“I guess that’ll have to do,” Barbara said, taking his arm.
Addison squirmed his way in between them. His face was a study of dried milk and faint red tomato sauce.
“Let me guess, you had spaghetti for lunch,” Sam said.
“Yep, and chocolate milk.”
“Sounds delicious,” Sam said. “Nothing like spaghetti and chocolate milk to perk a man up.”
They’d not been home long when Asa Peacock pulled in their driveway with a load of firewood, which the boys stacked in a lopsided row behind the garage, while Barbara made supper and Sam went to visit Dale, who had been cut loose from the hospital the week before and sent home to recuperate.
Persuaded God had spared his life for some noble purpose, Dale had been agitating Sam to reconsider canceling the revival so they could bring in an evangelist he’d seen on television—a man who’d been a missionary in Africa, where the cannibals ate his right leg before he could escape. Undeterred, he’d carved himself a new, albeit shorter, leg and now traveled the country enlightening the multitudes. Brother Lester, the One-Legged Evangelist. Like most folks of his theological persuasion, he leaned toward the right.
Sam had hoped the heart transplant would improve Dale’s personality, though that hasn’t happened. His new heart appears to be every bit as hard and unyielding as his previous one. When Sam had expressed reservations about Brother Lester visiting their church, Dale had blasted away at him. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. Stanley Farlow told me that the whole time I was gone you didn’t preach the Word once. Said you were nothing but a lukewarm ear tickler, and I’d have to say he’s right.”
Sam had been reading a book on the power of forgiveness. Written by a Catholic monk, it described in poetic language the benefits of pardon and mercy. Though Sam suspected the monk had never met anyone like Dale, he was still theoretically committed to the notion of turning the other cheek, so he went to visit Dale on his day off, in hopes of spreading some Christian cheer.
He didn’t stay long. They discussed their Thanksgiving plans. Dale hinted around that a true minister of the gospel would invite lonely parishioners to Thanksgiving dinner at his house. “Yeah, we’re just gonna be here by ourselves on Thanksgiving. The kids aren’t coming in until Saturday. It’ll just be me and the missus here by ourselves. Just the two of us. All alone. Here by ourselves.”
“Saturday will be here before you know it,” Sam said, determined not to host Dale Hinshaw yet another Thanksgiving.
“It might be my last Thanksgiving,” Dale said mournfully. “That is, if I live that long. ’Course that’s not my decision. But if the good Lord calls me home, I’ll not complain. His will, not mine, be done.”
Sam sat quietly, trying to imagine why God might want Dale in closer proximity.
“Well, you be sure to enjoy your family this Saturday,” Sam said, rising to leave. “Tell your kids I said hello.”
“Would you say a little prayer for us before you go? Maybe ask the Lord’s blessing on us in our loneliness?”
Sam almost caved in, but managed to steel himself, pray a brief prayer, and escape before Dale Hinshaw ended up seated across from him at the Thanksgiving table, hogging the drumsticks.
He made it halfway home, before he was overcome with guilt and went back to invite the Hinshaws to Thanksgiving. “We’ll be eating around noon.”
He didn’t mention it to Barbara until his parents arrived a little before eleven on Thanksgiving morning. “By the way, honey, I think Dale and Dolores might stop by for a little bite to eat. I seem to remember them saying they might. We might want to set a couple more places.”
Sam’s timing was exquisite. Just as she began to object, their front door opened and there stood his brother, Roger, and his latest girlfriend, Sabrina. Coming up the sidewalk behind them were the Hinshaws, clutching on to one another.
“Well, isn’t this a nice surprise,” Sam said. “Look, honey, Dale and Dolores are here. Come in, come in.”
As it turned out, Dale wasn’t able to squeeze a word in edgewise. Sabrina spent the entire dinner bemoaning global warming and lamenting the invention of the internal combustion engine.
Roger looked on, beaming at his girlfriend. “She’s from San Francisco originally. She lived in a redwood tree for three weeks so it wouldn’t be cut down. It was in all the newspapers.”
Barbara and Sam smiled, contemplating the appropriate response to Roger’s revelation.
