The Godsend of River Grove

by Rob Summers

Chapter 9 The Vote

  An elder’s meeting was held on Thursday, November second, and first on the agenda was the matter of Ollie’s nomination. He was actually formally nominated by Al Fontaine and seconded by By Hoplinger. The discussion was not over-long. By Hoplinger pointed out tellingly that the actual decision would be made by the congregation’s vote on Sunday night; and did anyone want to deny the congregation the opportunity to decide? With the exception of an abstention by Tom Bissell, the retired high school teacher, the vote was a unanimous recommendation to the congregation that Ollie be approved.

  But the elders were not at peace with themselves. Some could not forget, though they could not say, that in normal times Ollie would not have been nominated. But in recent months attendance at River Grove had continued to slip. Some bills were going unpaid, discussion of which was second on the agenda. The church was a hive of gossip and backbiting, and though they did not say it in front of him, they knew that every third member had a theory as to where Pastor Steve had gone wrong. So bringing back Ollie was a clearly necessary step. On the other hand, his reputation was clouded, and the board members did not wish it to be said that they had winked at the accusations. Therefore, Cal Torey, the engineering professor, suggested that the board produce a statement to be read aloud Sunday, that would place things in perspective. He had gone so far as to write a draft, which was eagerly called for and accepted by the other elders. It read:

  In recommending Oliver Fulborne for eldership, the Board of Elders of River Grove Community Church has carefully considered certain criticisms and points of order. First, we find that Oliver Fulborne was not expelled from eldership two years ago. Mr. Fulborne stepped down voluntarily at the board’s recommendation. Therefore, the subsequent congregational vote was improperly held and of no significance. As regards events previous to his leaving the elder board, the Board is fully convinced of Oliver Fulborne’s integrity in matters of morality and Christian doctrine. We do not feel that any candidate should be barred from eldership on the basis of rumors, unproveable accusations, or questionable interpretations of a private diary. Mr. Fulborne’s long record in this church body speaks for itself. His service, Christian walk, and value to the body are well known. Once again, we unreservedly recommend Oliver Fulborne for eldership.

  When this wording was approved by voice vote, By Hoplinger suggested that the paper be passed around the table to be signed by all. Then Joe Burden, the young policeman, noticed that one or two of the other elders, men who had unreservedly recommended Ollie, began to fiddle with their pens and re-read and dawdle to the point of giving the impression that they had a few reservations after all. No one commented on this, and in the end everyone signed.

  On Sunday morning in church Pastor Steve reminded the congregation that the evening meeting would be for business and encouraged all members to come and vote. Cal read aloud the elder’s statement to the congregation. Steve added that any discussion was welcome before the vote.

  That evening Hila arrived a little late and with reddened eyes. As she hung up her coat in the lobby, she could hear through the open double doors Elder George Thorne making laudatory comments about Ollie. George’s public speaking was always laced with humor, and he had the congregation laughing as he described some improbable incidents that had supposedly taken place on a fishing trip that he and Ollie had once taken, and ended by characterizing Ollie as a ‘fisher of men.’

  Hila noted that Ollie was not present and remembered that he would have been asked to leave the sanctuary until the discussion and vote were over. Betty was no doubt with him.

  Other church leaders stood in turn to put in a good word for Ollie. Then Jerry Oker stood with a crimson face and slowly said, “You all know what my daughter Pamela had to say about—Mr. Fulborne. She’s not here tonight, and I’m speaking for her—and for any other girls who have been—harassed by that pervert.”

  “Sit down,” Cal Torey said, “this is inappropriate.”

  Oker gestured with a large palm turned down. “No. Shut up. Don’t—make this man an elder. He’s no good. If he gets in, my family and me are leaving the church.” He took a few deep breaths. “I warned you.” He sat down.

  “I think we want to keep this on a certain level of civility,” Cal said from his pew, and his voice quivered a bit.

  Pastor Steve spoke from where he was standing up front. “Yes, Jerry, we can state our views without name calling.”

  “He’s a pervert,” Jerry said again. “That’s what he is, it’s not name calling.”

