A Place Called Hope: A Novel

by Philip Gulley

  Sam looked around the kitchen and into the living room. Their furniture did look a bit shabby.

  “When we get a little money ahead, we can buy some new furniture,” he promised.

  It had taken him almost thirty years to get their furniture broken in and comfortable, but he was fairly certain they’d never get a little money ahead so went ahead and promised Barbara. The furniture had belonged to his grandmother. She had won it, an entire living room suite, on the Gil Gillock Garden Hour, after correctly spelling the word chrysanthemum. The prize didn’t include delivery, so Ellis Hodge had driven her in his stock truck to Cartersburg, where she had visited Richard “Mother, Put the Coffee Pot On!” Bennett’s Furniture Store, and selected a couch, two chairs, a coffee table, three lamps, two end tables, and a rubber plant. She was dead two weeks later, causing many people to wonder why God had let her win all that furniture only to knock her off before she’d even removed the plastic covers.

  Sam and Barbara had lived on other people’s furniture their entire married lives, except for their bed. Harvey and Eunice Muldock had offered them their old mattress and box spring when they’d moved to Harmony, but Barbara had refused to accept it.

  “I am not going to sleep on the same mattress that Harvey Muldock’s bare, bony butt has lain on the last twenty years. We’ll buy a new mattress.”

  They had bought it on time, thirty dollars a month for thirty months. Nine hundred dollars for a mattress that formed a trough in the middle after six months. They woke up each morning, their backs throbbing, their necks stiff, their vertebrae locked in place. Sam calculated their mattress had shaved ten years off their lives.

  “Maybe instead of getting a new couch, we can buy a new mattress when we get some money ahead,” Barbara said that night, lying in the trough next to Sam.

  “Maybe the meeting will grow so big, I’ll get a raise and we can buy a new couch and a new mattress,” Sam said, ever the dreamer.

  “I need a new mattress, too,” Levi called out from the next room. “This one smells like pee.”

  “When is he going back to Purdue?” Barbara whispered to Sam.

  “I heard that,” Levi said. “This Thursday.”

  “We love you, Son,” Sam said. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Dad. Night, Mom.”

  Sam lay awake, cuddling next to his wife and feeling amorous, so he thought of Wanda Fink to tamp those feelings down. Thursday couldn’t come soon enough.

  36

  What’s that noise?” Barbara said, shaking Sam awake.

  “What noise?”

  “Listen.”

  Then Sam heard it. Music. A saxophone.

  “Did you leave the radio on?” he asked.

  “No. It’s not the radio. It’s coming from outside.”

  Sam threw the covers off and peered out the window.

  “It’s Hank Withers,” he said.

  “What in the world is Hank Withers doing outside at six in the morning?” Barbara asked.

  “He appears to be sitting on the bench outside of the meetinghouse playing a saxophone.”

  “Tell him to knock it off!” Levi yelled from his room. “I’m trying to sleep!”

  Sam pulled on his pants and a shirt, ran a wet comb through his hair, then walked across the parking lot.

  Hank lowered his saxophone.

  “Morning, Sam. How are you this fine summer morning?”

  “We’re fine, thank you, Hank. What brings you out here so early in the morning.”

  “Reverberation,” Hank said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Reverberation. If I sit here and play my saxophone toward the meetinghouse I get the nicest reverberation. Didn’t realize that when I designed it. Just got lucky, I guess. I like to come over here in the morning and play while the world’s still quiet. Norma doesn’t like me playing at home. Says it wakes her up.”

  “I can imagine it would,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, I don’t mind playing outside. In fact, I’ve come to prefer it. Gets a little cold in the winter, though.”

  “You play here in the winter?”

  “Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Bright and early,” Hank said. “You play an instrument, Sam? Maybe we could play together.”

  “No, no, I never learned to play an instrument. Took piano lessons when I was a kid, but it didn’t pan out.”

  “That’s a shame,” Hank said. “I’ve found music to be very relaxing. Why, some mornings I’ll sit and play for hours.”

