A Place Called Hope: A Novel

by Philip Gulley

  “I think I might have acted too hastily, that’s all.”

  “I knew this would happen,” Barbara said.

  “You knew what would happen?”

  “I knew once you got away from there, you would start finding reasons to go back. That town has a grip on you. When you’re there, you complain about how it drives you crazy, but when you’re not living there, you want to move back. I don’t know what to do with you, Sam Gardner.”

  “I want to move back.”

  “I’m staying here.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Sam said. “You wouldn’t go with me?”

  “Sam, I have followed you around all our married life. We went to Illinois to a church that didn’t work out. Then we moved to your hometown. I’ve been caring for our sons all this time, and never had the chance to do what I went to college to do. When I got a job in Harmony, I had to leave it. Now I have a job here, and you’re asking me to quit. I’m not going to do it.”

  “This church only has twelve people. How we can make it here?”

  “You knew that from the start, but you accepted the job anyway. Now stop moping, get off your butt, and get busy pastoring.”

  “I don’t have the energy to start all over.”

  “You’d better find the energy. These people are depending on you and you promised them you could help them. Now get off the couch, take a shower, and put on some clean clothes. We’ve been invited out to eat with the Woodrums. Hank and Norma are coming, too.”

  Sam jumped up from the couch. “The Woodrums? Did you invite them or did they invite us?”

  “They invited us. Apparently, Hank and Norma cleaned the flower beds at school and Libby wanted to take them to dinner as a thank-you. We’ve been invited along.”

  “Well, that’s a good sign,” Sam said, momentarily forgetting his fatigue. “What should I wear?”

  “Khakis and a dress shirt. We’re going to Bruno’s.”

  “The guy who wants to kill me?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Sam plugged in the iron and began pressing his shirt.

  “I bet the Woodrums will end up joining the meeting,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “Yes, I do like my new job,” Barbara said. “Thank you for asking.”

  “What do you mean? I didn’t ask.”

  “My point exactly. It would have been nice if you had,” Barbara said.

  “Oh, I get it. How did your new job go today?”

  “It was wonderful, I—”

  “Where’s the starch?” Sam yelled.

  “—think it’s going to be a wonderful experience.”

  “Well, that’s great, honey. I’m proud of you. Say, do you think if the Woodrums join the meeting, they could maybe bring in some people from their old church? If the Woodrums are unhappy, there might be others wanting to change churches, too.”

  You can tell men wrote the laws, Barbara thought. If women had written them, a wife would be forgiven the murder of her husband. Not just forgiven, but understood and sympathized with.

  “There, there,” the judge would say at her trial, “don’t be too hard on yourself. He had it coming.”

  43

  We certainly appreciate you being able to join us on such short notice,” Dan Woodrum said, after Bruno had seated them at a round table in the back corner of his restaurant.

  “This evening is to thank Hank and Norma for their work on the school flower beds,” said Libby. “We certainly appreciate it. And to welcome Barbara as the new librarian of Hope Elementary!”

  Bruno brought a basket of warm bread to the table and handed it to Sam, who passed it around the table and watched as the others ate it and lived before helping himself to a piece. A bottle of wine was opened, glasses filled, and a toast offered to Barbara with wishes for her success.

  “You’ll be interested to know we took a test on the Internet, twenty questions to help us discern which denomination we should join, and it indicated we were liberal Quakers,” Dan said.

  “Well, what do you know about that!” Sam said, starting to quiver with excitement. “I guess this means you’ll be joining the meeting.”

  Barbara kicked him under the table.

  “Not that you have to,” Sam added. “I just thought you might be considering it.”

  “Why don’t you just come to meeting for worship,” Hank Withers suggested. “If you become members, we’ll have to pay an assessment on you each year.”

  The Woodrums had only attended meeting for worship once and Hank Withers was already trying to talk them out of joining.

  “Joining might be premature, but we do think we’ll start attending,” Libby said. “To be honest, we’re disgruntled with our church. It has not been a kind place for gay people. Sam, when Janet told us you had conducted a same-gender marriage in Harmony, we were impressed. It was a very brave thing to do.”

  “Marriage equality is something I believe in,” Sam said. “I had given it a lot of thought and decided the time had come to take a stand. That’s why I decided to conduct their wedding.”

  “You told us in your interview that you didn’t actually conduct a lesbian wedding, that you just said a prayer,” Hank Withers pointed out.

  “It was a bit more complex than that,” Sam said. Hank Withers was starting to annoy him. He made a mental note not to recommend Hank for the new outreach committee.

  “Whichever the case,” Dan said, “we appreciate what you did.”

  Hank leaned toward Sam. “Don’t tell Leonard and Wanda Fink you support gay marriage. They won’t stop until they get you fired. They’ll stop giving, too. We’ve had some knock-down, drag-out fights over that topic.”

  Sam glanced around for an axe handle he could use to beat Hank Withers into silence.

  “We were under the impression the meeting supported marriage equality,” Libby said.

  “Oh, Lord, no,” Hank said. “You can’t ever get Quakers to agree on anything. We’ll be fighting about it for the next twenty years.”

