The Hymn Board
Pastor Lindqvist,
Welcome to St. Olaf’s. I’m sorry I won’t be there to show you around. The council will give you the keys and tell you about the furnace, which is temperamental, and the bats in the belfry, which are not a figure of speech. I’ve left a list of those things on the desk. This letter is about something else. I would ask you to read it before your first Saturday.
You’ll have noticed the hymn board, on the wall to the left of the pulpit. It’s oak, older than the church, brought over from the old country with the altar rail. Three rows, and a box of brass-and-wood number cards behind it. Every Saturday evening, since 1983, I’ve come in and set the board for the Sunday service. Opening hymn, hymn of the day, sending hymn. The pastor gives me the numbers on a slip of paper. I hang them. That’s the job.
The first time I found it wrong was my second winter. I’d set it Saturday night: 401, 263, 549. Sunday morning I unlocked the doors at seven to light the furnace, and the board said 1142, 18, 307.
Our hymnal ends at 659. There’s no hymn 1142.
I assumed it was the confirmation boys. I put the right numbers back and said nothing. That week, Arne Haugen, who farmed out on the county line, was found by his wife on the Thursday morning sitting up in bed with the window open, and the snow coming in onto the quilt, and he’d been dead for some hours, and he was smiling. The doctor said it was his heart.
The Haugens’ fire number was 1142. That’s what we call them out here, Pastor, the little green signs at the end of each farm lane. Every place in the township has one.
On the Saturday, Elsie Brandvold died, who lived at number 18, by the creek. The window was open. She’d been smiling. And on the Monday, it was the youngest Tollefsrud girl, at 307, who was four.
I want to tell you I went to the pastor straight away. I didn’t. I was twenty-six. I didn’t think anyone would believe me, and I didn’t think I believed myself. I went on setting the board each Saturday night, and some Sundays it was as I’d left it, and some Sundays it wasn’t. When it wasn’t, I’d write down the numbers, and I’d drive the township roads that week and look at the green signs, and I’d watch. It was nearly always within the week. Never violent. Always the window open, always the smile.
I learned something else, in time. It was by accident. One Saturday in 1986, I set the board, and then before I locked up I took the cards out and changed them. I don’t know why. I had a feeling. I put up three numbers for places I knew were empty: the old Rustad farm that had been abandoned since the war, the burned-out schoolhouse at 640, and a lot on the river road where there’d only ever been a cellar hole.
On Sunday morning, the board was just as I’d left it. Nothing had been changed.
No one died that week. But a neighbor told me later that the windows of the old Rustad house, which had been boarded up for forty years, were found standing open, the boards neatly set down in the grass. All of them.
It needs three, Pastor. That’s what I’ve come to understand. Not every week, but most. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it comes in the windows or if it’s that the windows open to let something out. I only know that if I don’t give it three numbers by Saturday night, it will choose its own, and it doesn’t choose empty houses.
So for forty-one years I have given it empty houses.
You won’t have noticed, coming in, but this township is mostly abandoned farmsteads. People think that’s the economy, the consolidation, young people moving to the Cities. Some of it is. But you’d be surprised how many of those empty places I bought, myself, at tax sales, over the years, with my own money, just to keep them empty. I own twenty-six of them. The council thinks I’m sentimental about old buildings.
I’ve been careful. I’ve kept a ledger: every number, every Saturday. I’ve rotated them so no place gets used too often, because I noticed if I used one too often the windows wouldn’t close anymore, and things would start to grow in the yard that I didn’t like the look of. You’ll find the ledger in the bottom drawer of the sacristy desk. Everything’s in it.
Here’s what I need to tell you, and I’m sorry it falls to you.
Last month the county pulled down three of my places. Safety hazards, they said. Then the river took the cellar hole at 640 in the spring flood. I’ve been getting by on fewer and fewer, using them more often than I should. The Rustad place hasn’t been able to close its windows since Easter. There’s a sound from it at night now, like a lot of people humming a hymn I don’t know.
Last Saturday, I set the board with the two places I had left that could still be used, and then I stood there a long time with the last card in my hand.
I’m eighty-four. My wife’s been gone eleven years. My lane is at the end of the township road, and the sign at the end of it says 59. I put the card up and locked the door and drove home and opened the bedroom window, because it seemed rude not to.
If you’re reading this, then I suppose that it worked. I hope I was smiling. Agnes always said I had a nice smile.
You’ll have to decide for yourself what to do now. I can’t tell you. The ledger’s in the drawer. There’s money in an account in the church’s name that’s meant for buying places, and the lawyer in town knows what it’s for, though not why. The board needs setting every Saturday by sundown.
And Pastor, one last thing. On your first Sunday, when you unlock the doors at seven, look at the board before you do anything else, before you light the furnace, before you so much as take off your coat. Then go to the ledger and look the numbers up.
If they’re in the ledger, it’s only been tidying up after me. If they aren’t, then it has started choosing for itself again, and you have until Saturday sundown to decide what you’re going to put up there instead.
You should know before you decide. The parsonage has a sign at the end of its lane, too. It’s number 61.
With gratitude, and in Christ,
Halvard Moe, Sexton