Inside that sealed box in the chimney chase was a leather folio, tied shut with a black ribbon. It was dry and clean, like it had been put there yesterday. On the cover, stamped in gold that had mostly worn off, it said, Hymns. M. L. Starcher.
I untied it. Inside were pages of sheet music. Handwritten. Every note drawn by hand in ink, every line of every verse written underneath. There were twenty six of them. Each one had a title and a date at the top, from 1946 to 1971.
The young couple who hired me, Kyle and Brittany, came down to the basement. Brittany is a music teacher at the middle school. She took one look at the first page and sat down on the bottom step.
She said, somebody wrote all of these. These are originals.
On the back of the last page was a short note. It said these hymns had been sung at the Ripley United Methodist Church for twenty five years, but the new pastor wanted modern music and threw out the hymnals. It said, I cannot stand to see them in a trash can. Maybe someday somebody will want to sing them again. Mildred Starcher, organist.
A church organist had hidden twenty five years of her own music in the one place in the house that would never catch fire.
Brittany called the church. The secretary there, a woman named Carol, had been going to that church since 1960. She knew the name right away. She said Mildred played the organ every Sunday for thirty years. She said some of the older members still hummed her hymns without knowing where they came from.
Carol asked if she could see them.
Brittany brought the folio to the church that Sunday. After the service, Carol took it to the old organ in the corner, the one they barely used anymore. She sat down and played the first hymn. It was called Lord of the Hills.
Three of the oldest women in the congregation stood up and started singing. They knew every word. They had not sung it in fifty years.
Carol said everybody in the church was crying by the second verse.
Brittany spent the next three months typing all twenty six hymns into notation software and printing copies. The church choir learned six of them. At Easter, they sang all six, with Brittany at the piano and Carol on the old organ.
Mildred had no children. But her niece, a woman in her eighties named Joyce, came all the way from Charleston for that service. She sat in the front row. After the last hymn, she told Brittany her aunt would have been so happy. She said her aunt always said music does not belong to the person who writes it. It belongs to the people who sing it.
I set the new water heater in that basement and ran a proper flue. The old chase is sealed now. But Kyle and Brittany kept the folio.
It sits on the piano in their living room.
Twenty years on water heaters. That is the first one I ever worked on that came with a song.