A woman admitted him to the church, the woman the people in town called the koster, an old Dutch lady with a protruding forehead and button-like eyes, who knew little English but was excited to know that the names on the stones in the churchyard were actually ancestors of the American with the Dutch name and the strange hat.
Burton Bartels and the koster stood in that tiny Frisian church, and he imagined what the Peace Psalmsters would sound like in such a small place, so old. The woman scrambled around him, muttering things in Dutch, pointing to this or that, and finally dragging an extension cord out from beneath a bench in the back.
“You like this?” she said to him, and she strung the orange cord all the way from the back of the church up to a little Hammond organ that stood opposite the pulpit’s saluting sounding board, an organ which produced a tinny, flat electronic tone.
She played a few chords, proudly. The organ was new. She rolled her eyes. “Ve yust haf’ dis a yheah,” she told him. “Maybe you like to play?” Her bulk twisted slightly toward him on the shaky bench.
“No,” he said, raising a hand.
“We are for ‘dis so happy,” she told him, wincing, as if it were a sin to be so proud.
She turned back to the organ and, hands poised, waited for some inspiration, as if the music had to be something apropos. She shrugged her shoulders. “‘Vat to play?” she said, embarrassed, as much to herself as to him.
She didn’t look at all like his mother. Her vigor was the opposite of his mother’s slow deliberate way, but this woman had a sense of humor not unlike the woman who’d raised him, shrewd and wily--and both of them were heavy. It seemed as if she knew him well, after what?--twenty minutes.
But his mother came back to him right there, not because what the koster played was Psalm 42 or 84 or even Old Hundredth. His mother came back to him in that old Frisian church because he saw in her something he’d not felt in himself or even the Psalmsters, something he’d only seen, but long ago forgotten in the way his mother had long ago played the organ. She came back to him because the woman did not perform at all, she only played. What she did with her hands, in that old church, was play that cheap electronic organ proudly, in the way his mother did, a way that suddenly opened his eyes to something other than ministry, other than performance, other than making a name--something he had a hard job naming, but something he knew finally he could call nothing more or less than worship.
What she played wasn’t anything from the repertoire of the Peace Psalmsters. It was, of all things, “Shall We Gather at the River”; and she played it by ear, no pedals, a few chords here and there so heartily hammered that she threatened the bench with the force of her hands, her shoulders rolling, her eyes up, her round fists pounding as if her fingers were themselves capable of volume.
But what he heard was the sound of something he’d thought he’d forgotten for so many years, something so real, so vivid, so unshowy, that he had to look away--not because it lacked virtuosity, but because it seemed to him to be too close to something he’d left behind.
“Thees thing ist new,” she told him again when she was finished, and she rubbed her hands over the top as if the organ were waiting to be stroked. “‘Ve is all so proud,” she said.
When he didn’t respond, she asked, “You haf’ maybe sometink in your eyes?”
He shook his head.
To say that Burton Bartels’ great idea died that day in Piiam, Fries land, the Netherlands, would be half-truth. The Peace Psalmsters have gone on to even greater fame and fortune, although now its members are drawn professionally, outside the church. Watch for them at a concert in your area. You’ll never forget them.
But after that midday visit to the old church where his ancestors had worshiped and left, after that impromptu recital on a four-hundred dollar Hammond, a rendition of “Shall We Gather at the River,” he never once called his own great idea, the Peace Psalmsters, a ministry again.
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