Life Goes On

by Philip Gulley

  It’s the same parade as the Corn and Sausage Days parade in September, except for the Sausage Queen, who sits enthroned in the backseat of Harvey’s convertible, waving to her subjects.

  The Fourth of July parade is held in the afternoon. Then we go home for a nap and a bite to eat. After that, we reassemble at the town park at dusk and sit in our lawn chairs on the hill above the pool to watch the fireworks, which are shot off from the center field of the Little League diamond.

  When I was growing up, Huey Gladden from the street department was in charge of the fireworks. But in 1976, in a valiant attempt to play the national anthem using fireworks, while rushing from one launching tube to another, he stumbled, fell upon a tube just as a Roman candle was lifting off, and very nearly achieved orbit.

  These days, Darrell Furbay, the fire chief, sets off the fireworks. Although he lacks Huey Gladden’s creativity, it is a comfort to enjoy the fireworks without worrying about a fatality.

  The day before the parade, my boys and I washed and waxed the tractor with my father. It’s been in my front yard the past two summers, after my father gave it to me, believing it would cure me of depression. I did cheer up shortly thereafter, so I’m not discounting its curative powers.

  My father and I have taken turns driving it in the parades. It was my turn this year. At first I’d resisted the idea, but then I discovered I enjoyed navigating the tractor up Main Street past the stores and knots of people, waving and throwing candy.

  “Can I ride with you this year?” Addison asked, as we polished the tractor.

  “I don’t think so, buddy. It isn’t safe. You might fall off my lap.”

  “You could pull me behind you in a wagon.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I suppose I could do that.”

  I phoned Ellis Hodge that evening to see if he had a hay wagon we could borrow, which he did. Addison was elated.

  Levi let out a snort. “You’ll look like a dork,” he said to his little brother.

  “Then so will you,” I pointed out. “Because you’re riding with us.”

  He began to whine, as only an eleven-year-old can.

  “No complaining,” I said. “Mom promised Deena she’d help her at the coffee shop. So you’re stuck with me, kid. And I’m on the tractor, which means you will be too.” I said it in my “And that’s that!” voice, to stifle any argument.

  The morning of the Fourth, the phone rang while we were eating breakfast. It was Asa Peacock, clearly distressed. “It won’t start,” he said. “I’ve been trying for two hours to get it running, and it won’t start.”

  “What won’t start?”

  “My new tractor,” Asa moaned. “I called the dealer and he said the computer must be out of whack. They gotta order in some parts from Atlanta.”

  “Gee, Asa, I’m sorry to hear that. Can you use Ellis’s tractor?”

  “He’s got it taken apart, workin’ on it. Can you pull the church float with your tractor?”

  I once heard of a mental illness that causes otherwise rational persons to occasionally behave in illogical ways. I have long suspected I suffer from this malady, for the next hour found me at Dale Hinshaw’s house, hitching my 1939 Farmall Model M tractor to a hay wagon bearing a replica of our meetinghouse and draped with a banner reading, “I will make this town a curse for all the nations of the earth.”—Jeremiah 26:6.

  Dale was stacking cartons of tracts inside the model. “The Catholics get this one,” he said, holding up a copy of Why Is Mary Crying? “And the liberals get Flight 581 or Reverend Tremendous. It don’t matter which one.”

  He loaded a box on the wagon.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “Salvation suckers,” he replied. “I got ’em at the Bible bookstore. They got the plan of salvation written right on ’em. See?” He held one up for me to inspect.

  “Those are as big as Frisbees,” I observed.

  “Got to be, to get all the Bible verses on ’em.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” I asked.

  “Throw ’em to the kids.”

  “I don’t know, Dale. What if you hit someone in the head? They’re pretty heavy.”

  “Better a concussion than to roast in hell.”

  I made the boys wear their nice clothes since we were representing the church. Levi began moaning about my choice of vocations. “How come just because you’re a minister, I have to do this? Why can’t I just stay home?”

