Almost Friends

by Philip Gulley

  “You’re the pastor, that’s why. Anything bad happens and it’s your fault. You ought to know that by now.” Frank grinned, clearly enjoying Sam’s predicament.

  Sam slumped in his chair. “Boy, I work my tail off trying to get this church to grow, trying to attract intelligent, capable people to our meeting, and Dale Hinshaw ruins it all in an hour’s time. No one will want to come here now.”

  “I don’t agree, Sam. I think people like Dale will want to come here. They probably liked his phone call.”

  Sam moaned, barely able to stand the thought of Dale’s spiritual cronies filling the meetinghouse.

  “The good thing is, people like Dale are tithers,” Frank said, trying to look on the bright side. “They pony up the bucks. Maybe now I’ll get that raise you’ve been promising me.”

  “What’s this I hear about you and Miss Rudy?” Sam asked, changing the subject, something he did whenever Frank raised the subject of a pay increase.

  Frank bristled. “My personal life is none of your concern.”

  “So when are you going to make an honest woman out of her?” Sam persisted. “It’s not too late for a summer wedding, you know. People your age shouldn’t postpone happiness. Never know when you might shuffle off to glory.”

  “There was a time when ministers were well-mannered,” Frank said, stalking out of Sam’s office.

  “Yeah, and there was a time when church secretaries didn’t badger their bosses,” Sam yelled back.

  They had these spats often, Frank and Sam. They circled one another like two old tomcats, the fight gone out of them but still able to hiss and spit.

  Sam busied himself with paperwork for a couple of hours. At eleven-thirty, Frank stuck his head in the office door, somewhat mollified. “How about a little lunch?”

  “Coffee Cup?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Frank said agreeably.

  Frank locked the meetinghouse door as they left.

  “Why’d you do that?” Sam asked.

  “Because it drives Dale nuts,” Frank said. “He’ll come by and want in and the church will be locked.”

  “I thought you gave him a key.”

  “Oh, that. That was the key to my garage, but don’t tell him.”

  Sam chuckled.

  “You can’t take Dale head-on, Sam. You got to come at him from behind. Wear him down. Make him want to be a Baptist.”

  That was a sweet thought—Dale Hinshaw joining the Baptist church.

  A barrage of protests met them as they entered the restaurant.

  “Took me the rest of the night to get back to sleep,” Stanley Farlow grumbled. “It’s my own church calling me and waking me up. Sixty-seven years I’ve been a member of that church and my parents before me, and you call and wake me up like that. You oughta be ashamed.”

  “Sorry about that,” Sam said. “Won’t happen again.”

  “Scared the missus half to death,” Harvey Muldock muttered. “She thought someone had died. Got her so nervous she couldn’t even fix my breakfast. Had to eat out this morning. Oughta send the church the bill, that’s what I should do. Makes a fella want to be a Methodist, getting treated like that.”

  “How about I buy you lunch, Harvey?” Sam offered. Harvey Muldock had given him a pastors’ discount on his last car, and Sam wanted to stay in his good graces.

  “What about me? You oughta buy my lunch too,” Stanley Farlow demanded.

  It occurred to Sam that maybe his father was right. He should have been a lawyer. Eight to five. Weekends off. Good pay. As for job security, as long as people bickered, lawyers had it made. Yes, he should have been a lawyer.

  He ate his lunch thinking about it. Three years of law school, pass the bar exam, and he’d be well-settled in his new profession by the age of fifty. No more Dale. Sundays off. It was something to think about, anyway.

  The remainder of the day passed uneventfully, which set him at ease—a dangerous condition for a minister. By bedtime, he was thoroughly relaxed, which made the impending calamity, when it broke loose in the wee hours of morning, all the more difficult to bear.

  Nine

  Some Deep Misfortune

  That night, as the grandfather clock in Sam and Barbara’s living room struck midnight, their phone rang.

  “Daggone that Dale anyway,” Sam cried out, leaping from his bed to answer the phone before it woke his children.

  He didn’t bother to say hello, just jabbed at the off button in a vain effort to end the call. Dale’s voice droned on, inviting him to worship at Harmony Friends Meeting. Beside himself with fury, Sam beat the telephone into its cradle repeatedly, trying to silence Dale’s bland preachments, to no avail.

