My neighbor’s grown son bought one of my ten-dollar organ CDs at the county fair, then came back and dropped it on my table. “I want my money back, this is funeral music for old ladies.” When I said no, he carried it up to the grandstand booth and played it on every speaker. He never saw who had just pulled up at the gate.
The money was for the organ at First Methodist in Algona.
Its bellows split in March, the repair quote came in at $6,400, and I’d sold twenty-three discs since the gates opened at nine.
I recorded them myself on a Tuesday night with a borrowed microphone taped to the choir rail.
Eleven hymns. One take each.
You can hear the radiator knock all the way through track six.
Kendrick Gilliam grew up two doors down from me.
I taught him to ride a bike in my driveway the summer his dad was working doubles.
He bought the CD at 3:15 and said it was for his grandmother.
At 4:20 he was back, with two buddies from the beer tent behind him holding their cups.
“Mrs. Sutton, I need a refund,” he said.
He set it on my table face down, like it was dirty.
“Did it skip?” I said.
“It didn’t have to skip. It’s old-lady music. Nobody under ninety wants this.”
His friends laughed.
“Your grandmother is eighty-eight,” I said.
“Close enough.”
“That’s the organ’s money, Kendrick. I’m NOT refunding the church because you changed your mind about hymns.”
He looked at me for a long second.
Then he picked it back up.
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s find out what everybody else thinks it’s worth.”
The grandstand sat right across the gravel from my booth, and Kendrick ran the sound for it every summer because his uncle had the contract.
He went up the metal stairs to the announcer’s booth two at a time.
Thirty seconds later my own organ came out of every speaker on that grandstand.
LOUD.
The opening of “How Great Thou Art,” the one where I fumbled the second bar and decided to leave it in.
People in the bleachers turned around in their seats.
Then his voice came over the top of it.
“Folks, this is what ten dollars gets you at booth twelve. TEN DOLLARS. Somebody go check if she’s still breathing.”
The beer tent howled.
The woman at the lemonade stand looked at me and then down at her ice scoop.
My hands were flat on the folding table.
I had a cash box, a roll of tape and nineteen discs left.
He let the whole hymn play, and then he let the next one start.
“Track two, everybody. Pretty sure it’s the same song.”
I started counting tracks in my head.
Three was the one I never put on the sign.
Three was “It Is Well,” and I had played it exactly once outside of practice, twelve years ago, at a funeral two doors down from my house.
Not track three.
I came around the table.
I’m sixty-four and I have a hip, and I made it about halfway across the gravel.
That’s when the golf cart pulled up to the grandstand gate.
Three people climbed out with clipboards and lanyards.
The judges for the Hometown Talent Show, which started at five and paid $1,500 to the winner.
Siobhan Fischer came first. She’s run that contest since before Kendrick was born.
Tariq from the radio station was behind her.
And the third lanyard, still untangling her purse strap from the cart seat, was Linh Gilliam.
Kendrick’s mother.
She stopped at the gate with one foot still on the cart step.
Siobhan stood still and listened with her head tipped to one side.
“Who is this?” she said.
“That’s Janet,” the lemonade woman said. “Booth twelve.”
Siobhan clicked her pen and wrote something on her clipboard.
“Is she even entered?” Tariq said.
“She is now,” Siobhan said. “Somebody put her on my speakers before my show. I’m counting it.”
Up in the booth Kendrick couldn’t see any of this.
“Okay, okay, track THREE, this one’s even slower, get your pillows out.”
The first chord came out over the bleachers.
Linh’s hand went to the gate post and stayed there.
She knew it in one chord. I knew she would.
She looked across the gravel at me.
I shook my head at her. I still don’t know what I meant by it.
Siobhan was still writing. “Entry fourteen. Organ. Sutton.”
Tariq leaned toward Linh. “You okay?”
Linh didn’t answer him.
She walked past both of them and up the metal stairs, slow, one hand on the rail.
The hymn kept going into the second verse.
Kendrick was still talking over it. “Seriously, who even BUYS this stuff?”
