Signs and Wonders

by Philip Gulley

  They pulled into their driveway late Friday evening. The boys were asleep. They carried them up to their bedroom, took off their clothes and shoes, and put them in bed. Sam unloaded the car, while Barbara took a long bath.

  Sam took a shower down in the basement in the “guy” shower, next to the furnace, with all the spiders. When he came upstairs, Barbara was lying in bed. She lifted up the covers for him. He sniffed the sheets. “It’s good to be home,” he said.

  Barbara sighed. “I should have been nicer,” she said.

  He was going to agree with her, but his pastoral judgment prevailed and he kept quiet.

  “Are you mad at me?” she asked.

  He was a little, but didn’t think it would help matters to say so. Instead, he reached over and pulled her to him and they slid together into the trough in the middle of their bed. “If you turn over, I’ll give you a back rub,” he said.

  He was good for about five minutes, then he fell asleep. There was a time when being alone with his wife in bed would have kept him sufficiently excited to stay awake, but that was fourteen barns and six nights in a leaky tent ago. Now he just wanted to sleep.

  Barbara lay awake, listening to his breathing and thinking. He was getting more like his father, more inclined to tell her how things were going to be. But he generally came around, if she gave him time. In most ways, he was a good husband. Whenever she put on a dress and asked him if she looked fat, he always said, “You are as slender as the day we were married.” Though it wasn’t true, the way he said it made it seem as if he believed it.

  She regretted her sarcasm. They’d been married twelve years. He had his faults. She had heard his jokes dozens of times. He was losing his hair. He would stand in front of the mirror each morning combing his hair and ask her, “Am I getting bald?” She would say, “You are as handsome as the day we met.” Which didn’t answer his question, but he would smile just the same.

  After twelve years, the illusions of hoped-for perfection have died. But when your expectations have been adjusted and you can still love each other, you’re doing well, Barbara thought. Sam wasn’t everything she thought he would be. But in some ways he was better. She was trying hard to remember that. And if he turned out to be like his father, that wouldn’t be so bad. After all, his father had his good points. He’d taught Sam to stand when she’d entered the room, to hold the door, and tell her she was as beautiful as the day they were married. If Sam turned out to be like him, that wouldn’t be all bad, would it?

  Eleven

  Signs and Wonders

  While on the Gardners’ vacation tour of all the round barns in the state, Sam took a careful inventory of the church signs they’d passed. He counted nine Come Grow With Us! signs, three instances of If You Think It’s Hot Down Here… , and one God Is Coming Soon And Boy, Is She Mad! at an Episcopalian church. Another sign predicted the end of the world was at hand, but if it didn’t end by the following Friday, everyone was cordially invited to the ham-and-bean fund-raising dinner.

  The sign in front of Harmony Friends Meeting is comparatively straightforward. It lists the times for Sunday school and worship, notes that Sam Gardner is the pastor, and reminds passersby that each Tuesday morning the Friendly Women’s Circle gathers to make noodles.

  There was a discussion at the August elders meeting whether the sign should say more. Dale Hinshaw suggested using the sign as a tool of evangelism, perhaps posting a different verse each week from the book of Revelation that might cause people to consider their walk with the Lord. The Friendly Women’s Circle proposed using the sign to advertise their annual Chicken Noodle Dinner, while Bill Muldock thought it might be nice to list the church’s Heavenly Hoops basketball schedule on the sign.

  Sam was horrified at the prospect of seeing any of that on the sign, so he hid the letters for the sign in the meetinghouse attic behind the box of Christmas decorations. He told Frank, the secretary, that if Dale came snooping around looking for the letters, to tell him he hadn’t seen them.

  “Wouldn’t that be lying?” Frank asked.

  “Did you actually see me put the letters in the attic?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s not lying.”

  Sam has been wanting to put up his own sign. After fifteen years of pastoring Quaker meetings and sitting through endless meetings marked by discord and indecision, he wants to post a sign that reads, Tired of Organized Religion? Try Us. But he feared the subtlety of his point might be lost.

