A Change of Heart

by Philip Gulley

  Barbara ushered them into the parlor, where they sat on chairs never intended to be sat on in the first place. They smiled awkwardly at one another, unaccustomed to this holiday finery.

  Somewhere in the room, a stomach gurgled. “I’ve had the worst gas,” Sam’s father announced. “Started last night. Had some cheese balls over at the Muldocks’ and been paying for it ever since.”

  Sam pondered how best to respond to his father’s revelation. “Those cheese balls will do it every time,” he said after a thoughtful silence.

  Roger and Sabrina arrived a half hour later, dressed in their customary black.

  It took twenty minutes to eat the meal Barbara had started cooking the day before. They pushed away from the table and reminisced about past holidays.

  “What did Santa bring you this year?” Sam’s father asked the boys.

  They ran to their bedroom and returned with their remote-control cars.

  “I hope those aren’t battery powered,” Sabrina said. “Did you know that in America we throw away enough batteries each year to fill the Empire State Building?”

  “Now that’s what I don’t understand,” Sam’s father said. “How do they know that? You couldn’t fill that building with batteries, ’cause every time you opened the doors to put more in, the ones in there’d roll right out and then you’d just have to start all over again. How do they know that?”

  “Batteries aren’t the worst of it,” Sabrina went on, frowning like the earnest person she was. “It’s packaging that’s the real problem. All that cardboard to hold a little toy and people throw it away with no thought of recycling it. You recycle, don’t you, Sam?”

  “Religiously. Don’t want to fill up the landfills.”

  Barbara stared at him, surprised by her husband’s newfound commitment to the environment.

  “Hey, Dad,” Levi piped up, “remember last week when the trash man wouldn’t take that old paint and you poured it down the storm drain?”

  Sam smiled weakly, pushed a sliver of turkey fat around his plate, and tried to remember why he’d been so happy when his children had learned to talk.

  Sam wasn’t the only parent with problems that day. Across town, Ralph and Sandy Hodge were trying to explain to Amanda why a tourist cabin wasn’t a fitting place for a teenage girl to live.

  “It isn’t that we don’t want you to be with us,” Sandy explained. “You know we do. But you wouldn’t have any privacy. There’s not even room for another bed. We need a little more time to prepare a place for you, that’s all. Then we can be together and it’ll be so much nicer. Right now, we’d just be tripping over one another.”

  “Do Ellis and Miriam know you’re here?” Ralph asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Amanda said, wiping her nose with her shirtsleeve. “I told them I was going for a walk.”

  “We need to let them know you’re here,” Ralph said. “They’re probably starting to worry about you. Why don’t you call and tell them where you are?”

  “First, I want to give you your Christmas present,” Amanda said, pulling a small package from her coat pocket. It was a photograph of the three of them, taken at a picture booth in a mall during a rare period of sobriety for Ralph and Sandy. Amanda appeared to be around seven, and they were all dressed up. “Remember, it was Christmas Eve and you took me to the mall and bought me a doll.” She’d kept the picture ever since, tucked between the pages of a diary she’d begun that same year.

  The week before she’d bought a frame for the picture at Kivett’s Five and Dime.

  Ralph and Sandy looked at the picture, not saying a word, just swallowing hard and staring. After a while, Ralph cleared his throat and pulled Amanda to him, smoothing her hair with his hand. “That’s the finest gift anyone ever gave us.”

  They all embraced, sitting on the edge of the bed, the only place to sit in the tiny room.

  “We’ll be getting a place real soon,” Sandy whispered to Amanda. “Then we can be together like a family should.”

  They visited a while longer. Then Ralph wondered if Miriam and Ellis might be concerned about Amanda’s whereabouts. “Probably ought to drive you back home,” he said.

  Back at Ellis and Miriam’s, Ellis had phoned Asa and Jessie Peacock to see if Amanda had stopped to see them.

  “Nope, we’ve not seen her,” Asa reported. “You think someone kidnapped her?”

  No, he hadn’t thought that. Not at least until Asa had suggested the possibility. Now he could think of little else.

