A Change of Heart

by Philip Gulley

  Then, for reasons she still doesn’t understand, she told Deena how she’d come to possess it. She regretted it immediately. Deena began to cry.

  “Oh, I should never have told you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad. Please forgive me.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m glad you told me,” Deena said, leaning over to put her arm around Miss Rudy. “How difficult that must have been for you.”

  They sat that way the longest time, Deena patting Miss Rudy. A silence enveloped them. In the front room, the mantel clock ticked on, as it always had, with a certain detached cadence. Across the alley, Uly Grant yelled out the back door for his sons to come in for the night.

  “Just look at us,” Miss Rudy said, “sitting here being melancholy when the happiest day of your life is fast approaching. Let’s be done with these silly tears.”

  Miss Rudy stood and smoothed out her dress, then carried the tea glasses into the kitchen. Deena rose and followed her, standing in the doorway. “I want you to be in my wedding.”

  “Excuse me?” Miss Rudy said.

  “I would be honored if you would be my maid of honor.”

  “Me? Why would you want a dried-up, old woman like me in your wedding? Surely you have a young friend or a family member.”

  “I have a brother, but I don’t think he’d look good in a dress.”

  “You’re being silly,” responded Miss Rudy, waving her hand in a gesture of dismissal.

  “I am most certainly not. It’s the prerogative of a bride to pick her maid of honor, and I want you. After all, you’ve been a great help to me.”

  Miss Rudy looked at Deena for a long moment. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then say yes.”

  “You’re sure?” Miss Rudy asked.

  “Absolutely positive.”

  “Then, yes, I’ll do it—provided I don’t have to wear a dress that shows my cleavage. That’s unseemly for a woman of seventy-seven.”

  “You’ll be the picture of modesty,” Deena promised.

  Deena stayed another half hour, then excused herself to go home. It was a warm, late spring night. Miss Rudy finished washing the dishes, then went out to her front porch. Ernie Matthews had come the week before to carry her porch furniture up from the basement. She sat on the porch swing, the one she’d shared so long ago, dreaming and hoping and holding hands.

  The paint had flecked off. Ernie had offered to paint it. She had thanked him, then politely declined. She wanted it just as it had been, when there was joy and life was good. The swing was bowed on the left side, where she’d always sat. She on the left, he on the right, pushing back and forth in a pleasant rhythm.

  Across the street, Owen and Mildred Stout rose from their game of Scrabble at the dining-room table and walked through the house, turning off the downstairs lights. She saw the bathroom light upstairs flicker on, then five minutes later fall dark. A faint glow from Mildred’s bedside table bathed the room in a soft orange. A shadow appeared behind their bedroom curtains. It was Owen, easing open the window for fresh air.

  Up and down the street, windows darkened.

  Miss Rudy rose and went inside, slipped out of her clothes and into her nightgown, brushed her teeth, climbed in bed, and then reached for the picture beside her bed. It had yellowed over the years and her eyes weren’t as good, but she could still make him out. The strong jaw, the kind smile, the thatch of unruly hair. “Bachelor hair,” he’d called it, with a laugh.

  She returned the picture to her bedside table, turned off the light, and lay in the dark, remembering. They’d met forty years ago this past Sunday. Forty years. There were some dates she forgot, but not that one. Never that one.

  Four

  A Present Danger

  Ellis Hodge sat at his kitchen table, looking over the fields toward their pond, eating his pancakes with unusual gusto.

  “You gonna help me clean off around the pond, kiddo?” he asked Amanda, reaching over to tousle her hair with a callused hand.

  “Can I drive the bush hog?” Amanda asked.

  He leaned back in his chair and studied her. “I don’t know about that. You’re awful young. How old are you now?” He was trying his best to look serious.

  “I’m sixteen, you know that. And I have my driver’s license.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s right. Don’t see how I could have forgotten that. We’ve nearly died at your hands a dozen times already.”

  Amanda Hodge, for all her intelligence and poise, was a menace behind the wheel. In a scant six months, she’d killed a groundhog, knocked over their basketball goal, and taken out the lamppost in front of Grant’s Hardware.

