A Place Called Hope: A Novel

by Philip Gulley

  34

  Though Sam’s official starting date had not arrived, he and Barbara made their way across the parking lot to meeting for worship the next morning, greeted their fellow Friends, and took a seat in the middle row, near the center of the meeting room. A nice, moderate, central position, not leaning toward any extreme, favoring neither the right nor the left. One had to be careful about such things, after all.

  Ruby Hopper led worship and Wilson Roberts brought the message, which turned out to be an autobiographical sketch of his life—his birth in the city, his brief service in the military before being discharged because of a medical condition involving an excessive pus discharge, which he discussed at length. He then expounded upon his entry into the plumbing business, beginning as a plumber’s assistant, working his way up the chain of command, until he founded his own business selling plumbing fixtures across the Midwest, culminating in his induction into the Plumbers Hall of Fame in 1989.

  At the conclusion of worship, Ruby Hopper stood, welcomed Sam and Barbara, mentioned Sam would be bringing his first message the following Sunday, then said, “Doreen Newby will also be giving a talk about quilting. Please be sure to invite your friends for what promises to be an exciting program. There will be a pitch-in dinner following meeting for worship, so bring extra food for any visitors we might have.”

  That seemed odd to Sam. A lecture on quilting? During church? As if Wilson Robert’s plumbing story weren’t unusual enough. He made a mental note to ask Ruby Hopper about that curious phenomenon.

  Doreen Newby rose to her feet.

  “I’ll be focusing especially on the wedding ring and log cabin quilts,” she said. “Describing the history of each, along with samples of both quilts.”

  Doreen’s husband, Wayne, beamed.

  “Doreen made her first quilt when she was seven years old,” he announced to the congregation.

  Several people clapped.

  “We look forward to your presentation, friend,” Ruby Hopper said.

  And with that, meeting for worship was over. Most of the members gravitated toward Sam and Barbara. Several invitations for lunch were extended, then Norma Withers suggested they eat together at a nearby cafeteria, which suited everyone except Wanda and Leonard Fink, who excused themselves and went home to eat bologna sandwiches.

  The conversation was lively, and the food tasty. Sam and Barbara lingered at the table with Ruby Hopper, while the others eventually took their leave.

  “I’m curious about something,” Sam said, “and wonder if you could shed a little light on it.”

  “I’d be happy to. What’s on your mind?” Ruby asked.

  “Wilson’s talk today was interesting, but not something one might typically hear in a church. And you announced that Doreen Newby will be speaking next Sunday on quilts. I’ve never seen anything quite like that in a meeting for worship. What is the thinking behind these talks? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “We started it after our last pastor left. We all take turns speaking about any topic of interest. It’s been quite fascinating. Did you know Wilson designed one of the first low-flow toilets?”

  “Amazing,” Sam said. “Truly astounding.”

  “Norma Withers brought her Hummel figurines to church one Sunday and talked about them. She has over fifty. She collects them. We’ve been looking forward to Doreen’s quilt talk for some time. She was going to give it this past winter, but we had to cancel church that Sunday because the furnace quit.”

  “I’m sure it will be interesting,” Sam said. “But now that the meeting has a pastor, do you think it’s still necessary to have the members bring a message?”

  “Well, the elders talked about that, but it’s become our favorite thing to do. We have asked everyone to limit their talk to no more than a half hour. With you speaking fifteen minutes, that will leave us time for two songs and an offering.”

  “What about time for silence?” Sam asked. “That’s an important part of Quaker worship.”

  “Most of us didn’t grow up Quakers. We’re not used to silence.”

  “I see,” Sam said.

  So much for hoping he had found a normal church.

  “I’m sure the lectures are interesting,” he said. “But perhaps we should schedule them for another time, maybe one evening a month, with a dinner. Do you think the congregation would like that?”

  “I’m not sure. We really enjoy hearing them. I think you’ll come to like them, if you give them a chance.”

  “It’s not that I don’t like them,” Sam explained. “I just think when people come to church, they’re looking for something more spiritual. I know plumbing fixtures are important, but they hardly seem an appropriate topic for meeting for worship.”

  “Oh, dear, this is going to upset people,” Ruby said. “The Sunday after Doreen talks about quilts, her husband, Wayne, wants to show us slides of his model train collection. He’s built a whole town in his basement, with trains coming and going. He even has a replica of the meetinghouse.”

  While Sam Gardner had never been fanatical about religion like some pastors were, he did consider himself a spiritual person. The prospect of sitting in church while its members lectured about plumbing fixtures, quilts, and model trains made him want to stick his head in an oven and crank up the gas.

  “Maybe instead of doing that during worship, we could have a pitch-in dinner once a month and invite someone from the meeting to give a talk on various topics,” Sam suggested.

  Ruby Hopper thought for a moment, frowning. “We already have our monthly pie supper. But I suppose we could have another pitch-in, if you wanted.”

  “What’s a pie supper?” Barbara asked. “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “Oh, they’re lots of fun. Everyone bakes some kind of pie and brings it to share with the rest of us. We always have a chicken pot pie or a beef pot pie or maybe a shepherd’s pie for the entrée, then various other pies for dessert. We’ve been doing it for years.”

