He drove on, past Fern Hampton’s house. She was raking the first batch of leaves into the gutter in a race against the setting sun. He coasted to a stop and leaned his head out the window.
“Hey, Fern.”
“Ellis Hodge, I’m glad you stopped by. I have something to tell you.” She thumped her rake on the sidewalk several times for emphasis. “Your brother is with that drunkards’ group that meets in our church, and last Wednesday they didn’t clean the coffeemaker after they were done with it. You tell him for me that if they don’t start takin’ a little better care of the kitchen, they’ll have to find another place to meet.”
“You might want to leave him a note, Fern. I’m not sure I’ll be seeing him anytime soon.”
She thumped her rake two more times. “I’ll write him a letter, that’s what I’ll do. Send it registered mail. That way he can’t deny gettin’ it.” She paused for a breath and another thump of her rake. “People like that, you try to help them and they don’t appreciate it, they go back to their old ways. It’s just like the Bible says, a dog returns to its vomit and a fool to his folly.”
“It’s been nice seein’ you, Fern. You take care now.” What a hard woman, he muttered under his breath as he drove away.
It is a curious phenomenon how the faults of another are glaring, while personal failings escape notice. And that was true for Ellis Hodge, who continued his drive toward home, utterly convinced his brother was still the bum he’d always been.
Thirteen
Patience
October passed in a flurry of activity. The farmers worked their fields, the distant rumble of combines could be heard through the day, and at night the drone of grain dryers lay over the land like a blanket. Dale Hinshaw was confined to home, his heart weakened after a frenzied burst of evangelism during which he’d distributed his fake five-dollar bills in restaurants across the county. Four weeks later, with not one convert to show for his efforts and a host of angry waitresses in his wake, he’d taken to his bed, a shell of his former self.
At Harmony Friends Meeting, Sam was compiling a file for Dale’s funeral sermon, pleasant memories he could share with mourners in the event of Dale’s demise. It was a piteously slender file, and Sam was trying to plump it up with quotes he’d culled from Reader’s Digest.
“Why don’t you just stand up there and tell the truth about him?” Frank the secretary suggested, standing in the doorway of Sam’s office. “Let it be a lesson to others.”
“That’s not what eulogies are for,” Sam pointed out. “Eulogies are for telling people how nice the deceased was even if you have to lie. Say, didn’t Dale once lend you fifty cents for coffee?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Good, I can mention that.” He wrote on a Post-it Note and tucked it in Dale’s file.
“But he charged me 25 percent interest each day,” Frank said. “Ended up having to pay him back a dollar fifty-three.”
Sam reached into his file and plucked out the note. “Probably I should leave the coffee story out,” he said, wadding the note up and tossing it in the wastebasket in the corner. “Can you be sure to let me know if you hear any nice stories about Dale?”
“In the off chance that happens, you’ll be the first to know,” Frank promised, sauntering back to his office.
It was Friday, and Sam was mostly done with his sermon. He needed a closing illustration about patience. He’d been preaching a series on the fruits of the Spirit from the fifth chapter of Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The problem with living in Harmony most of his life was that he hadn’t been exposed to many instances of patience. He had numerous stories about impatience, most of them involving his secretary.
“When are you gonna pick the hymns so I can do the bulletin for this Sunday?” Frank yelled from his office. “I want to get out of here sometime before midnight, for cryin’ out loud.”
“All Creatures of Our God and King,” “’Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus,” and “When We All Get to Heaven.”
“What about the Scripture reading?” Frank yelled.
“Galatians 5:22–23. The fruits of the Spirit. Same as last week.”
Sam could hear the clickety-clack of Frank’s manual typewriter as he pecked in the numbers.
“It would be a whole lot easier to use the computer,” Sam said. “You wouldn’t have to retype everything all over again each week. Just plug in the numbers and print it out, easy as pie.”
“Tell you what, Sam. If the hard drive in my Underwood ever crashes, I’ll use that fancy computer of yours. Until then, I’ll stick with this.”
Why, Sam wondered to himself, did people fight change so when it came to the church? The irony of it. Dale Hinshaw going around railing against any and all theological enlightenment, wanting to drag the church back to the seventeenth century. But when it came to his health, he was willing to forego leeches and bloodletting and have a heart transplant. What was it about religion that made people so stuck in the mud? It made him mad just thinking about it.
“You could at least clean the gunk out of the letter e. It’s starting to look like an o,” he yelled in to Frank.
“Boy, for someone who’s going to preach about patience, you sure are a grouch today,” Frank yelled back.
Being in no mood to write about patience, Sam switched off his computer. To heck with a closing illustration, he thought. I’ll just tell them to be patient if they know what’s good for them.
Dale’s deathwatch was wearing him down. For the past three days, convinced the angels were hovering about ready to carry him home, Dale had summoned Sam to his bedside. Sam flinched every time the phone rang. In his less charitable moments, he wished Dale would die and get it over with.
The next week was the boys’ fall break from school. Sam and his family had planned for some time to visit Barbara’s parents at their farm, two hours south. Given Dale’s affinity for putting people out, he would likely die the night before they left and ruin Sam’s one opportunity to get away.
