“I don’t think that really happened,” Asa said.
“Yeah, Sam said someone probably wrote that to scare people into giving money to the church,” Ellis Hodge said.
“That’s the whole problem right there,” Dale said. “We got ourselves a pastor who doesn’t fear the Lord and the next thing you know they’re cutting the funds to the Furnace Committee and the world’s goin’ to Hades in a handbasket and it’s all Sam’s fault. Boy, they stopped stoning people too soon, if you ask me.”
This was Dale Hinshaw at peak form—singling out one person whose well-deserved death would solve all the world’s ills. Unfortunately, people who apparently didn’t love the Lord as much as Dale had made it nearly impossible to kill heretics, so he took another tack. “I hate to do this, but I’m afraid you all will have to step down from this committee. It’s clear to me you’re not spiritually qualified to serve.”
Asa, Harvey, and Ellis looked at Dale, aghast.
“You can’t do that,” Ellis Hodge said. “You can’t kick us off the committee. The Nominating Committee appointed us.”
This was a technicality Dale was willing to overlook. “You serve on this committee at my pleasure, and I’m asking you to leave.”
Harvey burst out laughing. “Dale, I think that operation made you loony. You’re not the president of the United States. In fact, you’re not even the clerk of the committee. Ellis is.”
“I am?” Ellis asked.
“Yep. Remember, we take turns. Asa was clerk last year. You are this year. Next year it’s my turn, and then Dale is clerk.”
“Well, when it’s my turn to be clerk, I’m going to throw off the whole lot of you,” Dale screeched.
“You do that, Dale,” Asa said. “We’ll probably be ready to take a little break just about then.”
With that matter settled, they played poker with matchsticks for two hours, then adjourned.
“Boy, it’s a good thing I didn’t die,” Dale told his wife when he got home. “That whole committee has given themselves over to the devil. No tellin’ what would have happened if I hadn’t been there.”
“I didn’t think you’d be gone that long. I was starting to worry. How are you feeling?” Dolores asked him.
“I tell you what, this new heart is a champion. I don’t know who it belonged to, but the Lord sure did bless him with a good ticker. I feel better than I’ve felt in years. Think I might even start up my Scripture eggs ministry again.”
“Let’s not overdo it, honey. You don’t want to overextend yourself.”
Cleaning up after the laying hens Dale had kept in their basement had soured Dolores on poultry evangelism, and she’d been vastly relieved when the Lord, in His inscrutable ways, had snuffed them out.
Dolores changed the subject. “You know, we haven’t even met the donor family. I wish we knew who they were so we could thank them properly.”
Despite his disappointment at not being able to fire the Furnace Committee, Dale was feeling magnanimous. “Why not let’s call the hospital tomorrow and see if they can arrange a meeting? It might cheer them up to see what good use I’m making of my new heart.”
“Let’s do it,” Dolores agreed.
“Say, Sam Gardner didn’t call, did he?”
“Phone hasn’t rang all evening.”
“Huh. Frank said he’d have him call me. He must have forgotten. I’ll call him.”
“Honey, it’s nearly eleven. He’s probably in bed.”
“Oh, he’ll want to talk with me. It’s about the sermon he gave on Sunday.”
Dale dialed Sam’s house.
“Hello,” Sam answered rather groggily, after eight rings.
“Dale here. Just wanted to go over your sermon with you. Been a little concerned. Don’t get me wrong, I think you need to talk about grace every now and again, but I’m concerned you’re letting sinners off the hook. Thinking maybe it’s time you preached on Romans 3:10.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Dale. Thanks for your suggestion.”
“‘None is righteous, not one.’ Can’t go wrong with that verse,” Dale said. “I tell you, Sam, if you only knew what sinners there were in this town, some of them right in our own church, you’d think twice about preaching on this grace stuff.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Dale. Can I go back to sleep now?”
“Not just yet. I’ve got a few more verses I want to share with you.”
“Why don’t you write them down and bring them by the office tomorrow. No, wait, don’t do that. Just put them in the mail. I’ll be looking forward to getting them, Dale. You take care now. Good night.” And with that, Sam hung up the phone.