“I’m looking forward to the dessert you brought,” Barbara said. “It looks delicious. What exactly is it?”
“It’s homemade yogurt,” Roger said. “Sabrina made it from goat milk.”
Roger doesn’t date women; he dates causes, none of which last. By the next Thanksgiving, there’d be another girlfriend, probably someone from New York City who wrote poetry and belonged to a vegetable cooperative. But then Sam’s mother asked Sabrina how she felt about children, which led to a lecture on overpopulation and the general irresponsibility of bringing someone into a world on the edge of collapse.
“That’s why we got to go out and get people right with the Lord before the Rapture,” Dale interjected, launching into a commercial for Brother Lester, who, despite losing a leg to cannibals, was still faithfully preaching the Word.
“It serves him for right for imposing his values on other cultures,” said Sabrina, who then groaned about Western imperialism and religious colonialism.
Roger watched, glowing, as Sabrina prattled on, and when he kissed his mother good-bye, he whispered in her ear that he was thinking of proposing.
It was all his mother talked about while she and Sam and Barbara washed dishes. “Why can’t they just live together?” she moaned.
It is a shock to hear a mother urge her offspring to shack up, but then an afternoon with Sabrina had a way of shattering time-honored values.
“Your poor mother,” Barbara said that night, while she and Sam were lying in bed. “I bet she worries about Roger.”
“At least she has me,” Sam pointed out. “The winner of the Ora Crandell Memorial Scholarship. That ought to be enough glory for any mother.”
“And you wear your accomplishments so lightly. Winning fifty dollars and a shoe-shine kit would make the average man insufferable, but you’re the same humble man you’ve always been.”
“I am, aren’t I,” Sam agreed.
They lay quietly in the dark as an occasional passing car cast shadows against their bedroom wall. Barbara was thinking of all the things she had to do the next day, and Sam was reaching back in his memory twenty-five years, when the world was his oyster and pearls seemed plenty.
Sixteen
The Man in the Window
Bob Miles watched from across the street as Ned Kivett removed the Thanksgiving mannequins from his display window at the Five and Dime. Like most of the Five and Dime decorations, these had come with the store in 1956, when Ned had won the store from Marvin Danner in a poker game at the Odd Fellows Lodge. A thousand dollars in the hole, Marvin had offered Ned title to the Five and Dime instead. It had taken Ned less than a week to realize Marvin had gotten the better end of the stick.
In the window, Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrim were smiling happily at an Indian sporting a Mohawk haircut. The Indian was frowning, as if sensing he were about to get the shaft. He looked a little like Ned Kivett had in 1963.
Ned piled the mannequins in a shopping cart and pushed them through the store to the back room. Arms and legs hung lifelessly over the sides of the cart, casualties on their way to a storeroom burial. Ned stacked them in the corner next to the Easter Bunny, then loaded the Christmas decorations onto the cart and wheeled them to the front of the store. Another trip back to the storeroom for a load of snow—a bag of cotton that over the years had grayed to a wintry slush. Rudolph the reindeer, his red nose rubbed raw from years of children picking at it, stood next to Santa, who looked like an Odd Fellow after a hard night of fellowship.
Santa was actually Mr. Pilgr
im in more festive garb. Ned had stripped him in the storeroom, wheeled him naked through the store, then propped him in the window before dressing him as Santa. He’d forgotten the extra padding and had returned to the storeroom in search of a pillow.
What a sorry mess, Bob thought, looking on from the sidewalk as Santa Claus mooned the passing traffic. He thought of taking a picture of that for the front page, but could just imagine the letters to the editor he’d receive.
You cannot imagine the disgust I felt when I opened your newspaper only to find a naked man staring back! These must surely be the last days the Bible warns about, when depravity of all sort is unfolding before our very eyes!
The year before, Bob Miles had written an editorial bemoaning the wretched state of the town’s Christmas decorations—three strands of lights, a half dozen plywood cutouts Wilbur Matthews made in his garage back in the ’70s, and Ned Kivett’s pathetic excuse for a Christmas display—to no avail.
