Signs and Wonders

by Philip Gulley

  Harvey thought about telling Jimmy he knew. Whenever they’re together, he can sense Jimmy is uncomfortable. They talk about other people in town and what the Odd Fellows Lodge is up to, but never about anything personal. There’s a wall between them, an unspoken barrier that prevents such intimacy.

  No one in town talks about these things, except for Dale Hinshaw, who feels compelled to share his opinion with anyone who’ll listen. At the last meeting of the Furnace Committee, Dale told about an article on homosexuality in the Mighty Men of God newsletter. “Basically, they’re that way because they want to be. They could change if they wanted to. They talked with some guys who were that way, and they got married and now they’re just fine.”

  “I’m sure that’s been true for some people,” Ellis Hodge said, “but I don’t think that’s true for every gay person. I think it’s more complex than that.”

  “Humph, that’s what the liberals want ya t’ believe,” Dale said. “They won’t let the truth out.”

  “You know, Dale, not everything is a liberal conspiracy,” Asa Peacock said.

  It troubles Dale that so many members of the Furnace Committee have been led astray. “I guess I can’t blame ’em,” he told his wife. “They’re only hearing what the liberal media wants ’em to hear.”

  He wrote to the Mighty Men of God newsletter and bought gift subscriptions for the Furnace Committee. “Thank God there’s still one magazine that’ll tell the truth,” he told his wife.

  The official position of the Mighty Men of God newsletter is that gay people are going to hell, and anyone who doesn’t think so is also going to hell. There’s not much wiggle room in their theology, which Dale appreciates. Dale thinks the big problem in America is that there is too much wiggle room and not enough “Thus sayeth the Lord!” As long as he’s in charge of the Furnace Committee, there’ll be no truce with sin, he told his wife.

  So Harvey never talks with Dale about Jimmy. He worries enough about his son without hearing Dale prophesy his eternal damnation. Before he figured out Jimmy was gay, Harvey knew what he thought about homosexuals. But now that his son is one, he’s not so sure. He wishes he could talk with Eunice about it, but he can’t bear the thought of her knowing.

  He thought about talking with Pastor Sam to find out his opinion. But he supposed Sam would have to stick to the party line and be against it, elsewise Dale would get him fired. No, he didn’t want to drag Sam into this. Sam had enough problems without Dale hounding him.

  Harvey is not a man prone to philosophizing, but lately he’s been wondering why it is that the angriest and loudest people are the ones who get their way in the church. When he first started going to church, back when the kids were little, he thought it was supposed to work the other way, that the kind and wise people were the ones who were listened to, but it isn’t that way at all. It’s the angry ones that get their way. Everyone else is afraid to buck them; they just kind of go along.

  Like when they were putting in the furnace. Dale wanted the church to hire his son, Robert Dale, to install the furnace, even though that wasn’t Robert Dale’s line of work. But Robert Dale was between jobs and needed the money.

  Ellis Hodge had said, “Dale, don’t get me wrong, I like Robert Dale, but I’m not sure he’s the one to do this. I think we ought to hire a professional. It might even be against the law for your son to do it, since he isn’t licensed.”

  “Well, I never heard of such foolishness,” Dale had said. “Here we are, letting the government tell us how to run the church.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Dale. I’m just not sure Robert Dale is qualified. That’s all I meant.”

  Dale lectured them about freedom of religion and helping those in need and how Robert Dale was in need. Finally the Furnace Committee caved in and let him do it.

  Robert Dale bungled the job. He put the thermostat in the pastor’s office two feet above a hot-air vent. To get the meeting room up to sixty-eight degrees, they have to turn the thermostat to eighty-eight. Sam’s office is like a sauna. He has to open the windows, which defeats the purpose of having a furnace in the first place. Dale insists his son did nothing wrong, that that’s the way it’s supposed to work. He won’t let a furnace man look at it, and since he’s in charge of the Furnace Committee, he pretty well gets his way. Harvey doesn’t understand that, but resisting Dale would take too much energy, energy Harvey doesn’t have.