  “She’s been kidnapped,” he wailed to Miriam. “Somebody’s taken her. What’s the number for the police?” He paused to catch his breath. “Or maybe she’s run off with someone. Oh, Lord, did you have that talk with her yet?”

  “No, not yet. I was going to, but the time never felt right.”

  “Well, thanks to you she’ll come back here pregnant. You really let her down this time.”

  “Will you settle down! She’s been gone less than two hours. She probably wants a little time to herself.”

  “Well, if you’re not going to do anything, I guess I will,” he declared. He pulled on his barn coat, climbed in his truck, and drove toward town, slowly, peering in the ditches in the event she’d been struck by a car and was at that very moment exhaling her last feeble breath.

  He saw Ralph’s car before they saw his truck and swerved across the road to block their path.

  His no-good, drunken bum of a brother! He should have known. He flung himself out of his truck in a self-righteous fury, strode to Ralph’s car, which had come to a stop, yanked his door open, and punched Ralph squarely on the nose. “Kidnap my daughter again, and the next time you’ll get worse!” he said.

  He’d never punched anyone on the nose, and it was hard to say which of the brothers was more surprised. But Ellis was the first to recover, and while Ralph sat staring at him and holding his nose, Ellis cuffed him again for good measure.

  He then marched around the front of Ralph’s car, seized Amanda by the right arm, pulled her from the car, and half carried her to his truck.

  “He was bringing me home,” she yelled. “Why’d you hit him? And, for your information, I’m not your daughter. I’m your niece. Now take me back to my dad.”

  That Ellis would not do. He threw his truck into gear and tromped on the gas, spinning his rear tires and peppering Ralph’s car with gravel.

  When they reached home, Amanda went straight to her room, refusing to talk. Ellis stalked back and forth across the living room, ranting about his brother in such coarse language Miriam booted him out to the barn, then collapsed in her chair, her head spinning. What has happened to my nice, quiet husband? she wondered to herself. He’s turned into a raving lunatic. She’d read in several magazines that raising children had a deleterious effect on certain people, but she’d had no idea.

  As for Ralph, he was still seated in his car, his head tilted back, a handkerchief pressed to his nose to stanch the flow of blood. Getting punched in the nose, he was coming to realize, helped organize one’s thoughts, and right now he was thinking how much his brother must despise him.

  He entertained the notion of driving to his brother’s farm and returning the favor, then decided against it. He and Sandy had been studying the Bible and that very morning had read about forgiveness, which had put him in a charitable frame of mind. He was grateful he hadn’t just read about God slaying the Amalekites. Who knows how it would have ended? Instead, he drove back home to Sandy and their room at the tourist cabins, where she applied a cold washrag to his nose and consoled him.

  “I guess this means we’re not accepting Miriam’s invitation to come over tonight for dinner,” she said.

  “Probably wouldn’t be wise,” Ralph sniffed. He picked up the picture of Amanda and studied it. “What a Christmas Day this has been,” he said after a while. “I gain a daughter and lose a brother.”

  “We knew if we came back here, it wouldn’t be easy,” Sandy pointed out. “And let’s t
ry to look on the bright side. At least he didn’t kill you.”

  “There is that, I guess.”

  “How about some Dinty Moore beef stew?” she asked. “I think we have one more can.”

  “Sure, that’d be great. Getting beat up has a way of making a fella hungry.”

  She plucked the can of beef stew from the top shelf of their closet, opened it, and spooned it into their saucepan, which she set on top of the hot plate resting on their chest of drawers.

  “How you feeling, honey?” she asked, while warming his meal.

  “Better every minute.”

  “Maybe he didn’t mean to hit you. Maybe he slipped and fell and hit you on accident,” Sandy suggested.

  “He hit me twice.”

  She winced. “I guess you can’t call it an accident if he did it twice.”

  “Probably not.”

  A plume of steam rose from the saucepan. “Looks like your dinner is done.”

  She poured the beef stew from the pan into a bowl, then sat beside him on the bed and watched him while he ate.

