Signs and Wonders

by Philip Gulley

  It was a moment rich in irony. Fern Hampton, a stalwart guardian of religious law, magically transformed into the Patrick Henry of spiritual liberty.

  Miriam let it drop. She was hoping Sam would object, but sensing conflict, he’d excused himself ten minutes earlier to use the rest room, where he’d locked the stall door and sat quietly reading a book until the meeting was finished. The secret of pastoral longevity is knowing when to use the restroom and for how long.

  “So what’d they decide about the stove?” he asked Barbara on the way home from church.

  “They’ve formed a Stove Committee to pick out a new one.”

  “Who’s on the committee?” Sam asked.

  “Fern Hampton and three other women. They named you as the fifth person in case they can’t agree and need you to decide.”

  Sam flinched. He had a fleeting vision of the entire church locked in a heated debate over the merits of gas stoves versus electric stoves. Entire families would leave the church. Fifty years from now, people would still be talking about the Great Stove Battle.

  Who was the pastor then? they’d ask.

  “Some fella named Sam Gardner. They got ridda him and the last anyone heard he was selling used cars up in the city.”

  Sam wondered if he should just resign now and get it over with.

  Fern called him later that afternoon. “We’re going up to the city tomorrow to look at stoves. We’ll be past to pick you up around seven. Be ready.”

  “Gee, Fern, I don’t know. Tomorrow’s my day off and I was counting on doing something with Barbara.”

  “Bring her along then, just so she knows she doesn’t get a vote.”

  Quakers don’t actually vote on church matters, preferring to gather in silence, reflect on God’s will, and act accordingly. This theological subtlety has been lost on Fern, who believes the meeting has gathered to learn her will and act accordingly.

  They visited three stove stores before finding one that offered a discount to churches, which in the end wouldn’t have mattered anyway. No matter how much they paid, someone was sure to stand at the next monthly business meeting and say, “Well, I just wished I’d known about this. I got a cousin in Ohio who can get these stoves for next to nothin’. I just wished someone woulda told me.”

  That would have led to a two-hour discussion on the business procedures of the meeting, examining whether they were doing everything they could to keep people informed. They’d end up forming a new committee to evaluate and, if necessary, modify the church’s decision-making process. The committee would never meet, but a year later they’d have the same problem and someone would say, “I thought we formed a committee to look at this.” Then they would argue whether a committee had actually been formed and if so, why hadn’t it met, and someone would suggest maybe it was time to form a committee to find out what had happened. They would nod their heads sagely, agree it was a fine idea, and appoint a committee. Tired, though pleased to be of service to the Lord, they would adjourn the meeting, go home, and eat pot roast.

  The new stove was delivered the next Monday. The Friendly Women were present, overseeing, as three burly men from the stove store pulled the old cast-iron stove out from the wall, muscled it onto a dolly, and headed for the kitchen door. It got stuck halfway through. They pushed harder, which lodged it even tighter. The men began to swear, under their breath at first, in deference to their surroundings, but then louder and more fervently.

  “How’d you get it in here in the first place?” they asked.

  The ladies weren’t sure. Then Opal Majors, recalling the Juanita Harmon Inferno of 1967, said, “They rebuilt that wall after the stove exploded. I told ’em then the new door wasn’t wide enough to ever get the stove out, but they told me not to worry, that the stove would last another fifty years, and then it’d be someone else’s problem.”

  This pretty well summarized the philosophy of Harmony Friends Meeting. If you do it right the first time, there will be nothing for your children and grandchildren to do. So there they were, with a new stove they couldn’t get in and an old stove they couldn’t remove. Compliments of their ancestors, whose service to the Lord had only succeeded in creating more problems than it had ever solved.

  They called Sam from the kitchen phone, who reminded them it was his day off. He’d worked two weeks without a break and was irritated. “What do you want me to do about it? Lay my hands on it and pray it through the door? There’s nothing I can do. Tell ’em to hook the old stove back up and haul the new one back to the store.”