  He’s been spending time at the library with Miss Rudy, the librarian. She’s been teaching him how to use the Internet. He wanted to find out all he could about homosexuality and figured that would be an anonymous way to do it. But the word homosexual has the word sex in it, so when Harvey typed it in, a beeper in the computer began screeching and the computer froze up. This was Miss Rudy’s method of upholding community standards. Everyone in the library turned to look at Harvey.

  “Harvey Muldock, what kind of filth are you up to?” Miss Rudy called out from her stool at the front desk.

  Harvey panicked. “Nothing. I don’t know what happened.” He began striking various keys to silence the beeper, to no avail. Miss Rudy came out from behind the desk and peered at the computer screen. Her face reddened and she let out a gasp.

  “Can you make it stop beeping like that?” Harvey yelled above the noise.

  Miss Rudy tapped a key, and the beeper stopped. She glared at Harvey. “I won’t have that smut in this library,” she said.

  “It’s not what it looks like,” he said. “I just wanted to look something up.”

  The next thing Harvey knew he was in Miss Rudy’s office, telling her about Jimmy. He made her promise not to tell anyone, especially not his wife. “It’d break her heart,” he said. “She’d think it was her fault. I just wanted some information, that’s all. I don’t know much about it, and I don’t know who to ask.”

  So Miss Rudy taught Harvey how to use the Internet, and he has been reading up on the topic. He learned the various theories about the cause of homosexuality, ranging from man’s sinful nature to a person’s genetic code. Harvey suspects it’s all tied to religion. If you attend a church where the pastor preaches about the seven-headed beast of Revelation, you lean toward the man’s-sinful-nature theory. If your pastor has ever called God “Mother” or talked about “our brother, the whale,” you likely favor the genetics hypothesis.

  The Internet didn’t help much. Harvey’s still confused. The only thing he knows for sure is that he loves his son. He hopes God loves him, too. He isn’t sure. Just when he’s inclined to trust God’s love, Dale Hinshaw says something that causes him to doubt it. Harvey wonders how Dale can know so much. To hear Dale tell it, you would think he was the only one the Lord ever spoke to.

  Harvey finally worked up the courage to ask Ellis Hodge what he thought about gay people one evening after a meeting of the Furnace Committee.

  “I heard a preacher on TV say God hates people like that, that he sends them to hell. Do you think that’s so?” Harvey asked Ellis.

  Ellis chuckled. “If it is, I want my offering money back.” He laid a hand on Harvey’s shoulder. “Harvey, an awful lot of folks hate anything and anyone they don’t understand. That don’t mean they’re right.”

  “So let’s say you had a son, and you found out he was that way. What would you do about it?” Harvey asked.

  Ellis pondered that for a moment. “I think I would tell him I loved him. I suspect he’d want to hear that.”

  They checked the furnace one last time, shut off the lights in the church, and went out to the parking lot. Ellis climbed in his truck to drive home.

  Harvey walked home. He looped around the block a couple extra times. He needed time to think. He said a little prayer for Jimmy. That helped. It always had. He thought back to when Jimmy was little and he’d take him to church. How they’d sit side by side, Harvey resting his hand on top of Jimmy’s head, every now and then looking down at him and smiling with a fatherly pride. If the sermon went long, they’d pass notes b
ack and forth on the church bulletins. For whatever reason, Harvey had saved them in the top drawer of his dresser. Whenever he reaches in for socks, he sees Jimmy’s little-boy writing.

  He wouldn’t see Jimmy until Christmas. Six months away. Maybe instead of waiting that long to tell him he loved him, he could write him a note, maybe on the back of a church bulletin. They had some experience with notes, after all. Harvey thought about that. Yes, it seemed like a fine idea. Writing a note to your son saying you love him. Just a little note. “I love you, son. Can’t wait to see you at Christmas. P.S. Your mother loves you, too.”

  Harvey still wasn’t sure what he thought about homosexuality, but he did know he loved his son, and that seemed as fine a place to start as any.