  “Then I’ll leave you to it,” Sam said. “Enjoy your day.”

  He walked back to the house, poured a bowl of cereal, and was seated at the table when Barbara came in, coffee cup in hand, and sat across from him.

  “Is this going to be a regular thing?” she asked.

  “Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays,” Sam said.

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “He’s actually pretty good. It might grow on us.”

  Their telephone rang.

  “For crying out loud!” Levi yelled from his room. “Who is calling us at six fifteen in the morning?”

  “Maybe it’s the army,” Barbara said, jumping up from the table and hurrying to the phone. “I hope Addison’s all right.”

  She lifted the phone off the hook.

  “Hello. Gardner residence.”

  “Good morning. It’s Norma Withers. I’m looking for Hank. He wouldn’t happen to be there, would he?”

  “As a matter of fact he is. Would you like me to get him?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t want to bother you with that. Just tell him to bring home a gallon of milk from the store, if you could, please.”

  “Yes, I’ll tell him.”

  “And some eggs and bread, too, please. And orange juice. And tell him he’s almost out of MiraLAX, so if he wants some more, he should get some of those, too.”

  “Milk, eggs, bread, orange juice, and MiraLAX,” Barbara repeated. “Got it.”

  “Tell him jumbo eggs, not large.”

  “Jumbo eggs, not large. Okay.”

  “Do you prefer jumbo eggs?” Norma Withers asked. “I’ve always liked the extra whites for cooking.”

  “I haven’t given it much thought,” Barbara said. “But I suppose you’re right. I better go catch Hank, so I’ll let you go.”

  “Thank you, dear.”

  Barbara conveyed the message to Hank, discussed the virtues of jumbo eggs, then came inside, ate breakfast, showered, and continued unpacking.

  Sam went to his office at the meetinghouse, sneaking in the back door so Hank Withers, still wailing away on his saxophone, wouldn’t see him. He had never realized how difficult it was to concentrate while listening to someone play a saxophone. What a racket! He turned on his radio to drown out the noise, then got out the meeting directory and began memorizing names. He was surprised to learn the meeting had more than one hundred and fifty members, most of whom, he observed, lived near the meetinghouse, though only a dozen of them attended with any regularity. How did a meeting of one hundred and fifty members have only twelve attenders?

  Maybe Hank had played the saxophone during meeting for worship, he thought. That would certainly explain the exodus. Or maybe there had been a big church fight, or a boring pastor.

  During the interview, they had made it seem as if people had died off or drifted away over the years. He looked at the date on the cover of the directory. Three years old. He wondered what had happened in the past three years. Had to have been a church fight. He wondered why they hadn’t mentioned it to him. Maybe there were still raw feelings. He wished he could phone the superintendent and ask, but he suspected the superintendent would be of little help.

  Perhaps Hank would tell him. He glanced out the window and noticed Hank walking toward his car, getting ready to leave. He opened the window.

  “Hey, Hank. You got a minute?”

  Hank turned toward Sam.

  “Sure, let me put my horn up, and I’ll be right in.”
r />   Sam met him on the front stoop of the meetinghouse, the directory in his hand. Hank sat beside him.

  “Did something happen here a few years ago that upset some people in the meeting?”

  Hank frowned, then fidgeted and looked uncomfortable.

  “It’s probably not my place to say. Perhaps you should ask Ruby. She was clerk of the meeting then.”

  That was curious.

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you told me,” Sam said.

  “I’d rather not discuss it. It’s water under the bridge. No use dredging up bad feelings. Now we’ve got ourselves a new pastor, so let’s move forward.”

  “If you don’t want to talk about it, then you don’t have to,” Sam said, though being a nosy sort, he was desperate to find out what had happened.

  The presence of buried secrets thrilled him to no end, like stumbling upon a treasure map, hidden in an attic. One hundred and fifty members down to twelve. Where had they gone? What had happened? Where should he dig? In moments like this, Sam forgot all about the long hours and low pay. It was enough to realize others knew something he didn’t. Something delicious and scandalous. Something they didn’t wish to divulge, which had always been his preferred topic of conversation. The forbidden fruit. The apple on the tree. The snake egging him on.