  That they would not do. It had taken them thirty-five years and sixty-eight committee meetings to get their brand-new stainless-steel, two-oven, eight-burner stove. Now the only thing keeping them from victory was eight inches of wood and drywall. But they couldn’t count on the men from the church. Sam had proven that. Faced with a great struggle, the men would form yet another committee and recommend fixing the old stove. They would blanch in the face of battle. Meanwhile, the Promised Land was just over the ridge, perched in the back of the truck, its oven doors gleaming in the autumn sun.

  Fern ordered the men to pull the old stove back into the kitchen, which they did. She commanded the Friendly Women to fall in. They stretched out in a line across the kitchen, a human wall of grit and determination.

  She strode back and forth in front of them, recalling their past hardships: the Juanita Harmon Inferno of 1967, the Noodle Depression of 1975, the Coffeemaker Catastrophe of 1986, the Crosley Freezer Failure of 1999.

  “We’ve overcome hard times before,” she said. “We can do it again.”

  She ordered them to return to the kitchen in a half hour, armed with their electric knives. “Do not tell your husbands. They will only discourage you.”

  A half hour later, the women reassembled in the kitchen. They cleaned and oiled their electric knives, readying their weapons for battle. Fern gave the command, and they plugged in their knives and began to saw through the door frame as if it were a turkey at Thanksgiving, one thin slice at a time. The knives would clog, the women would fall to the floor exhausted, only to be dragged away as fresh troops took their place. Miriam Hodge nicked an electrical wire, sparks flew, and the smell of ozone filled the air. Opal Majors cut her finger, but stayed in the trenches, oblivious to the pain, her blood dripping onto the linoleum.

  The stove men sat watching, enthralled, knowing better than to utter a word.

  Finally, the opening was large enough. The men rose to help. Fern glared at them. “Stay put. This is not about you. This is not your fight.” The women loaded the old stove on the dolly and wheeled it to the truck. They then carried the new stove through the door, lowered it into place, hooked up the gas, and fired the burners.

  Sam came in just as they were finishing. He surveyed the opening, then spied the electric knife blades scattered on the floor, bent and dulled, among spatters of Opal’s blood. He grew pale at the carnage, turned, and fled. The women snorted. They weren’t surprised. Men didn’t have the stomach for battle. They talked a good game, but that was all. They formed committees, held conventions where they pontificated and blustered, and then maybe wrote a book on why something couldn’t be done.

  But if you wanted to cross the finish line, it took the tenacity of a Friendly Woman. For victory belongs not to the wisest, nor to the strongest, but to the persistent. The trophy goes not to the hare, but to the tortoise, who, never stopping to rest, plods ahead, her eye always on the prize.

  Fourteen

  Deadline

  Bob Miles, Sr., passed away the first weekend in October. His son, Bob Jr., hadn’t heard from him since late Friday. So Monday morning, on his way to work at the Herald, he stopped past his father’s house and found him reclining in his La-Z-Boy, beyond resuscitation. His hand lay limp in a bowl of Chee-tos. His face was colorless, except for a ring of Chee-to orange around his mouth.

  Bob’s first feeling was one of relief. With his father gone, he’d no longer have to go by “Bob
Junior.” Now he could be just plain “Bob.” His second feeling was guilt that his first feeling had been relief. His third feeling was regret. He and his father had never gotten along. Bob had been meaning to patch things up, but was a little too late. One more newspaper editor who’d missed a deadline.

  Bob lifted his father’s hand out of the Chee-tos, wet a washcloth at the bathroom sink, and cleaned the orange from around his father’s mouth. Then he combed Bob Sr.’s hair, brushed the Chee-to crumbs from his shirt, and phoned Johnny Mackey at the funeral home to come with his hearse.

  While Bob was waiting for Johnny to show, he nosed around the house. There was a Sunday bulletin from the Baptist church on the kitchen table, which meant his father had died sometime after church. Unless he’d died on Saturday, missed church, and a deacon on his visitation rounds, mistaking Bob’s death for slumber, had tiptoed past Bob and laid the bulletin on the table.