  “Because no one’s here to watch you. Your mother’s helping Deena and I’m in the parade, so that’s that. Now stop complaining and get dressed.”

  “Okay, but I’m not handing out anything.”

  “That’s fine. You can stay inside the float and pass things to Dale. No one’ll even see you.”

  “You’re crazy,” Addison said to his brother. “This’ll be fun. All our friends will see us and everything.”

  Levi smacked his forehead. “Well, duh. Like I really want my friends to see me riding on some dorky church float.”

  I had a fleeting recollection of plodding down Main Street on a donkey during the town’s annual Palm Sunday pageant. I was eleven years old, Levi’s age. It had been our church’s turn to supply a Jesus, and the finger of fate had settled on me after it was discovered that Herbert Stout, the other boy in our church, was allergic to donkeys. The elders didn’t want a Jesus with hives. So I was not without sympathy.

  “No one will see you,” I promised Levi. “Just stay hidden inside the float and you’ll be fine.”

  But I could tell he wasn’t pleased, and that the Methodists were looking more attractive every moment.

  The parade began at the elementary school, went north on Washington Street four blocks, hooked a left onto Main Street, looped around the town square, then headed back south to the school. It was always exciting to see whether the front of the parade would bisect the rear of the parade, as it did in 1976 when everyone and their brother marched in the bicentennial parade. But this year, Harvey missed Owen Stout, our perennial town board candidate, by a good twenty yards.

  Levi stayed crouched in the church on the float the whole time, handing out fistfuls of tracts to Dale, who distributed them to people who in his estimation needed saving. Addison passed out the salvation suckers, eating one for every six he gave out.

  Everything was going fine until the fire department’s tanker passed in front of Grant’s Hardware and the engine backfired. Bystanders later said it was the farthest they had ever seen an animal leap, when Billy Grant’s pet ferret, the one I’d given him, jumped from his arms and began sprinting among the Shriners. It dodged Clevis Nagle on his bicycle, scattered the Little League teams, then froze as my 1939 Farmall Model M tractor with its original steel front wheel bore down. I swerved to miss it, causing the church to slide from the float and land upside down on the street with a splintering crash. Levi, though unhurt, was lodged in the steeple, his legs opening and closing in the air like a pair of scissors. Billy Grant’s ferret had scrambled up Dale’s leg and was perched on his head, causing Dale to speculate that God had indeed made our town a curse for all the nations of the earth, just as Jeremiah had predicted.

  This was the picture Bob Miles snapped for the front page of the Harmony Herald, alongside an article about Billy Grant and his pet ferret and how he’d come to own it. Bob also interviewed Dale Hinshaw, who prophesied that this was the first of many catastrophes God would visit upon our town for our sins.

  “I’m never going to be in a parade again, Levi told me that night, after the fireworks.

  “I said the same thing when I was your age.”

  “Then how come you were in the parade today?” he asked.

  I thought for a moment. “Because Asa Peacock asked for my help, and he’s my friend.”

  “Is Dale your friend?”

  “I wouldn’t want to go on vacation with him,” I said, “but I don’t wish him any harm.”

  A car turned in front of ou
r house, it’s headlights casting shadows against my son’s bedroom wall.

  “Is it always like this in the church?” Levi asked, after a while.

  “Always like what?”

  “You have to be with people you don’t like.”

  “Sometimes it’s like that. But there are also a lot of wonderful people.”

  “I’m still not going to ride on the church float ever again,” he said.

  “Fair enough, sport.”

  I lay in bed that night thinking how nothing ever changes. I’m forty-two years old and still having to do things I don’t want to do. I suppose it’s the price of loving people. My son thinks he’ll somehow avoid these obligations, which is a common misperception among the young. In time, of course, he’ll learn otherwise, that maturity isn’t about doing what pleases us, but bearing with good humor that which annoys us to no end.