  Libby frowned. “Oh, my, I had no idea. I’ve grown rather weary of arguing about this topic.”

  “As have I,” said Dan.

  “Then you probably don’t want to come to our church,” Hank said, reaching for a piece of bread and slathering it with butter. “Say, this is really good bread. Now if you’re looking for a church that has settled this issue, you might want to look for a Unitarian church.”

  “The Episcopalians are generally supportive,” added Norma Withers.

  No wonder Quaker meetings never grow, thought Sam.

  “Our daughter dates a Unitarian minister,” Libby said. “Before we visited your meeting, we had given some thought to trying them out. But we enjoyed our time with you, and had made up our minds to come back.”

  “Give it time,” Hank said. “Look around.” He glanced around the room. “Where did Bruno disappear to? I wonder what tonight’s special is?”

  Sam was desperate, his mind racing, trying to rekindle the Woodrums’ interest in Hope Meeting.

  “What I’ve always appreciated about Quakers,” he said earnestly, or what he hoped passed for earnest, “is our regard for prophetic ministry. While we might not always agree on a given topic, we do acknowledge the freedom of other Friends to believe differently.”

  “Most of us anyway,” Hank said. “But we’ve got some real hardheads, too. You should have seen Wayne Newby when we switched hymnals a few years ago. You’d have thought it was the end of the world, the way he went on.”

  “Yes, but to his credit he only stayed away for a week and came to terms with it,” Sam pointed out.

  Hank laughed. “Is that what he told you, that he only stayed away for a week? Heck, he was gone for three months. He still complains about it if you give him half a chance.”

  Before Hank could inflict further damage, Bruno arrived to take their orders, then the Woodrums, Norma, and Barbara excused themselves to use the restroom.

  Sam turne
d to Hank. “I thought we were trying to get them into the meeting. Why are you being so negative?”

  “Just telling them the truth,” Hank said. “No sense in pumping them full of sunshine only for them to discover we’re not as perfect as they thought we were.”

  “Let’s at least try to get them in the door first, so we’ll have the opportunity to disappoint them.”

  When everyone returned to the table, Barbara and Libby discussed libraries, which moved into a conversation on favorite books, which led to a discussion about politics, with all of them agreeing their state legislature was the worst in the nation, and perhaps in the world, and most likely worse than any group of legislatures in the past or any legislative body to come. It was great fun, and had them in a fine mood by the time dinner wound to an end.

  “Meeting starts at ten thirty, right?” Dan Woodrum asked Sam as they were leaving.

  “That’s right,” Sam said.

  “Who’s speaking this Sunday?” Libby asked.

  “I am.”

  “No, I mean who’s talking about their hobby?”

  “Wayne Newby is going to tell us about his model train collection,” Norma Withers said.

  Sam cringed.

  “Hey, that’s pretty neat,” Dan Woodrum said. “I have a good friend, a retired neurologist, who’s a model train enthusiast. I might invite him along.”

  While he was pleased the Woodrums planned to return, Sam feared that Hank Withers’s passion for honesty was going to reduce their already depleted ranks to zero. And while he would take his victories wherever he found them, he was a bit discouraged that quilts and model trains were a bigger draw than sermons.

  44

  There were three visitors the next Sunday, not including the Woodrums, who were also present, but no longer considered visitors. One trip to a Quaker meeting was all it took for most meetings to place someone on a committee. At the start of worship, during the announcements, Hank Withers announced the limb committee would be holding a yard cleanup day the following Saturday, and asked Dan Woodrum, in front of God and everyone, to be in charge of the walnut subcommittee, picking up walnuts that had fallen, before people stepped on them and snapped their ankles and fell and broke their hips and died in abject misery.

  The visitors had come to hear Wayne Newby’s model train presentation; they were a retired neurologist and two of his friends, also enthusiasts. Sam had tinkered with the order of worship, changing the lineup so he could have the final word. So Wayne spoke first, but they peppered him with so many questions there was no time left for Sam to preach, which Sam suspected was their intent all along. Ruby Hopper, pleased to observe their increasing numbers and the growing interest in their lectures, asked Wanda Fink if she might prepare a brief homily on painting for the next Sunday, which she happily agreed to do. That is, as happily as Wanda Fink ever agreed to do anything, which is to say she grimaced and nodded her head.

  Sam introduced himself to the visitors, who, though polite, seemed uninterested in him and returned to gabbing with Wayne as quickly as they could. He scouted around for someone to talk with, but everyone was engaged with someone else, even Barbara, who was yakking with Libby Woodrum about books. Any fascination they might have had with Sam had apparently faded. The new had worn off.

  He made his way to his office, where he found Leonard and Wanda Fink studying the books on his shelves, searching for heresy. Fortunately, he had left his heretical books, the ones written by east coast Episcopalians, at his home office, so as not to alarm the congregation. The books in his meetinghouse office were written by former atheists who’d had near-death experiences and accepted Jesus and took up preaching in Baptist churches in Mississippi. He had lots of books about angels, and stories of miraculous cures involving children with cleft palates. Books no one could object to. Who wouldn’t be happy about God healing a cleft palate, for crying out loud?

  “Can I help you?” he asked the Finks.