  Although that wouldn’t reflect well on the Baptist visitation program, the awareness of someone’s mortality being a crucial element to a successful visit, it was not without precedent. In 1956, Grace Mills sat dead under a hair dryer at Laverne’s Beauty Shop for seven hours before anyone grew suspicious. Fortunately, the heat from the hair dryer had kept her limber, and they were able to display her in an open casket at her funeral. In fairness to Laverne and her customers, it had been an understandable oversight—Grace Mills had appeared lifeless for years.

  While Bob was reading the church bulletin, the doorbell rang. When he opened the door, there stood Johnny Mackey in his black undertaker’s suit. Bob noticed a pickup in the driveway.

  “Where’s the hearse?” he asked.

  Johnny Mackey reddened. “In the shop. We’ll need to use the truck.”

  Bob shook his head. “We’re not hauling my father across town in a pickup truck like some piece of lumber.”

  “Bob, I know exactly how you feel, and I’m sorry as can be. But it could be a couple days before I get the hearse back, and I don’t think we should wait that long.” He lowered his voice and leaned closer toward Bob to confide an unpleasant truth. “If we wait too much longer, it’s not going to smell very nice.”

  Bob sighed. “This is ridiculous. I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I guess it can’t be helped. But I don’t want him riding in the back. He’ll ride up front in the cab with us.”

  It helped a little that the pickup truck was a new one, not some rust bucket with a dog in the back like all the other trucks in town. Bob tried to act as if nothing were amiss, as if driving down Main Street in a pickup truck with his dead father leaning into him was a common occurrence.

  Johnny pulled into the garage of the funeral home and shut off the engine. His hands shook slightly; he removed the keys with a faint jingling. An old-man tremor, Bob thought. He noticed liver spots on Johnny’s hands, then observed his silver hair. He’d always thought of Johnny Mackey as having black hair. He wondered when it had changed.

  Johnny looked like he wanted to say something, but was hesitating.

  “Uh, say, Bob, if you wouldn’t mind, could you help me carry your father in? Ordinarily, I have a helper, but he’s out sick today. If you could help me get him in, I can take it from there.”

  Since the likely alternative to not helping was Johnny Mackey dropping his father on the garage floor, Bob eased his dad out of the truck, his hands under his arms, while Johnny lifted his legs. They placed him on a gurney and wheeled him through the garage, up the ramp, and into the embalming room, where they lifted him from the cart and lowered him onto the porcelain embalming table.

  “There we go. I can take it from here,” Johnny said. “Thank you for your help, Bob. Sorry I had to ask. Used to be I could do this by myself.”

  “That’s okay, Johnny. I didn’t mind.”

  In an odd sort of way, he hadn’t minded. It had eased his regrets for not patching things up with his father, which likely wouldn’t have happened anyway. His father had never been the type to make up, preferring to stoke the fires of discord to a white-hot heat. Had he been alive, he’d have refused Bob’s help. “Get away from me. Keep your hands offa me. I can walk in there myself.”

  It occurred to Bob that carrying his father into the funeral home was the first time he’d done something for him without his father pointing out he was doing it the wrong way. Still, Bob wouldn’t have been surprised if his father had revived long enough to yell, “You don’t lift a dead person that way. You gotta lift with your knees. Whadya tryin’ to do? Give yourself a hernia? For cryin’ out loud, use your head.”

  He walked around the corner and down the street to the Herald building, where he phoned his wife, Arvella, to tell her what had happened. She cried at first, then began to talk about how his death was actually a blessing.

  “He hadn’t been happy for the past few years,” she told Bob. It was an understatement of huge proportion, implying Bob Miles, Sr., had been happy at one time.

  This is the customary response to death in Harmony, to look on the bright side, to suggest someone’s death was actually a stroke of wonderful luck, an immense good fortune.

  When Grace Mills died under the hair dryer, it took Laverne exactly five minutes to make the cheerful observation that at least Grace already had her hair done for her funeral.

  Bob sat at his desk, rolled a piece of paper into his Corona, and began to type his father’s obituary:

  ROBERT J. MILES, SR.

