When I was in Miss Fishbeck’s sixth-grade class, she told a story I’ve never forgotten, of Japanese soldiers on isolated Pacific islands who, never having learned of the combat’s conclusion, continued waging a war whose end had been decided long before. Miss Fishbeck said that when some of the soldiers were told they’d lost, they didn’t believe it and fought to their death.
At first, I thought she was making it up and I didn’t believe her. Now that I’m older, I don’t doubt it a bit. There are people in this town who want things to remain as they were in the 1950s, people still upset with Mabel Morrison for closing down the menswear store after Harold died, and don’t vote for her for that reason. They want Ike to be president, and school to begin with prayer, which won’t ever happen again, and they can’t bear it. So they load their rhetorical guns to fight for a cause that is already lost.
Dale lives in a world that science disproved two centuries ago. He believes earthquakes are a sign of God’s displeasure, not shifts in the earth’s tectonic plates. Kyle thinks women are unsuited for leadership, which explains why no woman will marry him. They are oak leaves hanging on through spring, unwilling to make way for new life and fresh forms.
I thought about this on the way to the grain elevator, driving along in Ellis Hodge’s grain truck, which doesn’t have a radio and thus encourages reflection.
It took forty-five minutes to reach the elevator, and another half hour to unload and do the paperwork. I hadn’t been there since I was a teenager and worked for Ellis on the weekends during the harvest. It hadn’t changed much. A half dozen old men were clustered in the office, yellow flypaper speckled with last summer’s kill hung from the ceiling, and a Sunny Morning heating stove occupied the center of the room. License plates dating back fifty years were nailed to the walls.
It is easy to understand the appeal of a place like this. These old men settle in their chairs at night, watching news of an alien world they no longer understand. The elevator is their last fraying link to a world they knew and understood and wished they could reclaim, but can’t. They are old soldiers, making their last stand while the enemy circles outside.
Driving back to the Hodges’ farm, I wonder if this might be God’s way of nudging me into the future. I picture myself old and embittered, at odds with the world, and the thought appalls me. If statisticians can be believed, my life is half lived. I don’t want to spend this last half trying to recapture the first half. I want to stretch and grow and do bold things, like vote for Mabel Morrison and question what I’ve been taught and generally alarm people with my broad-mindedness.
By the time I made it back to the farm, Miriam was home. Ellis had finished the last field and was driving the combine into the equipment shed. They invited me to stay for supper, which I declined. I wanted to go home and see my sons and hear about their day.
The march toward winter has whittled down the daylight, and it was almost dark when I pulled into our driveway. My sons were watching for me from the kitchen window and came hurtling out the door, swarming around me like a great cloud of gnats.
It was a good way to end the day, surrounded by life and vigor. These spring-leaf sons of mine, bursting out and growing, reminding me that life isn’t to be found in holding on and looking back, but in letting go and looking forward.
Sixteen
Heather
The rumor was first heard on a Monday morning in mid-November at the Coffee Cup Restaurant, where most of the town’s rumors have their origins. Within an hour, it had made its way a block north to the Harmony Herald newspaper office, where Bob Miles sat, despondent over this bitter turn of events. He phoned Vinny at the Coffee Cup. “Is it true?”
“’Fraid so,” Vinny said, his voice trembling with grief.
Bob hung up the phone and rested his head on the desk, wracked with sorrow.
Heather Darnell was leaving the Coffee Cup. His lovely, beautiful Heather. And not just his lovely, beautiful Heather. Everyone’s lovely, beautiful Heather. Or at least all the old men at the Coffee Cup who planned their days around her work hours. Now they were beyond consolation. Heather was the wife they’d never had, but maybe could have had if they had paid as much attention to their wives as they had to Heather.
By lunchtime, the men of the Coffee Cup were in a dismal mood and, looking for someone to blame, had turned on Vinny. “She’d still be here if you weren’t so cheap,” Kyle Weathers said. “We kept tellin’ you to give her a raise, but did you listen to us? No, you didn’t. And now look where it’s got us.”