The booth door opened.
The mic was still on, so all of us heard it.
“Kendrick,” his mother said. “Turn around and tell me you KNOW WHAT SONG THIS IS.”
The booth door
Kendrick turned around in the chair.
Through the booth window I got the back of his head, then his face, then the beer cup in his hand.
The hymn kept going under them. Second verse, where the pedals come in.
“Mom,” he said. The mic carried that too. “What are you doing up here?”
“I asked you something.”
“It’s a hymn. They’re all the same hymn. That’s the whole joke.”
“So you don’t know.”
“I don’t know, Mom. It’s track three. Some church thing.”
Linh reached past him. Her arm went across the window.
She didn’t turn the music off. She bent down to the mic.
“This is what Janet Sutton played in our front room the day we buried your father,” she said.
Every speaker on the grandstand said it with her.
Then Kendrick slapped something on the board and it all went dead at once. The organ, the mic, the hum underneath.
It was quiet enough to hear the Tilt-A-Whirl on the far side of the hog barns.
The bleachers had turned back around. Nobody was looking at me anymore. They were looking up at the booth.
At the beer tent one of his buddies set his cup down on the grass, careful, like it might go off.
Siobhan’s pen was the loudest thing on the fairground.
Tariq had his phone out and was frowning at it.
I stood in the middle of the gravel with my bad hip and nothing to do with my hands.
The booth door opened again. Linh came down the metal stairs, one hand on the rail, as slow as she’d gone up.
She didn’t stop at the gate. She came across the gravel to me.
She’s fifty-two. She still pulls her hair back with the same black clip she wore at Nick’s service.
She had the CD case. She must have picked it up off the board.
She held it up between us. Clear plastic, my handwriting on the paper insert.
Ten titles. A gap after number two where nothing was written.
“Twelve years ago,” she said. “In my kitchen.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say to that part.
“You promised me you’d never play it where I could hear it.”
Nick’s Lowrey
Nick Gilliam bought a Lowrey organ at a farm auction outside Whittemore the year Kendrick turned nine.
A hundred and fifty dollars. The kind with rhythm buttons and a light-up panel, and two dead keys in the lower manual.
He and his brother Reg carried it into the Gilliams’ front room, and Nick announced he was going to learn to play.
He learned one song.
“It Is Well,” right hand, one finger, melody only. His mother used to sing it over the dishes when he was a boy.
Sunday mornings in summer, his front window was open and so was mine. I’d stand at my sink and hear him get to the third line and lose it.
He sang along, too. He sang “when sea pillows roll” instead of billows. Every single time.
Kendrick corrected him once from the porch steps. “Dad, it’s BILLOWS.”
“Pillows is better,” Nick said. “Who wants a billow?”
After that he did it on purpose, and louder.
That was the summer he started the doubles at the plant. Nobody was home at the Gilliams’ before dark, so Kendrick spent his evenings in my driveway on a blue bike with a bent fender.
I’d run beside him holding the seat and yell “BRAKES” at the bottom.
He never once used the brakes. He used the Pruitts’ hedge.
Nick died eight years later, in March. Heart. He was sitting in his truck in the plant lot after a double, and he never turned the key.
The Gilliams weren’t church people. Linh’s folks were Buddhist, back in Des Moines, and Nick hadn’t set foot in First Methodist since his confirmation.
Linh wanted him home. So the service was in their front room, with the casket where the couch usually went and the Lowrey against the wall.
She came over the night before and asked me to play it. That song. On his organ.
I told her it had two dead keys.
“Play around them,” she said.
So I did. Both hands, all four verses, steering around the dead F and the dead A-flat like potholes.
Kendrick didn’t come in.
He was seventeen. He sat on their back step through the whole service in his dad’s work jacket with earbuds in. Every time I turned a page, there he was through the kitchen door.
Afterward Linh found me at her sink, rinsing coffee cups that weren’t mine.
“Don’t ever play it at church,” she said. “I don’t want to be sitting in some pew on a Sunday and have it come out of a speaker at me.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise me, Janet.”