  “A little more practice won’t hurt, I suppose,” Ellis said. “Nice, level ground. No ditches or stumps. Insurance is paid up. Sure, you can drive the bush hog.” He grinned.

  “Don’t pay him any mind,” Miriam told Amanda. “You’ll be a fine driver in no time at all.”

  “I just hope we don’t run out of cars first,” Ellis said with a grin.

  “You stop pestering her,” Miriam warned, snapping him with a dish towel.

  Pestering the women in his life was something Ellis Hodge enjoyed to no end, and over the years Miriam and Amanda had learned to give as good as they got.

  Amanda had been born to Ellis’s no-good brother, Ralph, and his wife. Wretched alcoholics, they’d taken Ellis and Miriam’s life savings on the condition they leave Amanda with them, move far away, and never return. That was five years ago, and Amanda had blossomed in their absence. Letters from colleges arrived on an almost weekly basis, urging her to apply. And to Ellis’s dismay, teenage boys were starting to swarm around their doorstep like bees to honey.

  It was a Saturday morning, late in May. Deena Morrison’s wedding was two weeks away. Everyone had assumed the wedding would be held at the Harmony Friends meetinghouse. Though she hadn’t asked to have it there, the trustees had carpeted and painted the building the winter before in anticipation of the big event. When she’d announced she was having an outdoor wedding at the Hodges’ farm, in the pasture beside the pond, people were put out for a while, but got over it when Deena hired the Friendly Women’s Circle to cater the reception.

  The task had fallen to Ellis and Miriam to spruce up the pond. Ellis had retired to the barn the month before to build an arbor, while Amanda and Miriam had busied themselves planting ornamental grasses and a variety of flowers in clusters around the pond’s perimeter. Ellis had tilled the ground around the pond, laid on grass seed, and had a thick carpet of bluegrass to show for his efforts.

  “Tell you what, honey,” Ellis said, finishing his last bite of pancakes. “Why don’t you bush-hog the pasture so folks’ll have a place to park, and I’ll use the riding mower and mow off around the pond.”

  “It doesn’t look like anyone will be mowing today,” Miriam said, peering out the window. “It’s starting to rain.”

  The rumble of thunder could be heard in the distance.

  “There goes the day,” Ellis grumbled.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Miriam said. “We’ve been talking forever about driving up to the city to see the new state museum. Besides, it’s time we exposed Amanda to a little culture. Why don’t we go today?”

  “Can I drive?” Amanda asked.

  Ellis was trapped, with no hope of escape. “Uh, well…”

  “Sure you can. It’ll be good practice,” Miriam said.

  Miriam and Amanda cleaned up the breakfast dishes while Ellis got dressed, checked the oil, and swept the straw out of the truck. He sat in the truck waiting for them to come out, putting the time to good use by praying they would reach the city alive.

  Driving the back roads, it’s three hours to the city. They passed through one small town after another, making a game of it, seeing who could spy the water tower first as they approached each town.

  “They say those old water towers were welded with lead and now these kids are getting brain-damaged and that’s what’s
behind all this hyperactivity,” Ellis said. Ellis was a storehouse of peculiar information, most of it inaccurate. He was fond of saying, “They say…,” then disclosing some startling revelation, though he could never remember who the “they” was.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Miriam said. “If that were true, they’d be tearing them down.”

  “I’m just telling you what they say.”

  “Who’s this they you’re talking about?”

  “Some professor from this college out in California,” Ellis said. He often attributed his sources to a professor two thousand miles away.

  Amanda and Miriam began to chuckle.

  “You laugh all you want, but don’t blame me if you end up addlepated,” Ellis cautioned. “I warned you.”

  “But we’re on a well,” Amanda said. “We don’t get our water from the tower.”

  “There was a time when children respected their elders and didn’t talk back,” Ellis said. “Now pay attention to your driving. You almost hit a dog back there.”

  “What are you talking about?” Miriam asked. “She missed it by fifty feet. Besides, it was tied to a tree.”

