The Pipe Organ

By Rush Leaming

Neville Jones wanted to build a pipe organ in his garage, but there was a problem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bridgewood
• Release date: Dec 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386607762

Rush Leaming

RUSH LEAMING has done many things including spending 15+ years in film/video production working on such projects as The Lord of the Rings films. He was also an Adjunct Professor at the University of South Carolina. His first novel, Don't Go, Ramanya, a literary thriller set in Thailand, was published in the Fall of 2016 and reached number one on Amazon. He is currently working on his next novel, to be published in Fall of 2018, entitled The Whole of the Moon, set in the Congo at the end of the Cold War. His short stories have appeared in Notations, 67 Press, The Electric Eclectic, Lightwave and 5k Fiction. He has lived in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Zaire, Thailand, Spain, Greece, England and Kenya. He currently lives in South Carolina.

Book preview

part 1

Neville Jones wanted to build a pipe organ in his garage, but there was a problem. He had been meticulously planning and researching the project for over twenty years, visiting thousands of websites, reading hundreds of books and articles, and calling dozens of people around the world who had done similar things for their advice. It had been a dream of his, and his wife Julia’s, since they had first met as teenagers at St. Timothy’s Church, when he had been an altar boy, and she lead soprano in the choir. St. Timothy’s was the largest church in Hayden Beach, and it had the largest pipe organ in all of North Carolina.

As kids, he and Julia would linger in the great hall after school, or after morning mass on weekends, and listen to Francesca Hollings, the organist for thirty years, play church hymns, and Bach and Mozart, and with her sly sense of humor, sometimes she would slip in radio hits of the time like Waterfalls by TLC, or even hard rock songs by groups such as Def Leppard or Guns N’ Roses. Whatever she played sounded majestic, lush, transformative, and he and Julia would fantasize about what kind of house they would live in once they finished high school and got married and how great it would be to have their very own pipe organ they could play anytime they wanted.

But now, just days away from completing his two-decade quest, the city building inspector, a thin rat-eyed man named Marvin Spade, stood in Neville’s garage with a clipboard in his hand and shook his greasy head.

It’s the wiring, he said to Neville. You don’t have the correct wiring. This ain’t a toaster you’re tryin’ to build. That blower unit itself will be pushing five horsepower.

Neville clicked the fingernails of his right hand together, one at a time, back and forth.

Marvin continued: "You gotta completely gut the walls and put in industrial-grade electrics. But this is a house. A residential house, in a residentially zoned neighborhood. You can’t get a permit to do that here."

Neville looked at the freshly dug pit he had completed the day before,