Almost Friends

by Philip Gulley

  There is a fear of no longer being useful, of having people discover they can function without you. This appears to be Fern’s deepest dread, that others won’t find her indispensable. It is probably why she doesn’t take vacations, for fear the church will run smoothly in her absence. So she is present for every event, directing, producing, and writing the script.

  Along with his more generic anxieties, Sam fears a similar end, that one day his flock will discover they can live without him, that they will be swept off their feet by a newer, younger pastoral model and put Sam out to pasture. It is the fear of the middle-aged, that their careers will end before their retirement funds kick in, and they’ll be forced to sell vacuum cleaners door to door. The press of years alarms Sam when he thinks about it, so he tries not to.

  Avoidance of the inevitable is a popular pastime in Harmony. People in Sam’s church talk in rosy tones about heaven and going to be with the Lord, but then fight it with all their might and seem shocked when death pays a visit.

  “I saw him just last week, and he looked fine to me,” Harvey Muldock told Stanley Farlow after Stanley’s father, Russell, had died. Never mind that Russell Farlow was ninety-seven, had been in a nursing home for ten years, and was loaded with cancer. Harvey was still shocked. “What in the world happened?” he asked Stanley at the funeral.

  People who can’t imagine getting older and dying don’t prepare for retirement. Oscar Purdy is the rare exception, and he didn’t grow up here. He’s a foreigner who moved to town from the city in 1946, after he and Livinia married. They met at a YMCA dance during the war. He was poor, but Livinia sensed he was destined for greatness, and her hunch was right. Between the Dairy Queen and his school bonds, he’s worth a cool half a million. At least that’s what Vernley Stout, over at the bank, reportedly said while under anesthesia at the dentist’s office to have his wisdom teeth pulled.

  Death. The shame of it. Not being useful to anyone but the undertaker. These are people who’ll want to mow the clouds in heaven. Maybe suggest to the Lord that they form a committee to meet with the devil to discuss their mutual concerns in hopes of healing their historic division. Maybe form a softball league like they did with the Catholics, then go to the Dairy Queen afterwards. The Angels and the Imps eating their ice cream cones dipped in crunchies out back of the Dairy Queen with Oscar Purdy and Sam, discussing retirement and other frightful matters.

  Three

  The Light Shines in the Darkness

  The following Sunday morning found Dale Hinshaw at the meetinghouse, agitated over what seemed to him to be Sam’s clear departure from the gospel. It wasn’t the first time he’d suspected Sam of sacrilege and likely wouldn’t be the last. Sam had preached on evangelism that morning, suggesting that the gospel was best told with one’s life, not one’s lips.

  The life-versus-lips controversy was not a new one at Harmony Friends Meeting. It had raged for years, popping up every couple months in one form or another. Dale came down on the lip side, while Sam was squarely in the life camp. Dale believed you had to tell people the gospel. It wasn’t enough to live it. The hay had to be put down where the goats could get it. Then the goats needed to accept Jesus, or else.

  The lips-versus-life battle erupted in the usual places, mostly during hymn selection. To Dale’s great displeasure, Sam chose songs like “Take My Life and Let It Be,” which Dale believed smacked of works-righteousness. He was a big fan of “I Love to Tell the Story” and “We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations.” Bea Majors, the organist and a fellow lips advocate, felt free to change the hymns at the last minute if they didn’t meet her theological criteria. When Sam insisted they sing a works song, she gave in, grudgingly, then warned the congregation not to be seduced by the social gospel, which the liberals put forth because they couldn’t stand the rigors of true faith.

  Over the years, Dale had taken careful notes on Sam’s sermons, gathering evidence for the tribunal that would eventually charge Sam with heresy. His notes from today’s sermon were typical:

  Sam says living the Christian life is more important than talking about it. But see Romans 10:14 and Mark 13:10!!! Does Sam believe the gospel must be preached to all the nations or doesn’t he??? If he does, then I will not stand against him, but if he doesn’t, then I must shake the dust off my feet and leave this place!!! (See Matthew 10:14) Remind Sam that the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few!!!! Talk to the elders about false prophets in the last days!!! (2 Peter 2:1) Is Sam a false prophet??? (See Deuteronomy 13:1–5) If so, how should we kill him?