Dale brushed his teeth, put on his pajamas, and slid into bed next to Dolores.
What a day, he thought. He’d prophesied against the Nagles and their dalliance with Hollywood liberals, written an editorial against Bill Clinton and the Catholics, was on his way to restoring the Furnace Committee to its former glory, and had urged Sam to crack the whip on some sinners.
He pulled the blankets around himself, thanked God for his strong new heart, whose previous owner was obviously a God-fearing Christian, snuggled in next to Dolores, and then fell asleep dreaming of his Scripture eggs and the numerous heathens they would bring to the Lord.
Twenty
Secrets
February blew in with a snowstorm, twelve inches of snow with gale winds, drifting shut the country roads, snapping the power lines, and closing down the schools in a dozen counties. Asa and Jessie Peacock had driven south to Florida to visit his aunt and were stuck in the warmth and sunshine, trying to make the best of it. Asa had been glued to the weather channel, watching a red radar blob park itself over Harmony. He’d phoned Sam, who’d mentioned they’d lost their electrical power. “Miriam and Ellis lost power at their house too. You may still have it out at your place, I don’t know.”
Asa fretted for an entire day before Jessie suggested he phone their home.
“Why would I do that? There’s no one there to talk to.”
“If our answering machine picks up, you’ll know we have electricity,” she explained. “Then you can stop worrying.”
He dialed their number and listened as their phone rang. Eight, nine, ten, eleven, he counted silently. “When does the machine pick up?” he yelled into the other room to Jessie.
“Sixth ring.”
“Oh Lord,” he cried out, pacing back and forth across his aunt’s living room. “If we lost our power, then we lost our heat. Now the pipes’ll bust and flood the place.”
“Does that mean we’ll have to buy new carpet?” Jessie asked.
“I suppose so.”
“Good, I never have liked that carpet.”
Back in Harmony, Dale Hinshaw was staring out his front window. “Just look at that sidewalk. Gonna be a sheet of ice if we don’t get it cleaned off and salted.”
“I told you I can do it,” Dolores said.
“You think I’m gonna let a woman shovel my sidewalk? I’d never hear the end of it.” He watched glumly as the snow fell. “Wonder why Sam hasn’t stopped by to do it. These ministers nowadays sure aren’t much for serving.”
“Maybe if you treated him a little kinder, he’d have done it,” Dolores snapped. Being cooped up with Dale for four days had taken a toll on her patience.
Their phone rang before Dale had a chance to take her down a peg or two with a Scripture verse. Dolores crossed the living room and answered the phone in the kitchen.
“Who is it?” Dale yelled from his perch by the window.
She held up her finger to shush him, which of course had no effect. “If that’s Sam, tell him to get over here with some salt and get this walk cleaned up.”
“We’re looking forward to meeting you,” Dolores said after a few minutes. “Next Tuesday then, at eleven o’clock, at our home. And why don’t you plan on having lunch with us. Okay. We’ll see you then. Bye-bye now.”
Dale walked into kitchen
as she hung up the phone. “He can’t get here ’til next Tuesday? Heck, it’ll all be melted by then. The elders are gonna hear about this.”
“That wasn’t Sam.”
“Then who was it?”
“A Mrs. Betty Bartley.”
“Humph, never heard of her,” Dale said with a dismissive snort. “I suppose she wants to sell us something.”
“Not exactly. She’s the widow of the man who gave you his heart. She wants to meet you. So I invited her here next Tuesday.”
“Oh, well. That’s different.” Dale rubbed the scar across his chest. “Be nice to meet her. I wonder where she lives.”
“Up in the city. Her husband died in a car wreck. A woman in Ohio got his corneas, a man in Illinois got his liver, and you got his heart. A bunch of different people got his skin,” Dolores said with a slight shiver. “Anyway, she wants to meet the recipients, and we’re at the top of the list.”
“How old was he?” Dale asked.
“Forty-two.”
“What do you know about that! No wonder I feel so good.”
