Home to Harmony

by Philip Gulley

  I advised the ladies to stand back. I drew back my left hand and smacked the freezer hard, while plugging in the plug with my right hand. The freezer hummed to life.

  “Must have been a short,” I told them. “This freezer’s getting old. Probably time to buy a new one.”

  The women were crying.

  I said, “Don’t be discouraged. We can make more noodles. I’ll help you.”

  It took all day and into the evening. I cut the noodles, just like I did when I was a little boy. My mother cautioned me to pay attention and cut straight. We separated the noodles and hung them up to dry. Noodles everywhere, strung on clotheslines across the basement and draped across the pews upstairs.

  Jessie Peacock went to the Kroger, bought thirty chickens, boiled them, and picked off the meat, grieving the whole time they weren’t Rhode Island Reds.

  We came back on Saturday morning. The noodles were dry. We cooked them tender and stirred in the chicken. The people began lining up at the doors. They streamed through for three solid hours. The women were everywhere—pouring tea, stirring noodles, cleaning dishes, and wiping tables. By two o’clock we had served the last dinner and at five o’clock the last dish was wiped dry and the floor was mopped.

  It was all people talked about the next day at church. How everyone pitched in and worked hard to overcome a crisis. My mother stood and spoke of how all things work for good for them who love the Lord. Then Jessie Peacock told how I had worked harder than anyone, and how glad she was that I was their pastor and what an example of faith I was. She had forgotten all about the chickens.

  I didn’t say anything. I had come to church prepared to confess. I was going to tell them I had left the freezer unplugged, but sitting there, listening to them, I decided not to. The Lord moves in mysterious ways. This had been a good thing. It had caused them to work together. It had restored their faith and renewed their confidence. Who was I to cheapen that? So I kept quiet. For their sake.

  The next day I drove to Sears in the city and bought the Friendly Women’s Circle a new freezer. I bought myself a cordless drill. That Tuesday, two men delivered the new freezer, humping it down the stairs. They hauled the Crosley to the dump. The women stood around the new freezer, patting it, smiling and proud.

  My mother grinned and clapped her hands. “Come on, Friendly Women, let’s make those noodles.”

  I’ll tell them someday, but not anytime soon. Maybe when I’ve been here twenty-five years.

  I went up to my office and began working on my new sermon, “Lead Us Not into Temptation, but Deliver Us from All Evil.”

  I bowed my head to pray. “Yes, Lord, teach us this lesson. For sometimes we are too tricky for our own good. Help us to depend on You and not upon our cleverness. And Lord, if those women should ever learn the truth, protect and guard Your humble servant. Amen.”

  Fifteen

  The World

  I was in first grade when I learned that religious faith would not be easy to sustain. I bowed my head to pray at lunch, just as my parents had taught me.

  Thank You, God, for our food,

  for homes and health and all things good.

  For the wind and the rain and the sun above,

  And most of all for those we love.

  Then I said “Amen” and raised my head just as Jerry Porter hit me on the arm and called me a twinkie. This wasn’t like home, where I was patted on the head and given an extra helping of macaroni and cheese. This was The World. This was what Pastor Taylor cautioned us about every Sunday morning at Harmony Friends Meeting.

  “The World will persecute you for your faith. Jesus didn’t have it easy. Neither will you. Don’t you forget it. There’s hard times ahead. Be strong.”

  The next Sunday at church, I told my Sunday school teacher, Bea Majors, about Jerry Porter hitting me for praying. She told me it was the price of faith. If I had been a student of the Scriptures, I would have pointed out the biblical injunction against public prayer. Matthew 6:6. Printed in red ink, straight from the Lord’s own mouth. “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray…” It would have saved me a lot of bruises.

  Even though it was a dangerous half hour, I enjoyed school lunch most of all. I liked the order of it. Lining up in the classroom in front of the fish tank, marching down the hallway to the cafeteria, reaching down in the milk cooler and pulling out a chocolate milk. Sitting at a long table and talking until Mr. Michaels, the principal, put a classical music album on the record player, which was the signal to stop talking and start eating. To this day, whenever I hear Beethoven, I think of Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and diced peaches.