  The Fulborne’s daughter Ann called out, “He’s a lot better Christian than you are, you slanderer.”

  Hila stood up. Steve noticed her, straight and slender in a navy blue dress. “Hila,” he said with relief, “what do you have to say?”

  She left her pew, walked to the front, and faced the congregation. Though she believed herself to be expressionless, she saw curiosity and—here and there—suspicion in the faces before her. Evan was seated in front and looked at her with mixed affection and apprehension. She gave him a smile.

  Her high school and college debate team experience had made Hila at ease with public speaking. “I am against Ollie Fulborne’s being made an elder,” she said. “But before I can say why, I have a confession to make. On September second members of this church received mailings that included copies of a page from Ollie’s diary and of the October 25, 1998, Elder Board minutes. I made those copies and I mailed them.” She paused, expecting a reaction, but there was none. Everyone waited for her to say more. “To do that anonymously was wrong. It was wrong and I’m very sorry I did it. If any of you wish to forgive me, then the best forgiveness I could ask for is that you listen to what more I have to say.” By putting it that way, she stilled a slight buzzing of voices that had begun. “It may be that I’ve no right under the circumstances to enter this discussion, but I know all of you and trust you to be kind and to believe me when I say that not everything concerning Ollie Fulborne’s nomination has been covered. A most important aspect hasn’t been touched on at all. I am not referring to the matter of Mark Lambert’s death and what followed it. I’m not referring to entries in a diary that, however bizarre, seem to have no connection with this man’s actual life as we have witnessed it. And I’m not referring to allegations of sexual harassment that are just one person’s word against another’s. Serious allegations but unproven.”

  She had been facing somewhat to the left and now turned slightly to the right. Richard Ozark’s face jumped out at her from the third pew. He looked startled and paralyzed.

  “The reason Oliver Fulborne should not be an elder is this,” she said. “He denies the grace of God. He preaches and he lives a gospel of dead works, a message that you have to earn your way into God’s good favor. This sort of Pharisaism is lethal to the spiritual life of a congregation. So it’s imperative that no leader at River Grove misinterpret the scripture in that way. Our souls’ only hope is to hang on to the truth that we are saved, and that we continue to follow Jesus, solely by His grace and with not a particle of merit of our own; just as the scripture says.” She stopped abruptly and bowed her head. She looked up again. “I’m well aware that some say Mr. Fulborne is the leader who will solve the problem of declining attendance. But I know you remember that higher attendance is, of itself, of little value. You know that it’s our adherence to the Bible that will make River Grove Church successful, not numbers.”

  Though her face did not show it, Hila’s heart sank with these last words. For this was precisely what the River Grovers did not believe. Numbers trumped everything.

  “So a solid reliance on God’s grace is an absolute requirement for any leader here. And this is precisely what Oliver Fulborne lacks. Most of you have heard him preach works. Let’s take a pass on such a leader and wait for a man who teaches grace.”

  She was walking back to her pew almost before the last word
s were out of her mouth, and hearing a surprisingly small amount of talk from the congregation. She did her best not to look at her parents as she passed them. As a debater, she knew that her little speech had been superior to all that had come before it. She also knew that the comments that would follow would obliterate any effect she might have created. Sure enough, what Ann Mankewisz, By Hoplinger, and Cal Torey had to say about Fulborne’s lifelong adherence to the doctrine of grace was said clumsily, but it was said with spirit and at great length. What Ann had to say about Hila’s “treachery” was said even more spiritedly. Not even mispronounced, had Hila ever before heard herself described as a saboteur.

  When the time for the vote came, ushers distributed ballots. These were soon gathered up front and counted by Al Fontaine and Tom Bissell in view of everyone while the congregation sang ‘Beulah Land’ and a few other hymns. Tom handed the results to Steve, who now stood at the pulpit.

  “The votes are tallied,” he announced. “Oliver Fulborne has been voted in as an elder.” There was some applause.

  Hila got up and left. On her way out she turned in the direction of the office, intending to collect her personal items to take home. She would call in her resignation the next day if they gave her time to do so before firing her. As she went, she saw Kathy Hofrider arriving late, entering through the other set of double doors at the back of the sanctuary.