  They bickered back and forth good-naturedly the entire way to the city. They don’t have a radio in the truck. Ellis had read somewhere that sound waves from car speakers caused men to be sterile, so he’d taken it out and replaced it with commentary.

  He carries a bird book in his glove compartment, which he uses to identify the various fowl who’ve encountered vehicles head-on and lost. On the way to the city, they pulled over for two starlings and a yellow-bellied sapsucker on its way to Canada for summer vacation.

  “I wonder if birds commit suicide,” Ellis mused. “Maybe just get fed up with it all and decide to eat a bumper.”

  This was the kind of topic that could occupy Ellis’s attention for hours on end.

  “What’s interesting,” he said, “is that I’ve never found a dead bluebird. Not once. I guess that song is right.”

  “What song is that?” Amanda asked.

  “The bluebird of happiness song. You know that one, don’t you?” He sang a few bars. “Be like I, hold your head up high, till you find a bluebird of happiness.” He hummed the rest of the song, then said, “They got these medicines now for people who are depressed. Maybe if they mixed some of that up with the birdseed, we wouldn’t have so many birds killin’ themselves.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t suicide,” Amanda suggested. “Maybe they were just slow.”

  “Or stupid,” Miriam added.

  “And squirrels,” Ellis continued. “You can’t hardly drive a mile without hitting a squirrel. It’s like they want to die. They’re just standing there in the road and along you come and they run right underneath your wheels. What have squirrels got to be depressed about?”

  Miriam sighed. “They’re probably wife squirrels whose husbands drove them nuts.”

  Ellis frowned.

  They stopped at a diner south of the city for an early lunch. It was still raining. Amanda parked the truck, and they hopscotched their way to the restaurant door around the pools of water that had collected in the parking lot. There was an open booth near the back. It was warm and steamy inside; the windows were fogged over. A jukebox in the corner crooned a Don Williams song.

  “Well, I have to say you were right, Miriam. We needed a little culture.” Ellis glanced around the diner. “This is nice. Real dishes and everything.”

  They ordered three cheeseburgers. “Drag ’em through the garden,” Ellis told the waitress, who smiled as if Ellis were witty and clever, though she’d heard that expression fifty times a day for the past ten years.

  Ellis noticed a man over at the jukebox, leaning against the glass and peering at the selections. Though his back was to him, the tilt of his head seemed most familiar. And when the man turned to a woman and asked, “How about Willie Nelson?” Ellis was sure. It had been five years, but when you grow up sharing a bedroom with your little brother for eighteen years, staying up late, talking back and forth in a moon-shadowed room, you’d know him anywhere.

  Ralph Hodge turned from the jukebox and, seeing Ellis, stopped and stared. The brothers studied one another, not saying a word. Then Ralph smiled slightly, nodded at Ellis, and sat down next to his wife.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” Miriam asked.

  Ellis tore his eyes away from his brother. “Nothing, nothing at all. Just waiting for our food, that’s all.”

  He leaned back in the booth and draped his arm around Amanda, protectively, instinctively.

  Their cheeseburgers came; they ate quickly, Ellis urging them along. “Got to see that museum before it closes. Let’s not dawdle.”

  Ralph was the first to leave. Ellis watched as he paid his bill at the counter, then opened the door for his wife, and walked out into the rain, hunched over, toward their car, a white, rust-speckled sedan. They sat in the car. Then Ralph’s wife turned in her seat and peered into the diner. Her car door opened, and she stepped out and began walking toward the diner.

  Ellis watched, transfixed. She was crying, her tears mingling with the rain.

  Ralph jumped from the car, caught up with her halfway across the parking lot, and guided her back to their car.

  If Ellis hadn’t been paying attention, he never would have heard them.

  His brother saying, “It wouldn’t be right.”

  His wife crying, “But that’s our baby in there.”

  Miriam glanced at Ellis, then followed his gaze out the window as Ralph and his wife climbed back in the car. “Why are you staring at those people?” she asked.

  “Oh, no certain reason. Just thought I knew them, that’s all. Looked like some fella I used to know over at the feed store in Cartersburg. But it wasn’t.” He forced himself to take the last bite of his cheeseburger.