“I promise.”
A week later Reg and Kendrick wheeled the Lowrey down the sidewalk on a furniture dolly and into my front room. Linh couldn’t look at it anymore.
It’s still there. I practice on it. Twice a year, maybe, I play that hymn on it with the windows shut.
That’s the practice. The funeral was the once. That’s twelve years.
Then this March the bellows split at First Methodist.
Gemma Gilliam, Nick’s mother, comes to our early service on the van from the Good Samaritan home. She sits in the second pew because she says the first pew is for show-offs.
In her room she keeps a brown plastic radio on the windowsill with the dial taped at 1490, so the aides can’t knock it off the station when they dust.
The Sunday after the quote came in, she caught my sleeve after the benediction.
“You’re making a record for the organ,” she said. “Put Nicky’s song on it.”
“Gemma, I told Linh I wouldn’t.”
“You told Linh you wouldn’t play it in church. I’m not asking for church. I’m asking for a record I can play in my room. I’m eighty-eight, Janet. I’m not asking Linh.”
So I put it on. Track three.
I left it off the sign and off the insert so nobody would pick it out by name, and I told Gemma it was the third one.
That’s what I told Linh, standing in the gravel. Shorter than that.
She looked down at the case, at the gap after number two.
“Gemma doesn’t drive,” she said. “Who was bringing it to her?”
“Kendrick bought it. At 3:15. He said it was for his grandmother.”
Linh turned and looked up at the booth.
“Did she tell him which one it was?”
Ten dollars from the cash box
Kendrick came down the stairs before I could answer her.
Two at a time, same as he’d gone up, with the disc in his hand and no case.
He was grinning before he hit the gravel. It was the beer tent grin, the one that needs somebody watching.
“Okay,” he said, loud enough for the bleachers. “That got weird. My bad, everybody.”
A few people laughed, not sure they should.
Bryson, the taller of his buddies, hollered from the tent. “Kenny killed the old lady’s set!”
That one got a bigger laugh.
Linh didn’t turn around to him. “Kendrick. Did your grandmother tell you which track.”
“Grandma tells me a lot of stuff. Grandma told me the Hawkeyes were going to the Rose Bowl.”
“I’m asking you.”
“No. Okay? No. I put it in, I hit play, I hit next. I didn’t even know there were eleven. Her sign says ten.”
He pointed at my sign, the poster board taped to the front of my table.
TEN DOLLARS. TEN HYMNS. FOR THE ORGAN.
That part was true. I’d made it that way on purpose.
“It was a joke,” he said to his mother. “I was messing with Mrs. Sutton because she wouldn’t give me my ten bucks.”
So I gave him his ten bucks.
I went back around my table, slower than I’d come, and opened the cash box.
The tens were under the clip. Twenty-three of them, less what I’d broken for change.
I took one out and held it across the table. That was my whole plan. Give the boy his money, take the disc back, let everybody go watch the pig races.
He looked at the bill.
“Nah,” he said. “Keep it. Put it toward a new microphone. The one you used sounds like it was taped to something.”
It was taped to something. It was taped to the choir rail.
Bryson laughed so hard he had to grab the tent pole.
The lemonade woman came out from behind her counter then. Camille, from the Lutheran side of town. I’d bought a lemonade from her at noon and we’d talked about her grandson’s braces.
She didn’t say a word to Kendrick. She carried a folding chair over from her side and set it behind my knees.
“Sit,” she said. “Before that hip sits you.”
I sat. I still had the ten in my hand.
Kendrick put the disc on my table. Face down. Again.
“There,” he said. “Now you’ve got the money and the music. Everybody wins.”
Across the gravel Siobhan was coming toward us with her clipboard up, still writing.
Rule nine
Siobhan Fischer is seventy-one. She’s had that clipboard, or one exactly like it, since the talent show was in the old livestock pavilion with a bedsheet for a curtain.
She stopped at my table and read off it without looking down.
“Entry fourteen. Organ. Sutton. You’ll go after the Petersen twins and before the cloggers.”
