The Organ Bench Nobody Could Take
At the graveside, Merle Gaskins sang “Abide With Me” with no accompaniment at all, in a November wind that took the hats off two of the men. He had sung that same hymn in the hospital on the Tuesday, four days before, with the door of the room propped open by a nurse so the sound could go down the hall. He is 82 now and sings bass like a barn door closing.
I poured my coffee and sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the phone on the wall.
I have a cell phone. At home I use the one on the wall, which has a cord long enough to reach the stove.
Merle answered on the first ring.
“You heard,” I said.
“Everybody heard, Ardith.” I could hear his television behind him, the Titans pregame going on over a lot of loud men. “I about came out of the loft. Faye had to take hold of my robe.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m not saying I wouldn’t.”
“Merle, I need you in the loft this Sunday. Same as always. Robe on, folder in hand.”
“We going to make a fuss?”
“No fuss.”
“Then what are we doing?”
I had thought about this on the drive home. A fuss was exactly what the church would have forgiven him for. A woman writes a letter, a man stands up at business meeting and bangs his cane on the floor, and everybody gets to say it turned ugly. Then the preacher is the victim of a bunch of cranky old people, and the organ goes to a man in Columbia for $900.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said. “I’m going to sit in pew 6. I’m not going to touch the bench. That’s all.”
“And us?”
“You come and sing what you’ve always sung.”
There was a long quiet on the line. A man on his television lost his mind over a penalty flag.
“Ardith,” Merle said. “That boy puts that speaker on. What do we do?”
“What do you do any Sunday when it’s time to sing?”
He did not answer that. He did not need to. After a bit he said, in a different voice, “I sang at Vernon’s bed that Tuesday, and you sat by the window with your hands in your lap like it was church.”
“I remember.”
“I’ll be there.”
I called Faye Bledsoe next. She is the soprano everyone leans on, 66, retired from the county clerk’s office, and she cried first and got mad second, which is the right order. I called Gloria Wagner, who ran the parts counter at the implement dealer until it closed and has a voice like a trumpet that has been told to behave. I called Sherman Underwood, the tenor, who is 71 and has a granddaughter I will come to. By supper I had called all nine of them, and I said the same thing to each.
“No petition. No meeting. No speeches. Don’t talk to the pastor about it, and don’t talk to the deacons. Come and sing what you always sing.”