  Dale tuned out Sam’s sermon halfway through and began writing a jingle for the Mighty Men of God evangelism contest, whose first prize was a month of free telephone Scripture greetings. Every household in the winner’s locale would be phoned every day and greeted with a Scripture that would convict of them of their unrighteousness and bring them to repentance.

  Dale was giddy at the thought of the entire town being hailed each day with a message from the Lord. He paused from his jingle writing to pray for God’s guidance.

  The jingle not only had to convict the depraved of their sin; it had to be short enough to fit on matchbooks, which could then be distributed in taverns across the nation, where the sinners set up shop.

  Seated in the quiet, still smarting from Sam’s sermon, Dale felt the fog lift from his mind and the perfect jingle descended, like a gift from above. Neatly penned underneath his reminder to kill Sam was a jingle he’d first thought of years before, when, inspired by Burma Shave ads, he’d erected signs throughout town calling his fellow Harmonians to the Lord.

  Go to church and learn to pray,

  Or when you die, there’s hell to pay.

  If that wouldn’t bring saloon-goers to their knees, nothing would.

  Dale went home and rifled through his past copies of the Mighty Men of God newsletter until he found the ad in the Easter edition of the newsletter. Though it was the Sabbath and he wasn’t supposed to work, he knew the Lord would understand, these being the end times and all. He sat at his Corona typewriter and pecked out his jingle like a chicken grubbing for bugs. He folded it carefully, affixed an In God We Trust postage stamp to the envelope, walked it down to the post office, and deposited it in the mailbox, where Clarence, the mailman, would be sure to see it first thing in the morning.

  Pleased by his faithful obedience to the Lord, Dale spent the rest of the day seated on his front porch surveying his latest marvel—a wooden windmill he’d constructed, which, when the blades turned, generated enough electricity to power a lightbulb at the top of the windmill. Underneath the lightbulb, he’d painted the words Ye Are the Light of the World! On windy nights, people from all over town drove past to see the blades spin and the light shine in the darkness.

  Charles Gardner, Sam’s father, had long maintained that Sunday was the one day when sitting around doing nothing didn’t have to be excused. Indeed, sitting around doing nothing was a sign of one’s commitment to the sixth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.” The stores closed, even Kivett’s Five and Dime, though Ned Kivett was not a churchgoer and hadn’t been since the late 1970s, when the ladies of the Circle began buying the church’s toilet paper from the Kroger, where it was eleven cents cheaper.

  It’s thirty years later, and Ned has still not forgiven them. Once a month he unloads on Sam. “All the years I’ve been a member of this church, teaching the high-school class and sponsoring a Little League team and setting up tables for the Chicken Noodle Dinner, and this is how you repay me? You people claim to be Christian, but I don’t know. You think if St.

  Peter had owned a Five and Dime, Jesus would have forsaken his friend to save a little money? You oughta be ashamed.”

  Ned was a tither, and the Five and Dime had prospered over the years. Whenever anyone moaned about the church’s money problems, it was all Sam could do not to mention that the Circle’s desire to save eleven cents had cost the church a hundred thousand dollars, some of
which could have plumped up his salary. Instead, Ned wakes up early on Sundays, loads his pickup truck, and goes fishing at Raccoon Lake. Except in the winter, when he and his wife drive over to Cartersburg for the Sunday buffet at the Holiday Inn.

  Sam would love a secular Sunday, but there was little chance of that. Even when he didn’t speak, he was expected to be at church. The people who were most adamant about not working on Sundays never seemed to mind Sam working on Sundays.