“Siobhan, I didn’t enter.”
“Rule nine,” she said. “Anything performed on the grandstand system during show hours is an entry. I wrote that rule in 1994 because a man from Bancroft kept sneaking his yodeling on during the pig scramble.”
“It’s not show hours. It’s quarter to five.”
“Show hours start when the judges arrive. I arrived.”
“Strike it,” I said. “Please.”
“No.” She clicked the pen. “I don’t strike entries because the entrant got embarrassed. Embarrassed is half my lineup.”
Linh was still holding the empty case.
“I’m judging this,” she said to Siobhan. “You understand that. You want me to sit at that table and give a number to that.”
“I want you to do what you signed up to do. If you can’t, I’ll get somebody from the 4-H office.”
Kendrick laughed. A short one, through his nose.
“So she wins,” he said. “That’s great. Fifteen hundred bucks for my dad’s funeral.”
Siobhan looked at him for the first time.
“Your dad’s what?”
He didn’t answer her. He was looking at me.
“You’ve got his organ in your front room,” he said. “You’ve got his song on a ten-dollar CD. Now you’re going to get fifteen hundred dollars for it on a stage. What else of his have you got? You want his truck? It’s in Reg’s machine shed.”
“Kendrick,” Linh said.
“No, I’m asking. She’s the one who keeps a dead guy’s organ in her living room and plays it with the windows shut like nobody can hear it. We can hear it, Mrs. Sutton. Two doors is not that far.”
I hadn’t known that. Twelve years of windows shut, and they’d heard it anyway.
Camille put her hand on the back of my chair.
Tariq had been standing a little behind Siobhan all this time with his phone. He came up beside her now and held it out, screen first, like a badge.
He had an earbud in one ear with a thin white cord going into his shirt pocket.
“Siobhan,” he said. “We’ve been live since four.”
Tariq’s headset
Tariq is forty and he does the afternoons on 1490. Swap shop, school lunch menus, obituaries at twelve-fifteen, and the fair, every August, from under the grandstand overhang.
He explained it the way you explain something to people you know won’t like it.
The station was carrying the talent show live at five. So at four o’clock Kendrick’s uncle had patched the booth board straight into the station’s line, for the sound check and the pre-show.
“Everything on that board since four,” Tariq said, “went out.”
“Out where,” Linh said.
“Out. Over the air. All of Kossuth County and halfway to Mason City.”
Siobhan put her pen down. I’d never seen her do that during fair week.
“All of it?” she said.
“The first hymn. Track two.” Tariq didn’t look at Kendrick. “Him. The breathing thing.”
Kendrick laughed. “Nobody listens to AM on a Saturday.”
“Our Saturday numbers are fine,” Tariq said.
Over at the beer tent, Bryson had drifted back inside, like somebody had called his name.
The other buddy, a short kid in a seed-corn cap, stayed out on the grass with his cup.
“Dude,” he said to Kendrick. “My mom listens to that.”
Nobody laughed at that one.
Linh had both hands on the empty case now, one at each end.
“Does the second half go out too,” she said. “Did the part where I talked go out.”
“Yes ma’am.”
She shut her eyes.
I knew what she was seeing with them shut. Anybody from First Methodist who’s ever visited the Good Samaritan home would have known.
The brown radio on the windowsill. The masking tape on the dial.
The Cubs were off today. I’d heard Tariq say so at nine, while I was setting up my table.
So it would have been the station’s afternoon on that radio. The station’s afternoon had been Kendrick.
“She naps at four,” Kendrick said. “Grandma always naps at four. She’s got the TV going, she doesn’t even—”
“She doesn’t have a TV,” Linh said. “You’d know that, if you went in.”
That one went in somewhere. His face did a thing it hadn’t planned to do.
Then he got it back, and he was talking again, fast. Grandma’s ears. Grandma’s hearing aids sitting in the little case on her dresser. Grandma never knows what day it is anyway.
“She knew what day it was in March,” I said.
That was all I said. He stopped.
