Life Goes On

by Philip Gulley

  Harvey was working at the dealership, and didn’t learn of Hester’s overthrow until that night at the supper table, when Eunice spilled the beans, describing in great detail Hester’s transgressions and her eviction from the treasurer’s position.

  Brilliant, Harvey thought. Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll steal something, and they’ll have to throw me off the council.

  He started the next day, visiting the town hall during his lunch break and pocketing a box of paper clips in plain view of Dottie, the billing clerk.

  “You need some paper clips, Harvey?” Dottie asked. “Help yourself. Somebody works as hard as you do for this town ought to get a box of paper clips every now and then.”

  “I’m gonna take a stapler too,” he said. “Mine’s broken.”

  “Funny you should mention that,” she said, reaching into her desk drawer. “I brought an extra one from home just yesterday. You take it for as long as you need it.”

  This wasn’t going at all as he’d planned. If Dottie didn’t start cooperating, he’d never be a thief. He glanced around the office. His eyes fell on the soda pop machine. He ambled across the room, reached behind the machine where Dottie hid the key, unlocked the machine door, pulled out a Nehi orange pop, and took a swig.

  “Let me buy that for you,” Dottie said, fishing through her purse for change. “I owe you one from last week. Remember?”

  Harvey sighed. That was the problem with people nowadays, he thought. They’re too soft on crime. Whatever happened to the good old days when they hanged criminals?

  On the way home, he walked past the Herald building just as Owen Stout was depositing a quarter in the newspaper dispenser. As Owen opened the door to get the paper, Harvey leaned in beside him. “Don’t shut it yet,” he said, reaching past Owen to grab a copy of the paper from the dispenser.

  Bob Miles was working on his “Bobservation Post” column, reporting the Tuesday afternoon view from the front window of the Herald, and saw the whole thing. He was aghast. Larceny on his doorstep! By a public servant, no less!

  When the newspaper hit the doorsteps two days later, the first line of the “Bobservation Post” read, “What member of the town council was recently seen STEALING a newspaper?” Bob’s article went on to lament the decline of integrity among politicians, starting with Watergate and winding its way through the Iran-Contra scandal, Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and now a brazen theft in broad daylight by a town councilman.

  What kind of example did this set for the children in town? Bob wanted to know.

  There are three members on the town council—Harvey, Owen Stout, and Clevis Nagle. Clevis was out of town that week with his wife on their annual trip to visit her brother in Des Moines, so he was ruled out, which left Harvey and Owen. Owen is an attorney, and an honest one, but because people like to believe the worst about lawyers, they assumed he was the culprit and letters to the editor began rolling in demanding his ouster from the council.

  Owen was going to let it pass, but his wife wouldn’t and wrote a letter to the Herald defending her husband. Unfortunately, by insisting on Owen’s innocence, she inadvertently implicated Harvey. This annoyed people to no end. In all their lives, they had never seen such a malicious and blatant political attack. Harvey couldn’t go anywhere without people stopping him to voice their support.

  Harvey refrained from any public comment, which was seen as yet another example of his sterling character. People began sending him money for his reelection campaign. The Odd Fellows convened a special meeting, a first in their long and noble history, and named Harvey the recipient of their first annual Civic Leader of the Year Award.

  Harvey began to panic. At this rate, the townspeople would not only vote Owen off the council, they’d carry Harvey through town on their shoulders and install him as council president for life. He thought of publicly confessing, but was growing accustomed to the adulation and even starting to enjoy its privileges. The day before, he’d eaten at the Coffee Cup and Ned Kivett had insisted on buying his lunch. Vinny Toricelli had mowed his yard, and his name had been added to the prayer lists at all the churches so everyone would remember to pray for him and Eunice as they came under Satanic attack.

  Judy Iverson wrote a letter to the Herald pointing out Harvey had served for sixteen years without a dime of compensation and suggested it was time for a tax hike so council members could be paid.

