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It was communion where the problems started to arise. With no one to serve the blessed wine to; the priest was forced to drink the remainder of it himself after concluding the brief prayer of sanctification and taking a sip of the body and the blood. After crossing himself he walked back towards the vestibule, and, behind a pillar he drank the rest of the wine mixed with a bit of water. It was near three cups, and he took it in a single draught. He immediately began to feel the effects of the wine, and stumbled his way back toward the altar. He knew that he just needed to get through the final two songs and the post-communion prayer to be finished. He saw a light at the end of a tunnel, but no, it was no light at all, a man had wandered into the church, skinny with a faint pencil thin mustache.

“Father,” the man said, “Father, can I play you out?”

“Play me out?” the priest asked, too disturbed by the wine and to notice the interruption in the Liturgy.

The man didn’t wait for an answer, he climbed the stairs in nice black shoes that clicked as he mounted the stairs toward the organ. “I only know a few Father,” he called down from the loft, but the priest waved him on anyway.

The organ started, dirge like, before lifting immediately into a tune incredibly familiar to the priest and yet, distant sounding. “That’s not what’s on the board,” he called up, but the man didn’t answer, engrossed in the music as he was.

The priest understood after a few more bars that the man in the loft was playing an old song that his nursery maid had sung him as a child that was some old spiritual about using prayer to keep the devil at bay. “This is a favorite of mine,” the man called down, stopping the song briefly to converse.

By this time the priest was remembering his nursery maid. Helga, had her name been Helga. She’d been Scandanavian and beautiful. Helga had two children of her own that she’d left in the care of her mother to be their nurse made for the summer when he was twelve, and he’d listened to her sing children’s songs, played hide and seek in the small house, because he loved her. Helga. He’d forgotten all about her.

And that was the day my grandfather sang spirituals with the devil.