The Organ Builder's Skillet

The week before last, the regional facilities conference was supposed to fill all eighty rooms here at the lodge, and then on Tuesday afternoon every single one of them cancelled at once because the host venue burned down in a brush fire, which meant I went from planning eighty breakfasts to planning nothing, and the quiet that settled over the place was the kind of quiet you can hear. I have worked at the lodge at the edge of Pinyon Flats for eleven years now, cooking in the café and renting out rooms in the slow months, and I am forty-four years old, and I thought I knew every kind of quiet this place could make. I was wrong. The parking lot sat empty except for my truck and the ice machine hummed to itself and the wind came down off the ridge and rattled the flag halyard against the pole in a way I had somehow never noticed before, and I stood in the kitchen holding a dish towel and thought, well, Shirley, this is what it sounds like when nobody needs you.

Except there was one guest. A man had wandered in from the gas pumps around four o'clock, dragging a rolling suitcase across the gravel, and he stood in the doorway of the café looking as if he had been told bad news in three different buildings that day. His name was Clay, he was forty-seven, and his flight out of the little regional airport had been cancelled and rebooked and cancelled again, and the nearest real airport was three hours east, and the shuttle wouldn't run again until morning. So I gave him room six and told him the café closed at eight but I'd feed him before it did, because there was no point letting a stranded man go hungry when I had a fridge full of food I'd bought for eighty people who were never coming.

I spent the afternoon doing the things I do when the lodge is empty, which mostly means I went back to the workshop behind the café and worked on the pipe organ. Yes, I build pipe organs. I know how that sounds, a lodge cook in the high desert building church organs, but my father was an organ tech and I apprenticed under a woman in Flagstaff for six years, and there are more little desert chapels out here than you'd think, and more of them than you'd guess want a real tracker organ instead of an electric box that hums. The current job is for a chapel being built up toward the pass, and it won't be finished until spring, which means the organ can't be delivered until spring, which means I have been living with three hundred pipes leaning against my workshop walls like a very patient wooden crowd.

At seven I came back into the kitchen and started the chili, because chili is what you make when you have too much of everything and no reason to economize. I browned the meat in my skillet, the big cast iron one that lived on my father's stove before it lived on mine, and I don't trust any other pan in the building for that first stage, the part where the meat has to sit still and go dark and crusty instead of steaming itself gray. Some people collect things. I have one skillet and a set of organ tuning knives and a truck with two hundred thousand miles on it.

He came down around seven thirty, showered and changed into a clean shirt, and stood at the pass-through as if he wasn't sure if he was allowed in.

"Something smells incredible," he said. "What is that?"

"Chili," I said, and held up the skillet so he could see it, because I am a little proud of it and he looked like the kind of man who would understand a pan being a big deal. "This is the only pan in the world I trust for a proper mountain meal. Everything else in that kitchen is a compromise."

He laughed, an actual laugh, surprised out of him. "A skillet with a reputation. Can I get a bowl of the compromise-breaker?"

"You can get a bowl, corn bread, and a chair by the window. Sit."

He sat. I brought two bowls and the corn bread and, after a moment's thought, the bottle of whiskey I keep under the register for occasions, and this counted, an empty lodge and one stranded stranger and a cancelled conference worth eighty rooms. I poured us each two fingers and sat down across from him, and for a while neither of us said anything, we just ate, and the chili did what chili does, which is make a room feel like a room instead of a box.

"Okay," he said finally, setting down his spoon. "I have to confess something, since you're feeding me and plying me with whiskey. I was dreading that conference. Dreading it. When I heard it burned down, my first feeling was relief, and my second feeling was shame about the relief."

"What were you dreading about it?" I asked, though I had a guess.

"It's a transition conference," he said, turning his glass around on the table. "I'm moving across the country in six weeks for a new job. Bigger role, more money, the whole package, and everybody keeps telling me how lucky I am, and I've spent two months lying awake at three in the morning thinking I have made an enormous mistake and it's too late to unmake it. The conference was supposed to be the first official thing in the new chapter, and I couldn't face a hotel ballroom full of people asking me how excited I am." He took a sip. "So when it burned down, some animal part of me threw a party."

"That's not shame," I said. "That's just information. Your gut voted no on the party, not on the job."

He looked at me like that had landed somewhere. "What about you? What's the story with the, did you say you build pipe organs?"

"Pipe organs," I said, and told him about the chapel job, the three hundred pipes, the little chapel up toward the pass that won't have a roof until spring, so the organ sits in my workshop getting finished and tuned and retuned with nowhere to go. I told him about the wind chest I had to rebuild twice because I cheaped out on the leather the first time and had to eat the cost, and he actually asked follow-up questions, real ones, about how a tracker action works, and I explained it, the little mechanical connection between the key and the valve, and how you can feel the pipe through your fingertip when the action is built right.

"That's the part I like," I told him. "You touch a key and somewhere a pipe answers, and there's no electricity in between, just wood and leather and felt and your hand. It's honest. Nothing hides."

"And you do that between frying eggs and renting rooms."

"And between frying eggs," I agreed. "It pays worse than the cooking but it pays better than the rooms, and I only take one job a year, so it stays fun. Six years ago I took two jobs, and one of the clients was a chef visiting from the coast who wanted an organ for a wedding chapel he was restoring, and that turned into a whole thing I won't bore you with."

"A whole thing," he said, eyebrows up.

"A brief, agreeable thing that ended when he flew home," I said, and we both laughed, and he refilled my glass without asking, which I noted and approved of. The wind had picked up outside and the halyard was rattling again and it didn't sound lonely this time, it sounded like weather, which is a different thing entirely.

"So the chapel gets its organ in the spring," he said. "And you get to hear it finished."

"If the organ is honest," I said. "That's the deal I make with every one of them. If I've built it right, it'll still be telling the truth a hundred years from now, long after everybody in this story is gone."

He turned his glass again and was quiet a second. "I wish I'd built something," he said, half to himself. "Anything. A cabinet. A relationship that lasted. Something you could point at."

"There's time," I said. "You're what, forty-five?"

"Forty-seven."

"Forty-seven is nothing. I started the apprentice thing at twenty-six after my marriage folded up. You've got years." I stood and gathered the bowls, and I will admit I took my time about it, and I will admit that when I asked him if he wanted to see the workshop, the way the low light came through the door and caught the pipes leaning against the wall, I already knew what kind of evening was starting to arrange itself, though neither of us had said a word about it yet. "Come on," I said. "You've got a morning shuttle and nothing else. Let me show you what an honest machine looks like."

He followed me out the back door and down the gravel path with his hands in his pockets, and I unlocked the workshop and flipped the switch and watched his face do the thing faces do in there, which is go quiet. Three hundred pipes leaning against the walls in ranks, from pipes the size of fence posts down to pipes no bigger than pencils, all of them mouth-up and waiting, and the smell of wood shavings and hot hide glue and the little bit of tin the smaller pipes are made from. I keep a workbench in the middle with the voicing tools laid out in a row like surgical instruments, because that is essentially what they are, tuning cones and knives and a little brass cup of shellac.

"So these are all of them," he said, turning in a slow circle. "It's like standing inside the instrument."