Life Goes On

by Philip Gulley

  A month later Albert Finchum shuffled off to glory. We held the funeral at the meetinghouse and buried him in the South Cemetery on Lincoln Street, across from the Co-op. The ladies of the Circle cooked the funeral dinner—ham, green beans, cheese potatoes, fruited Jell-O, lemonade or tea (mourner’s choice), with pumpkin pie for dessert.

  In lieu of flowers, donations were made to the meeting and we raised two hundred dollars, which the men of the church wanted to use to buy a memorial lawn mower, reflecting Albert’s passion for lawn care. Albert’s daughters wanted to use the money for a bookcase. The church quickly divided into lawn-mower and bookcase factions and likely would have split, until Miriam Hodge persuaded Uly Grant to knock twenty dollars off the price of a lawn mower and suggested to Albert’s daughters that a bookcase made little sense in a church without books. So, instead, they purchased a book in their father’s memory, which left enough money for the lawn mower, and a crisis was averted.

  It took Albert’s daughters several days to select a book befitting their father’s stature in the community. They were torn between purchasing a Bible or a book about the Cincinnati Reds, Albert having been a big fan. After a round of arguing, they couldn’t agree and compromised by buying a book they’d heard about on “Oprah”—a novel about women in the Bible.

  Frank the secretary mentioned it in the church newsletter, along with a quote from me thanking the Finchum daughters for their generosity in donating this fine book, which I was confident would have a profound impact on anyone who read it. And though we were grieved by Albert’s death, this book would remind us of his several weeks of selfless ministry to the church.

  Fern Hampton signed it out the first Sunday it was available. No one heard or saw her for three days. She skipped the Christian Education meeting on Monday night and failed to show the next morning for the Friendly Women’s Circle noodle making. When she did surface, in my office on Wednesday afternoon, she was livid.

  “I’m just glad my mother isn’t alive to see this,” she said. “If she weren’t dead, this would have killed her.”

  “What would have killed her?” I asked.

  “The pastor encouraging us to read smut. Have you read that book the Finchum girls gave the church?”

  “No.”

  “Well, maybe you should,” she said. She shook her head in disgust. “Perversion. Nothin’ but perversion. Full of filth. Sam Gardner, if the Lord doesn’t strike you down, He ought to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  And with that she turned and stalked from my office.

  I gave Fern several hours to calm down, then phoned her, asking if I could come by her house and get the book.

  “Bea Majors has it. I told her all about it, and it upset her so much, she had to read it for herself.”

  Within a day, word of the book had spread through the Friendly Women’s Circle, who, in the interests of maintaining community standards, vowed to read the book to judge whether the Finchum daughters should be drawn and quartered.

  Later that week, Shirley Finchum was at the Kroger, where she ran into Miriam Hodge. Miriam hadn’t read the book, but had been receiving a torrent of phone calls about it. And though she didn’t want to add to a grieving widow’s burden, she did think Shirley ought to know what had transpired, in the event her daughters were taken out by a Friendly Woman bent on purifying the world.

  On Friday morning, Bea Majors passed the book on to her sister, Opal, who gave it to Hester Gladden, who read the first three chapters, was thoroughly scandalized, and in a fit of righteous indignation hauled it to the burn barrel in the alley behind her house and set it ablaze. She went to bed that night pleased with the day’s work, the pleasant odor of Inquisition fresh in her nostrils.

  As for me, I couldn’t sleep for worrying about whether I would be the sacrificial lamb at our next monthly meeting for business. I tossed and turned for two hours, then got dressed, put on my coat, and went for a walk. I headed toward town, past Grant’s Hardware and the Legal Grounds, then turned west and passed by Kivett’s Five and Dime. It was quiet outside. The houses were dark. I stopped for a moment and watched the fish tank in the front window of the barbershop, then walked past the Dairy Queen, now shuttered for the winter. Oscar and Livinia had left for Florida the week before.