  He brought it up with his wife on their Sunday afternoon walk. “I tell you what drives me crazy. They not only work me like a borrowed mule; they’re all the time saying how nice it must be to only have to work one day a week. Next time anyone says that to me, I’m gonna punch him in the nose.”

  They rounded the corner and walked down Main Street, past all the closed stores. “Am I the only one in this town who works on Sunday?”

  “For crying out loud, Sam, you’re a minister. Do you expect them to move worship to Thursdays, just so you can have a free weekend?”

  “And what would be wrong with that? Most people get off work on Fridays and have the whole weekend ahead of them to enjoy. I have to spend Saturdays getting ready for Sunday, then spend Sunday at church.”

  “You get Mondays off,” Barbara pointed out.

  “Unless someone is in the hospital or has an emergency or wants me to do something, which is just about every week.”

  “Sam Gardner, you are so cynical. Why can’t you be more positive?”

  “I’ve been talking with the other ministers. We’re thinking of going on strike until they move worship to a different day,” Sam said.

  “You mean have a different day be the Sabbath?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then the new day would be the Sabbath and you’d still have to work.”

  Sam paused for a moment, then frowned. “Well, I guess we hadn’t thought about that.”

  “You have some real Einsteins in that ministerial association,” Barbara laughed.

  “What I need,” Sam announced, “is a sabbatical. They’re supposed to give you one every seven years. I’ve been doing this eighteen years without hardly a break. Eighteen years!”

  Barbara reached over and took his hand. Her voice softened. “Why not ask them for some time off, honey. You could spend time with your Dad. You’re always saying you don’t see him enough. And he’s getting older. He won’t be around forever. Maybe you could take a little vacation with him. Go visit some hardware stores or whatever it is you men like to do. Maybe even take the boys with you. They’ll be off to college before you know it.”

  “Wouldn’t work,” Sam said. “They’d never let me off. And if they did, they wouldn’t pay me. Can’t afford to take time off without pay.”

  “Maybe I could get a temporary job. Deena’s told me I could come work full-time at the Legal Grounds anytime I wanted.”

  “Nah, I’ll be all right. You know me, I just like having something to moan about.”

  They ambled past Dale Hinshaw’s house. Dale waved to them from the front porch.

  “Don’t stop,” Sam whispered.

  “Hey, Sam. You’re just the man I needed to see.”

  “I can’t go anywhere,” Sam muttered under his breath.

  Barbara spoke to Dale. “Perhaps it could wait until Tuesday. Sam’s off the clock right now.”

  Dale went on, oblivious. “I’ve been thinking about this Evangelism Committee we’ve got going, and I think it’s time we got a little more serious about things. I got this idea I want to tell you about.”

  “Not today, Dale,” Barbara said. “No more work for Sam today. And tomorrow’s his day off. But he’d be happy to talk with you on Tuesday.”

  A pouty look crossed Dale’s face. “One of these one-houra-week Christians, eh?”

  “He’ll see you on Tuesday,” Barbara told Dale, taking Sam by the elbow and steering him down the sidewalk. “There are days I’d like to choke that man,” she muttered, when they were out of earshot.

  Sam figured every member of every Harmony Friends Meeting had entertained the notion of choking Dale Hinshaw at one time or another.

  They turned the corner and approached Sam’s parents’ home.

  “It looks like they’re taking a nap,” Barbara observed.

  “Let’s wake them up.”

  They walked up the sidewalk and clomped hard up the wooden stairs to the porch. His parents stirred to life. His father stood and stretched, then sat back down on the swing, sliding over to make room for Sam and Barbara.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Gloria Gardner noted.

  “It certainly is,” Sam agreed.

  “I’m glad you came by,” his mother said. “I was talking with Fern this morning about fixing up the nursery, and we wanted to know if you could help us paint tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s his day off,” Barbara said.

  “It’s not like it’s church work. It’s more like helping your mother. Your father would do it, but he’s been having these bad headaches lately, and the paint fumes make it worse.”