  Back in May, at the Mighty Men of God Conference, Dale Hinshaw had attended a church-growth workshop presented by a pastor from Iowa who had taken a church of twenty-three people and built it up to nine hundred by the strategic placement of Scripture verses throughout the church building. He’d written a book about his triumph, in which he revealed his secrets for convicting unbelievers and putting people in their place. Dale bought three copies.

  Listening to the preacher from Iowa talk about convicting the unbelievers made Dale wish Sam was harder on sin. Sam never talks about convicting the unbelievers. Dale suspects Sam has never really given his heart to the Lord. Dale asked him the specific date he became a Christian and Sam said he wasn’t sure, that he’d just grown up in the church and had always been a Christian.

  “But you gotta have a definite date when you asked Jesus into your heart. Didn’t you ever do that?” Dale persisted.

  “I never asked him to leave my heart in the first place,” Sam said.

  This only added to Dale’s doubts about Sam. He told his wife, “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He don’t even know the date he became a Christian.”

  Dolores Hinshaw frowned. “Well, what’d you expect from someone who’s strayed from the Word?”

  Undaunted, Dale began posting Scripture admonitions around the meetinghouse. Over the sink in the kitchen he hung a sign reading: You cleanse the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are full of extortion and wickedness! (Luke 11:39). That did not go over with the Friendly Women’s Circle, who like to think their noodles have brought untold thousands to the Lord. In the meetinghouse nursery, Dale placed a sober warning to the nursery workers: Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung round his neck and he were thrown into the sea (Mark 9:42).

  He posted James 3:1 over Sam’s desk: Let not many of you become teachers, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness. Sam had taken it down three times, so Dale burned it into the paneling with a woodburning kit while Sam was on vacation.

  The final straw for Dale came in early September when Sam, without asking anyone’s permission, got the letters for the meetinghouse sign out of the attic and wrote on the sign: To dream of the person you wish to become is to waste the person you are.

  Dale had several problems with the sign, chief among them his conviction that Sam’s sign violated the first point of the four-point plan of salvation: Admit you are a sinner. He bickered with Sam about it after church.

  “We’re not supposed to be happy with who we are,” Dale said. “That’s the whole point of going to church, so we can feel bad about who we are. Now you come along with this sign saying we don’t need to change, that who we are is good enough, and it just gives people an excuse to keep on sinning. That’s the dumbest sign I ever seen. Where’d you get that idea, anyway?”

  Sam told him he’d seen it on vacation, in front of a Unitarian church.

  “Well, there you go, that’s what I mean. Unitarians wouldn’t know the Lord if He was wearing a name tag.”

  Dale went on for another ten minutes, accusing Sam of turning the church into a hotbed of carnality with signs encouraging fornication.

  “I never encouraged any such thing,” Sam said.

  “You certainly did. It’s right there on the sign. To dream of the person you wish to become is to waste the person you are. What if what you are is a fornicator? You’ve just told people it’s okay to
keep being that way.”

  “That’s not what the sign means, Dale, and you know it.”

  “Then you tell me what it means.”

  “Well, it means everyone is valuable, and we shouldn’t waste our lives trying to be something or someone we’re not.”

  Dale snorted. “I can’t say I’m surprised. The Reverend Johnny LaCosta talked about this just the other day on his television show, how making our peace with sin will be the ruination of our country.”

  “What’s wrong with people appreciating who they are, Dale?”

  “Because who we are isn’t good enough. Can’t you see that? We’re sinners. Why should we feel good about that?”

  “Because that’s not all we are,” Sam said. “And, Dale, how do you think God feels when He creates someone, and they spend their entire lives wishing they were someone else. Isn’t that being ungrateful?”

  Dale frowned, concerned Sam might have a point. Then he brightened. “Matthew 5:48 says we’re to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.” He beamed triumphantly. There was no finer feeling to Dale than hitting the bull’s-eye with a Scripture arrow.

