Gordy and Cole and Wilbur and one of the Pederson boys carried it out the front door on a dolly and across the field on a pair of planks.
It took twenty minutes and a good deal of language I am not going to repeat.
They set it on the grass at the side of the field near the front rows, in the cottonwood’s shade, and Gordy shimmed the legs with flat stones so it sat level.
He put a little wooden bench in front of it for me.
I sat down at it and pumped the pedals and played a C chord.
The sound came out over the stubble thin and sweet and a little wheezy, the way it always has, and three women setting out coffee cups turned around.
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Lucille stood at the end of the organ with her hand over her mouth. “Your mother played that at my wedding,” she said. “1969. In the old Bethany, before the fire.”
“I know,” I said. “She told me.”
At one o’clock people started coming. They parked along the section road on both sides, farm pickups and church cars and one big shiny truck from Cole’s sale barn that everybody admired.
They came across the stubble in their good clothes, the women holding their hats, the men in the sport coats they wear to funerals and Christmas.
They filled the chairs from the back the way Lutherans do.
Cole’s grandparents came in from their motel. Grandpa Hendricks walked across that field with a cane and his wife on his arm, and when Cole got him into a chair on the aisle, he looked up at the tree and whistled.
“Now that,” he said, “is a cottonwood.”
By ten minutes to two every chair was full, and people were standing along the shelterbelt and sitting on the round bales.
It was a sunny June afternoon, blue sky to every edge, the wheat green on the next section.
I went and sat down at the organ. I had my sky-blue dress on, the one Brooke picked out for me in Fargo in March.
My hands were not quite steady. I set them on the keys anyway.
Pastor Monty came out and stood under the cottonwood with his book. Cole came and stood beside him in his tan suit.
His brother stood with him. Cole kept putting his hands in his pockets and taking them back out.
At two o’clock I started to play.
I had thought about the hymn all spring. In the end it was never really a question.
I played “Children of the Heavenly Father,” the one my mother sang over the dishes every night of my childhood.
She sang it in Swedish when she was tired and in English when she wasn’t. I can hear her yet.