  There was a light on in the meetinghouse. I tried to remember if there had been a committee meeting that night and someone had left the lights on, a not uncommon occurrence. The back door was unlocked, which wasn’t unusual, since Frank forgets to lock it half the time. I walked through the meeting room toward the office, when I heard a quick shuffle of feet and muffled whispering. Burglars! Probably poised to leap from a closet and shoot me down like a dog.

  I backed out of the meetinghouse and jogged home the three blocks to call Bernie the policeman, who was asleep and had to get dressed and brush his teeth before meeting me back at the meetinghouse. It took him thirty minutes, and by that time whoever was in the church had left. One of my desk drawers was open, though nothing appeared to be missing.

  I have several magazines hidden in my file cabinet under the letter P for Progressive Christianity, which I don’t want anyone to know I read, for fear of being branded a godless heretic. Thankfully, they hadn’t been discovered.

  Bernie sniffed around the church a few minutes, poking his head into closets and shining his flashlight behind the furnace and into the crawl space beneath the cloakroom.

  “Looks like whoever was here is gone,” Bernie said. “You sure you heard someone?”

  “Yes, there were at least two of them.”

  “Robbing a church,” Bernie said, clearly disgusted. “People like that, they’re goin’ straight to Hades. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

  “Well, it wasn’t quite a robbery. It doesn’t look like anything’s missing.”

  “How about I loan you my gun. If they come back, you go ahead and plug ’em. Just make sure they’re inside the church when you shoot ’em, so’s we can call it self-defense.”

  “That’s all right, Bernie, but I’d just as soon not kill anyone. It was probably just some kids. I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  He drove me home, and I fell into bed exhausted and slept until six o’clock the next morning when my boys began jumping on the bed. It was Saturday. I ate breakfast, then walked to the meetinghouse to finish my sermon. As I neared the meetinghouse, I heard the squeal of tires and saw a white car speed away with two people hunched down in the front seat. The license plate was smeared with mud.

  Someone had been in my office. The file cabinets were open. A copy of Progressive Christianity lay open on the floor to the centerfold of Charles Darwin. Someone had drawn horns coming out of his head. Still, nothing seemed to be missing, so I didn’t phone Bernie. Instead, I finished my sermon, then went home to spend the day with my family.

  A little after midnight that night the phone rang. This isn’t unusual for a pastor. I routinely field phone calls at all hours of the night from people who believe I’m wide awake, poised by the phone, waiting to solve their latest dilemma. Dale Hinshaw is particularly notorious for late-night calls, phoning to correct my thinking or elder me for some slight sin I had inadvertently committed.

  So when the phone rang, I thought it was Dale and didn’t pick it up. It rang a dozen times before falling silent. Five minutes later, there was a knock on the door. I pulled on my bathrobe and negotiated my way through the dark to the front door. It was Bernie.

  “Got a light on down at the church and the back door’s wide open. Thought you might want to catch ’em in the act.”

  I hurried upstairs, got dressed, and two minutes later was seated in Bernie’s patrol car, as we eased our way through the ally in back of the meetinghouse. He slowed to a stop behind a white car.

  “That car was here this morning,” I said. “They must have come back.”

  Bernie unbuckled the flap over his pistol. This alarmed me greatly. T
he last time Bernie had unholstered his weapon, Bill Muldock had nearly been killed for taking a whiz in his own backyard in the middle of the night.

  We left the car and crept across the parking lot, making our way toward the back steps of the meetinghouse, then up them and in. The light in my office was on and we could hear two people bickering. It sounded like women.

  “It’s not here, I tell you.”

  “Well, don’t get mad at me. It was your idea, after all. I can’t believe you didn’t read it first.”

  I heard weeping and sniffling. “I knew you’d end up blaming it on me.”

  Then, in an exasperated tone, “Oh, quit your crying and help me look for it. Did you check Frank’s desk?”

