaniment but the ghost of that organ.

The young families sang. The children sang. I saw the drummer put down his sticks and come out from behind his plastic shield, and I saw him sing. By the last verse the only person in that whole church not singing was Pastor Garrett Shaw, standing to the side of his own stage with his hands at his sides, and I will tell you, I watched his face, and whatever he had believed when he looked out at that full room, he did not believe it anymore.