  With a savage tug, he yanked the phone from the wall, stomped downstairs and across the kitchen, threw open the back door, and hurled the phone into the backyard.

  “Was that necessary?” Barbara asked, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  Sam looked at her, crazy-eyed and maniacal. “He’s done it again. We told him not to call anymore, and he’s done it again.”

  Their kitchen phone rang. “Please don’t throw that phone away too. I’d like to have at least one phone in my house.”

  Sam snatched the phone from the kitchen wall. “Hello,” he barked.

  “Sam Gardner,” Mabel Morrison screeched into his ear, “not sixteen hours ago, you promised that nutcase would stop harassing me. Now you’ve gone and done—”

  Sam hung up, gently this time, and disconnected the phone from the wall jack. He slumped into a kitchen chair, his body aching from spent adrenaline and fury. “I can’t take it any longer. I’ve reached my limit. This is it. I’m quitting.”

  “Now, now, let’s go back to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning. A month from now, you and Frank will be laughing about this.”

  “No, I’m going to Dale’s house to cut his phone line.”

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t do that. Have another talk with him tomorrow. I’m sure it was just an accident.”

  He slept fitfully the rest of the night, finally falling into a deep sleep just before his alarm clock rang.

  That morning found him showered, shaved, and dressed, standing on Dale Hinshaw’s front porch, knocking on his door. Dale answered the door in his pajamas, studying the booklet of instructions from his computer.

  “Hey, Sam. Boy, this is the craziest thing,” he said, scratching his head. “I know I changed my computer from AM to AM. At least I thought I did. Oh well, just gonna have to keep on trying. Guess that’s all we can do. Besides, you know what Paul wrote in his letter to the Hebrews.”

  “It’s a lengthy letter,” Sam said. “Perhaps you could be more specific.”

  “‘Run with perseverance the race that is set before us.’ We gotta keep persevering.”

  “Dale, I know you mean well, and don’t think I don’t appreciate your efforts to help our meeting grow, but you’ve got to stop. You’re making the whole town mad at us. No one’s going to come to our church after this.”

  Dale began to protest, but Sam held up his hand. “Dale, I’m not going to argue with you. You’re doing this in the name of the church, and it must stop. If you don’t, I’m going to call the elders and have them speak with you.”

  “Well, that’s a fine thing,” Dale said. “Somebody in our church finally starts preaching the gospel, and you’re gonna have the elders make ’em stop. That’s a fine how-do-you-do.”

  “If you don’t like it, you can always attend another church,” Sam said.

  It had taken him six years to invite Dale to worship elsewhere, and saying it out loud, instead of muttering it under his breath in private, felt pleasantly liberating.

  “And if I left, who would head up our Evangelism Committee?” Dale asked. “Harvey Muldock? Ellis Hodge? I don’t think so. They’re nice guys, but they don’t have the heart for the gospel like I do. No, Sam, I can’t leave now. The meeting needs me.”

  I will have to kill him, Sam thought
to himself. It’s the only way to be shed of him. Drown him in the bathtub. Load his body in the car trunk and throw him in the river. Maybe Frank can help me. A smile crossed his face.

  Dale broke Sam’s reverie. “Don’t worry, Sam. I’ll get it right this time. You just go do your ministry and I’ll do mine, and the Lord’ll bless us both.” And with that, Dale closed the door.

  Though Sam didn’t think it was possible, the day turned out worse than the one before. Wherever Sam went, he was greeted with open hostility and threats of lawsuits. Two members turned in their membership, and Miriam Hodge, a pacifist to the core, stopped by the office to inform Sam one of his parishioners was in jeopardy. “I’m telling you this now, so you can visit him in the hospital. I’m going to hit Dale Hinshaw squarely in the nose, and I’m not stopping until he’s down.”

  Sam counseled forgiveness and tolerance, but Miriam could tell he was insincere, that he wanted, more than anything else, to clean Dale’s clock too.

  She had brought a copy of the Quaker Faith and Practice with her. “Do you realize there is a glaring omission in our book of order?” she asked Sam. “Nowhere does it say we can kick Dale Hinshaw out of the church.”

  “I suggested to him that he worship elsewhere,” Sam said.

  “How’d he take that?