  I could be happy here, he thought. Happy, indeed.

  37

  Sam and Barbara drove Levi back to Purdue on Thursday. He was living off campus this semester to save money. Nine guys in a three-bedroom apartment. A hundred dollars a month each, another twenty for utilities, each boy responsible for his own meals. Levi took three cases of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Seventy-two cans of soup. Twenty-four days at three cans per day. Roughly three dollars a day to eat. Not bad. Not bad at all.

  “All that sodium,” Barbara said on the way home. “His blood pressure is going to shoot through the roof. It’ll probably kill him.” She began to cry, thinking of her firstborn lying in a casket, killed by soup.

  “He’ll be fine,” Sam said. “He’s young. He can take it. Besides, he likes chicken noodle soup.”

  Supper was quiet that night, with the boys gone. Barbara wasn’t feeling especially romantic and swatted Sam away at bedtime. He was too distracted to mind, thinking about the meeting and what might have happened to it.

  Since Monday morning, he’d been visiting members of the congregation, even the Finks, hoping one of them would rat someone out. He hadn’t come right out and asked anyone what had happened, but had dropped hints, all to no avail. Of the millions of churches in the world, he had stumbled upon the one church whose members didn’t gossip. What rotten luck.

  On Friday morning, he visited Wayne and Doreen Newby. Wayne took him to the basement to show him his train set. Wayne was a talker, a regular gasbag, who droned on about model trains. Sam stuck with him, slipping in a question now and then, hoping to catch him off guard so Wayne would spill the beans. He asked Wayne how long he and Doreen had belonged to the meeting, and when Wayne said twenty years, Sam feigned fascination and asked Wayne for a brief history of the meeting.

  “Tell me the high points and low points,” he said.

  Wayne told him about the first pie supper, a high point, and serving on the limb committee, a low point. He told Sam about a former pastor who collected rocks and another who’d found a dozen four-leaf clovers at one time.

  “That fella was something else. He could spot a four-leaf clover a mile away.”

  “Amazing,” Sam said. “Simply amazing.”

  “But you asked for the low points,” Wayne said.

  “I’ve found that being open about our struggles can help us overcome them,” Sam said piously.

  “Well, I don’t know if the others would agree, but the worst time in my memory was when we switched hymnals about four or five years ago. Personally, I was against it.”

  Sam’s pulse quickened. This must have been it. He had known congregations to split over hymnals, to go at one another hammer and tongs over music to the Lord.

  “Did anyone leave?” Sam asked.

  Wayne thought for a moment.

  “Not that I remember. Oh, I stayed away for a week, but then Doreen asked me to come back, so I did.”

  “Did anything else happen a few years ago?” Sam asked, exasperated.

  “Oh my, yes, that was a dreadful time,” Wayne said.

  “I’ve sensed something very painful happened, but no one wants to talk about it.”

  “I think it’s because, looking back, we’re kind of embarrassed it ever happened. It was one of those things that didn’t have to happen. One thing about it, though, we sure learned our lesson. It’ll never happen again. Not in this church.”

  Sam was beside himself. “Would you mind telling me what happened?”

  “I don’t know that I’m the one to tell you. I’m not the clerk of the limb committee. Maybe you ought to ask Hank Withers.”

  “Hank told me to ask Ruby Hopper, that she was the clerk when it happened.”

  Wayne paused. “Well, that’s true. She was the clerk of the meeting when it happened, but Hank was the clerk of the limb committee.”

  “What’s the limb committee got to do with what happened?” Sam asked.

  “It was the limb committee that dropped the ball,” Wayne said. “But don’t tell Hank I said so. He’s kind of sensitive about it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, there was this big limb that had broken off a tree and it was dangling over the meetinghouse. The meeting had asked the limb committee to take care of it before it broke off all the way and punched a hole in the meetinghouse roof. But the committee put it off and put it off and then one night a storm blew up and knocked the limb down and, sure enough, it punched a hole in the roof.”

