We’re driving to Newburg for a carburetor part, my father quiet as usual. I’m thankful to get out of the house. My mother, in her threadbare nightgown and worn pink toenails, shoving the vacuum around, grumbling about being a martyr, while the four of us kids deep in sofa cushions, toes tucked under us, staring at the TV. I’m enjoying the silence and time with my dad while he’s sober.
The red barn with hand-painted letters, Antiques and Collectibles, pulls my father off course. Inside, the moist smell of old wood and the lonely canyons of junk make me question joining him, but we don’t have to go far. Right up front, a dusty pump organ waits for my dad like an old hound at a shelter. The man says it’s in good condition, “’cept for the part that makes sound.” The bellows that supply the air are shredded. “I’ll give you a deal.” Music to my father’s ears.
My mother has played the piano since she was a girl. She even makes the cheap out-of–tune piano in the family room sound wonderful. But she doesn’t know the first thing about an organ you have to pedal while you play. My father is too excited to worry about this. I expect the organ will go in the garage, next to the snow blower that never started, or the bike without a seat that he got free from the dump. But when he hands me one of the legs from the back of the station wagon and tells me to take it right into the parlor, I sense the organ has a different fate.
My father isn’t a gifted craftsman. His tools are rusty and smeared with dried epoxy. He doesn’t stop to look at a project, think it through, and do it right. Sometimes, I keep him company while he works, but watching him grimace and grunt as his cheap Saturday corduroy pants slip off his ass isn’t my idea of quality time. When he finishes, a leaky faucet drips less, a busted screen has fewer holes for flies, a plaster of Paris patch on the porch steps might last another year.
The organ is different. He looks at the sections laid out on the floor as if he knows what it has gone through to get here. He’s not rushing, like usual, but working slowly, handling each piece with reverence. It feels wrong to watch him, too intimate.
A few hours later, my father ushers all of us into the parlor. He stands next to the fully assembled organ with a can of Pledge in one hand and a rag made from old underwear in the other. The mahogany panels, turrets, and carved dowels glisten like a bowling ball, the pitted mirror above the keyboard as clean as it will ever be, and the spaces between the ivory keys clear of debris from years in the barn.
“Why is there a hose from the back of the organ to a hole in the wall?” my sister asks. My father smiles and opens the closet door next to the organ. The hose is attached to the exhaust end of an Electrolux canister vacuum cleaner, the new iron lung that makes pumping unnecessary. He turns on the vacuum, and a whine fills the air.
My mother sits down at the organ, like it’s church, the drone of the vacuum normal. Her long, strong fingers press the keys, and the organ surges to life with a strange, sweet, sad sound. My father places his hands gently on my mother’s shoulder, a rare gesture of tenderness. During the day, they pass each other like unfriendly cellmates. At night, all hell breaks loose after my father’s second martini. Music restores them as a couple, reminds them they share more than the love for their kids. They collected 78s, then 33s, now the lower shelf of the teak stereo cabinet holds 8-tracks of Herb Alpert, Glenn Miller, Brenda Lee, and Eddy Arnold. When they dance cheek to cheek in the kitchen to Ella Fitzgerald, I wish they were always this close, but I know the truce is temporary.
My mother responds to my father’s touch by sitting up higher. My father opens his big fish lips and sings, Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, with a power that catches me off guard. His rich baritone makes the floorboard tremble. He repeats the refrain, Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, sliding up to the tenor of the choirboy he once was. The song is a lover’s lament. A dark lullaby. A waltz that rocks back and forth, slipping farther away like a boat on an outgoing tide. My mother bobs up and down. Her fingers find the keys on their own. One last time, Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, my father in full voice, my mother rising higher. She would float straight up to the ceiling if it weren’t for his hand still on her shoulder.
We remember how a song ends. Not the beginning. Not what happens in the middle. Those last notes vibrate inside us, long after everything else is gone.
Leo MacLeod
Leo MacLeod is a storyteller, musician, and author of two professional development books. His essays aim to capture what Whitman called the multitudes within us. He lived in a cabin in Maine before hitchhiking across the country to settle in Portland, Oregon.