Siobhan picked her pen back up and didn’t write anything with it.
Tariq took the earbud out and wound the cord around two fingers.
The bleachers were filling for the show. People were coming in from the midway with corn dogs, and the ones who’d heard it were telling the ones who hadn’t. I could tell by where they pointed.
They pointed at the booth. Then at me. Then at the woman with the lanyard standing next to me.
Then Linh’s purse buzzed.
She took her phone out and looked at it, and turned it so I could read it too.
GOOD SAMARITAN FRONT DESK.
Room 114
Linh answered it on speaker without anybody asking her to.
Gemma doesn’t do phones unless she can shout into them. Everybody in the family knows that.
A girl from the front desk came on first, bright and a little out of breath.
“Mrs. Gilliam? It’s Asia at Good Samaritan. Your mother-in-law’s fine, nothing’s wrong. She just made me call you. She’s real excited. I’m going to put her on.”
Then the scrape and the breathing of Gemma holding a phone too close to her mouth.
“Linh? Linh. Did you hear it?”
Linh opened her mouth and nothing came out.
“They played Nicky’s song on the radio. Janet’s record. The organ. It came on 1490 from the fair, I had it turned up all the way.”
“I heard it, Mom,” Linh said.
“I cried on my good blouse. Asia had to get me a towel.”
Kendrick stood at the end of my table with his hands in his front pockets.
He’d stopped moving. The beer cup was gone. He must have set it down somewhere.
“Somebody was talking over it,” Gemma said. “Some man. I didn’t have my ears in, I couldn’t make him out. Was that Kenny? Was that Kenny telling them whose song it was?”
Nobody answered her.
Siobhan was looking at her clipboard. Tariq was looking at the gravel.
Camille’s hand was still on the back of my chair.
“Linh? Are you there? Is he there with you?”
“He’s here, Mom.”
“Put him on.”
Linh held the phone out toward her son. Her arm was straight and it didn’t shake.
He didn’t take it. He looked at it like it was the disc, face down on my table.
“Kenny?” Gemma said. “Kenny, I told you. Thursday, I told you, when I gave you my ten dollars. Third one. Your daddy’s.”
He still didn’t take the phone.
“You said you’d play it in the truck first, by yourself, so you’d know it before you brought it. Did you play it in the truck?”
I thought about the booth. Before the first chord ever came out of a speaker, he’d said it. This one’s even slower.
You don’t know a song is slower unless you’ve heard it.
He’d heard it. Some time between 3:15 and 4:20, in a truck, by himself.
And then he’d brought it back to my table and called it funeral music for old ladies.
“Kenny?”
He took the phone out of his mother’s hand.
He turned his back to all of us. His shoulders went up under his T-shirt and stayed there.
“Hey, Grandma,” he said.
He listened.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I played it in the truck.”
He listened again. Longer.
“Yeah, that was me talking. Yeah.”
The bleachers were half full behind him. A kid in the front row was kicking the riser. The cloggers were lining up by the stage steps in their red skirts.
“Yeah, Grandma,” Kendrick said. “I told them it was Dad’s.”
The metal stairs
He hung up. He handed the phone back to his mother without looking at her.
Then he turned around and started talking. He talked like somebody had pulled a plug out of him.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t any of you. You don’t know what she can hear, she can’t hear anything, she can’t hear the TV she doesn’t have. She heard organ. That’s all she heard. She’s happy. She cried on her blouse. Leave it.”
Nobody had said anything yet.
“You heard her,” he said to me. “She’s happy. So that’s done.”
“It’s on at five,” I said.
He stopped.
Tariq looked up from the gravel. He understood it before Kendrick did. The show was going out live, same line, same board, same radio on the same windowsill.
And Gemma, who’d just been told her grandson stood up in front of the county and said whose song it was, would be sitting by that radio with her towel waiting for him to do it again.
“No,” Kendrick said. “No. I’m not doing that.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You want me to go up there and do a dedication? On the radio? With Bryson standing right there? With Mom at the judges’ table? You set this up. You put it on the CD. You put it on the CD, and you gave it to me, and you knew.”
