The Organ The New Pastor Sold

That is where I have to stop, because the rest of what happened, what the people of this town did in the weeks after, and what became of the organ, and what became of Pastor Garrett, is a longer story than one Sunday, and it has an ending I could not have written for us.

The organ came home.

It took six weeks and it took the whole town. Roy Teagarden, the dealer, turned out to be a better man than his line of work required him to be. When I called him that next Monday and told him what had happened on Sunday, the whole thing, the silence and the cassette and the three hundred voices, there was a long pause on the line, and then he said, “Ma’am, I have not parted it out yet. It is sitting whole in my warehouse. I will sell it back to you for exactly what I paid, and I will haul it back up myself for the cost of the diesel, and I will not take a dime more, because I have been in this business thirty years and I have hauled a lot of organs out of a lot of churches, and I have never once had one call me and tell me the people stood up.”

Four thousand dollars to buy it back. The congregation raised it in eleven days. Dale and Peg wrote the first check. The quilting circle sold quilts. The men’s pancake breakfast ran three Saturdays in a row. The young families, the ones Pastor Garrett had been so sure wanted the band, passed a coffee can and filled it twice. A boy I did not know, maybe sixteen, came to my door with forty-one dollars in ones and fives that he said he had made shoveling snow that winter, and he said, “My grandma got married under that organ. I want it to come back.” I cried right there in my doorway in front of that child.

It came back on a Saturday in May. Roy drove it up himself, just like he said, and half the town turned out in the parking lot to carry the pipes back in, the big wooden ones and the little bright metal ones, and a man from the organ company in the Cities who heard the story through the Lutheran grapevine came up and reinstalled it for half his usual fee and spent two days up in that chamber with the low D and the tremulant, and when he came down he found me in the pews and he said, “Whoever kept this instrument before, he loved it. You can tell. These do not survive a hundred years on their own.”

I told him my husband’s name was Eldon Kruse. He wrote it in his notebook.