  It was about this time that the idea of being president for life began appealing to Harvey.

  Unfortunately, the only one able to set the record straight was Bob Miles, who was faced with having to chose between journalistic integrity and money. It did not take Bob long to decide. Harvey was Bob’s largest advertiser—a twenty-dollar back-page ad every week for his car dealership. Though Bob felt sorry for Owen, Owen hadn’t advertised in the paper for years.

  Bob toyed with the idea of blackmailing Harvey. But, then, blackmail was such a harsh word. Actually, he thought of it as laissez-faire capitalism, which he explained to Harvey when he came in the Herald office to pay his advertising bill.

  Bob was seated at his desk by the front window.

  “Quite a view you got there,” Harvey commented as he laid a twenty on Bob’s desk for that week’s ad.

  “It sure is,” Bob said. “I can see everything on the town square from here. Anybody does anything, and I can see it.”

  “Everything?” Harvey asked.

  “Yep. Everything.”

  “So how’s business?” Harvey asked, changing the subject.

  “Been pretty good. Got a phone call the other day from someone wanting to buy the entire back page for the next year.”

  “The back page?” Harvey said. “But that’s my page. You’ve always put me on the back page.”

  “Well, they’ve offered me fifty dollars for it. But don’t worry, we can always run your ad on the classifieds page.”

  “The classifieds page!” Harvey was indignant. “No one ever reads the classifieds. You can’t do that to me.”

  “Nothin’ personal, Harvey. Just business. Course if you wanted to buy the back page, I could let you have it for the same price as the other fella.” Then Bob leaned back in his chair. “Yes, this sure is some view I have here.”

  Well, what was Harvey to do? What is a man to do when, despite his best efforts, he finds himself the most respected man in town and suddenly has a reputation to uphold? He bought the entire back page for one year, though not cheerfully.

  Harvey stopped by my house that evening seeking absolution for his sins. He told me the whole sordid story while sitting on my front porch.

  “I don’t feel bad about Hester,” he said. “She got what she had comin’. But I wish Owen hadn’t been dragged into it. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Maybe you should apologize to Owen.”

  “I don’t feel that bad,” he said.

  “Well, what do you want from me, then?” I asked.

  “Just wanted to get this off my chest, and it helped. I feel a whole lot better.”

  “Don’t you think you’d feel even better if you confessed to stealing the newspaper?”

  Harvey thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so.” He paused. “So am I forgiven, Sam?”

  “It’s not up to me to forgive you, Harvey. You didn’t wrong me. If you want forgiveness, you should go see Owen.”

  “You know, the Catholics, they can go to their priest and the priest’ll have ’em say a few prayers and they’re forgiven.”

  “Well, Harvey, we’re not Catholic.”

  “Not yet anyway,” Harvey grumbled. “But I’m giving it serious thought.”

  Harvey sat quietly for several minutes. “So what would people think of me if I told the truth?”

  “I know I would respect you a great deal, and I imagine others would too.”

  “It’s just that it’s felt pretty nice with everybody treating me special. It’s nice to be respected.”

  “It sure is,” I agreed. “A
nd the way you get respected is to be respectable.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  It began raining that night, just in time to save the corn, which gave people something else to talk about. The next day Harvey lifted the watering ban, and Hester’s groundhog was struck dead by Amanda Hodge, who’d had her driver’s permit less than thirty minutes before taking a life. It wasn’t a very auspicious start, even though Hester seemed profoundly grateful.

  That week Harvey ran his first full-page ad—a letter of confession with an apology to Owen Stout, which was graciously accepted. All in all, it was a good way to end the month—a farmers’ rain, soft on the roof, a fitting repentance, and the death of a marauding groundhog.