“Gemma asked for it,” Linh said.
“Gemma asks for everything. Gemma asked for a pony at Christmas, she’s eighty-eight.” He was walking now, two steps one way and two back, on the gravel in front of my table. “You played it in our house. You know that? You played it right. Every note. Around his dead keys and everything. He never got through the third line in his life, he sang it wrong, he sang sea pillows, every time, on purpose, and you came over and played it right with both hands and everybody cried and said how beautiful.”
He stopped walking.
“Pillows,” he said. “He said who wants a billow.”
The kid in the front row had stopped kicking the riser.
Linh had her hand over her mouth. Her other hand was still holding the empty case by one corner.
Kendrick looked at the disc on my table. Then at the cash box. Then at Siobhan.
“And she gets fifteen hundred bucks for it,” he said. “That’s the part. She gets a check.”
That was the part I could do something about.
“Siobhan,” I said. “Strike entry fourteen.”
“I told you, Janet, I don’t—”
“Not because I’m embarrassed.” I put the ten-dollar bill down on the table, on top of the disc. “Give his slot to him. Five o’clock. Track three, all four verses, nobody talking over it but him at the start.”
Siobhan looked at me a long time. Then at Linh. Then at the boy.
“Then it’s not an entry,” she said. “It’s a dedication. I can’t score a dedication, Janet. There’s no prize for it. You understand that’s fifteen hundred dollars.”
“I know what it is.”
“That’s a lot of bellows.”
“I know.”
She clicked her pen and drew a line through something on her clipboard. Then she wrote under it.
Kendrick said, “I didn’t say yes.”
His mother turned to him.
It was the first time she’d looked straight at him since the booth.
“You already told her you did it,” Linh said. “You want to go call her back and tell her you didn’t?”
He didn’t want to do that. Nobody standing on that gravel wanted to do that.
“You’ll hear it on a speaker,” I said to Linh. “That’s the promise.”
“I already heard it on a speaker.” She put the empty case down on my table next to the disc. “At least this time I’ll know it’s coming.”
Kendrick picked up the disc. He left the ten.
He went to the metal stairs and stood at the bottom with his hand on the rail. The way his mother had.
At 5:02 the cloggers were still waiting by the stage steps when every speaker on the grandstand clicked on.
His voice came first. It wasn’t loud.
“This is for Gemma Gilliam in room 114 at Good Samaritan,” he said. “This is Nick Gilliam’s song. My dad. He played it wrong.”
Then the mic went off, and my organ came out over the bleachers, and nobody turned around.
The fall bazaar
The bellows are still split.
We’ve been doing the early service on the piano since August. The paper thermometer in the narthex says $4,385, and it’s been saying that for three weeks.
The Saturday before Halloween the church had its fall bazaar in the fellowship hall, and I set up my folding table between the pie ladies and the quilt raffle.
Six discs left. I’d sold the rest the week after the fair, mostly to people I didn’t know who’d heard it on 1490.
Linh waves from her driveway. She hasn’t come over. I don’t knock.
At about two o’clock Kendrick came in the side door off the parking lot.
He’d never been in that building, as far as I know. He stood in the doorway and looked at the pies like he’d walked into the wrong wedding.
Then he came over to my table.
He took his wallet out and put a ten-dollar bill down on it. Face down.
“For your grandmother?” I said.
“She’s got one. She plays it in the mornings. The aides are sick of it.”
“Then who?”
“Me.”
I handed him a disc in its case. He turned it over and looked at the insert, at the gap after number two.
He took the pen off my table, clicked it, and wrote in the gap.
It Is Well. And under it, smaller, in parentheses, sea pillows.
Then he set the pen back down, square with the edge of the table, the way I’d left it.
If someone in your family still keeps a radio with the dial taped down, go sit with them this week and let them pick the station.
Family members can find all kinds of ways to cross a line – like in the story of a daughter who gave away her mother’s birthday car, siblings arguing over their mother’s house, and the ex’s truck left behind the welding shop.