Dale spent the rest of the afternoon at the kitchen table studying actuarial tables he had left over from when he’d sold life insurance. “As near as I can figure,” he announced just before supper, “with a forty-two-year-old heart—wait, was he a smoker?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t seem right to ask.”
“He probably wasn’t, or they would haven’t taken his heart in the first place.” He scribbled a few more figures, then poked the pencil point against the paper with a confident jab. “Looks like I’ll reach ninety-eight.” He leaned back in his chair with a satisfied smile on his face. “You know what the Word says, ‘The fear of the Lord prolongs life, but the years of the wicked will be short.’”
“I wouldn’t point that out to Mrs. Bartley if I were you,” Dolores suggested. “She might not like you implying her husband was wicked.”
“Wonder what he did to make the Lord so mad?”
“Maybe he didn’t do anything to make the Lord mad. Maybe he just had an accident.”
“Not a sparrow falls to the ground that the Lord doesn’t know it,” Dale intoned. “He must’ve really honked God off. Whatever it was, I hope it isn’t catching.”
The next few days were warmer, the steely clouds lifted, and by Friday the Hinshaws were stir-crazy and went to the Kroger for groceries, passing by the meetinghouse on the way.
“Would you look at that,” Dale said. “Sam didn’t even shovel the church’s sidewalk. What are we paying that man to do?”
“I thought the church had hired Uly Grant’s boy to do that,” Dolores said.
“No, I called him and told him not to do it, that we had a pastor who was perfectly able-bodied and there was no sense in paying someone else to do it.”
He shook his head, mystified by Sam’s indolence. “I just don’t understand that man. We pay him twenty-five thousand dollars a year to work one hour a week, let him take a week off in the summer, give him a hundred dollars at Christmas, and he can’t bring himself to shovel a little snow.”
He pulled to a stop in front of the meetinghouse. “I got half a mind to clean it off myself. Maybe that’ll shame him a little, watching an older man do his work.”
Dolores thought of stopping him, but after a week of listening to him rant, the possibility of widowhood seemed pleasant. “I’ll wait right here,” she said.
He stormed from their car and marched into the meetinghouse, past a startled Frank, into Sam’s office. “I see the front walk’s not been cleaned.”
Sam looked up from his computer. “I wouldn’t know. I use the back door. Billy Grant’s supposed to shovel the front.”
“Well, he was, but I told him not to, that we could do it ourselves.”
“Thank you for volunteering, Dale. The shovel’s in the front closet beside the water heater. You might want to put some salt down once you get it cleaned. Billy was going to bring salt pellets from the hardware store, but now that you’ve fired him, I suppose you’ll have to get some.”
Sam turned back to his computer.
“What about my heart?” Dale asked. “You want a man in my condition out there shoveling snow? I could die.”
“Think how kindly the Lord would look upon you if you died while serving the Kingdom.”
Dale hadn’t thought of that. A snow-shoveling martyr for the Lord. He liked the ring of it.
“You’re really going to let him shovel the walk?” Frank asked after Dale left the office.
“Best-case scenario, he shovels the walk so we don’t have to. Worst-case scenario, he drops dead and I have to preach his funeral, but he won’t be around to pester us anymore.”
“I can see the Christmas spirit doesn’t last long around this place,” Frank said.
“First thing they teach you in seminary,” Sam said. “Don’t ever shovel the church sidewalk or mow the church yard, or you’ll be stuck with it the rest of your pastorate.”
“You want me to keep an eye on him, just in case?” Frank asked.
“Yeah, if he drops dead, drag him over to the Baptist church, so maybe their pastor will bury him.”
“What’s got you so on edge?”
Sam stood for a moment, looking out the window, a tired look crossing his face. “Oh, this Hodge thing. I guess Ellis punched Ralph on the nose on Christmas Day. Miriam is on the verge of booting him out to the barn to live. She wants to resign from the elders. Says she has too much on her plate.”
“I always thought they got along real good,” Frank said. “They seem close. Guess you never know about some folks. That’s what I like about this job. You get all the poop on people.”
“There is that,” Sam said. “But I’d just as soon not know some things.”
Outside, Dale was scooping the snow from the walk.