“Don’t blame me. If you hadn’t been such a lousy tipper, maybe she’d still be around.”
I sat in the corner eating my lunch. I had been avoiding the place in order to preserve my arteries, but had lately been craving grease and had caved in. I was also there because my wife was mad at me and had suggested I fix my own meals for a while. That too had to do with Heather, who’d come to my office the week before seeking counsel. My wife had seen her enter the meetinghouse and later that day had inquired about her visit. I couldn’t elaborate, of course, because it was confidential, which riled my wife even further.
My wife is not ordinarily the jealous type, but there is something about Heather Darnell that causes even the most self-assured woman to feel threatened.
She is twenty years old and her friends from high school are away at college. They come back for the summer, walk by the Coffee Cup, tap on the glass, and wave. But she no longer gets invited to all their parties, and when she does, they talk about their sororities and how they can’t wait to finish college and move to the city, far away from this place.
They make fun of the town and the people in it and, she suspects, talk about her behind her back for still living here and working at the Coffee Cup. Or so she told me.
I’d asked her how she felt about working there. “It’s okay, I guess. Everyone’s nice to me and everything. I just don’t want to spend my life there, that’s all.”
She had broken up with her boyfriend, who’d gone to Bloomington to college and used to drive home every weekend to see her, but lately had been avoiding the trip. She had been thinking of moving to the city, getting an apartment, and finding a job.
“Why not?” I’d said at the time, not believing she’d do it.
As I reflect back, I think my being a minister carried more weight with Heather than I’d considered. My approval of her plan was apparently just the nudge she needed. Within the week, she’d turned in her notice at the Coffee Cup and packed her bags.
The men at the Coffee Cup pleaded with her to stay, to no avail. Vinny offered to raise her pay twenty cents an hour and make her manager of the noon buffet, but to her credit she wouldn’t be swayed by riches or titles. Several of the men offered to accompany her to the city and, though she seemed to appreciate their thoughtfulness, she declined their generous offers.
They held a going-away party for her on a Wednesday evening, Italian Night at the Coffee Cup. Bea Majors confused her nations and played “Vaya Con Dios” on the organ, poorly, missing most of the notes. Fortunately, Kyle Weathers was standing near the outlet and was able to nudge the organ’s electrical cord loose with his foot.
Bob Miles had driven to the jeweler in Cartersburg to buy a brass plaque, which he hung over the buffet table, proclaiming it The Heather Darnell Honorary Salad Bar and Buffet. Five years before, it had been christened The Doris Elmore Honorary Salad Bar and Buffet, but that was a minor technicality and no one even pointed it out.
Heather gave a speech about how she would always remember the Coffee Cup for giving her a start in life. The old men began to weep, dabbing at their eyes with faded red bandanas they pulled from their back pockets. Vinny gave her a pen and pencil set from the Rexall drugstore, and the men presented her with a set of matching luggage they’d purchased at Kivett’s Five and Dime.
Heather was outside the Rexall the next morning at ten-thirty, waiting for the bus to the city. Her parents were with her, along with a clust
er of grief-stricken old men wearing their funeral suits, as if gathered for a wake. Bob Miles snapped a picture for the Herald.
They heard the bus before they saw it—a low, diesel rumble coming up the hill past the park. Then the bus heaved into sight near the Dairy Queen, its silver skin gleaming in the morning sun, a purveyor of suffering and woe.
Heather’s father hugged her close, her mother kissed her good-bye, and the men lined up to shake her hand and pat her back. They gathered for one last group picture while the driver loaded Heather’s new suitcases into the belly of the bus. Then Heather mounted the stairs and sat in the front seat, reaching her hand through the window to touch her parents one last time.
She came back that weekend for a visit, then Monday morning returned to the city to look for a job. She’s staying with Shirley Finchum’s niece and her husband, who have three small children and live in an old house on the north side, where all the rich people live. The agreement was for her to help with the kids four hours a day in exchange for a room in their basement.