For the past week, Dale had been propped up in a hospital bed in his living room next to his picture window, which he rapped on when anyone walked past. He would motion for them to come in, then apprise them of his suffering. Sam walked the long way home to avoid Dale’s litany of woe.
All in all, it had been a gruesome week in ministry. Ralph and Sandy Hodge had been attending Harmony Friends the past two Sundays. Ellis had visited the office and asked Sam to kick them out.
“I can’t do that,” Sam had explained. “They’ve done nothing wrong.”
“What do you mean they haven’t done anything wrong? They’re drunks and they abandoned their only child. That don’t seem like good Christian behavior to me.”
“Ellis, does Miriam know you’re here?”
Ellis had studied the tops of his boots. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I just wondered what she might think of your request to kick your brother out of church.”
“She’d take my side.”
“Well, Ellis, I’m sorry, but I can’t,” Sam had told him. “Jesus took in everyone and so must we.”
“You asked Bob Miles’s dad to leave that one time.”
The problem with some people, Sam thought, is that they have too long a memory.
“That’s because he was being abusive to other people. Ralph and Sandy have been perfectly cordial.” He had paused, debating what to say next. He dreaded having to challenge people, but felt the time had come for some frank talk. “Ellis, it’s no secret that you’ve been treating your brother shabbily. He came here wanting to make amends and heal relationships, and you’ve been most unkind to him. I’m asking you to make room in your heart for your brother. Not just for your brother’s sake, but for Amanda’s also. You’re asking her to choose against her parents, and no one should do that to a child.”
“Well, sometimes kids don’t know what’s best for them.”
“That’s true, but that isn’t the case here. Amanda is a very capable young lady, wiser than many adults I know. Besides, you can’t keep her away from her parents all her life.”
“Well, I can’t believe you’d take their side,” Ellis had said, then had turned and walked from Sam’s office.
Sam had phoned him the next day and left a message, but Ellis hadn’t returned his call.
First, it had been Dale Hinshaw driving him nuts, then Ellis Hodge, and now Frank, his secretary. What is it with old men? Sam wondered. Do they take lessons on how to be crotchety? Dear Lord, don’t let me get like that, he prayed.
He’d hoped a rousing sermon on patience would melt their hearts, though he wasn’t overly optimistic. The problem with preaching sermons people needed to hear was that the people who needed most to hear them thought they were intended for someone else.
Lacking a personal illustration, Sam decided to finish the sermon with the parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15, though not without misgivings. When he’d preached on that text two years before, Asa Peacock had approached him after worship, wearing an uncharacteristic frown. “That shepherd shoulda quit while he was ahead. Sheep aren’t worth the trouble.”
Sam had tried to explain that the parable was actually about the patience of God and the worth of the individual, but Asa hadn’t been persuaded. “Sheep are dumber than dirt. You could smack one upside the head and if it could talk, it’d ask you to do it again.”
Biblical scholarship, Sam had decided long ago, didn’t have much of a following in Harmony.
The next day was Saturday. He took his younger, Addison, to football practice in the morning, then spent the afternoon raking leaves. The angry whine of leaf blowers could be heard all over town. The week before, Bob Miles had written an editorial about noise pollution, calling down a host of plagues upon the inventor of the leaf blower, who, if God was just, was deep in the bowels of hell, without earplugs, a leaf blower screaming in his ear, driving him insane.
Sam was of the same mind and therefore able to resist Uly Grant’s preachments about the superiority of the leaf blower. He bought four rakes instead, one for each member of the family. Saturday afternoon found him, Barbara, and their sons raking the leaves in a line across the yard and into the gutter for the street department to collect, saving back a pile for the boys to jump in and, when they wearied of raking, to burn in the driveway for the smell.
They worked four hours, then went in for supper—chili, peanut butter sandwiches, and iced tea. Sam’s parents stopped by while they were washing dishes to compare leaf-raking notes. Sam’s father is a purist. He prays over his rake, preparing for the task like a priest arranging the elements for Communion. He composts the leaves in a worm bed behind his barn, turning them once a week with a pitchfork, stirring coffee grounds into the mix each morning. Caffeine, he believes, energizes the worms, causing them to wiggle on the fishing hook, luring more fish.
He sells night crawlers each summer, on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, to fishermen passing by on their way to Raccoon Lake two counties west. He posts a sign on the telephone pole at the corner of Main and Mulberry—Home Grown Night Crawlers—with an arrow pointing toward his home. He’s been thinking of expanding into slugs and needs more leaves, so he asked Sam for his. They spread a painter’s tarp on the street, raked the leaves onto it, then lifted them into the back of his father’s pickup, and hauled them the four blocks to the Gardners’ house on Mulberry Street.
“Yep, worms and slugs this year, and if that goes well, I might expand into crickets,” Sam’s father said. “There’s big money in crickets.”
“The sky’s the limit,” Sam said. “Today, earthworms. Tomorrow, you’re the Rockefeller of the bait business.”
His father smiled at the thought of it.