  Six

  A Mighty Man of God

  Dale Hinshaw knew it was a sign from the Lord when he found the spent helium balloon lying on the ground next to his garage back in early May. A piece of paper was tied to the balloon with the words, If found, please contact Missy Griffith of Owasa, Iowa. Underneath Missy’s name was a phone number, which Dale called late that night, when the rates were cheapest.

  Missy Griffith, it turns out, had been studying wind currents in her fourth-grade science class, and her teacher had the kids release helium balloons to see how far they would travel.

  Dale had looked for Owasa in his atlas, but couldn’t find it. “Just where is Owasa, exactly?” he asked Missy.

  “Ten miles east of Buckeye,” she said. “That’s where we grocery shop.”

  That didn’t help much, but Dale finally found it on his map. They calculated that Missy’s balloon had flown four hundred and twenty miles in three days.

  “It might have got here earlier,” Dale said. “I was gone yesterday, to the Mighty Men of God Conference up in the city. It might have come when I was up there.”

  “You’re the farthest person to call,” she told Dale. Dale felt a proud thrill.

  A couple weeks later, a big envelope postmarked Owasa landed in Dale’s mailbox. There was a newspaper in the envelope, and on the front page was a picture of Missy Griffith holding a map showing the distance from Owasa to Harmony. In the third paragraph, it mentioned Dale’s name and how he’d found Missy’s balloon next to his garage on a Thursday morning, though the article allowed as how it might have landed in Dale’s yard on Wednesday when Dale was at the Mighty Men of God Conference in the city.

  The thing was, the conference had ended with a plea for the Mighty Men of God to go out and make disciples of all the nations. Then, the very next day, Dale had found the balloon, which he took to be a sign from the Lord that he, Dale Hinshaw, was being called to launch the salvation balloons ministry.

  Dale had been casting about for a new way of spreading the Word after his Scripture eggs ministry had gone belly up when all his chickens had died of a poultry disease on Good Friday. Dale’s Scripture eggs ministry had begun when Dale read in Ripley’s Believe It or Not of a chicken who’d laid an egg with a scrap from a telephone book preserved in the yolk. That was when he’d had the idea to feed Scripture verses to chickens, who would then lay Scripture eggs, which Dale would distribute to unbelievers.

  Things went well until Good Friday, when the Lord removed his hand of blessing and all the chickens died of a fearsome disease. Dale had been praying for a new ministry, and then had awakened to find the balloon in his yard the day after the Mighty Men of God Conference.

  “It’s not just a coincidence,” he told his wife. “This is the Lord’s doin’. I just know it. Why else would that balloon have landed in our yard?”

  Dale’s idea was to write the plan of salvation on a piece of paper, tie it to a helium balloon, and set it free when the wind was blowing toward heathen lands. The genius of the idea was in its simplicity. No more chickens in the basement to feed, no more poultry diseases to worry about, no more egg delivery to concern himself with. Just blow up the balloons, tie on the plan of salvation, set them free, and trust the Lord to direct them to heathen unbelievers.

  It took the better part of May and June to save the money for a helium tank. He had gone to the May meeting of the elders to ask for two hundred dollars to get his balloon ministry off the ground. He showed the elders a map of the wind patterns, pointing out how, if he released the salvation balloons in Harmony, they would fly east toward all the liberals.

  Miriam Hodge sat wondering why she had agreed to be an elder for another three years. “Why exactly do you need the money, Dale?”

  “Mostly for a helium tank. I can buy the balloons myself, but I can’t swing a helium tank just yet.”

  “I don’t know,” Sam Gardner said. “I don’t think this is something the church would want to get behind. I think maybe we should pass on this one.”

  Dale tried not to hold it against them, but it was difficult. “It’s like the Bible says,” he told his wife, “where there is no vision, the people perish. They’re dying—they just don’t know it.”

  “You can thank the liberals for that,” she said. “They’ve made it a crime to even pray. No wonder the Christians are running scared.”

  With the church running scared, Dale saved his money and in early July bought a helium tank. He inflated two hundred balloons with the plan of salvation tied on each one. He had to use a lot of abbreviations to make the plan of salvation fit on a piece of paper, but he thought people could still understand it.