“Suppose we ought to help him?” Frank asked.
“Probably so,” Sam said, walking over to the coat tree and pulling on his jacket.
With three of them working, it only took fifteen minutes. Then Sam walked the two blocks to Grant’s Hardware, rehired Billy Grant, and purchased a bag of salt.
He finished broadcasting the salt just as the noon fire whistle sounded. He checked his watch, moved it forward two minutes, then stowed the shovels in the front closet.
“What’s for lunch?” Frank asked.
“Doesn’t much matter to me.”
“How about the Legal Grounds? Today is grilled cheese day.”
And with that they were off.
Deena glanced up from the grill as they walked through the door. “Hi, Sam. Hey, Frank.”
“Hi, Deena,” they said in unison.
“A grilled cheese with tomato soup today,” she said. “Or a tuna salad wrap with a fruit cup.” They both grimaced.
“Grilled cheese with a Coke.” Sam said.
“Same here, except for coffee,” Frank added.
They sat at the table next to the window, to watch the passersby. Across the room, Miss Rudy looked up from her book and smiled.
Frank rose to his feet. “Hello, Miss Rudy. How are you?”
“I am well, thank you, Franklin, and how are you?”
Frank blushed. “Just fine,” he said, then sat back down.
“Franklin?” Sam said, stifling a laugh.
“Oh, hush up. You know it wouldn’t hurt for you to treat me with a little more dignity.”
“I’m sorry, Franklin, I wasn’t aware you felt that way. I’ll try harder, Franklin.”
“So how’s married life?” Sam asked Deena when she brought them their sandwiches.
Deena paused, blew a lock of hair from her forehead, and sighed. “When I see him, it’s good, but I don’t see him all that much. Today, for instance, he has the day off and is sitting at home while I’m here working.”
“Maybe you need to close the place down,” Sam suggested.
Underneath the table, Frank kicked Sam squarely on the shin. “He didn’t mea
n that, Deena. Did you, Sam?”
Deena laughed and patted Frank on the shoulder. “I’d miss Frank too much if I closed down.” She smiled at Frank, causing his heart to flutter. There are few things more beautiful than a Deena Morrison smile. “You certainly have been a faithful customer lately. You and Miss Rudy. Don’t know how I’d stay in business if it weren’t for you two eating lunch here every day.”
She pulled a rag from her apron pocket and swiped the table next to them. “Let me know if you need anything else,” she said before walking away.
“You and Miss Rudy, eh?” Sam asked. “Down here every day, eh? Why, Franklin, you are full of surprises.”
“Sam Gardner, has anyone ever told you that you have a big mouth?”
“Just my wife.”
“Well, she’s right,” Frank said, then chomped into his sandwich, clearly agitated.
“Yes, sir, that’s what I like about my job. You get all the poop on people,” Sam said. “And just so you know, I give a wedding discount to senior citizens.”
“The problem with you, Sam Gardner, is that you are ill-bred. Just because I stand up to greet someone doesn’t mean I want to get married.”
“Of course, it doesn’t, and I apologize,” Sam said. “Your love life is none of my business. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“I ought to quit, take up golf, and leave you to take care of Dale Hinshaw all by yourself,” Frank grumbled. “It would serve you right for all the trouble you’ve caused me. I was supposed to have a nice retirement, with lots of time to do what I wanted. Now I’m stuck with you, making peanuts, havin’ to do all your scut work. What I was thinking?”
And so their lunch went, bickering back and forth, the customary wintertime conversation of most people in Harmony when the ravages of weather forced them indoors, where they irritated one another to no end, rubbing their edges raw.
Over at the Kroger, Dale and Dolores were squabbling over what to feed their visitor the next Tuesday. At the Hodge home, Miriam and Ellis ate their lunch in a gloomy silence. And back at the Legal Grounds, Deena looked wistfully out the window toward her home while Miss Rudy glanced up from her book, studying the line of Frank’s jaw, how it ended in his thick thatch of unruly hair. Bachelor hair. There are secrets in this town that weigh heavily, like snow on winter roofs.
A Change of Heart Page 15