  Bernie and I froze. At the moment, we were crouched behind Frank’s desk. The door to my office opened and one of the Finchum daughters, the heavy one, appeared in the doorway.

  “Freeze!” cried Bernie, leaping to his feet, his pistol extended.

  The lights in the office went out and the electric pencil sharpener I kept on my desk came hurtling through the air, catching Bernie squarely in the face, though not before he’d managed to squeeze off a shot in the general direction of my office.

  There were screams, the scent of gunpowder stung my nostrils, and my ears were ringing. Bernie slumped to the floor with a groan, done in by a pencil sharpener.

  “We surrender,” the Finchum daughters yelled, emerging from the office. They saw Bernie lying on the floor, out cold, blood dripping from his nose. “My Lord, we killed him,” they cried in unison. The Finchum daughters did everything in unison and always had, as doing things together spared them the difficulty of having to think for themselves. They’d married the same day, to brothers, lived next door to one another, went to the same church—the Harmony Worship Center—and believed everyone who didn’t share their narrow ideology was destined to spend eternity in a warm climate.

  After a few minutes, Bernie began to stir, then moan. We helped him up to his feet and seated him in Frank’s chair. An egg-shaped bump was rising on his forehead. He was still dazed, but after a moment his eyes began to focus on me. “Did I get ’em?”

  “It appears you’ve killed my office clock,” I informed him. “Fortunately, the Finchum daughters are alive and well.”

  He shook his head in confusion. “The Finchum daughters? What are they doing here?”

  I turned to face them. “Yes, what are you doing here?”

  They looked away.

  “And you were here earlier, weren’t you? Last night, and then again this morning?”

  The heavy one was the first to speak. “You should be ashamed of yourself, reading magazines like Progressive Christianity.”

  “Aha! So you’re the one who drew the horns on Charles Darwin!” I had them dead to rights.

  “Oh, just tell him,” the other one said. “Then we can get it and get out of here.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “It’s that book we donated to your church in my father’s name. We want it back. It’s, uh, not appropriate for a church.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me for it?”

  “We didn’t want to be a bother.”

  “So, instead, you broke into the church, kept me up two nights in a row, and nearly killed Bernie with a pencil sharpener. This is your idea of not being a bother?”

  “Maybe we went about it the wrong way,” they conceded.

  “Yes, maybe you did.” Then I told them I didn’t have the book, that I wasn’t sure who did, but when I found it, I’d give them a call.

  It had been a while since Bernie had arrested anyone. He was all for slapping the cuffs on the Finchum daughters and driving them to the jail in Cartersburg, but I managed to talk him out of it, pointing out that it wouldn’t do wonders for his reputation to be known as the first police officer in history to lose a gun battle to a pencil sharpener.

  We reached a compromise. I agreed not to press charges if they agreed not to tell anyone about my reading Progressive Christianity. They apologized to Bernie for knocking him out, and he apologized for trying to kill them. I was out an office clock, but decided not to push the issue.

  Bernie was still dazed, so I drove him home in the patrol car, then walked the half dozen blocks to my house. Walking the streets at night was becoming a maddeningly familiar practice and one that was leaving me fairly tired.

  The next morning, during meeting for worship, Hester Gladden stood and with obvious glee told how she’d burned the book, describing in delicious detail the curl of flames and the great plumes of smoke, which, she theorized, was not unlike hell, which was where the author of the book was headed, along with anyone who read it.

  I sat in my chair behind the pulpit, reflecting on the sad state of theological education in the meeting. My Sunday school class that morning had been dreadful. We’d drawn one of Dale’s questions from the hat. He writes a dozen questions for every one of someone else’s, so we invariably draw one of his.

  This morning he’d asked whether those who believed in a premillennial rapture are really Christian. I’d made the mistake of asking him what he meant by the term premillennial rapture, which led to a fifty minute monologue on the end times. If I’d been a fox caught in a trap, I’d have chewed off my leg to get away.