  Robert J. Miles, Sr., editor emeritus of the Harmony Herald newspaper, passed away at his home. The editor of the Herald from 1945 to 1990, he was known for his conservative perspective.

  Born on April 20, 1920, to Robert and Martha Miles, he was preceded in death by his wife, the former Rosemary Jenkins, whom he married in 1941. They had one son, Robert J. Miles, Jr., born in 1948, the current editor of the Herald.

  A member of the Harmony First Baptist Church and the John Birch Society, he also founded the Live Free or Die Sunday school class at Harmony Friends Meeting.

  Services will be held Thursday at 10:00 A.M. at the Mackey Funeral Parlor.

  Bob Sr. had founded the Live Free or Die Sunday school class in 1960 as a vehicle to air his bigotry. Now the class was taught by Dale Hinshaw, who used it to rail against homosexuals, Californians, and people who scoffed at the Rapture.

  Founding the Live Free or Die Sunday school class had been Bob Sr.’s one burst of innovation. Like most cranks, he seldom initiated anything himself, preferring to shout advice from the bleachers. Bob’s earliest memory was of his father sitting by the radio yelling at Harry Truman to drop the atom bomb on Korea. “Kill ’em all, that’s what I say. Nothin’ but a bunch of slant-eyed communists, the whole lot of ’em.” This was the Robert J. Miles, Sr., strategy for foreign relations—kill everyone who didn’t look and think like him—which he’d trumpeted across the editorial page of the Herald for forty-five years.

  Bob was tempted, while writing the obituary, to put a positive spin on his father’s life and make up something nice to say. It was pure habit, having expended much ink over the years trying to persuade people his father wasn’t as bad as he seemed.

  “Although it is true the editor emeritus, Robert Miles, Sr., wrote in last week’s edition of the Herald that homosexuals ought to be put on a boat and sunk, we believe he meant that in a Christian sort of way.”

  But with his father dead, Bob no longer felt the need to follow behind him cleaning up his messes. Besides, he was weary of defending a man whose views were indefensible. He rolled the paper out of the typewriter and set it on the stack of copy for that week’s edition of the paper.

  It occurred to Bob he’d spent much of his life searching for some noble quality or virtue in his father. He’d even agreed to take over the Herald in hopes it might draw them together. But proximity to Robert Miles, Sr., had never deepened anyone’s affection for him, and they’d had fierce arguments. In 1992, Bob had a plaque engraved
recognizing his father as the editor emeritus, which he presented to his father at a surprise retirement party. After the party, he escorted his father to the office door, expressing his sincere desire that his father’s retirement be filled with happiness, nudged him out the door, and phoned Uly Grant to come over and change the locks.

  After that, his father wrote the editorials only when Bob was on vacation, which meant Bob had to spend his first week back apologizing for his father and clarifying his more strident comments.

  “Though it is true the editor emeritus of this paper referred to the Democratic nominee for town council as a ‘drug-snorting, free-love hippie’ in last week’s edition, we are confident he meant nothing personally by it.”

  He wondered if anyone would come to the funeral. His father hadn’t had any real friends. There were a few men down at the Coffee Cup who’d passed the time with him, but they weren’t the kind of men to put on a suit and attend a funeral. The most they would do was mention something to Bob the next time they saw him.

  “Say, I heard about your father. He was a character, that’s for sure.”

  Bob wished he had a dollar for every time someone had said to him, “Your father, I don’t know about him. He sure is a…” They would pause to think up a suitable description, not wishing to insult a man’s father, but neither wanting to adorn him with false praise. “A character,” they’d invariably say, after several awkward seconds.

  Bob imagined himself at the funeral, shaking hands with people while they pointed out he’d been sired by a character. He wondered if maybe they could skip the funeral altogether and have a private showing, like they did for movie stars and war criminals.

  His father had attended Harmony Friends until two years before, when Sam Gardner, in a rare display of backbone, had taken Bob Sr. to task for his behavior, which had resulted in Bob Sr.’s storming off to the Baptists. Sam had asked the elders if he should apologize and invite Bob Sr. to return, but the consensus was that they should quit while they were ahead.