  “Why don’t we have the lectures during the pie supper?” Sam said.

  “We’ve never done that before, but I suppose I could ask,” Ruby said. “Of course, we’d have to check with the pie committee. If they don’t agree, we might have to keep things the way they are.”

  “Why don’t you talk with them,” Sam suggested.

  Later that day, while Sam was reflecting on the morning, it occurred to him he had placed the central act of Christian community in the hands of a pie committee.

  “Whoever heard of giving a pie committee the authority to decide what we do during worship? What kind of place is this?” he said to Barbara.

  “I wonder who the clerk of the pie committee is,” Barbara said.

  “I didn’t think to ask.”

  Just that morning, Ruby Hopper had presented him with a thick folder of papers detailing the business of the meeting. He retrieved it from the kitchen table and began sorting through it, looking for a list of committee members.

  “It says here Ellen Hadley is the clerk. Do you remember meeting her?” Sam asked.

  “Ellen Hadley. Ellen Hadley. I don’t remember an Ellen Hadley,” Barbara said. “Why don’t you call Ruby and see who she is.”

  Sam dialed her number.

  “I was just getting ready to phone you,” Ruby said. “I’ve spoken with the clerk of the pie committee and she wants the lectures to stay a part of worship.”

  “Would that be Ellen Hadley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who exactly is she?” Sam asked. “I don’t believe I’ve met her.”

  “You haven’t yet, I don’t think. She doesn’t come to church anymore. She got her feelings hurt by our last pastor and stopped attending. We thought if we put her in charge of the pie committee, she’d maybe come back.”

  “So a woman who no longer attends our meeting heads up a pie committee, which apparently has the authority to tell us what we can and can’t do during worship? Do I have that right?”

 
; “When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound right, does it? But we’re hoping she’ll start coming back to church.”

  “Perhaps we can discuss this matter at our next elders’ meeting,” Sam said.

  “That’s a good idea. Ellen will be there and we can talk with her then.”

  “Why would Ellen be there?”

  “We made her an elder, too, hoping to keep her involved,” Ruby said.

  That night, Sam, Levi, and Barbara discussed the situation while eating dinner.

  “I never thought I’d miss Dale Hinshaw,” Sam said.

  “Oh, honey, it’s not that bad.”

  “This morning we listened to a message about plumbing fixtures. A woman who never comes to church serves as an elder and the clerk of a committee, a pie committee no less, and has taken it upon herself to oversee our worship and no one wants to cross her for fear she’ll quit altogether. As much as I disliked Dale, at least he didn’t stand up during worship and talk about toilets.”

  “They mean well,” Barbara said. “Cut them some slack. You don’t have to change everything at once. Let them do their lectures. In a little while they’ll get tired of doing it, and then you can suggest some changes. If you push the issue, they’ll resist the change. It’s human nature.”

  “You end up with the weirdest churches,” Levi noted. “I wonder why that is?”

  Sam suspected it might have something to do with a personal deficiency, so he preferred not to think about it.

  “It’s times like this I wish I had a superintendent I could talk with,” Sam said.

  “You don’t need a superintendent to keep you from doing something stupid,” Barbara said. “You have me. Now relax. You haven’t been here two days and you’re already complaining.”

  Though she was a pacifist, sometimes it was all Barbara could do not to throttle Sam. She went for a walk instead, while Sam and Levi stayed home to watch 60 Minutes. It was her first foray into the neighborhood, which turned out to be quite charming and not at all what she thought neighborhoods in the city would be like. When Sam had first told her Hope Friends Meeting was in the city, she imagined dilapidated buildings, graffiti, gang wars, skinny thugs with droopy pants selling drugs, and getting mugged, if not outright killed.

  Instead, the neighborhood was very pleasant, the houses modest in size but tidy, the yards nicely landscaped with flowers. Children were out on their bicycles; their parents seated on porch swings. Many of them greeted her as she walked past. Two blocks from their house was a corner market. Next door was a hardware store, and down from that an Italian restaurant. Across the street was a public library. A public library two blocks from home! Joy of joys!

  A man who appeared to be in his sixties was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. He greeted Barbara, then opened the door to his restaurant and invited her in. At least she thought he did. He had a heavy Italian accent and was hard to understand. The only person in Harmony with an accent was Myron Farlow’s brother, Vince, who had been conked in the head while splitting firewood and had talked funny ever since.

  “Come in, come in. You have some wine with me.” He guided Barbara through the door, seated her at a table near the window, poured her a glass of wine, then poured one for himself and sat down across from her.

  “My wife, she no longer alive. So I share my wine with you,” he said. “I am Bruno.”

  Barbara reached across the table to shake his hand.

  “Hello, Bruno. I am Barbara,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  This would never happen in Harmony. The minister’s wife didn’t sit in a window drinking wine with an unmarried man, not if she wanted to hold her head up in public, that is. She’d lived in the city less than forty-eight hours and was already hitting the sauce with a man she barely knew. She hoped no one from Hope Friends Meeting walked by while she was there, lest she become the topic of the next lecture.

  Bruno hadn’t let go of her hand.

