The Organ Bench Nobody Could Take
The ten-thirty service would keep the organ and the choir. The committee, and not the pulpit, would decide what changed in the music of that church, and it would decide it in a room where the person who played the instrument had a chair.
And the pastor would not announce a change to the worship from the pulpit again before he had spoken to the people it touched. He had written that out himself on the back of a bulletin. He slid it across to Vernell, who read it with his glasses at the end of his nose, crossed out one word, and handed it back without a smile.
He did not make a speech that night, and he did not apologize again. I noticed that. I think he understood he had said it already, in my kitchen, and that a second time would have been for himself.
Near the end Faye asked the question none of us wanted to.
“Ardith. Who plays when you can’t?”
Nobody said anything. The coffee maker ticked.
I told them. I put my left hand flat on the table, where they could see it, and I said what I had told Faye the least of, and what I had told the boy in my kitchen. I said it was the thumb, and that I could do the melody and the right hand and the pedals for a good while yet, but that the bass was going, and that I had been cheating it for two years.
Clark whistled low. Vernell looked at his binder.
“Well,” the pastor said, after a bit. “It’s not in the bylaws.”
It was the first joke he had made in my hearing, and it was not a bad one. Faye laughed. I did, too, a little.
I played the next Sunday.
Nobody asked me to. When I came into the sanctuary at a quarter to ten, the hymn board said 214 and 108, the same two numbers as the Sunday he had thanked me, and the pastor was at the front with his Bible and no tablet. The speaker was gone from beside the baptistry. There was only a pale rectangle on the carpet where the stand had been, and a clean strip of floor where the cable was taped.
He looked up as I came down the aisle. He did not say a word. He did not thank me, which I was glad of. I sat down on the bench and lifted the lid and put my music on the stand, and I played the prelude, and the church came in around it the way it always has.
That afternoon the telephone rang. It was Merle.
“Sounded fine,” he said.
“It did.”
“Sounded like it was supposed to.”
That is as much as Merle Gaskins has ever said on the subject.
The Wednesday after, I went to the church at 3:30 for Annie Kate’s lesson. She was already in the back pew with her backpack. And on the left end of the bench, where nobody sits, was Hannah Rhoades.