Home to Harmony

by Philip Gulley

  “The Constitution,” Bob Jr. said. “You ought to read it. There’s all kinds of good ideas in there.” Then he hung up the phone, something he’d always wanted to do.

  There’s anger in Bob Jr. and deep cynicism. I can sense it. I’m a little worried about him. It is a burden to spend your life in one place, thinking you’d be happier somewhere else. I pass by his office in the evening and see him in there, staring at his map, listening to the BBC, and feeling trapped. He wants to get away but suspects he never will, that the time for escape has passed.

  Once I was hiking through the woods and came upon a fox seized in a trap. The fox had struggled to escape, then had given up and settled in to die. That’s the feeling I have about Bob Jr.

  I wish he could see the marvel of this place. I wish Harmony brought him the joy it brings me. But there he sits, night after night, pining for Paris. There’s danger in thinking joy is a matter of location. If we can’t find joy where we are, we probably won’t find it anywhere.

  My grandfather taught me that. He didn’t mean to. It just happened. I was a little boy and amid the symphony of his snores, I’d pull a chair up to his chest of drawers and rummage through it. I’d read the Herald clippings and finger the pictures and know I was holding onto happiness.

  The leaves of our blessed lives fall to the ground and if we’re wise like my grandfather, we gather them in a pile and keep them safe lest the winds of forgetfulness blow them away.

  Four

  The Swordfish

  There are two restaurants in Harmony: the McDonald’s out on the highway where traveling salesmen stop on their way to the city, and the Coffee Cup, where the rest of us eat when our wives are mad and won’t cook.

  The Coffee Cup sits on the town square and has ever since 1963, when Vinny Toricelli and his wife, Penny, moved here from the East somewhere. We’re not sure where; they’ve never said. Although we’re eager to know the details, Vinny and Penny have never offered any, so we remain in a cloud of unknowing.

  Their first ten years here, the town was rife with speculation about their arrival. Some theorized they were in trouble with the law, so changed their names and moved here to avoid arrest. Others said they had abandoned their families to run off together. Dale Hinshaw thought they were in the witness protection program. He conjectured that Vinny, being Italian, had been a hit man for the Mafia and had testified in court in exchange for protection.

  It is true that when the Coffee Cup opened a buffet, Bob Miles Jr. wanted to run a picture of Vinny and his buffet in the Herald and Vinny refused to have his picture taken. So Bob settled for a picture of the buffet table, with a painting of the Last Supper hanging on the wall behind the buffet. Jesus and His disciples gazing upon iceberg lettuce, sunflower seeds, bacon bits, and four styles of dressing. Vinny added a fifth dressing, Russian, but removed it after accusations of being a Communist sympathizer.

  Dale Hinshaw said at the time, “The people in the witness protection program can pick anywhere in the United States to live. The government’ll set ’em up in business and even buy them a house. It’s a pretty sweet deal, but you have to kill someone to get it.”

  Bob Jr. grumped, “If they could’ve lived anywhere, why in the world would they pick this place?”

  After a while Vinny and Penny became part of the landscape and we stopped guessing what had brought them here.

  Now we’re just grateful they’re here. Otherwise we’d have to drink our coffee at McDonald’s from a Styrofoam cup and burn our lips. Instead, we sit in a booth at the Coffee Cup and drink fresh coffee from mugs that have our names printed on the bottom and that hang on the wall next to the front door when we’re not there. We walk in, the bell over the door tinkles, Vinny greets us by name, and we pluck our mugs from the rack and head to our booth—where Penny smiles and pours coffee and hands us menus, even though we know what we want.

  The Coffee Cup is long and narrow. There are twelve red vinyl stools at the counter, six red vinyl booths along the wall, and a liar’s table at the rear, underneath the stuffed swordfish Vinny brought with him from back East. My parents remember the day Vinny and Penny drove into town in a 1959 Chevrolet with the swordfish tied on top. You don’t see that every day and it has stuck in our memories. I meet my father for a cup of coffee and he looks at the fish and asks, “Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw that fish?” I always say no because it pleases him to tell the story, which he does in detail, right down to the color of the car (light blue with a cream top); the weather (mostly sunny with the wind from the west); and where he was standing (in front of the Rexall).