  “Feels like someone is just peeling the skin right off my head,” Sam’s dad blurted out. He had a way of describing his headaches that gave everyone else a headache. “It’s like they’ve sawed right through my skull and started beating my brain with a hammer. Man, it hurts.”

  “I get the picture,” Sam said. “Can we change the subject?”

  “So can you help your poor, saintly mother tomorrow?” his mom asked again.

  “Well, it was my day off…” Sam said.

  “Day off! What the heck you need a day off for? You only work one day a week as it is. Boy, I wish I had a job like that,” his dad said, then adjusted his pants, which were riding up, stretched one more time, closed his eyes, and resumed his Sabbath slumber.

  Four

  Krista’s Dream

  Some people come kicking and screaming to ministry; others seem born for it, slipping into it as easily as a hand slides into a silken glove. For as long as she could remember, Krista Riley had wanted to be a priest, and although her parents had always told her she could be anything she wanted, they apparently hadn’t counted on the pope’s inflexibility on that particular matter.

  As a child she would sit and watch the priest holding the host aloft, his face radiant, and she longed to do what he did. The church’s only concession was to let her be an altar girl, which placed her in the vicinity of the altar, but not close enough to satisfy; it was like sitting on the sidelines and never getting to play.

  The week she turned thirteen, her grandfather died in their living room, on the hospital bed they’d rented from the drugstore. She’d spent the day holding her grandpa’s hand, wondering how many other people had rented this bed to die on. Everyone else had drifted in and out of the room, uneasy with death, but she had stayed by his side, strangely at ease, every now and then patting his hand and wiping his brow. By the time the priest had arrived to anoint her grandpa’s pale head and pray for him, Krista knew God had called her to the ministry, just as surely as if Jesus had appeared in the room, pointed an elegant finger at her, and said, “Follow thou me.”

  “I want to be a priest,” she’d told her mother that night.

  “You can’t. You’re a girl. They don’t allow women to be priests.”

  “You’ve always told me I can be anything I want.”

  There is a tendency among the young and idealistic to believe if people are simply presented with the facts, they will make a reasonable decision. “I’ve been thinking,” Krista told her mother later that evening, “and unless there’s something you haven’t told me, the big difference between men and women is that men have a…well, you know…and we don’t.”

  Her mother blushed.

  “I know all about it,” Krista went on. “They told us about it in health class. They have one and we don’t and that’s the big difference. Right?”

  “There are others, of course, but I’d say that’s the
more obvious one,” her mother admitted.

  “So, practically speaking, there’s no good reason to keep a woman from being a priest?”

  “That’s right, dear. Though I think it’s written in the Bible that women can’t be priests.”

  It took Krista two days to find the verse her mother had mentioned, but it was there, in Paul’s first letter to Timothy, chapter 2, verse 12: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.”

  A careful reading of the verse indicated that, although the Apostle Paul permitted no woman to teach, God’s opinion of women leaders was left unstated. When she pointed this out to her mother, her mother said, “I think they believe the Apostle Paul is speaking for God.”

  “But how can they be sure? Isn’t it dangerous to assume someone else is always speaking for God?”

  Her mother sighed, then rubbed her temples. “Krista, honey, I love you to death. But these questions of yours give me a headache. Tell you what, honey, why don’t you write our priest a letter and ask him these things?”

  But Krista had always been told to go to the top, so she wrote the pope instead.

  It was amazingly simple. She wrote the letter on unlined paper, in neat rows and tidy script, expressing her desire to be a priest and wanting to know if the pope might make an exception in her case. “Though I don’t have everything a man has”—she thought he’d know what she meant, so she didn’t elaborate—“I do love God and believe I’m called to spend my life serving Him.” She studied the word Him. She didn’t for a moment believe God was a Him, but she let it stand, just so the pope wouldn’t think she was a radical out to make a point.

  Then she rode her bicycle to the post office, where they gave her the address for the Vatican, which she carefully copied onto the envelope, before sealing it closed and sliding it down the chute into the bin of stamped mail.