  I especially liked the food trays. At our house, all the food ran together on our plates. The green bean juice got mixed in with the applesauce, which spilled over on the corn. I didn’t care for that and wouldn’t eat it. My mother told me to clean my plate, that kids in Africa didn’t have any food. I offered to send them my supper.

  What I liked about the school food was that it knew its place. There was the meat section of the tray. It was the biggest section of all, in the lower right-hand corner. Next to it was the vegetable section, which was a circle in the lower left corner. On the left edge of the tray was where you laid the silverware, along with your napkin and drinking straw. The fruit went in the upper left corner, and next to it, in the top center section, was the dessert. In the upper right corner was where you set your cardboard container of milk. Chocolate milk if you were a boy, white milk if you were a girl.

  The trays were a disservice, leading us to believe the rest of life would be orderly, though it never was. They’d have been better off stirring our food together and telling us that was how the world was—mixed up and out of kilter. Instead, they had us walk in lines and didn’t let our food run together. They taught us harmony and sent us forth into chaos.

  I had forgotten all about the trays until I went to eat lunch with my son Levi the second week of school. I signed in at the office and walked down the hallway toward his classroom. I passed the sixth-grade hallway and heard Miss Fishbeck calling out words for a spelling bee. I listened as Amanda Hodge spelled the word methodical. M-e-t-h-o-d-i-c-a-l. The talk at the Coffee Cup was that she might win the county spelling bee.

  My son’s class was lined up in the hallway. Mrs. Hester marched us to the cafeteria, where the ladies spooned out our food in sections. We sat at a long table. It reminded me of a prison table, where the convicts ate and planned their escapes. I was sandwiched between Levi and a little boy named Adam Fleming.

  My son had told me about Adam—how Adam’s name was written on the chalkboard at least once a day, how he’d been sent to the principal’s office two times already, how none of the kids liked him.

  “He’s a liar,” my son reported. “And once at recess he kicked Billy Grant right in the stomach. On purpose. If he messes with me, I’ll karate-chop him.”

  The Flemings lived east of town in a trailer. Adam and his two little sisters and his parents had moved to town the year before. Adam’s daddy, Wayne, worked nights at the Kroger waxing the floors, and his mother labored at the McDonald’s down near the interstate.

  Then early one morning Wayne Fleming came home from work to find the kids asleep and his wife gone. There was a note on the table that read, Don’t try to find me. I’ve gone away.

  The rumor was that she’d met a trucker and had gone west with him. Our thoughts toward her were not charitable. The women from the meeting had been taking food out to the trailer and the lady who worked at the Kroger deli let Wayne take home the day-old bread and the chicken wings that didn’t sell. The nights were hardest, when Wayne would tuck the children into bed and they would cry for their mommy. People said they were better off, but it didn’t feel that way to Adam and his sisters.

  Their daddy never knew what to tell them, so he never said anything. He would just hold them until they fell asleep. Then he’d tidy up the trailer and start the laundry and wash the dishes.
Then the retired neighbor lady would come sleep on the couch, and Wayne would leave for the Kroger.

  I knew about all this as I was kind of their pastor, since they’d come to our meeting the Easter before. I’d gone to visit them a time or two and had seen Wayne at Kroger when I’d go there late at night for ice cream. We took to visiting in the aisles and struck up a kind of friendship. When his wife ran off with the trucker, Wayne called to tell me.

  I mentioned their need to the Friendly Women’s Circle, who were casting about for a new project. They decided to take on the Flemings. But as magnificent as those women were, they were no replacement for a mother. Adam and his sisters still cried themselves to sleep.

  I had told my son that Adam didn’t have the blessings he had and to treat him nice.

  Now Adam was sitting next to Levi and me in the school cafeteria. He said, “My daddy sleeps in the daytime. He doesn’t eat lunch.”

  I said, “Hey, Adam, why don’t I come next week and have lunch with you. Would you like that?”

