The Haunted Parlor

The Parlor
The ancient, oak, pump organ groaned, moaned, wheezed, thumped and squealed. I pressed its peddles with my child’s feet and pushed its keys at random with my skinny fingers. I had nearly flunked flutophone in third grade and had no musical talent. All I could play was a record player.
I wondered why my grandmother had bought such a hideous instrument, rather than a piano or guitar. The organ’s cacophony was worse than a bag pipe’s and it took up more space. My grandmother couldn’t even play the contraption. Nobody in the family could until my mother took piano lessons and my mother’s musical ability matched mine. The family home didn’t even have an indoor bathroom when the organ was purchased. At that time, no house in rural Campbelltown had indoor plumbing, yet many homes were furnished with pump organs, even my stingy Aunt Manie owned one. A superlative salesman had persuaded those thrifty farmers to buy pump organs.
The dark varnished organ, bereft of its ornate superstructure, which had been relegated to a dirty shed, stood in the parlor on the west end of the T-shaped farm house. Like most houses built in the late 1800s, whether farm house or city row house, this house was built with sixteen-foot joists spanning the width of each section. The parlor wasn’t sixteen feet wide, however. A wide, enclosed stairs took up one side of the room, but we didn’t use this comfortable stairs. My grandmother preferred the steep, narrow kitchen stairs.
Mature box elder trees and a porch shaded the gloomy parlor. My grandmother’s best furniture filled it; a dark blue velvet couch and chair; several tables and lamps; my mother’s old radio, enclosed in a wood cabinet as tall as I was. The radio needed new tubes and didn’t work. A little clock hung on the wall. It didn’t work, either. A Victorian superfluity of knick knacks furnished every table and shelf. My mother’s Bobsey Twins books gathered dust on one shelf. A rug covered the baby-poop-brown painted floor. Two 16”by 20” calendar pictures hung in wide elaborate gold-painted frames against floral wallpaper. One frame held a copy of a Dutch master’s vase of flowers and the other frame held a picture of Jesus with a flock of sheep. In spite of these comforts, my grandmother never used the parlor except for special visitors.
I always felt that a benign presence watched me in that cold room, but it didn’t bother me much, not with that organ bawling loud enough to dissipate any spirit. However, in the evening, I never entered the parlor alone. I felt a stronger presence then, even when accompanied by my grandmother.
On dull summer days, when the sun and humidity made outside play miserable, I retreated to the cool parlor and investigated postcards and a photo album stored in the organ’s empty top. My grandmother had sent most of the cards, with one cent stamps, to my grandfather when they were courting. The photo album contained tin types, photos printed on thin metal plates, of family members I didn’t know. Most of them had died before I was born.
Family members consistently died young. Most died of tuberculosis, but one great uncle had cut himself shaving and died of blood poisoning.
When I was four, my father held me up to kiss my beautiful, blonde, fifteen-year-old cousin goodnight. She was sleeping, he said. I thought it strange that she slept fully dressed, in a satin-lined box, in a strange house. I never saw my cousin again. Later I learned she had died of an aneurism.
The parlor seemed to fill with spirits when I looked at those old photos. Sometimes I thought I saw movement in the shadows, but reasoned that was just my nerves. Even in summer, the parlor was as cool as my dead cousin’s skin.
Years later, my grandmother died and we faced the usual family concerns, or usual for my family. Would the hearse get stuck in the narrow track that led to the family graveyard? The graveyard sat on a slight sand hill in the midst of a muddy corn field. The quarter mile path to it consisted of two deep, overgrown ruts. Grass-grown muck served as a parking lot by the graveyard. The hearse didn’t get stuck and we buried my grandmother between her husband and granddaughter. The next year, we added my uncle.
By then, we had sold the farm. My mother sold the organ to Florida relatives for ten dollars. They fetched the organ, but never paid the money. My father said it didn’t matter, “Good riddance! We didn’t have room for that ugly old organ. Now those queer Florida relatives won’t bother us because they owe us money.” My family used the word “queer” to describe our ubiquitous oddball relatives. Odd was typical in our family.
My mother told me once that the good stairs in that old farm house were only used to carry coffins downstairs when someone died in bed. In former times, the family displayed the corpse in the parlor for all the friends and relatives to see before burial.