Bob had even sponsored a Christmas decorating contest, to be judged by the Sausage Queen and other dignitaries, but no one had entered. First prize had been a year’s subscription to the Herald, which was not much of an inducement since it was already free. Then he’d thought of sponsoring a beauty contest, a Miss North Pole, but his wife had nipped that in the bud.
Ellis and Amanda Hodge rumbled past in Ellis’s truck. Amanda was driving, squinting through the windshield, appearing to be in sore need of corrective eyewear. It was remarkable, Bob thought to himself, how a girl who’d won the National Spelling Bee could be such a dreadful driver. Success had attached itself so firmly to Amanda, it was a jolt to witness her deficiencies behind the wheel.
A clap of crunching metal snapped him out of his ruminations and he looked up to see the Hodges’ truck wrapped around a streetlamp. Though not a religious man, Bob breathed a prayer of thanksgiving for what would surely be a front-page photograph and hurried across the street, his camera at the ready.
Ellis had pulled a bandana from his pocket and was preparing to wipe away a slight stream of blood trickling from his nose.
“Not yet,” Bob cried out, clicking away with his camera. “Let me get a shot of that blood!”
There was nothing like gore and mayhem to increase circulation.
Amanda reclined in the seat, unharmed, but dazed.
A small crowd began to gather around the truck, shouting advice.
“Get ’em out of that truck before it catches fire.”
“Don’t move them. They might have broken necks.”
“Keep away from that blood! No telling what diseases he might have.”
Ellis and Amanda scrunched down lower in the seat, thoroughly embarrassed.
“Somebody call an ambulance!”
Antifreeze leaked from the radiator onto the street.
“My Lord, that’s gasoline,” a voice yelled out. “She’s gonna blow.”
What a picture that would be, Bob thought. He studied the growing puddle. “It’s just antifreeze,” he reported, clearly disappointed.
Sam Gardner, sitting in the chair at Kyle’s barbershop, had witnessed the entire calamity. He’d rushed from the shop and begun helping Amanda from the car. “Did the same thing myself when I was your age,” he said, in an effort to console her. “Except I hit a Corvette.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “Thank God for seat belts. You don’t look any worse for the wear. Don’t you worry about the truck. It can be replaced. You can’t.”
Ellis had climbed from the truck and was inspecting the front end of his once unblemished truck. Johnny Mackey rolled up in his ambulance, his siren fading into silence. He studied Ellis’s nose. “Maybe we oughta take you to the hospital. I read this story once about a man who broke his nose and he didn’t have it looked at and a bone splinter had poked itself into the brain and three days later the guy dropped over dead, just like that.”
“I’m fine,” Ellis grumbled.
Johnny pulled him aside. “You know, Ellis, events like this remind us of life’s uncertainties. Why don’t you and Miriam stop by tomorrow so we can discuss funeral prearrangements? We’ve got a special this week. A 10 percent discount on embalming with the purchase of every casket.” He slipped Ellis a business card. “We never know when the Lord might call us home,” he said with the solemnity befitting a mortician.
The crowd began to disperse, except for the men who lingered to offer counsel on how best to remove a truck from around a streetlamp. Ten minutes later, Nate Logan arrived with his tow truck, hitched it to the back of Ellis’s truck, and pulled it loose with a long, loud screech, like fingernails on a chalkboard.
By then, Harvey Muldock, having caught wind of a potential customer, had appeared. “Got a real good deal on new trucks, Ellis. Why don’t you and the little lady come on down and we’ll fix you right up?”
“Vultures!” Ellis yelled, uncharacteristically for him. “You’re all trying pick my carcass clean. Johnny Mackey wants to sell me a casket and now you’re after me to buy a truck.”
“Leave the man alone,” Bob Miles ordered. “Can’t you see he’s in a state of shock.” He put his arm around Ellis. “Now why don’t you and Amanda lay down here on the street beside your truck and I’ll get one last picture for the Herald.”
This is all my brother’s fault, Ellis fumed to himself. Not one good thing has happened since he moved back here.
Sam Gardner gave them a ride home. By then, half a dozen concerned citizens had phoned Miriam to tell her the news. The wreck grew in severity with each call. By the sixth one, Ellis and Amanda, or what was left of them, were being helicoptered to the hospital in the city, clinging to life, vestiges of their former selves.