  Vinny mounted the swordfish on the back wall, where it’s been ever since. Except for when some high-school kids snuck it out, put it in Ellis Hodge’s farm pond, and hid in the bushes to watch what would happen. A little while later Ellis drove past, saw a big fin sticking out of the water, and rolled to a stop.

  Its blue body broke the surface. Why, that’s a swordfish, Ellis thought. That’s an honest-to-goodness swordfish. Who’d believe it?

  A witness—he needed a witness.

  He turned his truck around and drove back to the house to get his wife, Miriam. He called Bob Jr. at the Herald to come take a picture and grabbed his Zebco 303 rod and reel from the mudroom wall.

  By the time Ellis, Miriam, and Bob Jr. converged on the pond, the boys had hauled the swordfish out of the water and were halfway back to town. The boys never told anyone, but for the next three years, always on May 3, they would sneak that fish out of the Coffee Cup and put it in Ellis’s pond. Each time Ellis would run to get Miriam and call Bob Jr., who would rush to the pond to no avail.

  The boys eventually graduated and left Harmony, but not before giving Ellis a purpose in life. Whenever he drove past that pond he would slow to a crawl. Sometimes he’d take a flashlight and go out there at two in the morning, on the off chance it was a nocturnal swordfish. Ellis referred to it as the Loch Ness of Harmony and devised a theory about how the swordfish ended up in his farm pond.

  “It has to do with El Niño. It started out in the Gulf of Mexico and went up the Mississippi River to the Ohio River, then to the Wabash, then to the White River to White Lick Creek, then up that little branch right into my pond. I think it happened during those heavy rains a few years back, when we had that flooding. They say El Niño caused things like this. I’ve read about it in the paper.”

  Then Miriam went to visit her sister in the next county. Ellis usually accompanied her, but not this time. It was May third. Swordfish Day. This time he’d be ready. He had a net—a big one—and his Zebco 303 rod and reel with a fifty-pound line, and a video camera. He waited all morning. There was a nice bass in the pond; every few minutes it would rise up and break the surface. But Ellis let him be. He was after bigger game.

  Noon came. Ellis was hungry. Miriam was gone, and she did all the cooking. She enjoyed it. Every now and then Ellis wanted to go to the Coffee Cup for lunch, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  She’d say, “What would people think, seeing you at the Coffee Cup? They’d think we were fighting. No sir, you’ll eat right here at home.”

  So Ellis had never been to the Coffee Cup, but with Miriam gone, today would be the day. He retrieved the video camera and tripod from his truck, inserted a ninety-minute tape, and looked through the viewfinder to be sure it covered the whole pond. Then Ellis jumped in the truck and drove the mile into town to the Coffee Cup. Miriam would never know.

  It was almost full. There was one booth open, near the back, next to the liar’s table. Penny was right there, handing him a menu and smiling, a coffeepot in her hand. She took his order and stepped aside…and there was the swordfish.

  I’ve seen that fish before, Ellis thought. Then he remembered where. Suddenly he felt self-conscious, like his pants were unzipped or there was toilet paper stuck to his shoe, and he looked around to see if anyone was watching him. But no one was. They were busy eating their beef manhattans and talking about people wh
o weren’t there to defend themselves.

  Well, to be made a fool of for four years was not a very good feeling. Ellis wondered who had done it. He wondered if they were in the Coffee Cup right now, cackling under their breath. Then if he got up to leave, they’d burst out laughing. So Ellis just sat there and ate his beef manhattan and acted like he belonged.

  Vinny came over and sat in the booth across from Ellis. He said, “Hey, Ellis. What did you do to get Miriam so mad?”

  Ellis said, “Nothing like that. She’s gone to see her sister.”

  “That’s nice,” Vinny said. “It’s a good thing for families to stay in touch.” Vinny said it quietly. He looked sad. He said, “I haven’t seen my family since 1963.”

  Ellis couldn’t imagine that. Not seeing your family? He didn’t ask why. It wasn’t his business.