  “Nothin’ better than Dinty Moore,” he said.

  “Someday we’ll have a real house with a real kitchen, and I can cook you real meals.”

  “But I like Dinty Moore.”

  She laughed and snuggled in beside him. “One day, your brother will come to his senses and realize what a wonderful person you’ve become, and things’ll work out.”

  “I hope that happens before he punches me in the nose again.”

  He finished his supper, washed the bowl in the bathroom sink, then sat in the chair beside the window, watching the sun set in the December sky as another Christmas Day slipped into memory.

  “Dear Lord,” he whispered, “forgive us all for all the hurt we cause.”

  Nineteen

  Dale’s Fine Form

  It was the last Tuesday in January before Ned Kivett finally took down his Christmas display. He makes his money at Christmas and hates to see it come to an end. Santa’s departure was duly noted by Bob Miles in that week’s “Bobservation Post,” and Owen Stout collected one dollar from every member of the Odd Fellows Lodge for correctly predicting when Ned would give Santa the boot and set up the window for Valentine’s Day.

  The lottery Kyle Weathers began in July to cash in on what appeared to be Dale Hinshaw’s imminent demise had fallen by the wayside after Dale’s stunning comeback.

  Dale, now seated in Kyle’s chair for his weekly neck shave, was pondering aloud why the Lord had spared him. “I can’t help but think He wants me to give the Scripture eggs ministry another try.”

  Four years before, Dale’s Scripture eggs ministry had come to a tragic end when his chickens had died of a poultry disease; he’d been lamenting their loss ever since.

  Kyle, desperate to change the subject before Dale got wound up, turned to Asa Peacock. “How’s life on the farm, Asa?”

  “So far, so good,” Asa reported. “Say, Dale, that sure was odd how your chickens died all at once like that. I never seen anything like that before.”

  “It’s like the Lord Himself wanted it to end,” Dale said glumly, still perplexed by this unfathomable evil even four years later.

  Kyle unsnapped the apron from around Dale’s neck and removed it with a hurried flourish. “There you go, Dale. All done. Next!”

  Dale counted out the exact change into Kyle’s hand, rubbed his hand across his reddened neck (this was the amazing thing about Dale Hinshaw—no matter the season, his neck was always red) and sauntered out the door.

  It was an unusually balmy day for January, so he’d walked the three blocks to get his hair cut. On the way home, he stopped out front of Grant’s Hardware to stand on the spot he’d collapsed the spring before. He’d been after Uly to place some type of plaque there memorializing the event, but Uly had resisted, even after Dale had pointed out that reminding people of the fragility of human life might bring them a little closer to the Lord.

  Nora Nagle was helping her father, Clevis, change the sign at the Royal Theater. Dale paused to rebuke them for being in league with the godless liberals in Hollywood who were causing God Almighty to withdraw His protective hand over this once God-fearing nation.

  “It’s a Disney cartoon, Dale, about a fish,” Nora said. “How is that perverting America?”

  “I’ll tell you right now, if you played that movie backwards, you’d see Satan worshipers. You mark my words!” he cried out, his voice rising to a fevered pitch.

  Dale was feeling better than he had in months.

  He stopped by the meetinghouse to see if Sam was there, but Sam had seem him coming and had slipped out the back door.

  “Don’t know when he’ll be back,” Frank the secretary told Dale. “But I’ll be sure to tell him you stopped by.”

  “Tell him I caught a few mistakes in his sermon this past Sunday,” Dale said.

  “I’m sure he’ll be delighted to hear from you.”

  “Maybe you should just have him call me.”

  “You got it, buddy,” Frank said, as he eased Dale out the door.

  It was almost noon, time for Brother Lester’s radio program, so Dale hurried home. He’d written Brother Lester the month before inviting him to speak at the meetinghouse, but hadn’t heard back. Brother Lester had mentioned the many requests he’d received, but that with one leg he could only do so much. Not only that, he’d been sequestered away doing research and was now poised to reveal a dark secret the Vatican had tried in vain to keep quiet.