  I forget this myself sometimes, so it’s good to be reminded, lest in my arrogance I despise the Dales of the world for not marching to my tune. When I was a child, my father would advise me not to take myself so seriously. I wondered if I should wake my son to pass this truth along, then decided against it. There are some lessons we have to learn on our own, lessons whose truths aren’t accepted until the soul is ready to hear them.

  Seven

  Freedom Month

  A heat wave rolled into town the week after the Fourth and has hunkered down for a long stay. It’s been the hottest July in forty-eight years, or so Bob Miles at the Herald noted in an editorial warning about global warming, which agitated the conservatives, causing them to fire off letters to the editor. They complain about the liberal slant of the Herald and how it’s time true Americans stood up for their rights, which apparently includes the right to tell editors what they can and cannot publish in a newspaper. The irony of this seems to escape them, so Bob points it out in another editorial, which provokes them even further.

  Civil liberties have never really caught on with some people in our town. Freedom of the press is fine, as long as the press agrees with them. These same people attend the school-board meetings demanding freedom of religion, that our children be made to pray whether they want to or not. But not just any prayer will do; it has to conform to certain theological assumptions and be led by the teacher. Unless the teacher objects, at which point the school board might reconsider why they hired that teacher in the first place.

  Bob has declared July “Freedom Month” at the Herald in honor of America’s birthday. The first week he wrote about freedom of the press. The second week he wrote that freedom of religion also included freedom from religion. This did not generate the controversy he’d hoped for, so in the third week he wrote about the freedom of association, that Americans ought to be free to associate with whomever they wished. It was one of those editorials that had the men at the Coffee Cup saying, “You got that right, mister,” all the way through, until they hit the last paragraph, in which Bob contended that if we really believed in free association, then gay people ought to be free to marry one another.

  The Herald landed on our doorsteps on Thursday afternoon. When I arrived at the meetinghouse office on Friday morning, thirteen messages were on the answering machine wanting to know if Bob Miles was a member of our church and, if so, could we boot him out or censure him or possibly burn him at the stake.

  Frank nailed me as soon as I came through the door. “The ministerial association is holding an emergency meeting at ten o’clock. They asked if you could be there.”

  I’d been avoiding the ministerial association meetings for the past six months, ever since they’d elected Pastor Jimmy of the Harmony Worship Center as their president. I had better things to do than listen to him boast about the growth of his church. Truth be told, I think they were glad I was staying away. They’d been shunning me since the year before, when I’d suggested we hold a peace rally on the town square. The motion had failed, five to one. They had then forged boldly ahead with their plans to have a booth at the Corn and Sausage Days festival.

  “Could you please call them, thank them for their invitation, but tell them I can’t make it?” I asked Frank. “I need to work on my sermon.”

  Within the hour, Dale Hinshaw and Fern Hampton were in my office. Although I’d given Frank firm instructions to keep Dale and Fern at bay, he was upset that I’d given the ferret to Billy Grant. He retaliated by ushering into my office Dale and Fern, who demanded to know what I was going to do about Bob Miles.

  “What would you suggest I do?”

  “Kick him out of the church,” Fern said.

  I pointed out that he wasn’t a member.

  “So let’s make him a member and then kick him out.”

  “What did Bob do that was so awful?”

  “He’s promoting filth,” Dale said. “He’s wreckin’ the institution of marriage.”

  “His editorial didn’t hurt my marriage. Do you know anyone who’s gotten divorced because of Bob’s editorial?”

  But Dale had worked himself to a lather and wasn’t in the mood for reason. He predicted if Bob weren’t silenced, all manner of tragedies would follow, up to and including the fall of Western civilization.

  “Not to mention how it’ll affect the Corn and Sausage Days festival,” Fern Hampton screeched. “You think God-fearing Christians will want to visit a town that’s given itself over to perversion? And if that flops, so does our Chicken Noodle Dinner. And there go our chances of ever getting new kitchen cabinets. But I suppose you haven’t thought about that.”