Miriam was backing the car from the barn when they pulled in the driveway. She was so relieved they were alive, the destruction of the truck didn’t faze her. “I thought you were dead. Oh my Lord, I thought you were gone.” She began to weep, clutching Ellis and Amanda to her.
“It’s my fault,” Amanda said. “There was a naked man in Kivett’s window and I was watching him.”
Miriam reddened, and Ellis blushed.
“It wasn’t Ned, was it?” Ellis asked. Rumors of Ned and his mannequins had been circulating for years.
“I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see very well. I just saw his backside.”
“Man ought to be arrested, standing naked in broad daylight like that,” Ellis groused. “What’s this world coming to?”
Losing his truck had soured him considerably.
It was suppertime. Miriam made Amanda’s favorite meal—blueberry pancakes, milk, and bacon on the side. Then Amanda did her homework and went to bed, done in by the day’s events.
Miriam and Ellis lingered at the supper table, contemplating life without a truck.
“It’s that brother of mine,” Ellis said. “He moves back and everything goes wrong. I tell you, Miriam, we ought to pack our bags and take Amanda and move out of this place. Not tell a soul in the world where we’re going.”
Miriam reached across the table and took his hand. “Ellis, you know you don’t mean that. This is our home. And today wasn’t your brother’s fault. He wasn’t anywhere around when you wrecked. You’ve had a rough day. Why don’t you take a shower and let’s go to bed.”
Ellis hung his head, the picture of gloom. “Now that Amanda’s seen a naked man, I suppose you’ll have to give her the birds and the bees talk.”
“Me? Why me? I thought we’d both do that…”
“You can’t be serious. I’m a man. I can’t be talking with her about those things. That’s a mother’s job. If she were a boy, it’d be different.”
“I wonder if they told her anything in school.”
“Not anymore. Dale Hinshaw made them stop. Remember?”
“Then let’s have Dale talk to her,” Miriam suggested.
“It would serve him right,” Ellis agreed. “But let’s not do that to Amanda.”
They sighed.
&nbs
p; “I’ll talk to her this weekend,” Miriam said. “Why don’t you make yourself scarce Saturday morning and we’ll have a girl talk then.”
“I suppose I could go look for a new truck,” he said with a sigh.
Upstairs, Amanda was listening through the heating duct, absolutely horrified. In a life that had seen bleak days, today was one of the worst. Not only had she wrecked Ellis’s truck, Miriam was going to talk with her about sex. She thought of running away before Saturday morning. She imagined their conversation. Her listening and trying not to be embarrassed and thanking Miriam for telling her things she already knew, having heard all about sex from Melissa Yoder, her best friend. Not that Melissa was speaking from personal experience; she read widely.
Boys, Amanda thought, who needs them anyway? She’d seen her first naked man today and it was no big thrill. He’d been standing there in Kivett’s window like a moron—pale, slack-jawed, and lifeless.
She lay in bed, estimating the number of days she had before going away to college.
Downstairs, the phone rang. She could hear Miriam speaking. “Hello, Ralph. Yes, she and Ellis were in a wreck, but they’re all right. She’s upstairs in bed just now. Would you and Sandy like to come by tomorrow to see her. I’m sure she’d love to see you.”
Oh, great, Amanda thought, they’ll come out, Ellis will go to the barn and sulk, and when he comes back in, he and Miriam will argue.
Lately, all they’d done was argue—Miriam reasoning with him, encouraging him to forgive his brother; Ellis standing firm against these graces, hidebound in his loathing.
It wasn’t like she could talk to Ellis about it. She felt she had to be constantly grateful to Miriam and Ellis for taking her in five years ago when her real parents were drunkards. And though she appreciated their sacrifice, she felt their charity required her unwavering thankfulness. Melissa Yoder would occasionally talk back to her parents, the prerogative of every hormone-addled teenager. Amanda couldn’t imagine doing that to Ellis and Miriam, after everything they had done for her. Now she’d wrecked their truck and the burden of gratitude weighed even heavier.
A Change of Heart Page 12
