The Organ Bench Nobody Could Take

“Hannah made it,” he said. “Chicken and rice. She said to tell you she’d have brought it herself, but she thought you’d rather it was me.”

“Come in.”

I sat him at the kitchen table under the phone on the wall. I poured him coffee. He drank some and burned his lip and pretended he hadn’t.

“Mrs. Eckhart,” he said. “I owe you an apology.”

“I imagine you do.”

“I should have come to you before Sunday. I meant to. I had it planned for Saturday, and then on Saturday I looked at it and thought, if I tell her privately it becomes a conversation, and if she says no I’ll have to back down, and I’ve backed down on three things since I came. Then it was Sunday morning, and it was in the bulletin as an announcement, and I thought I’d just say it quick.”

“And thank me.”

“And thank you.” He looked at his hands. “Hannah told me not to. She said it Saturday night, and again in the car after church. I didn’t answer her.”

I let that sit for a while.

“Why?” I said. “Not the speaker. Why me?”

He took a long time.

“We were 190 the Sunday I interviewed,” he said. “We were 96 last month. I’ve counted. I keep a notebook. Clark Pfeiffer runs the youth group, and he says the kids call the ten-thirty service the funeral music. Not you. The sound of it. Three families with little kids left in the spring, and one of the mothers told Hannah it felt like a museum. I thought if I could get something that sounded like the radio, something they already know, we’d stop it.” He shook his head. “I’ve been in charge of this church for fourteen months and I can feel it going out the back door.”

“That’s a reason for the speaker,” I said. “It isn’t a reason for me.”

He flushed. “I heard you tell Faye at coffee hour a few weeks ago that your hands weren’t what they used to be. I thought, she’s tired. I thought I was taking something off you. I thought you’d be relieved.”

I looked at my hands on the table.

I had told Faye because Faye asked, and I had told her the least of it. My left hand is going. It is the arthritis in the knuckles, the thumb joint most of all, and for about two years I had been hiding it by simplifying the bass line, a note here, an octave dropped there. Nobody noticed. Vernon would have noticed. But Vernon was on the hill, and the one person in the county who would have heard it was in the ground.

So the boy was half right, and I knew it, and it did not make me like him better.

“I did say that,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I accept it.”

He let out a long breath. “Then you’ll come back Sunday? I’ll tell the deacons it was a mistake. I’ll announce it first thing. We can sort the tracks out for the evening.”