  “You’re a very, how do you say, striking woman,” he said.

  O Lord, she prayed, please do not let my son walk by here and see his wine-slurping mother holding hands with a total stranger.

  She’d only had two sips of wine, but when one is not accustomed to alcohol, that can be potent. Her vision was slightly blurred. What had she become? Is this what the city did to people? She glanced across the street at the library. It was probably full of dirty books about middle-aged, married women running off to Italy with unattached men. Oh, Lord, what had she become?

  35

  Barbara felt better the next morning. A little headachy, but not quite as disgusted with herself. She hadn’t wanted to be rude, so had finished the bottle of wine with Bruno before excusing herself and walking home. No reason to feel guilty. He was old enough to be her father, after all. Over in Italy, fifteen-year-old boys were customarily married with two or three children. Weren’t they? She thought so. She told Sam about Bruno to satisfy her conscience.

  “I met the nicest man yesterday on my walk. A lot older than us. Probably around a hundred or so. He owns the restaurant next to the hardware store.”

  “There’s a hardware store in the neighborhood?” Sam asked, then began to talk about nuts and bolts and all manner of fastening devices, promptly forgetting all about the man who had made a pass at his wife and tried to get her pickled.

  “I’ll have to go see that hardware store,” he said. “But first I must organize my new office.”

  His old office at Harmony Friends Meeting had once been a boiler room and was musty and dark. But when Hank Withers had designed the Hope meetinghouse, he had outdone himself at the office. Two walls were mostly windows, looking out into the beech trees. The other two walls were bookshelves made of cherry and walnut. The desk was built-in, nestled in the corner where the windows met, looking outside. The windows were tinted. He could look out, but people couldn’t look in, which gave him time to hide if someone he didn’t want to talk with approached the meetinghouse. He whispered a prayer of thanksgiving for Hank Withers.

  Sam unpacked his boxes of old sermons and arranged them on the bookshelves. He organized them by years in loose-leaf binders on the off chance he became famous and his alma mater wanted his sermons after he died. Nearly fifteen hundred sermons, only a few of which he remembered, none of which he wished to preach again. He changed his mind too often to give the same sermon twice. He knew ministers who’d written three years of sermons and kept repeating them. They were the same ministers who bought joke books and looked up sappy stories on the Internet to include in their sermons, and made it seem as if the events had happened to them. Usually a story about a kid with leprosy.

  He stacked his funeral eulogies next to his sermons. From time to time, when he was depressed, he would reread certain of them and be cheered up. It was comforting to remember some people were dead and no longer annoying anyone. In some instances, Sam believed death was God’s way of evening the score. Some people are the source of great suffering and finally God knocks them off in a spectacular fashion and everyone has to act sad, but after the funeral they go home and say to their spouse, “He sure had that coming.” When Bob Miles Sr. had finally died after a long, hateful life, Sam’s father had said, at the funeral within earshot of half a dozen people, “It’s about time he bit the dust. Meanest man I ever knew.” Sam read Bob Sr.’s eulogy once or twice a month, always with great pleasure.

  After arranging his papers, he sharpened a dozen pencils and placed them in the tray drawer of his desk, opened a box of stationery, and placed it within reach of his chair. So far, the only furniture in the office was the desk and chair, but the meeting had told him to go buy a new couch and two chairs. At Harmony, his office had been filled with castoffs people had dragged in from their homes. Chairs with three legs, a recliner with worn-through fabric, a coffee table with water stains, moth-eaten rugs, and old lamps with frayed cords that threw off sparks, causing Sam to leap out of his three-legged chair and stomp out sm
all fires. The recliner had belonged to Bob Miles Sr. It had been donated by Bob Jr. and smelled like a dead geezer, like someone who had died on a Friday and not been found until the next Monday, which had in fact been the case. Sam had a theory that Bob Sr.’s spirit had stayed behind and settled in the recliner. Nothing else could explain the stink.

  A new couch and two chairs! He didn’t have to run his choices past a committee or seek anyone’s approval. No one had to okay his fabric selection or ask if it was on sale. He didn’t have to listen to anyone talk about how this was no time to be buying furniture what with children starving in Africa.

  “It’s your office,” Hank Withers had told him. “You pick out the furniture. What do we care what it looks like? You’ll be the one staring at it all day.”

  Sam was starting to think he could listen to a lot of lectures on plumbing fixtures for this kind of freedom.

  After organizing his office, he drove to the furniture store Hank Withers had recommended, selected a couch, two matching easy chairs, and a coffee table, then arranged for delivery.

  He ate a late lunch with Barbara. Tuna salad sandwiches. She’d spent the morning working on the house, arranging the kitchen and hanging up their clothing.

  “Well, what do you think so far?” Sam asked.

  “I can’t believe this house. It’s so pretty. Everything is so tasteful. I can see why Wanda Fink wants to keep it nice.”

  “Yeah, well, I still think she’s a little kooky,” Sam said.

  “I’m almost embarrassed to put our furniture in here,” Barbara said. “It smells like dirty socks.”

  “You can come over to my office and smell my furniture anytime you want,” Sam offered. “Brand-new. Just picked it out.”