  Instead, he asked, “Where’d you get the swordfish?”

  Vinny chuckled. “I caught that on my sixteenth birthday. My old man ran a bait shop and loved to fish, and on my sixteenth birthday he took me deep-sea fishing. I caught that fish and he had it stuffed for me.

  “My boy has the most fun with that old thing,” Vinny continued. “He put it in White Lick Creek last year and someone thought it was alive and called the police. Can you believe anyone could be that dumb?”

  Ellis took another bite of his beef manhattan.

  Vinny pulled his wallet from his pocket and plucked out a yellowed picture. It showed a younger Vinny with his father, the swordfish hanging upside down between them.

  He said, “My old man wanted me to take over his bait shop. When I told him I didn’t want to, he got mad and stopped speaking to me. That’s when Penny and I moved here. Haven’t seen him since.”

  It was the first time Vinny had ever told anyone. Ever since he and Penny had moved here, people had been speculating about their past. Dale Hinshaw, in particular, was all the time hinting that if Vinny had anything to get off his chest, now would be the time to do it. Dale told him how confession was good for the soul, that the Lord loved him and would forgive him. For once, Dale had his theology right.

  Vinny looked down at the picture. His father wasn’t all bad, Vinny reminisced aloud. He’d taught him how to ride a bicycle and how to make ice cream. Vinny remembered the feel of his father’s hand wrapping around his as they turned the crank. He missed his father. The year before, Penny had sent his father a Christmas card. She said it was foolish, these two stubborn men not talking all these years. She forged Vinny’s name on it: Love, Vinny. And then underneath it she wrote Your Son just in case his father had forgotten. Then she mailed it away.

  “I don’t know, maybe I ought to call him,” Vinny said.

  “Might not be a bad idea,” Ellis said.

  Then Ellis said he had to be moving along, that he had work to do, and paid his bill and left. He drove back to the pond, turned off his video recorder, and stowed it in the mudroom closet just as Miriam pulled up in the driveway.

  He asked about her sister. She asked if he would like a little something to eat. He told her thanks, but he was fine. He didn’t tell her about the swordfish. Driving home from the Coffee Cup, he’d decided never to talk about the swordfish again. He was going to let the matter drop. Maybe people would forget about it after a while.

  That Saturday he and Miriam drove to town to do their shopping. They walked past the Coffee Cup. It was closed, the door locked. Dale Hinshaw was standing with his face pressed to the window, peering in. There was a note on the door:

  Closed for two weeks.

  Will return on the 23rd.

  Gone to be with family.

  “Looks like that Mafia finally caught up with him,” Dale said. “Poor guy.”

  Ellis said, “You just never know.”

  And that is true. We just never know. We think we do. We think we have life figured out, and in our arrogance we become hard. But life has a way of humbling us, of softening us. That’s what Ellis was thinking as he walked down the sidewalk, holding Miriam’s hand—that we don’t know the first thing about anything. We’re so easily deceived.

  When we’re young, we think we know all there is to know. Then we grow older, and the more we learn, the more we realize how little we actually know.

  It takes a wise man to realize just how much he doesn’t know.

  Five

  Revival

  Every June we hold a revival at Harmony Friends Meeting. These revivals began when I was a kid, and back then, I enjoyed them. I especially enjoyed the time Cowboy Bob, the Wild West Evangelist, preached and did rope tricks and told how the devil had him hogtied, but then Jesus lassoed him and now he wears the kingdom brand. Then he passed out prayer bandannas and invited us to pray the Cowpoke’s Prayer: “Dear Lord, I’ve been a low-down, rotten cowpoke. Take away my black hat and mark me with your kingdom brand. Amen.”

  Afterwards, Cowboy Bob and his wife, Charlene, sat at the back of the meetinghouse and sold white cowboy hats and musical tapes of Cowboy Bob and the Kingdom Korral singing their favorite gospel tunes of the Old West.

  When I was a child I loved listening to Cowboy Bob and all the other evangelists who would visit our church each June. There was Brother Bruno, who found the Lord in prison and became an evangelist. Then came Mohammed the Baptist, who had grown up Muslim and was converted by a missionary. He wore a turban and robes and took kids on camel rides in the parking lot.