  The office light was on, and it occurred to Hila before she reached the door that Ollie and Betty might be in there waiting for the result of the vote. Then again someone might simply have left the light on. Hila was brave. She went in.

  Ollie and Betty were seated holding hands on the trim blue couch that faced Hila’s desk. They looked up expectantly. Ollie’s eyes had the wild look of a school bully who expects to escape punishment from the principal, a bully about to be set free. Betty was subdued. Hila realized that they thought she had been sent to report the vote and fetch them back to the sanctuary. She went behind her desk silently, not trusting herself to speak, and started gathering her possessions.

  “Is the vote in?” Ollie said to her.

  She found a plastic bag in the back of a drawer and began putting her things in it.

  “What is it? Are they still discussing?” asked Betty.

  “You’re an elder again,” said Hila in a voice just loud enough to be heard.

  Ollie grinned and slapped his knee. “Hah! What was the vote? A good majority.”

  “They didn’t say.” Hila took a picture off the wall.

  Suddenly, Ollie was in her face and thrusting papers into her hand. “I want that typed and copied to all the elders. Put it on letterhead and get a copy back to me.” Hila stared at the handwritten sheets, the first sentence of which said something about a three year plan for River Grove. “Get it out to them quickly. I want those in tomorrow’s mail. You have all the addresses? Young lady, do you have all the addresses?”

  Hila looked up. “Yes.”

  “Good, then get on it this evening. This is very important.”

  Oddly enough, someone was singing very loudly in the hallway. Hila dropped the papers on the desk, picked up the plastic bag, and made for the door. She did not have everything, but it would have to do. As she stepped out, she saw Evan Marklestan and Kathy Hofrider coming her way, walking close together. It was Kathy who was singing, trumpeting the ‘Veggie Tales’ theme with her face turned toward Evan and her arm linked in his. Evan was both embarrassedly shushing her and laughing at her. Hila caught the words “You kook!” A few steps closer, and they saw her. Kathy choked off her song, released Evan’s arm, and blushed. Evan looked uncomfortable.

  Hila took this in and in one second reached a conclusion: marriage. Not, she supposed, that Evan or Kathy would know that for months yet, but it was plain enough. She had already noticed that they were sometimes like a little brother and sister playing together. Soon neither would be able to imagine spending life playing with anyone else. Actually, it was charming and just the sort of picture she needed at that dark hour.

  Coming from behind her, Ollie brushed past and turned to face her grimly. “Make sure that gets done,” he said. “Tomorrow’s mail.” He turned to Evan. “How many for and against?” Hila found herself standing by Betty and wanting to run.

  “You made it,” Evan replied, not knowing that Hila had told him.

  “I know that. What were the numbers?”

  “Not announced yet.”

  Without a word Ollie strode toward the sanctuary with Betty trailing after him. Evan looked at Hila and made a motion toward them with his head. “Does he know?”

  “That I sent the mailings? No.”

  Evan turned to Kathy. “You missed it by coming in late. It turns out that Hila is our anonymous mailer.”

  Kathy was still too embarrassed about what Hila had just witnessed between her and Evan to react much to this. The three stood quietly.

  Evan hesitantly met Hila’s eye. “Why? Why did you do that?”

  Hila felt herself crumbling inside. “There’s no good explanation. Excuse me, I have to go now.” She speed walked to the coat rack and then out of the church.

  A few minutes later, feeling about eighty years old, she came to her front door, at Cora’s, and found it unlocked. Blaming Eddie in her thoughts, she pushed in. In the darkened living room, a man was seated. She froze.

  “Who’s there?” she whispered.

  “It’s me,” he mumbled.

  She let out a ragged breath. “Well, damn you, Bill, why are you sitting with the lights off?”

  “Oh.” He fumbled for a moment and turned on the table lamp beside his chair.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve had a rough time this evening. I wanted to tell you about it.”