She found a job at a restaurant where the waitresses wore skimpy T-shirts that showed their belly buttons. She wore a sweater her first day, which the manager instructed her to remove so the customers could see her T-shirt. Heather doubted it was her T-shirt they wanted to see and said so. Then she asked why he didn’t wear a T-shirt that showed his belly button, and that was when he let her go.
The next job, working as a cashier at a gas station, went a little better. She kept that job until noon, when the manager caught her talking people out of buying lottery tickets. She wanted to discuss whether it was right to encourage poor people to gamble. Unfortunately, her boss was not the philosophical type and promptly fired her.
Her third day in the city, she found a job at a McDonald’s, working on the French fry line. By the next day, she had broken out in acne, wrenched her back after slipping on grease, and decided to take early retirement.
On the fifth day, she woke up early, packed her bags, and used the last of her money to buy a bus ticket back to Harmony. She worried the whole way home what her parents would think. The bus pulled up to the Rexall at four o’clock just as Kyle Weathers was closing his barbershop. He spied her out his front window and hurried outside to help with her luggage. He loaded it in the back of his truck and drove Heather home to her parents.
Mr. and Mrs. Darnell saw them turn off the highway and come down the driveway, Heather and Kyle in his Ford pickup. Her parents’ worst nightmare—their beloved daughter throwing her life away on an old geezer like Kyle Weathers. She hadn’t gone to the city to live. She’d run off to get married and now was coming home to tell them what she had done. She was pregnant and Kyle Weathers was the father and they were going to get married and live in a trailer at the edge of town. And he would die when she was thirty-five, leaving her with nine children and a mortgage. She would have to go on food stamps and get a job tending bar at the Buckhorn. Their beautiful, precious daughter. All of those images flooded their minds as they watched Kyle climb from the truck, come around, open Heather’s door, and carry in the luggage.
So when Heather told them the truth, that she’d gone through three jobs in four days and had come home and Kyle had been kind enough to give her a ride home from the bus stop, they were delirious with joy and not at all upset, as she had feared they would be. And though Heather was pleased with her reception, she couldn’t understand it. But then who can figure parents?
She lay low the entire weekend, resting her back and scrubbing her face. Then on Monday morning she returned to the Coffee Cup to ask for her job back. Vinny was there by himself, frying bacon and making coffee. He didn’t notice her come in. It was early; the morning crowd hadn’t arrived yet. In fact, since Heather had left, there hadn’t been a morning crowd. Or an afternoon or evening crowd for that matter.
Her apron was hanging on a hook next to the brass plaque. Bob Miles had framed a picture and placed it alongside the plague, over the phrase Forever in Our Hearts. It was the picture of her seated on the bus, looking through the window as it pulled away. She lifted down the apron and tied it around her waist.
“How about I start mixing the pancake batter?” she said.
Vinny spun around at the sound of her voice. He didn’t speak at first. He tried, but words wouldn’t come. “Is it really you?” he asked after a while.
“It’s really me. And I might be available for employment again.”
“Whatever it takes,” Vinny said. “Name your price.”
“A twenty-cent-an-hour raise and manager of the noon buffet.”
“Done.”
“Let’s shake on it,” Heather said, reaching out her hand.
So they shook on it.
“Maybe we oughta talk about you buying into the business,” Vinny said. “A young person needs a stake in the future, and I’m not going to be around here forever.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Maybe you could ask your boss for loan. I think he’d be open to that suggestion.”
“You’d do that for me?” Heather asked.
“For you,” Vinny said, “I would do that.”
It took thirty minutes for word to circulate among the elderly gentlemen in town that Heather was back to pouring coffee and consoling them in their old age. Within an hour, the Coffee Cup was full to overflowing. Men were peering through the window, praising God for this miraculous turn of events.
I stopped past around three, after the crowds had dwindled down. I ordered a Coke and made my way to a booth. Heather brought me my soda and sat down across from me.