  1. ADMT U R A SNR.

  2. TRN FRM SIN.

  3. BELEV JESUS SAVZ SNRS.

  4. INVIT JESUS N2 YR LIFE.

  Then he wrote his name and phone number at the bottom so people would call him.

  It took the better part of a day to blow up the balloons. Two hundred balloons don’t look like a lot when they’re up in the sky, but when you have to blow them up yourself, it’s a sizable number. Plus, writing out the plan of salvation two hundred times was no small feat. Then he worried that someone who couldn’t read might find a salvation balloon, so he recorded several cassette tapes of the plan of salvation and tied them to balloons.

  When he finished, the wind was blowing from the west at a steady ten miles an hour.

  “They’ll be in Washington, D.C., in a little over two days,” he told his wife, then opened the garage door and pushed them out and up into the sky. The balloons rose in the air, a rainbow of color. A few stuck in the oak tree in the neighbor’s yard, but most of them cleared the tree and headed east, toward the heathens.

  That was on a Saturday. The next day at church he stood up during the prayer time and asked for prayers for his salvation balloons, that the Lord would direct them to unbelievers.

  “I can’t help but think the Lord had them blowing toward Washington, D.C., for a reason,” he said. “Maybe some of our leaders will find one and be saved, and this nation will come back to the Lord.”

  “Amen to that,” said Bea Majors from the organ.

  For the hundredth time in the two years he’d been there as pastor, Sam Gardner wished he were somewhere else.

  Dale wiped away a tear. “I feel so privileged to do the Lord’s work this way,” he sniffed. “I’ll be releasing four hundred balloons this Saturday. I’ll need some help. They’re predicting winds from the south, which should carry the balloons toward Chicago. Now I don’t want to get all political, but there’s a lot of Democrats up that way who need the Lord. If you think the Lord is nudging you to help, then talk to me after church.”

  His wife began to weep quietly. Four hundred balloons! she thought. He’ll wear himself out. Lord, send him helpers.

  It had been a rough couple months for Dale’s wife. When the chickens died, effectively ending their Scripture eggs ministry, she felt God had let them down. She tried talking with Dale about it, but it only upset him.

  “The ways of the Lord are not ours to understand,” he told her. “I can only believe he has something finer in store for us.”

  Then to see Dale’s faith rewarded with the salvation balloons ministry was suc
h a joy.

  There was a rustle by the organ. Bea Majors rose to her feet. “I’ll help you blow up the balloons, Dale.”

  “Count me in, too,” said Bill Muldock from the back row.

  Dale’s wife began weeping in earnest. I’m sorry for ever doubting you, Lord. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  Dale was still standing, sniffling. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. “Thank you, friends. I can’t tell you what this means to me. The Lord bless you.”

  Sam Gardner was praying also. Dear God, please let him sit down now.

  But Dale couldn’t be stopped, not when the hand of the Lord was so clearly upon him. “I need your prayers for a rare north wind. Ladies, I know it might hurt your petunias, but with Dubois County straight south of us, I need a strong north wind to reach the Catholics in those parts.”

  Bea Majors frowned. She’d just planted two flats of pink petunias. She prayed, but not too hard.

  Dale spent the next three days experimenting with his balloons. He discovered if he filled the balloons with less helium, the balloons would fall to the ground much sooner. He called it “target evangelism.” On Wednesday evening, he released twenty balloons a mile upwind from a Kingdom Hall just as the Jehovah’s Witnesses were gathering to worship. On Thursday, he floated another twenty balloons toward the Masonic Lodge in Cartersburg.

  On Friday morning, when Dale was eating breakfast, their telephone rang. Dale picked it up and said hello.

  “I’m looking for a Mr. Dale Hinshaw,” a man said.

  “You got him.”

  “I’m calling about one of your balloons.”

  Dale was faint with excitement. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Pittsburgh with the zoo. One of your balloons landed in our aviary exhibit, and our trumpeter swan choked on it and died. Do you know how many trumpeter swans there are in the world, Mr. Hinshaw?”