The Organ Bench Nobody Could Take
I could have gone down that hall and said what I had to say through the door, and he would have said he was sorry, and he would have meant that too, and on Monday the speaker would still have been plugged in. I could have called Vernell Dahl, who chairs the deacons. Vernell would have sighed and called a meeting, and the meeting would have been about me.
I know what this church does for a widow who asks. It sends a casserole, and it feels sorry for her for about a year. It does not give her the bench, or if it does, the bench is handed back like a dish she left at somebody’s house, and every Sunday after that she sits down on it knowing why.
I did not want my seat handed back. If I was going to have it again, I wanted it chosen.
So I closed the lid. I picked up my music bag and my coat, and I shook Marjorie’s hand, and I walked out to the gravel lot where my Mercury sat between two pickups. I drove the six miles home to the farm. I did not cry until the Mercury was in the machine shed with the engine off, and then I cried for about ten minutes, and then I washed my face at the pump sink and went in and put the coffee on.
That organ is an Allen, two keyboards and a pedalboard, with the speaker cabinets in a chamber behind the choir loft. The church bought it in 1962 for $2,850. I know the figure because it is lettered in gold on a little plaque by the baptistry that nobody reads anymore. What the plaque does not say is that nine farm wives paid for it in egg money, over four years, out of a cigar box that the pastor’s wife kept in her sewing cabinet. My mother-in-law, Leona Eckhart, gave $212 of it. She told me that once at a funeral dinner and never again.
When Vernon and I married in 1977, the church had an organ nobody could play. I had taken piano from Mrs. Tilden for nine years and had never touched a pedal in my life. Vernon’s mother sat me down on that bench the Wednesday before my first Sunday and showed me where the pedals lived. By Sunday I could do one hymn. By Christmas I could do all of them, badly.
Forty-nine years. I have played four pastors in and three out. I have played at the weddings of children whose parents’ weddings I played. I played Vernon’s mother out of the church, and I played my own father out of it, and I did not miss a note, because if I had missed one I would have had to stop.
When Vernon died I could not play. He lived nine days in the county hospital after the truck, and then it was a Saturday, and the church had a substitute from the Methodists in town do her best on the hymns while I sat in the first pew holding our daughter Sabrina’s hand. It was the first time I had heard the organ without me in it. It sounded fine. It sounded like somebody else’s kitchen.