  The questions I’ve been thinking of putting in the hat are these: Why am I silent about such insanity? Why am I so passive in the face of this fundamentalist lunacy? Why do I sit and listen to this foolishness with a smile on my face, as if his ideas merit my thoughtful consideration? Those are the questions that have lately been consuming me.

  Deena and Dr. Pierce have stopped coming to the class. Deena told me it was nothing personal; they just didn’t see how starting their week with Dale Hinshaw was a benefit to their spiritual journey. The class had dwindled down to Stanley Farlow, Dale, and myself. If I weren’t the pastor, I wouldn’t be there.

  Now Hester had taken up book burning. Hester Gladden, whom I’ve known all my life and remember as a pleasant woman, now stricken with this cancer of intolerance. Attendance at church has been dropping. The only people we attract are folks like Albert Finchum, people who are dying and know they won’t have to attend very many Sundays.

  Hester finished speaking and I rose to my feet, propelled by some unseen force that I now believe to have been the Holy Spirit.

  “What in the world does this have to with Jesus?” I asked.

  Although this wasn’t the question I anticipated asking, it seemed to grab everyone’s attention. Miriam Hodge smiled, Hester and Dale frowned, and Asa Peacock, who didn’t realize it was a rhetorical question, said, “Nothin’, as far as I can tell.”

  Then, having held my tongue for four long years, I found my backbone, looked directly toward Dale and Hester, and said, in as firm a voice as I could muster, “And I’m renewing my subscription to Progressive Christianity.”

  And with that, I gathered up my Bible and strode from the meetinghouse, suspecting my days as a pastor were numbered, but feeling wonderfully alive nonetheless.

  Eighteen

  Sam’s Revelation

  December blew in on a snowstorm. It was supposed to have rained, but the temperature dropped and it snowed instead, twelve inches, catching everyone off guard, including the county highway department, which had sent all its workers home. The roads out in the country drifted shut, sealing the farmers off. The few men who made it to the Coffee Cup on Saturday morning tried to remember the last time this much snow had come so early. Bob Miles dug through the old Heralds and found it hadn’t snowed this much this early since 1953, so he wrote a big article about it being a fifty-year snow. He also announced that my son Addison had won that year’s snowfall contest, accurately predicting the first inch of snow would fall on the third of December, which was his birthday and the date he picks for everything to happen.

  Church services were canceled, except for those at Harmony Worship Center, who said that in light of all the Lord had done
for them, the least they could do was slog through a little snow to get to church. Harmony Worship Center, I’m discovering, is one of these churches that never loses an opportunity to remind the rest of us how virtuous they are.

  Miriam Hodge phoned me on Saturday evening to ask whether we should cancel services. Uly Grant and I had spent much of the day shoveling the parking lot and sidewalks, only to have them covered again with fresh snow. It was like trying to clean the house while the children were still home.

  I was all for skipping church, reasoning it would give people more time to forget my behavior from the week before when I’d left the church in a self-righteous snit, fed up with what was passing for the Christian faith these days.

  “What are the roads like out there?” I asked.

  “We’re shut in.”

  “Why don’t we go ahead and cancel, Miriam. I’d hate for someone to fall and break a hip. Let’s just keep folks home.”

  “I agree.”

  We divided the congregational directory in half to make phone calls. I asked for N-Z, so I wouldn’t have to tell Dale Hinshaw, who I was sure would question our commitment. “What do you mean we’re canceling church? Don’t you think maybe we oughta trust the Lord to get us there okay? Boy, I bet the Lord is looking down on us right now and this is just breaking His heart, that Christians these days will deny their faith over a few snowflakes!”

  We slept in the next morning, then woke up and ate pancakes. The boys wanted to go sledding, so we went to the basement, dug out the sleds, waxed the runners, and then headed toward the park, to the hill above the basketball court. By then, the sun was out in force and the snow was starting to melt. By noon, patches of pavement were showing through the snow, and by suppertime it was forty degrees and the streets were clear.