  When I was in the seventh grade, Miss Marcella Montero came to speak. She had been a 4-H Fair beauty queen, then moved to Hollywood and compromised her morals. Ten years later, she couldn’t talk about it without weeping. Thankfully, she had turned from sin, renewed her faith, and taken to the revival circuit, where she hinted of past depravities. We waited breathlessly for details, though she was not as forthcoming as we’d have liked.

  I loved all this as a child, but now that I’m the pastor, it’s a little hard to take. The evangelists come and do rope tricks and tell dramatic stories about their lives of sin before they met the Lord. Sin creative in its originality. Sin we didn’t know existed. It is thrilling to listen to, and a little shocking. Then they leave and the next week I step back in the pulpit, and the air is thick with disappointment. It makes me wish I had sinned a bit more before I became a Christian, so I could offer a more colorful testimony.

  Truthfully, I was somewhat embarrassed by these evangelists and wanted to dispense with the revivals altogether. So at the April meeting of elders, when Dale Hinshaw brought up the subject of the June revival, I suggested that this might be the year to skip the revival and have a week of prayer instead.

  “That’s so boring,” Fern Hampton said. “Let’s think of something else.”

  It was then that Dale Hinshaw told about Billy Bundle, the World’s Shortest Evangelist, who was preaching in the city. Dale had gone to hear him and was greatly impressed by this little man who was so short he couldn’t see over the pulpit. He told how Billy took the big pulpit Bible, placed it on the floor, said “Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet,” then stepped up on that Bible to preach.

  Dale Hinshaw was captivated and vowed to bring the World’s Shortest Evangelist to Harmony Friends Meeting as our June revival speaker.

  “You should have seen the crowd,” Dale exclaimed. “The place was packed. The offering was so big they had to empty the baskets halfway through. We do this right and we can maybe raise enough money to buy new cabinets for the church kitchen.”

  Fern Hampton said, “I’m for that.”

  So that is how Billy Bundle, the World’s Shortest Evangelist, came to speak at the June revival of Harmony Friends Meeting.

  Billy Bundle hadn’t always been an evangelist. He’d started out as a professional wrestler. My brother Roger and I used to watch him Saturday afternoons on Channel 5. The wrestling matches were held at the armory in the city. If we wrapped tin foil around the television antennas and slid it up and down, Channel 5 would come in clear. We were little kids, and professional wrestling made a gr
eat impression. We’d push the furniture back to the walls and wrestle in our underwear, just like Billy Bundle.

  Except that they didn’t call him Billy Bundle on television. They called him “The Mississippi Midget,” even though he wasn’t from Mississippi, nor was he a midget. He was from the Bronx and came from a long line of short people. He spoke in a Southern drawl and wore bright red wrestling trunks. As he walked to and from the ring, he wore a top hat, which he took off in the presence of ladies. A Southern gentleman.

  Billy was one of the good guys, at least at first. Then he became one of the bad guys and would kick his opponent when the referee wasn’t watching. He hid brass knuckles in his trunks, which the referees never found. He hit below the belt. He was an easy man to hate.

  Then Billy had his accident, which everyone watching Channel 5 witnessed. He got tangled in the ropes, fell, and broke his right leg, which caused him to limp for the rest of his life.

  While Billy was in the hospital he watched Channel 21, the religion station, and realized his true calling: evangelism. He quit the wrestling business and began traveling from town to town, preaching revivals. On the last night of the revivals, Billy would do a dramatization from the book of Genesis, Jacob wrestling with the stranger at the river Jabbok. He would ask for a volunteer from the audience, whom he would fling around the platform, using flips and body slams and headlocks. At the stirring conclusion of his story, you’d hear a loud c-r-a-c-k and Billy would rise to his feet, grimacing, and hobble away—just like Jacob. It always brought in a good offering, and afterwards Billy would autograph pictures of himself dressed in his wrestling trunks, back when he was “The Mississippi Midget.”

  This was the man Dale Hinshaw chose to bring a message from the eternal God.