I opened Normas sealed envelope on the church steps, the one that said for Opal, only if they ever touch the organ money, and I read the first line twice before I could breathe. Norma had known, years ago, that somebody would try this someday, and she had left me the way to stop it.
Our old treasurer, gone since 2009, had foreseen the exact thing Sheila did, and she had quietly locked part of the organ fund where no committee chair could spend it, and written down the law that protected the rest.
Pastor Nolan had already read Normas green notebook aloud, the official church board minutes from March 1998. Motion carried, all bake sale money to be held as a restricted fund, for a pipe organ only. Thats a restricted gift, he said, by law a church cannot spend it on anything else. Sheila said that was a million years ago. Restricted means restricted, Sheila, he answered, you spent sixty-four thousand three hundred dollars that wasnt yours to spend, and the man from the district office was already writing it down.
Then came Normas sealed letter, and it was not only comfort. It was a plan.
I am Opal, seventy-eight. I have played the organ at our little Baptist church in Macon for forty-one years. In 1997 I started a bake sale after second service, every first Sunday, pound cakes and pecan pies, and every dollar went into a fund for a new organ, until it reached sixty-four thousand three hundred dollars. Then Sheila came, said nobody wants a pipe organ anymore, put a teenager with a drum machine on the platform, and told me in front of the choir that I was too old, my hands shook, and I embarrassed them.
My son said dont make a scene in Gods house. I did not argue. I sat in the fourth pew for five months and watched them pour the concrete for a fellowship hall with Sheilas family name over the door. Then, cleaning my closet, I found the box Norma left in 2009, with the green notebook and the typed minutes and, tucked in the back, her sealed letter.
Normas letter told me what she knew. She wrote that she had watched money tempt good people her whole life, so when the organ fund grew large she had, with the board that was honest then, placed a good portion of it into a certificate held in the churchs name, restricted in writing, where a future chair could not simply vote it into concrete. The rest was protected by the law of restricted gifts, and she had kept the minutes to prove it.
She wrote one more thing, just to me. Play until your hands give out, Opal. The organ is already yours, in the eyes of the Lord and the law. Dont let anybody tell you different.
A restricted gift must be used for the purpose it was given, and a church that spends it otherwise has to make it right. The district office saw to that. The sixty-four thousand three hundred dollars was restored to the fund, out of what the committee had spent and from the sale of some of the extravagance Sheila had added, and with Normas protected certificate on top of it, there was enough.
We bought the organ. A real pipe organ, dedicated to Norma and to all the ladies who baked for twenty-seven years. Sheila faced the district and the law for spending a restricted fund, not my anger, and her family name came down off the hall, which became simply the fellowship hall, belonging to everyone.
Youre too old, your hands shake, Sheila told me. My hands do shake. They shook on the first hymn I played on that new organ, and three hundred people sang anyway, and somewhere Norma, who knew all along, was surely smiling. She baked beside me for years, and she left me the one recipe that mattered, the one for protecting what the Lords people gave.