  The reverse lights on Ralph’s car lit up as he backed from his space, then went dark as he rolled forward, pausing at the highway before accelerating away, his car disappearing in a swirl of mist and fog.

  “You girls, ready?” he asked, standing up, pulling the wallet from his back pocket, and laying down a tip.

  “Let’s go,” Amanda said. “Can I drive?”

  “How about we let Ellis do the driving now that we’re in the city,” Miriam suggested.

  They paid their bill, then dashed to the truck. Amanda sat between them. Ellis was in no mood to stay in the city, in the vicinity of his brother. He started the truck, then turned to Miriam. “You know, I think I might have left the iron on back home.”

  “You haven’t used an iron in twenty years,” Miriam laughed. “What do you mean you left it on?”

  “I unplugged it,” Amanda said. “I ironed my jeans, then I unplugged it.”

  “I’m sure I smelled something hot just before we left,” Ellis insisted. “Did you unplug the coffee pot?”

  Miriam thought for a moment. “Yes. It was dirty, so I washed it. I remember unplugging it then.”

  “Wonder what it was I smelled?” Ellis mused. “Oh, well, it’ll probably be all right. Anyway, that’s why we have insurance. Right?” He moved the gearshift into reverse and backed up.

  “Do you think we should go back and check on things?” Miriam asked, a note of concern creeping into her voice.

  “Nah, we’ll be all right. It’s probably nothing.”

  He edged the truck forward and pulled onto the highway.

  “Maybe we ought to go home,” Miriam said.

  “You think?”

  “Yes, let’s. Amanda, is that okay with you, honey?”

  “I guess so. Can I drive?”

  Ellis rolled to stop. “Sure, honey. You drive, and I’ll keep us company.”

  But he scarcely said a word the whole way home. He just stared out the side window of the truck, preoccupied.

  “Don’t worry. The house will be fine,” Miriam said, patting his hand.

  “Hope so.”

  They turned into the driveway a little before three.
Up the lane, their farmhouse stood unmolested, against a backdrop of oak trees Ellis’s grandfather had planted sixty years before.

  “See, everything’s fine,” Miriam said, with a sigh of relief.

  Ellis nodded his agreement, though in his heart he knew it wasn’t true.

  Five

  The Night Before

  All things being equal, Sam Gardner preferred funerals over weddings. There were no mothers of the bride to appease, no hungover groomsmen to sober up or photographers to accommodate. At funerals, the guest of honor lay quietly, without a word of protest or advice, not worrying for one moment whether he’d forget the vows or she’d trip on her bridal gown.

  At funerals, he didn’t have to sit in a banquet hall eating overcooked chicken with inebriated strangers. Or dance. Instead, people gathered in the church basement, in the bosom of family and friends, eating chicken and noodles, profoundly grateful for having dodged death’s bullet.

  Funerals didn’t require a rehearsal the night before, which tended to be even worse than the wedding. Sam hated rehearsals most of all—the last minute changes in the ceremony, the frayed nerves, having to explain to a pregnant bride why “You’re Having My Baby” is not an appropriate wedding song.

  Despite this, he’d been looking forward to Deena’s wedding ever since Dr. Pierce had proposed the autumn before. Now the week of Deena’s wedding had arrived and Harmony was frantic with activity. Ned Kivett had ordered in a rack of new dresses at the Five and Dime, which was picked clean five days before the wedding. Kathy at the Kut ’n’ Kurl was staying open late to accommodate the mob of women wanting their hair styled. On Thursday, a white three-spired tent appeared next to the Hodges’ pond, as if the circus had come to town.

  “Ellis told me they had three hundred chairs,” Asa Peacock said to no one in particular at the Coffee Cup Restaurant.

  “I heard they was having a swan made of ice,” Kyle Weathers said. “Bet five dollars it’ll be a puddle of water before noon.”

  “Betcha it won’t,” Clevis Nagle said. They each pulled a five-dollar bill from their wallets and handed it to Vinny for safekeeping in his cash register.