Mr. Pruitt, the church treasurer, held up the bank statement for the Organ Maintenance Fund and said thirty-eight thousand dollars had been collected over forty years, and that four checks had been written since June, every one signed by the same person. And that person was Reverend Dale Whitcomb.
The pastor did not push me off the organ bench because my hands shook, he pushed me off because a soloist of forty years was the one person who would notice the fund going missing from the loft.
Mr. Pruitt had already stopped the whole Homecoming Sunday cold. When Reverend Dales niece Kaylee sat at my organ and it would not make a sound, it was because Harolds nephew had quietly pulled the power key from the console the night before, and he had every right to, because that organ never belonged to the church. In 1986 Harolds family paid forty-two thousand dollars for it and loaned it, in writing, signed by the trustees, filed in the church records, the original in Mr. Pruitts safe. The organ stays as long as Margaret Ellis plays it. The day she does not, the family can take it back.
We want our organ back, Harolds nephew said, or we want our organist back. And then Mr. Pruitt, since everyone was already there, pulled out the maintenance fund statement.
I am seventy years old. I taught piano to half the children in Savannah, and I started playing at First Methodist in 1985. My husband Harold sat in the third pew for thirty-six of those years and winked every time I hit the last chord of It Is Well. Harold passed in 2021, and I kept playing, because it was the only place I still felt him.
When Reverend Dale came last spring with a niece who had taken a few lessons in college, the board called me into the fellowship hall, seven people on folding chairs, no coffee, and told me they were going in a new direction. Your hands shake now, the Reverend said, the Lord deserves better. Eleven minutes. Six to one. They asked for my key to the loft that same night. My sister Louise said just bow out gracefully, Peg. I did not argue. I handed over the key and asked only to take my old green hymnal home, and the Reverend laughed and said take it, were getting new ones.
Tucked in the back cover was a folded paper in Harolds handwriting that I had not read since 1986. It was the loan agreement, the proof that the organ was never a gift. Harold kept his copy in a hymnal and told me, years ago, that if the church ever forgot who the organ belonged to, I would have the answer on the bench.
A loaned organ is not the churchs to keep once the condition is broken, and a maintenance fund is not a pastors to spend. Reverend Dale had been signing checks out of a forty-year fund the moment he arrived, and the surest way to keep the only person who watched that loft from asking questions was to call her hands shaky and vote her out.
Stealing from a church fund is a crime, whatever the collar, and a treasurer with forty years of records and the original loan agreement is not a man you can wave off. The board that took eleven minutes to remove me took rather longer to explain the checks.
Reverend Dale faced the law, not my anger. The organ stayed, because I came back to the bench, which was the only thing that let Harolds family leave it in the loft. Kaylee, who had done nothing but take a few lessons and be somebodys niece, found another church, and I hope she plays somewhere her uncle is not signing the checks.
Your hands shake now, the Lord deserves better, the Reverend told me. My hands do shake. They shook on the first chord of It Is Well that Homecoming, once the power key was back in, and three hundred people stood up anyway, and somewhere in the third pew I felt Harold wink.