  He said he would. Then he said, “My mommy came to eat lunch with me yesterday. Have you met my mommy? She’s a good mommy. She’s real nice.”

  Hoping if he said it enough times, it’d make it true.

  I said, “I don’t know your mother well, but I bet she’s nice.”

  He said, “She’s real nice. When I get home from school she has cookies for me. And she buys me lots of toys. Anything I want.”

  A little girl across the table shrieked, “He’s lying. He’s a liar. His mommy’s gone. She ran off.”

  “Shut your face,” Adam screamed and lunged at her. I grabbed hold of him and pulled him back. He was shaking with rage. Then he leaned into me and began to cry.

  The lunchroom monitor marched over, frowning, and told Adam if he didn’t settle down, he’d have to sit off by himself at the quiet table.

  This is The World’s response to suffering. We want it out of sight, off by itself over at the quiet table.

  Raw pain alarms us. It reminds us that life isn’t as orderly as we’d hoped. We demand that pain settle down before we shuffle it off to the quiet table. We want pain to stay in its own little section, want to keep it from spilling over into the other parts of life. Just like those lunch trays. Keep pain in its own little compartment.

  I held Adam to me, thinking of his mother. Wondering if her joy in running off was worth all this. I thought of Wayne having to teach his children they were still worth loving and worth having. What a large task, when all the evidence seems otherwise.

  This was The World Pastor Taylor had warned against. A world where some parents cared more about their happiness than they did about their children. I thought of the cold evil committed by folks looking to be happy.

  The World.

  I held that little boy to me and thought hopeful thoughts of a New World. Yearning for it as never before. A New World.

  A world where God has set up housekeeping, where God will live right with us, and we with Him. He’ll wipe the tears from our eyes, and death will die. No more crying, no more sorrow, no more pain, no more.

  I held that crying boy to me and thought my hopeful thoughts.

  Sixteen

  Mutiny

  The Quaker religion began in 1647 and was based on the premise that God could be known directly by all persons. Quakers believed you didn’t need a priest to approach God on your behalf, that you could approach God yourself. A kind of do-it-yourself religion. It was a radical concept at the time and was strongly opposed, mostly by priests who had made a handsome living approaching God on other people’s behalf.

  The Quaker fondness for self-sufficiency continues to this day—we would never think of hiring a plumber or electrician to work in the meetinghouse. Consequently, our meetinghouse toilet gets stopped up a lot, and when the furnace kicks on, the freezer in the basement blows a fuse. Any suggestion to hire a professional to fix these problems is met with derision by staunch Quakers accustomed to standing on their own two feet.

  Not hiring professionals has become a test of one’s faith. Three hundred years ago, the Quaker proverbs included “There is that of God in every person” and “Thou shalt not kill.” Today, it is “We can fix that toilet ourselves” and “If we all pitched in, we could paint the meetinghouse together.”

  Except we never get around to fixing anything, because when it gets mentioned during our church’s monthly business meeting that we need to paint the meetinghouse, Dale Hinshaw scoffs and says, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing right now. Ever since they took lead out of paint, it hasn’t been worth a darn. Used to be a paint job would last twenty, maybe thirty years, but not anymore. Why don’t we have Sam drive up to Canada and buy some paint with lead in it, so it’ll last.”

  I sit quietly, thinking to myself: This is why I went to seminary—so I could drive to Canada and buy lead paint.

  The young mothers sit there, horrified, envisioning their children licking lead paint and suffering brain damage.

  One of them raises her hand, timidly. “Isn’t lead kind of dangerous?” she asks.

  “Naw,” Dale scoffs, “that’s a government lie. The paint companies bribed Congress to take lead out so we’d have to paint our houses more often and buy more paint. It’s a big racket. Lead never hurt nobody.”

  This is Dale Hinshaw at his finest, dismissing a whole body of scientific research in one fell swoop.