  Dale rushed along, positively gleeful at the prospect of this sordid revelation. Five minutes later, he was seated at the kitchen table next to Dolores, listening to Brother Lester labor for the Truth. What a blissful day it was turning out to be, full of opportunities to correct and reprove the wayward and lukewarm! Now to hear Brother Lester confirm what he’d always expected—that the pope himself was a member of the Masonic Lodge and had met regularly with Bill Clinton, a closet Mason, to plot a new world order—elevated his mood to mountainous heights.

  “I knew it!” he said, slapping the table. “Didn’t I tell you? Well, their secret’s out now.”

  He thought of picketing the Masonic Lodge in Cartersburg that very evening and would have, except that he had a meeting of the church’s Furnace Committee. Instead, he wrote a blistering editorial to the Harmony Herald and hand-delivered it to Bob Miles an hour later, demanding it be placed on the top half of the front page and not buried in small print in the classifieds, where Bob ordinarily ran his letters.

  “You know, Dale, there are some people in this town who get tired of reading your letters. We can’t run them every week,” Bob pointed out.

  “That’s the problem with today’s generation. They don’t want the truth. They wanna have their ears tickled and keep going in their filthy sin and not be called to righteousness.”

  “Truth? You want to talk about truth? Do you really think God gave you a new heart so you could write nasty letters to people? Why don’t you make yourself useful?”

  Dale turned beet red and tried to speak, but could only sputter, he was so indignant. “Bob Miles, that’s the…You’ll not ever see me again…Why, I’ll never buy your newspaper again.” A harmless threat, since the newspaper was free.

  He turned and stalked from the office, then spent the rest of the day preparing his devotional for the Furnace Committee meeting. He’d missed the last six meetings, what with his heart problems, and was concerned the committee had grown spiritually lax in his absence. It seemed to be a trend among certain townspeople. So he prepared a devotional explaining the history of the furnace in the Bible, recalling when three men of faith—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—were tossed in the flames by the wretched Nebuchadnezzar.

  “I tell you, if it hadn’t been for the furnace, we wouldn’t even have that story,” he said at that night’s meeting. “And what about in Matthew, chapter thirteen, when the Lord Himself said he’ll send his angels to throw the evildoers in the fu
rnace. Now how’s He gonna do that unless we have furnaces?” He thought briefly of Bob Miles burning to a nice turn.

  “I don’t think Jesus really said that,” Asa Peacock said.

  “Yeah, I don’t think God would do that to people,” Harvey Muldock conjectured.

  Dale shook his head in disgust. The committee’s waywardness was worse than he’d feared.

  But that battle would have to wait; he had more pressing matters to resolve, namely, the church’s utter contempt for its Furnace Committee. That very month, the Budget Committee, headed up by Fern Hampton, who had been against the Furnace Committee from the very start, had decided not to give the committee its annual three hundred dollars for furnace maintenance.

  Dale was fit to be tied. “These people have forgotten what it’s like to be without a furnace. I say we shut down the furnace this Sunday morning and let ’em freeze their keesters off. That’ll make ’em think twice about not giving us our money.”

  “We can’t do that,” Ellis Hodge said. “They’ll just go home.”

  “Not if we lock ’em inside,” Dale said. “The kids start losing their fingers and toes, and three hundred dollars for the Furnace Committee looks pretty cheap.”

  “What about you, Dale?” Asa asked. “You told me you had to stay warm on account of your heart transplant.”

  That doused Dale’s fire considerably. Children losing their digits didn’t faze him a bit, but his own discomfort was another matter entirely.

  “I know what we could do,” Dale suggested. “Let’s all of us start designating our offerings to the Furnace Committee. Then we’d have all the money we need. Let me run some figures here. How much money do you give the church each week, Asa?”

  Asa hesitated before telling Dale what he gave was a private matter.

  “Yeah, I don’t think it’s anybody’s business what someone else gives,” Ellis Hodge added.

  “Now that’s where you’re wrong,” Dale said. “Acts, chapter five. Ananias and Sapphira didn’t come clean and the Lord struck ’em dead.”