  She flung down her purse and plastic bag. “You’ve had a rough time! You! Let me tell you—” she threw her coat on the back of the couch “—I’ve had a rough time. How’s this? I had to tell the whole church tonight that I’m the mystery mailer, that I deceived and lied to them. And Ollie ‘Hitler’ Fulborne, Ollie ‘Work, You Slackers!’ Fulborne, got voted in, no doubt by a comfortable majority.” She threw herself down full length on the couch. “What else? Oh yeah, I’m losing my boyfriend.”

  “Damn,” he said. “That is rough.”

  “And God seems to have abandoned me.”

  “Yeah, I see. But, uh, you haven’t heard what happened to me.”

  “Nothing ever happens to you.” She pushed her face into a cushion.

  “Hila, this was bad! Just listen to me. I decided I couldn’t wait anymore, so I wrote myself into Bafilia. I just showed up at the Whiskers and told them the truth about us and them. And Hila—” he leaned forward with wide eyes and a grim mouth “—I tried to write it so that they would believe me, but how could I do that? It’s the same problem I had with the Garden Mole’s visions and with the walnut. I can’t just make them react the way they wouldn’t do. I can’t make them be other than what we made them because then it wouldn’t be them and it wouldn’t be Bafilia. You know how it is, Hila. It’s more like they’re writing the story than we are, once we’ve established their characters. So I just told them about us and then I had to write what would really happen, not what I wanted to happen. And Hila, what really happened is that they didn’t believe me. Not even one of them believed me, not one solitary one! Damn it all, Hila, are you crying or laughing?”

  She had sat up and, though tears were on her face, was decidedly laughing. She hugged her sides.

  “It’s not funny.”

  She strove to speak. “They—wouldn’t believe you! Those—rotten—little—atheists!”

  It took three full seconds for this to sink in, and then his eyebrows knitted and his face reddened. He seemed to want to say something but nothing came out. He stood up and stomped out, slamming the door.

  She lay on
the couch and gradually subsided back into tears. Then her eyes popped open and she clumsily scrambled to a nearby telephone. She dialed her parents’ number and prayed that they would not be home yet. They were not. She left a message begging her mother not to come over and assuring her that everything was ALL RIGHT but that she was going to unplug the phones, which she did. Then she went to the backdoor, let in the dog, and fed him. When she went upstairs, she found Eddie mesmerized in front of his TV, playing a Nintendo game. He paused the game.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  “It’s OK, they shot up all my extra lives anyway.”

  “Everything been OK this evening?”

  He shrugged.

  “Fulborne made it in. But not before I got up and told them all about the mailings. I didn’t mention you.”

  “Why did you tell them?”

  She shrugged. “Your mom thought I should.”

  “Oh. Hey, I guess you saw Bill downstairs.”

  “Yes, he’s gone now.”

  “OK. He wanted to tell you something about Bafilia, I think. He didn’t want to talk to me about it.”

  “He told me and it’s taken care of. Eddie, if anyone comes to the door, will you tell them I’m indisposed? I already unplugged the phones.”

  “Geez, we’ve got an answering machine.”

  “Yes.” She looked around vaguely. “I don’t want even messages tonight.”

  Eddie rose and looked more closely at her. “You’re all broke up, aren’t you? Don’t be like this, you’re never like this. You shouldn’t care if old Ollie is an elder. It’s not your business, it’s that whole church doing it.” He gestured broadly with skinny arms. “And Mom and I don’t go there anymore and you don’t have to either.”

  She nodded. “I can’t go there now. It’s over. I’m quitting my job too, before they fire me. I’ll call Steve tomorrow. Goodby, River Grove.”

  “Mom doesn’t come back to take care of me for a long time yet, so why don’t you come to our house church while you’re still here in Viola? You’d like Dan and Jamie who lead it. There’s nobody like Fulborne there.”

  “I could kill him. I could honestly, cold-bloodedly murder him,” she found herself saying to her surprise. “Yes, Eddie, whatever. I’ll go with you next Sunday. I’ll never go back to River Grove. It’s all over. I lose.”

  Eddie seemed satisfied with this and stole a glance at the frozen scene of carnage on his TV screen. She took the hint and went to her room.