  He drew a deep breath, girded his loins, and plunged ahead. “Now, Jesus would never ask something of us if it weren’t possible, so it must be possible to be perfect, which is what we have to strive for, even though we’ll always be sinners. But if we ignore Jesus and don’t aim for perfection, then we’ve proved our disobedience, which means we’re still sinners deserving of hell. And it’s all because we were content to be sinners and didn’t care about perfection, which is why we shouldn’t be happy with who we are and need to work hard to be someone else.”

  Sam tried to follow what he was saying, but by then had a pounding headache, which is how most of his conversations with Dale ended. He thought it’d probably just be easier to take down the sign and put up Come Grow With Us! or a verse from the book of Revelation.

  “Why don’t I just take down the sign?” Sam offered.

  “That’s being a good pastor, Sam. I knew you’d see my point, if you just put your mind to it.”

  Sam turned the lights off, closed up the meetinghouse, and walked home with Barbara and the boys. He was quiet.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” she asked, after a few blocks.

  “Oh, nothing. I’m just tired,” he said.

  “Tired? We just got back from vacation. How could you be tired?”

  How indeed?

  The next day was Monday, Sam’s day off. He went to the office anyway, to change the sign. He didn’t want Dale calling him at home, hounding him about it.

  He rummaged around in his desk, looking for the key to the sign. “Hey, Frank, where’s the sign key?”

  “Don’t ask me. I never did anything with it.”

  “Hmm, I’m sure I put it back in my desk the other day. But it’s not here. Maybe I left it in my pants pocket.”

  He called home and asked Barbara if she’d found a key in his pants when she’d done the laundry.

  “Nope, no key. I did find a tube of ChapStick, though. I’ve told you not to leave it in your pockets. It melts in the dryer and gets all over everything. I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  She paused, then chuckled. “Of course, my wishing you were different doesn’t mean I’m not grateful for the person you are.” She was laughing by now.

  “Very funny,” he said and hung up the phone. His own wife had turned on him.

  “Don’t we have a spare key for the sign?” Frank asked.

  “Nope. It got lost last year, and we never had a spare key made.”

  “You know, Sam, I hope you don’t take this wrong, but Pastor Jimmy over at the Harmony Worship Center really has his church organized. He has extra keys for all the locks and knows right where everything is. Maybe you should try to be a little more like him. Why’d you have to go and change the sign anyway? It was fine the way it was.”

  Sam had put the sign up because it was different, because it wasn’t drivel, like all the other church signs he’d ever seen. To dream of the person you wish to become is to waste the person you are. Sam liked the feel of it.

  All his life, people had told him who he was wasn’t good enough, that he could be better, that he should admit he was a sinner. No one ever reminded him he was the light of the world, the salt of the earth, made in God’s image. Dale never hung those Scripture verses around the meetinghouse. After all, it might cause people to feel good about themselves, which would be dangerous. It might cause people to think they were worthy of love and, therefore, desirable, which would, of course, lead to fornication.

  Sam searched another hour for the key, but couldn’t find it.

  “Well, I guess we’ll just have to leave the sign up,” he told Frank.

  “We could always break the glass.”

  “No, I don’t think so. The key’ll turn up, and when it does, we’ll change it then.”

  But he didn’t plan to look very hard.

  When Dale phoned later in the day to complain, Sam suggested that not finding the key to the sign was itself a sign from God. Then he added, “He who has ears, let him hear. Matthew 13:9.” It was a beautiful moment for Sam, trumping Dale Hinshaw with a Scripture verse.

  The sign is still there. Sam imagines some people genuinely appreciate it. They walk past, read it, and, for a brief moment, love themselves. They stop wishing they were someone else and thank God for making them who they are—a person worthy of love. Contrary to Dale’s theory, there has not been an outbreak of fornication. If anything, in loving themselves, in reminding themselves that maybe they really are the light of the world, they have become a bit more holy, a bit more eager to gladden God’s heart.