  Eleven

  Labor Day

  Labor Day has descended and people are finding their way back to church after their summer hiatus. Sunday school classes are resuming, with one exception. The Live Free or Die Sunday school class, founded by Robert Miles, Sr., in 1960 to guard against Communist infiltration in the meeting, has closed its doors. Dale Hinshaw had taught the class the past four years after Robert Miles, Sr., left in a huff to join the Baptist church. It’s taken four years for people to realize that an hour with Dale Hinshaw is a bad way to start their week.

  The class has been losing membership for several years, it being difficult to get folks worked up against the Soviet Union after it no longer existed. Dale had made a valiant effort to draw the class’s attention to other threats, such as Democrats and Unitarians, but without much luck. He grew bitter about the congregation’s lack of hostility. “For crying out loud, why even go to church, if you’re not gonna fight the Lord’s enemies?” It saddens Dale that people have lost their passion for true godliness.

  With the official closing of the class, the four remaining members invaded Judy Iverson’s young-adult class. Suddenly, the prospect of teaching the children with Alice Stout didn’t seem as daunting and she asked if we could switch classes yet again. By then, I had tired of flannelgraphs and trying to explain to the children that God hadn’t really ordered the deaths of entire nations of people. So back I went to the young adults and the remnants of the Live Free or Die class.

  Dale couldn’t bring himself to sit under my instruction and began attending the women’s class, which meets in the basement around the noodle table. On the first Sunday of the class, he read aloud from Paul’s First Letter to Timothy, that women should learn in silence with all submissiveness, then tried to take over. But Fern Hampton, a retired schoolteacher, was fortunate enough to have taught back in the days when teachers knew how to apply pain to various parts of the body to achieve a desired result. She gripped the back of Dale’s neck, causing him to go limp as a noodle. She raised him from his seat, marched him up the basement steps, and deposited him with a thud at the door of my classroom.

  I use the word classroom loosely. When I had proposed we begin a new Sunday school class for the young adults, I was met with stiff resistance. Why, the argument went, we already had perfectly good Sunday school classes, one for the men and one for the women. Why couldn’t the young adults attend those classes? What made them so special that they needed their own class? That was the problem with this generation, they wanted everything to revolve around them. Besides, there was no place for them to meet.

  But I persevered, and they finally relented when I agreed to clean the coatroom just inside the front door and hold the class there. Frank and I spent several hours that summer painting the room, making it presentable. This caused considerable ire among the remnants of the Live Free and Die class, who complained that they had never had a classroom of their own, and maybe if they had, their class would still be meeting.

  The first day of Sunday school they shuffled into the coatroom, eyeing the young adults rather suspiciously. Stanley Farlow handed me a stack of dog-eared papers—the original typed pages of the Live Free or Die Sunday school curriculum, written by Robert J. Miles, Sr., himself in 1960.

  “We teach from this,” he said. “We’re on lesson twelve, ‘Better Dead Than Red.’”

  “That’s fine, Stanley, but we don’t use a curriculum in this class,” I said, handing it back. “This is a discussion group. Why don’t you put this someplace where it’ll be safe.”

  I welcomed everyone to the class, then shared the process I had in mind. Everybody in the class would be given small slips of paper on which they could anonymously write any theological question they wished us to consider. We’d put the slips in a hat and pull one out each Sunday to discuss, and perhaps together we could arrive at some insight or truth.

  Stanley Farlow frowned. Truth by consensus was apparently not his preferred method of enlightenment. “Why don’t you just tell us what the Bible says? Ain’t that good enough anymore?”

  “We’ll certainly consult the Bible,” I assured him. “But we also need to remember that Quakers believe truth can come from a variety of sources.”

  I expected Dale to object, but he was slumped in the corner, still dazed from his encounter with Fern.

  The upside of the class was the presence of Deena Morrison and Dr. Pierce, who’ve been coming to church together for the past two weeks. It is an unparalleled joy to look up from my chair behind the pulpit and see the lovely Deena Morrison in the company of a handsome, young man. And a doctor, no less.