  They ranted on for fifteen minutes before my telephone rang. I excused myself and answered it. It was my wife, reminding me to meet her for lunch. She hung up, but I stayed on the line, feigning a pastoral emergency so I could pry Fern and Dale from my office. I looked up apologetically. “I’m afraid I need some privacy,” I told them. “Thank you for stopping by.”

  They harrumphed in unison, turned, and stalked from my office.

  The day did not improve. My phone rang continually as a variety of enraged citizens and church members called to demand I lead the battle for righteousness against Bob Miles. My only break came at lunchtime, when I met my wife at the Legal Grounds for our weekly date. It is the town’s one safe haven for progressive thinkers. Deena had posted the editorial page from the Herald on her bulletin board just inside the door, along with a letter of support for Bob Miles, which she invited us to sign.

  “No, thank you,” I told Deena. “I think I’ll remain above the fray.”

  “Not me,” my wife said. “I’ll sign it.” And with that, she took the pen from Deena and signed her name in big, bold letters, with a flourish.

  By Sunday morning, the town was locked in the grip of a civil war, with the Bob bashers far outnumbering his defenders. Meeting for worship was a disaster, with Dale praying aloud that the Lord would smite Bob, lest his sin infect the town. By then, word had gotten out that my wife had signed the letter in support of Bob. So after Dale had prayed for Bob’s destruction, he waded in on me, chastising me for not making my wife submit to me, in accordance with the Scriptures.

  I didn’t respond, electing to follow Jesus’ example of remaining silent before his accusers.

  Miriam Hodge stood and pled for tolerance, which was like standing in a tavern and arguing for sobriety. Bea Majors began playing the organ to drown her out.

  It was a bitter hour.

  I took Monday off and went with my family on a picnic at a state park sixty miles away, where no one ever read the Herald. I thought of taking the week off, but was short of vacation days. Instead, I had Frank, who had since forgiven me, guard my office door, weeding out the malcontents from those sincerely needing help.

  On Thursday morning, Opal Majors arrived to start pasting together the church newsletter, as she has since 1967, when Juanita Harmon met her untimely demise while lighting the meetinghouse stove. Opal agreed to do it until we could find a replacement for Juanita, and she’s been at it ever since. We can’t pry it fr
om her now, as much as we’d like to. The whole newsletter is one long editorial, with the church activities and Opal’s opinion of them woven together into a four-page dissertation, all of it one paragraph and single-spaced.

  “Are you coming to the march?” she asked me.

  “What march?”

  “The march on Bob. It’s this Saturday. All the churches in town are participating. It’s on the flier.”

  “What flier?”

  “From the ministerial association,” she said. “It had your name on it. Didn’t you read it?”

  “What do you mean it had my name on it?”

  “At the bottom, along with all the other ministers.”

  “Do you have a copy I can see?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it’s here somewhere,” Opal said, rifling through her purse. “I got to tell you, Sam, I was real proud to see your name on it. There for a while I thought you were turning liberal on us.”

  She handed me the flier, and I read it. Just as I had feared, it was contemptible—a withering tirade against gays and the liberal media elite. It bore no resemblance to the gospel. And there was my name, heading the list of signatures.

  “It’s in today’s Herald too,” Opal said, beaming. “On the editorial page. We’re awful proud of you for taking a stand, Sam.”

  It took an hour to find out who’d added my name to the flier—Pastor Jimmy at the Harmony Worship Center. It had been his last nefarious act before leaving town for a two-week vacation, which, in retrospect, was a blessing, as it prevented my hunting him down and taking his life.

  As for Bob Miles, he was elated. Newspaper sales had never been better. He’d been back to press three times in the past week. Dale Hinshaw had purchased one hundred extra copies so he could burn them on the day of the march.

  Bob had added four pages to the paper in order to print all the letters to the editor he’d received and was now selling the paper for a dollar a copy as a special edition. He’d also published his next editorial, in which he proposed the government add Bill Clinton’s face to Mount Rushmore. Dale bought two hundred extra copies of that one.