“I see you’re back,” I said, stating the obvious.
“Yes, I’m back.”
“So how do you feel? The last time we talked you didn’t want to spend your life being a waitress.”
Heather smiled. “I’m not a waitress. I’m an entrepreneur. Vinny is letting me buy into the business.”
“That’s wonderful, Heather. I’m happy for you. So how does it feel to be an entrepreneur?”
“Pretty good so far. Vinny’s put me in the charge of the noon buffet and next week we’re adding croutons and pineapple chunks.”
I nodded my head solemnly. “Sounds like a fine place to start.”
We sat quietly. I stirred my Coke, forming a tornado in the glass, while Heather surveyed the restaurant.
“Maybe now people won’t think I’m a failure,” she said after a while.
I continued stirring my Coke, then asked if she had ever seen the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.
She thought for a moment. “Is that the one where the man jumps off a bridge and an angel takes him around town and shows him what it would have been like if he hadn’t been born?”
“That’s the one. Anyway, do you remember the end of the movie, when the angel says that no one is a failure who has friends?”
Heather nodded, then smiled. “You think that’s true?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What if she’s only a waitress?” Heather asked.
“She’s not. She’s an entrepreneur.”
We laughed. I rose to leave. “It’s good having you back, Heather.”
“It’s nice to be back.” She stood and I gave her a ministerial hug, not too tight and very brief, which made it all the more remarkable that my wife had chosen that very moment to walk past the Coffee Cup, glance through the window, and see us embracing.
“It was just a hug,” I told her later that evening. “Nothing more. Purely innocent. I hug lots of women in the church.” Which, in retrospect, was not the brightest thing to say.
I slept on the couch that night, thinking of the city, where morals are looser—women wear T-shirts that show their belly buttons and people gamble and ministers hug their parishioners and no one thinks a thing of it.
“I’m glad Heather’s not there any longer. I’m glad she’s back home, where people love her, some of them a little too much, to be sure, but in a harmless sort of way. And lyin
g on the couch, listening to an occasional car driving past and Hester Gladden’s dog barking in the distance, I thought of Heather and remembered what it was like to be young and full of dreams. I remember when I was her age, how my parents sent me off from home, hugging me close and telling me to shoot for the moon, that even if I missed, I’d end up among the stars.
Seventeen
Sam Finds His Backbone
Shirley Finchum had invited us to Thanksgiving at her house, with her two daughters and their families. This was their first Thanksgiving after Albert’s passing. I knew it would be a glum day and was glad I already had plans.
I don’t know Shirley well. She and her husband, Albert, began attending Harmony Friends back in August, when Albert caught a whiff of his mortality after being diagnosed with heart trouble. He was one of those people with impeccable timing who put God off all their lives, then at the very last moment sneak in the door—like the workers in the vineyard who arrived late but still received a full day’s pay. I could tell it annoyed Dale Hinshaw, who griped that he had been laboring for the Lord sixty-three years and here came Albert Finchum, who got saved the week before he died and was even now lounging on a cloud while he, Dale, was left to inhabit this veil of tears.
I’d conducted Albert’s funeral over the objections of his two daughters, who attended Harmony Worship Center and were concerned my presence at the funeral would undo their father’s salvation after Pastor Jimmy had gone to all the trouble of getting him saved in the first place.
When Albert had begun attending Harmony Friends, he was hoping that washing dishes at the Chicken Noodle Dinner and mowing the churchyard a time or two would be enough to get him in God’s good graces. It took Pastor Jimmy four home visits to set him straight, telling him if he weren’t baptized in the name of Jesus he would roast in hell. And none of this sprinkling stuff like the Episcopalians and Catholics, Pastor Jimmy warned, but a good dunking in the stock tank behind the pulpit at the Harmony Worship Center. So Albert, anxious to cover all his bases, snuck off there one Sunday, got himself baptized in the name of Jesus, then returned to our meeting the next week, his sin purged.
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