  Every now and then, Sam observes from his office window as folks stop to read the sign. He watches their brows furrow in thought and slight smiles curve into place. In Sam’s mind, they walk away a little straighter, their heads held a bit higher, an air of peace about them. The scolding inward voice reminding them of their deficiencies is silenced, if only for a moment. He wonders if, as they walk away, they repeat the words to themselves, like a hymn, like a holy chant: To dream of the person you wish to become is to waste the person you are.

  Sam is thinking of maybe preaching about it, just to give people a break. They come to church and sit through Dale Hinshaw’s Sunday school class hearing that they’re lower than worms, then trudge into the meeting room laden with shame. To learn God made them and declared them good might be a comfort.

  Then again, it might make them mad. They’d accuse him of encouraging spiritual sloth. People who’ve been told all their lives they’re not good enough get upset when anyone suggests otherwise. They believe grace ought be kept a secret, lest people take advantage of God’s mercy and fall headlong into sin. That’s the big fear. Sam could hear them now. “You won’t be whistling the same tune when our teenage girls walk in here pregnant and the boys kill an usher and run off with the collection plate.”

  Sam wondered why it was if you told some people they were no-good sinners, they’d thank you for setting them straight and drop an extra twenty in the offering. But if you said God loved them just as they were, they’d go find a church where the preacher wasn’t so liberal. Dale had told Sam about the church in Iowa that had grown to nine hundred people through scriptural admonitions. Sam was suspicious of any church that beat people down in order to lift God up.

  It bothers Sam that all the church has done for some people is make them feel like rats. If there were a Unitarian church in town, he might just go. That would get people talking. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Dale would say. “I knew he was a fraud when he couldn’t tell me the date he became a Christian. Don’t surprise me at all. He was fine up until he went to that seminary. That’s where he got ruined, if you ask me.”

  The next time the budget came up for discussion, they’d take the thirty dollars they normally sent to the seminary and mail it to the church in Iowa instead, a true Christian organizatio
n that wasn’t afraid to tell people how rotten they were, in order that they might know God’s love and be saved.

  Let them have their signs, Sam thought. He would have his. To dream of the person you wish to become is to waste the person you are.

  Twelve

  Bea

  The Corn and Sausage Days parade has been a mainstay of the town since 1954, when it was first held. It’s the same parade every year. There’s no point in going to it again and again, though if you don’t, people question your loyalty. Moving away is not a sufficient excuse for missing the parade. If you can make it home for your mother’s funeral, you can come back for the parade, too. Unless you’ve gotten too good for this town, in which case no one was surprised and they’re glad to see you gone. And good riddance.

  The parade begins with the recitation of the town poem, written in 1898 by Miss Ora Crandell—librarian, thespian, and Harmony poet laureate.

  O’Harmony, sweet Harmony,

  We lift our song of praise to thee.

  Whether far or whether near,

  In our hearts we hold you dear.

  In 1954, Vernon Hodge wrote a second verse paying tribute to the corn plant, the modest pig, and the Lord, which together have brought prosperity to the town and made it the Athens of the Midwest it is today.

  O’mighty stalks and noble swine,

  We celebrate and laud,

  Making life so fair and fine,

  With a little help from God.

  The Sausage Queen recites the poem from memory, which is the chief requirement for being the Sausage Queen—the ability to look earnest and shed a tear while saying, “In our hearts, we hold you dear.” Once crowned, the Sausage Queen must be an enthusiastic sausage consumer, which leaves the Sausage Queen, by the end of her reign, considerably broadened by her experiences.

  There is no bathing suit competition in the Sausage Queen contest, this being a Christian town opposed to the inflammation of male passions. Though to be truthful, most of the Sausage Queens could not have inflamed male passions in a prison, with the exception of the 1974 Sausage Queen, Nora Nagle, who was pure beauty and moved to New York where she starred in a Boraxo commercial.