  “That’s it? A tree limb caused the meeting to lose over a hundred members?”

  “I don’t remember that we lost anybody. Oh, sure, a few people were upset with Hank for dillydallying, but no one said anything to him. And he fixed the damage himself. He’s real handy with that kind of thing.”

  “Did it cause a church fight?”

  “No, we all get along pretty good with one another.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Sam said glumly.

  Wayne launched into the history of model trains, while Sam looked for an opening to escape. Wayne wouldn’t let him depart until Sam promised to return the following week to see Wayne’s latest acquisition—a Lionel Lincoln Funeral Train.

  “They brought Ol’ Abe’s body right through here, you know. Sunday, April thirtieth, eighteen hundred and sixty-five. It was raining to beat the band. My great-grandfather was there. He was just a kid. He used to tell me about it when I was little.”

  Wayne began to tear up, thinking of Abraham Lincoln being dead, as if he’d just gotten the news.

  “One of the soldiers guarding the casket was smoking a cigar and he threw it to the ground and my great-grandfather picked it up. It got passed down to me. Want to see it?”

  Before Sam could object, Wayne was rifling through a cabinet, retrieving a brown object which he showed to Sam.

  “Grandpa dipped it in varnish, so it’s held up pretty well.” Wayne studied it. “Just think, this very cigar was touched by someone who touched Abraham Lincoln. Pretty amazing when you think about it. I bet I could get some real money for it. Truth is, I’m counting on it funding my retirement. Don’t have any kids I can pass it down to. I thought I might take it to that fella on that pawnshop show on TV and have him tell me what it’s worth. I bet they’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “That would be a safe bet,” Sam agreed. “They probably don’t see a lot of used cigars.”

  After a lengthy discussion of Abraham Lincoln, Sam took his leave.

  He’d only visited three members that week, but was already exhausted; still, he determined to press on. He was certain the meeting’s refusal to acknowledge its dark secret was the reason for its dwindling num
bers. When he got home, he Googled the meeting to see if perhaps someone had been murdered in the meetinghouse. He found the meeting’s website. It hadn’t been updated since the late nineties. The pastor before last was still listed as the minister. Sam had a faint recollection of him. A large, doughy man named Fred who had a colon condition. He had given a lengthy talk about it one year at the annual pastors’ retreat. Maybe Fred had exploded in the pulpit one Sunday. That would certainly explain the exodus.

  That afternoon he wrote his sermon, his first at Hope, encouraging the congregation to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Galatians 6:2.

  “Let there be no secrets among us,” he wrote. “Let us share with one another those things that cause us pain, those matters we’d like to forget that still hurt us.” Then he would ask the congregation to enter into silence, giving them the opportunity to stand, as the Spirit led them, to share their burdens.

  Sam loved Galatians 6:2.

  He read the sermon to Barbara that evening, just before bedtime.

  “Nice try,” she said. “But wouldn’t it just be easier to ask Ruby what happened?”

  “Ministry is about subtlety,” he told her.

  “I thought it was about honesty.”

  “Well, that, too, but only as a last resort.”

  With that settled, they went to sleep.

  38

  They had their first visitors on Sunday—Janet Woodrum from the Harmony Public Library, with her mother and father in tow.

  “Surprise, surprise,” Janet said when she saw Barbara. “I came home for the weekend and thought it would be fun to see you.”

  Barbara hugged her. “I’m so glad you did. I’ve missed you. How have you been?”

  While Barbara and Janet visited, Sam welcomed Janet’s parents. Two possible new attendees in a congregation of twelve. Sam did the math. Sixteen percent growth on his first Sunday. Not bad.

  Having served as a local doctor, her father knew several of the members, and those he didn’t, his wife, the local elementary school principal, did.

  “This is a pleasant surprise,” Janet’s mother said. “I didn’t think we’d know so many people here.”