  A few minutes later, in pajamas and robe, she reclined on her bed, propped up with pillows, and looked at her closed Bible where it lay on the bedtable. The Bible was there because Hila had her quiet times in the evenings. Pretty much every evening. Now was the time to read and pray. For the last several weeks she had forced herself through these times with the half conscious calculation that, if Ollie were voted down, she would want to have stayed true to the God who in that case would have won the battle. But now God had lost the battle, or had never taken the field. She appeared to have been fighting alone. It would seem to make sense to skip the Bible tonight—and perhaps for some time to come.

  But that scared her. For nine years she had been used to thinking of herself as Christ’s possession. Slaves do not just walk away. Loving slaves do not want to. And it was not as if she had known no such hard times since becoming a Christian, though this was certainly the worst. In Indianapolis she had for years been a part time volunteer counselor at Joshua House, a half-way house for troubled teens. Some she had helped and others had left the House to sink deeper into drugs and crime. Girls she had loved, girls she had prayed for with wild intensity, had nevertheless fallen away. She had attended some pathetic funerals. By the time Joshua House had closed some two years previously, she had again and again ‘prayed through’ concerning God’s seeming callousness and neglect. She had told herself that she was ready to follow Him blind, no matter how disappointing the results.

  But now this. A whole church full of His people, or supposedly His people, abandoned to the tender mercies of Oliver Fulborne. What she had endured at Joshua House had been the loss of some youngsters fresh in the faith, the loss of a few green troops, as it were. But tonight she had seen, or seemed to see, the loss of a whole fortress, with its garrison of veterans, to the enemy. To evil. A line from Job ran through her mind, “…and I alone have escaped to tell you.”

  Of course her method of resisting that evil had not been the best, but she at least had resisted, while God apparently had not. “Loser,” she said, and throwing herself off the bed, went downstairs. She had not revisited the John of the Cross book. It lived downstairs and she lived upstairs. What kind of idiot would name himself “of the Cross” anyway? Now she went to it as to a threatening challenger and in the pale light of the ceiling lamp in Cora’s office looked through it again. She found the underlined quotation that had so unsettled her before, read it, and flipped ahead to the next underline.

  Tell my Beloved, that as I languish, and as He only is my salvation, to save me; that as I am suffering, and as He only is my joy, to give me joy; that as I am dying, and as He only is my life, to give me life.

  Out of habit her heart responded to such words. Christ had been her beloved for so long that even under hammer blows she could scarcely think of Him otherwise. Only by the greatest effort of will could she be false to Him; He was, oh, so difficult to betray.

  To betray. Judas had managed it. He had wanted money; she had wanted Ollie Fulborne’s head on a platter and River Grove safe for the gospel. In her opinion, quite a difference, no comparison. Nevertheless, an impish little poem she had learned long ago in a college literature class came to her now, in part, and she sat down on a pile of magazines and papers that littered the only chair in the room and concentrated until it came back to her. It had been written by a non-Christian author, some gloomy fellow named Robert August who understood too much about human nature.

  Someone saw our bright Lord

  (Oh, how could it be Him?)

  And received the sure word

  In the heavenly light

  And was thus reassured,

  But I did not see Him.

  No, I stumbled through days

  (They seized and they bound Him),

  Taking all the wrong ways

  Till I came in the night

  To the kiss that betrays,

  And there I found Him.

  Had she, she wondered, already betrayed Him in a way? But then why did she still love Him? She was mad at Him, stressed out, ready to quit; that is, if there had been anyone else to go to. But He had her and there appeared to be nothing she could do about it. Even if, by lying to the church, she had betrayed His cause, she had nothing to do but remain miserably His.

  “All right then, Loser,” she said out loud. “I admit it, I still love You, love You like a fool. But I think I have a right to some explanation about what just happened at River Grove. You’ve got to show me, or else be as elusive as You are ineffectual. I demand to get to the bottom of this evil that You turn Your back on. I demand to be allowed to know.”

  Something unexpected happened at this point. She knew suddenly what the reply was. As had happened a very few times before in her Christian Life, she received in her heart a perfectly clear reply, as if the words were spoken and audible.

  “Very well, you have My permission. Go and uncover this mystery of evil.”

  Part II The Mystery of Evil