  Deena introduced Dr. Pierce to the class, we exchanged greetings, and I began distributing slips of paper and pencils for people to write their questions.

  “This is a splendid idea,” Dr. Pierce said. “I’ve always wanted to participate in something like this.”

  One by one, people passed their questions around to me, which I deposited in my lawn-mowing hat I’d brought from home. “Now remember,” I said, going over the rules once again, “we’ll discuss only one question per week and we can’t dodge a question just because we don’t like it or it makes us uncomfortable.”

  “Agreed,” everyone said, smiling enthusiastically.

  In that moment, I had a vision of us engaged in serious reflection on the role of Scripture, the meaning of the Resurrection, and other topics that had plagued theologians for centuries.

  I closed my eyes, reached my hand into the hat, stirred the papers around, then plucked one out. I studied the question before I read it. It was spidery, old-man writing.

  “Read it out loud,” Uly Grant said, urging me along.

  “I can’t quite make it out,” I said. “Maybe I should pull out another question.”

  “Let me see it,” my wife said, reaching over and taking it from my hand.

  “What’s it say?” Deena asked.

  My wife studied the paper, then read, “Why can’t we study lesson twelve?”

  “I thought I’d already explained that,” I said. “This class doesn’t use a curriculum.” I pulled another question from the hat and prepared to read it.

  “I thought we was only gonna have one question a Sunday,” Stanley Farlow said.

  “That was the intention,” I said. “But this is a little different.”

  “Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do,” he said. “This class is only ten minutes old and we’ve already caught you lyin’.”

  Catching the scent of a crippled teacher, Dale had revived and was moving in for the kill. “I think that pretty well shows us what we have to look forward to. I say we need a new teacher, somebody we can trust to tell the truth. I’d like to volunteer my services.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Stanley Farlow said. Stanley Farlow had not uttered a half dozen words in my presence in the four years I’d pastored Harmony Friends, but now he wouldn’t shut up.

  The young adults paled. My mind raced, trying to think of a way to avert this catastrophe. I glanced around the room, seeking an ally in my looming struggle against Dale and his minions.

  Dr. Pierce was the first to speak. “Mr. Hinshaw, I’d be all for you teaching the class, were it not against the Bible.”

  “What do you mean, against the Bib
le?” Dale asked.

  “Second Titus, third chapter, ninth verse,” Dr. Pierce said. “As all are not called to be pastors, so shall ye let them instruct the believers and not obstruct them.”

  This seemed to give Dale pause. “I never heard that one before, but I sure don’t wanna go against the Word.”

  Although I knew the Apostle Paul had written one letter to Titus, I was unaware he had written a second one, but wasn’t about to say so, since Dale appeared to be wavering.

  I took advantage of his uncertainty and reached into my lawn-mowing hat to pull out a second question, which I read aloud to the class. “Why do some Christians oppose abortion but support capital punishment?”

  It was a question I had pondered many times over the years, but had never asked aloud for fear of losing my job.

  The men of the Live Free or Die class, who were generally fond of capital punishment, frowned.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Mabel Morrison said. “Because they don’t know their keesters from a hole in the ground, that’s why.”

  There was nothing like having a liberal in the class to get the ball rolling.

  A spirited discussion followed, with Dale and Mabel circling one another like two bulldogs, growling and nipping at one another. At first, I tried to mediate, but it soon became clear Dale and Mabel weren’t interested in finding common ground. By the end of the hour, my stomach was in knots and I wanted to vomit.

  Dr. Pierce shook my hand after class. “That certainly was bracing,” he said. “I had no idea when I wrote that question it would create such a lively debate.”

  Dale didn’t stay for worship. He gathered up Dolores and left the meetinghouse in a huff.

  The fertilizer hit the fan the next day, when Miriam Hodge stopped by my house to tell me she’d received a half dozen phone calls about the new class. “It was Dale and the men from his old Sunday school class,” she said. “They want the class shut down.”