The Organ Bench Nobody Could Take
“No,” I said.
“No?”
“If I walk up there Sunday because you came out here with a casserole, I’m on that bench because you were embarrassed. I don’t want it on those terms. I’ll be in pew 6. You run your service the way you planned it.”
He stared at me. “I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t.” I got up and put the dish in the oven to keep warm. “Go on and do what you were going to do. I’d think about eating Hannah’s chicken while it’s hot.”
He sat there a minute longer. Then he stood, and said thank you, and took his cup to my sink and rinsed it, and set it upside down on the drainboard.
He stopped in the doorway.
“Mrs. Eckhart? Did you call the choir?”
I looked straight at him.
“I called nine people,” I said, “and I told them to come and sing what they always sing.”
He nodded slowly. I watched him think it through, the way a man runs his hand along a fence to find where it’s down. He could have gone back to town and pulled the plug on his own plan. A smaller man would have.
“All right,” he said, and went down the steps.
That Sunday it rained the way it does in late October, a gray steady fall that makes the whole county smell like wet fence posts. The sassafras along the road had gone red. The lot was full by a quarter past ten, and Vernell Dahl’s boy was parking cars on the grass.
I wore my blue dress again. I took pew 6 on the left, on the aisle, where Vernon used to sit with his hat on his knee. Marjorie Kloster was in the second pew with her walker folded beside her. Annie Kate sat with her mother two rows behind me, and when I came in she lifted two fingers off her lap, a secret wave.
The bench stood empty at the front with its lid down.
I could feel the church noticing, the way a breeze goes through a field of beans. People walked past that bench one at a time, looking, and sat down with their faces gone careful. Where I would have played the quiet pieces for ten minutes, there was only the rain and the shuffling of bulletins.
At 10:25 the choir filed in from the side door in their burgundy robes. All nine. Merle in the back row with his folder under his arm, Faye next to him, Gloria with her chin up, Sherman with his white head bowed. They climbed the loft steps and turned and stood in their places, and not one of them opened a folder. They stood with their hands at their sides.
Pastor Rhoades walked to the pulpit at 10:30. He was pale. He gave the good morning and a short prayer, and then he lifted a small tablet from the lectern and looked at it. The speaker, new and black, stood on a stand by the baptistry. A white cable ran across the carpet and was taped down.