  The mothers sit there, blinking and dazed. This is not what they’d heard about Quakers. They’d read about the Quakers’ opposition to war and slavery, about our beliefs in simplicity, reconciliation, and integrity. They come to church expecting enlightenment and meet Dale Hinshaw instead.

  This is why our church never grows. Just when we’ve gotten someone committed enough to come to our monthly business meeting, Dale Hinshaw is honing his latest conspiracy theory. It makes the new people leery about sticking around; they worry they’re joining some kind of weird cult.

  It happened again in October, when the toilet in the women’s bathroom broke and needed replacing. Uly Grant offered to donate a brand-new toilet from the Grant Hardware Emporium. In a fit of new-convert enthusiasm, he even offered to install it.

  Dale Hinshaw rose to his feet. “Well, Uly, you do what you want, but I think there’s a higher principle involved here, something many of you probably haven’t thought about, and that is the topic of these new low-flow toilets. They don’t work. You got to flush ’em two or three times. Why don’t I drive up to the city to a secondhand store and see if I can get us a used one.”

  The women began to murmur, ruminating about used toilets. Dale would buy the cheapest one, probably one from the men’s room of an old gas station. It would be dark brown with rust. It would have cigarette burns on the toilet seat. The women grimaced.

  Dale continued, “I tell you, the government’s gone too far this time, telling us what kind of toilets we can put in our own homes. That ain’t right.”

  Miriam Hodge spoke up, the picture of Quaker reasonableness. “Aren’t the new toilets supposed to use less water, so we can better preserve our limited natural resources?”

  Dale said, “Miriam, this ain’t about water. This is about liberty. This is about freedom. They’re starting with our toilets, then it’ll be our guns, then it’ll be the vote. You watch and see. No, I can’t agree with this at all. It’s time we took a stand.”

  Suddenly the installation of a toilet had become a political issue, a test of our patriotism, a challenge to the Bill of Rights.

  The trouble with belonging to a religion founded on rebellion is that the spirit of rebellion is never exhausted. It just finds different things to rebel against. First we rebelled against empty religious practices, then against war and slavery. Now we had toilets squarely in our sights.

  After the meeting was over, the women gathered in a corner, talking, their voices raised. I was standing with Uly. The women headed toward us. Fern Hampton emerged from their ranks.

  “
If we don’t get a new toilet by next Sunday, the women of this meeting are going on strike,” Fern declared. “No more pitch-in dinners. No more teaching Sunday school classes. No more serving on committees. No more noodles. You think about that.”

  Then, having fired their shot across our bow, they turned and marched away.

  Mutiny. This was getting ugly. No more noodles.

  I turned to Uly. “What are we gonna do?” I asked him.

  He said, “Meet me at the back door of the meetinghouse tonight at ten o’clock. Don’t tell a soul. Come alone. Bring your flashlight. Wear dark clothes.”

  I wondered all day what Uly had in store. Barbara and I went to bed at nine-thirty. She fell asleep. At nine-fifty I slipped out of bed, pulled on my dark clothes, and grabbed my flashlight. I walked the four blocks to the meetinghouse and stood at the back door, in the shadows.

  A pickup truck, its headlights off, coasted into the meetinghouse parking lot and pulled up next to the back door. The driver’s door eased open, and Uly slid out of the truck, noiselessly.

  He motioned me to the back of the truck. There was a brand-new, low-flow toilet perched in the truck bed.

  “Uly, it’s beautiful,” I told him.

  “Shh!” Uly whispered. “Help me lift it out.” We snuck the toilet into the meetinghouse and down the stairs to the women’s bathroom.

  Uly said, “Turn on your flashlight.”

  I flipped it on. It looked odd in there, with the subtle mingling of shadow and light. It felt wrong to be there, a violation of everything I’d been taught. Spurning the bright light of truth and hiding in the shadows. I felt guilty. I recalled Pastor Taylor admonishing us “to present ourselves to God as one approved, a workman who has no need to be ashamed…” Now here I was, slinking around in the shadows of the women’s rest room.

  Uly said, “You hold the flashlight; I’ll put in the new toilet.”