The chairman of the deacons stood on my front porch at seven the next morning with his hat in one hand and a bouquet of white lilies in the other, and behind him, parked at the curb, were five cars I knew from church. Deacon Harold Pettigrew was eighty one years old, a retired banker, a stiff and courteous man who had never once in his life been seen without a tie. Today the tie was crooked, and there were dark circles under his eyes. “Miss Opaline,” he said, “may we come in? We have come to apologize, and we would like to do it properly.”
I let them in. There were seven of them, all men over sixty, standing in my front parlor among the doilies and the photographs and the old upright piano, looking like boys sent to the principal. I made coffee and set out the good cups. Deacon Pettigrew did not sit. He took from his breast pocket a folded paper, and I saw that it was the very same deed that Leland had wired inside the bass pipe. “I read this last night, Miss Opaline,” he said. “I read it three times. And I would like to read it to you, aloud, in front of witnesses.”
He cleared his throat. The condition at the foot of the deed, typed by a lawyer in 1974 and signed by the deacons of that year, said that the organ was donated to First Baptist Church of Natchez by Leland Tate, in memory of his mother. It was to remain in the sanctuary and to be played, in worship, by a member of the Tate family, so long as one lived who was willing and able. Should the organ be removed, sold, silenced, or replaced, all rights to the instrument and to a trust fund of one hundred twenty thousand dollars would pass to Opaline Tate, wife of the donor.
I sat down on the piano bench, because my knees had gone weak. A trust fund. I had not known. Leland had been a modest man, a choir director with a gentle voice and a habit of giving away his lunch. He had never mentioned money. I looked at the faces of the deacons, one after another, and I saw how pale they were. They had not known either, they said. The paper had been lost in a flood of 1979, and the tuner had only found it when he reached into the pipe to dislodge a mouse nest.
A husband can leave his wife more than money. He can leave her a place where her gifts will always be needed, signed and sealed in a pipe.
Mr. Fontenot told us the rest later that morning, when he arrived on the arm of my daughter, thin as a rail and bright eyed as a bird. In 1974, he said, Leland had come to him one night after choir practice and asked him to hide a document in the organ where nobody would look. Leland had a feeling, he said, that someday someone would try to take it away. A pastor, a committee, a young man with new ideas. He did not want his wife to be left with nothing. So he built a safeguard, as a good musician builds a fugue, with an answer waiting.
Pastor Brent was the last to come. He stood at the door of my parlor with his hands hanging at his sides, in his quarter zip sweater, looking shrunken. I had never seen him without a smile. He crossed the room slowly and stood in front of me. “Miss Opaline,” he said, “I said something unforgivable. I said you could not hear the notes. I have been a fool.” His voice cracked. “I confess I wanted the church to grow. I thought the old ways were holding us back. I did not think about what the organ meant to you, or to the people who have wept to its music for fifty years.”
I did not answer right away. I looked at him, the husband of my daughter, a man I had loved for his goodness and been hurt by for his pride. I thought of how Leland would have handled it. He would have stood up and put a hand on the young man shoulder and said, in that mild baritone of his, “Brent, let us talk about hymns.” So that is what I did. I told the pastor that I had no wish to take his band away. I told him that music is not a battle.
We worked it out that week at the kitchen table of my daughter, with a legal pad and a pot of tea. The organ would stay. It would be played on Sunday mornings at the early service, which was quiet and old fashioned, and at all funerals and weddings. The band would play at the eleven o clock service, as the young people liked. There would be one hymn each Sunday that both would play together, organ and guitars, drums and pipes. I wrote down the terms myself in my best Palmer method script. Brent signed with a trembling hand.
Kimberly cried through all of it. She had not called me in thirty one days, she said, because she had been afraid I would never forgive her husband, and afraid that I would not forgive her for standing beside him. I held her face in my hands. I told her that a daughter does not need forgiveness for being caught between two people she loves. She laid her head on my shoulder like a girl of ten, and we sat that way until the tea went cold, as if no time had passed at all.
The first Sunday of the new arrangement, I played the early service at six minutes past eight. The sanctuary was nearly empty, full of morning light, and my fingers found the first chord of Abide With Me as if they had never left. When I reached the third verse, I did not cry, for the first time since the funeral of Leland. I listened to the long note of the bass pipe, the one that had hidden the secret for fifty years, and I heard it clearly. Every note. Not one half step out of tune.
At the eleven o clock service, the guitars came in under the pipes on the final hymn, and the whole congregation rose. A boy of about nine, the grandson of Deacon Pettigrew, was playing the drums with a look of terrified joy. The sound filled the building, strange and thrilling and old, new voices climbing on the shoulders of old ones. I stood at the organ bench with my hands in my lap and listened to the music of two eras woven into one. the tuning fork of Leland lay in the little drawer, silent and content.