  “No, no,” they said, scurrying from the office like cockroaches when the light came on.

  He took off his sport coat and hung it on the coatrack, then strolled into the kitchen, where he found Ruby Hopper cutting slabs of pie and heaping them with ice cream, which improved his mood considerably.

  “Sorry we ran out of time and you didn’t get to preach,” she said. “But look on the bright side. At least you won’t have to write a sermon for next Sunday. You’ve already got one.”

  Well, there was that.

  “Take some pie to our guests, Sam. They might have come here to hear about model trains, but let’s see if we can’t entice them to come back for nobler reasons.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sam said.

  “And Sam.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your discomfort this morning was obvious. I know you don’t like these talks, and to be truthful, they seem odd to me, too. But I can’t remember the last time we had three visitors, so let’s be patient and see where this goes.” She held up her finger. “Just listen for a moment.”

  He could hear the excited chatter of people.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that much talking in this place,” Ruby said. “It’s a good sign, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so,” Sam said grudgingly, reluctant to surrender the point. “But tell me, is Wanda Fink a good artist?”

  “I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

  “You asked her to talk about painting next Sunday.”

  “Oh, no, not that kind of painting. She paints rooms. Very nicely, I might add.”

  What a flaky bunch of Quakers, he thought.

  “Sam, do you believe God can work through anyone or anything?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then let’s see if God can’t work through these circumstances, even if they’re a little, uh, unusual,” Ruby said.

  Though it was good advice, it nevertheless annoyed Sam, who preferred that God do his work in a manner more agreeable with Sam.

  45

  After meeting for worship, Ruby Hopper phoned her cousin Miriam Hodge. They chatted about family matters, then Ruby inquired about Harmony Friends Meeting.

  “We’ve let go of Paul Fletcher, our pastor. He was a disaster. Our attendance is half of what it was when Sam was here, and our superintendent keeps sending us pastoral candidates who are utterly unsuitable. Other than that, all is well. How is life at Hope Meeting?”

  “We’re seeing a slight uptick in attendance. Barbara is a delight and seems genuinely happy to be here, but Sam seems distracted, even angry at times.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Sam,” Miriam said. “He was always cheerful when he was here. He would get frustrated now and then, but what pastor doesn’t. I certainly wouldn’t want the job.”

  “What it was like when Sam left? I know the circumstances weren’t the best, but he’d been your pastor for almost fifteen years. Did you give him an opportunity to say good-bye to the congregation, or thank him for his ministry? In a public way?”

  “No, we didn’t. Some of our elders insisted he not be allowed back in the pulpit and the rest of us didn’t push the matter. I’m sure individual members of the meeting thanked him, but we did nothing as a congregation.”

  “Perhaps it might be good for our meetings, and good for Sam, if you invited him back for a Sunday morning. Especially now that Paul Fletcher is gone. Let Sam preach a farewell message, show him a little appreciation, wish him luck. I think he needs, uh, what do they call it?”

  “Closure?”

  “Yes, closure,” Ruby said. “He needs closure, so he can move forward.”

  Miriam raised the subject at that week’s meeting of the elders’ committee. With unprecedented swiftness, Harmony Friends had not only kicked Paul Fletcher to the curb, they had pitched Dale, Fern, Bea, and Opal off the committee, replacing them with Deena Morrison, Asa Peacock, Judy Iverson, and Uly Grant, who immediately agreed with Ruby’s proposal.

  “We should have done this last year,�
�� Uly said.

  “Let’s have a dinner for them, too,” said Deena. “I can head it up.”

  “I’ll help,” Judy Iverson said.

  “What about the Friendly Women’s Circle?” Asa Peacock asked. “Aren’t they usually in charge of dinners?”

  “If we ask them to do it, then Fern, Bea, and Opal will take it over. Quite frankly, I don’t trust them,” Miriam said.

  Miriam thought for a moment. “You know what would be really nice? If we not only invited Sam and Barbara to return for a proper good-bye, but if we asked the people at Hope Meeting to join us. It’ll show Sam we’re happy for him and we’ll be reaching out to a fellow Quaker meeting in the process. What do you think?”

  Uly Grant said, “I’ll supply the drinks and the cups.”

  It took them an hour to work out the details, then Miriam placed a quick phone call to Ruby Hopper, who gave her quick assent.

  “Please don’t tell Sam and Barbara about your meeting attending,” Miriam advised. “Let’s have it be a secret.”

  “A secret it will be,” Ruby promised. “And our meeting will supply all the desserts.”

  A date was for the Sunday after next, and that evening Ruby phoned the entire membership of Hope Friends Meeting, told them of the news, warned them to keep it quiet, then put Hank Withers in charge of transportation, arranging the car pools.

  “Always wanted to see inside the Harmony meetinghouse,” he said. “It was built on the Akron plan, you know. Drawn up by an architect named Jacob Snyder for a Methodist Episcopal Church in Akron, Ohio, back in the 1870s. Quite an ingenious use of space.”

  When Hank Withers got cranked up about architecture, nothing held him back, so Ruby excused herself when he paused to breathe. She phoned Ellen Hadley, the clerk of the pie committee, to get her busy on the desserts.