“So what’s tomorrow’s sermon about?” he asked Sam, raking the leaves out of the truck and onto the compost pile. This was an old scheme of Sam’s father, who routinely asked him to divulge his sermon contents the day before church, so he wouldn’t have to attend the next morning.
“I’m going to preach about a rich man who built larger and larger barns and laid up a big supply of bait, then decided to sit back and relax, and he died the next day. Maybe you oughta come hear it.”
His father hitched up his pants, then studied him for a moment. “I thought you were preaching on the fruits of the Spirit.”
Sam chuckled. “You got me there, Dad. Actually, I’m going to talk about patience.”
“Fat lot of good that’ll do.”
“Well, it never hurts to try.”
He raked another clump of leaves out of the truck. “Patience, huh? Well, your mother could certainly use that sermon. I’ll recommend she pay close attention.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
Sam’s father eased himself down off the tailgate, walked into the barn, flipped on the floodlights, and returned with a broom to sweep out the last of the leaves. “It’ll be sweet romance all winter long and come spring, there’ll be young ’uns poppin’ out all over. Yessiree, money in the bank.”
His annual discourse on worm propagation was the closest he’d ever come to talking with Sam about reproduction. As a child, Sam thought babies came from compost piles.
They closed the tailgate with a resounding thunk, then climbed in the cab of the truck and drove back to Sam’s house. Piles of leaves lined the streets, like watchers of a parade. They drove this gauntlet of color, taking care not to drive too fast, lest leaves be scattered in their wake.
“Looks like winter’s on the way,” Sam’s father said, anticipating the cold with a shiver.
“Any day now,” Sam said, shifting from second gear to third in front of Bea Majors’s home. “Why don’t you take some of your worm money and go to Florida this year for a month or so?”
“What would your mother do?”
“I was thinking you’d take her with you,” Sam said.
“Kinda takes all the fun out of it.”
“You better not let her hear you say that, or you won’t be in any kind of shape to go to Florida.”
“Can’t go to Florida anyway. Gotta stay here and watch my worms.”
Uly Grant was standing in his driveway, burning leaves, the flames licking the edges of the piles, a glowing thread of light in the autumn dark. They turned the corner and drove past Dale Hinshaw’s home.
“You know, if you were any kind of pastor, you’d rake Dale’s leaves.”
“It’s my job to equip the church members for ministry,” Sam said. “Why don’t you rake them? That way we’ll both be doing what we should.”
“For a man of the cloth, you sure are sneaky.”
“Got to be to keep up with my parishioners,” Sam said.
They turned into his driveway and rolled to a stop in front of the garage, alongside the kitchen door. They sat in the truck, just the two of them, studying the yard, thinking their thoughts.
“Yep, gonna be some winter,” Sam’s father said after a bit. “If I didn’t have so much to do, I wouldn’t mind gettin’ down to Florida. Don’t see it happening, though.”
“You think you got it bad. If Dale Hinshaw dies, I have to think up twenty minutes of nice things to say about him.”
Sam’s father winced. “I don’t envy you that.”
“You know something nice I could say about him?”
He thought for the longest time. “Nothing comes to mind.”
“If something does, will you let me know?”
“You’ll be the first to know,” Sam’s father promised. “Yessiree bob, the first to know.”
Fourteen
Out with the Old, In with the New
The phone call came the first day of November, on a Monday morning, Sam Gardner’s day off. He’d just settled into his recliner to read the Sunday paper, which had arrived from the city in that morning’s mail. He’d read the front section, then the comics, and then the advice columns, in that order. He su
rveyed the obituaries, to make sure no one he knew had died, and had just turned to the television section to preview that week’s drivel when the telephone rang.
“Can you get that?” he yelled to Barbara. “I’m not home, so take a message.”
He heard his wife pick up the phone in the next room.
“Sam, it’s for you.”
“Daggone it all, why can’t you take a message?” he grumbled. “It’s my day off.”
“You need to take this one,” Barbara said, handing him the telephone.
“Hello,” he said, rather gruffly, in order to discourage a lengthy conversation.
“It’s Dale,” Dolores Hinshaw began.
Of course, it would be Dale, Sam thought. Who else but Dale Hinshaw would ruin my day off?
“The hospital called. They have a heart for him. We’re supposed to be at the hospital in three hours. I’m too upset to drive and Dale can’t and I called my sister but she’s not home. Harvey Muldock said he’d take us, but he and Eunice went up to Chicago to see their son and all our kids are at work and we can’t get hold of them and I don’t know what we’re gonna do. I called the hospital to ask if they could just keep it in Tupperware until we got there, but I guess they don’t do that.”
Then she let out a wail, which Barbara heard from across the room. Sam covered the telephone mouthpiece with his hand, turned, and smiled at his wife. “Honey, did you have any plans today?”
“Laundry, grocery shopping, housecleaning, taking the boys to the dentist after school, then to the barbershop for haircuts, then cooking supper and making cupcakes for Addison’s class tomorrow. Other than that, my day’s wide open. Tell you what though, if you want to do all that, I’ll be happy to help the Hinshaws.”
A Change of Heart Page 10