  “He said he could never desert the meeting, that we needed him too badly.”

  “If I weren’t so mad at him, I’d be touched by his loyalty,” Miriam said. “Right now, I just want to wrap my hands around that skinny little neck of his, right above his Adam’s apple, and squeeze for all I’m worth.”

  They sat quietly, contemplating the ethereal beauty of such a circumstance.

  “Well,” Sam said after a bit, “we can’t very well do that now, can we?”

  “Probably not,” Miriam conceded.

  “It’s times like these that test our Christian charity,” Sam pointed out.

  “You’re absolutely right. I must do better,” Miriam said, standing to leave. “Thank you for reminding me of my Christian duty.”

  Which isn’t to say she still didn’t want to choke Dale, just that she knew it would be wrong.

  After Miriam departed, Frank poked his head in Sam’s office door. “Say, uh, Sam, I was thinking of taking tomorrow off. Is that all right with you?”

  Sam consulted his pocket calendar, thinking aloud, “Hmm, sermon preparation in the morning…lunch with the ministers’ association…visitation in the afternoon…When would you do the bulletin?”

  “Already got it done,” Frank said. “Stayed over yesterday and wrapped it up. The newsletter’s done and mailed out. I have the quarterly reports filled out and put in this morning’s mail.”

  “My, aren’t you the picture of efficiency. Sure, you can take the day off. Got big plans?”

  Frank hesitated. “I’d rather not say.”

  “I tell you my secrets.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do. Every one of them. I tell you when Barbara’s mad at me. You know how much I earn. You know everything about me. I’m an open book. I don’t keep anything from you. I can’t believe you don’t trust me.”

  “It isn’t that I don’t trust you. I just don’t want you laughing at me,” Frank said, with uncharacteristic timidity.

  “Frank, I would never laugh at you. You’re probably my best friend.”

  “Well, okay then, I guess it’s all right for you to know. Miss Rudy and I are going to Cartersburg to look at a new refrigerator for her.”

  Sam slapped his desk and began to chuckle. “I knew it. Sounds like it’s getting serious. Boy, wait till I tell Barbara.”

  “Sam Gardner, if you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll staple your lips shut.”

  “Oh, don’t get your knickers in a twist. I won’t tell anyone you and Miss Rudy are shopping for appliances.” Sam leaned back in his chair. “Be careful, Frank. This is how desperate women trap a man. They take him shopping for appliances. Innocent on the face of it, but the next thing you know you’re picking out china patterns.”

  “You’re not the least bit funny, Sam.”

  “Hey, Frank. Do me a favor, will you?”

  “It depends.”

  “Find out Miss Rudy’s first name, would you? I’ve known her all my life, and I still don’t know her first name.”

  “I know it,” Frank said. “She told me.”

  “What is it?”

  “I promised not to tell and, unlike some people I could mention, I know how to keep a secret.”

  “If you marry her and I do the wedding, I’ll have to know her first name to fill out the wedding license,” Sam pointed out.

  “Maybe we’ll just live together and scandalize everyone,” Frank said. “Just think how much trouble that would cause you. Fern Hampton would be all over you, wanting you to fire me. It would make this mess with Dale Hinshaw look like a picnic.”

  Sam paled. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you, Frank?”

  “In a minute. Yep, they’d fire me and hire Dale Hinshaw to be your new secretary, seeing how he has his own computer. You’d make a good team, you and Dale.”

  Sam felt the faint stirring of nausea.

  For a church secretary, Frank had a cruel streak that showed itself at the worst times.

  “Take the day off, then,” Sam grumbled. “It’ll be nice to have the place to myself for a day.”

  “With or without pay?”

  “Without!”

  “You give it to me with pay and if I marry Miss Rudy, I’ll tell you her first name.”

  “Deal,” Sam said.

  “Where we gonna eat lunch?”

  “Barbara packed something for me. There’s no way I’m going out in public. Not after Dale woke up the whole town last night.”

  Sam worked until late afternoon, then walked home down the alleyways, keeping to the shadows so no one would see him. He was almost home when Shirley Finchum, burning trash in her backyard barrel, spied him. “Sam Gardner, you’re just the man I wanted to see.” She wagged her cane at him. “Two nights now I’ve been woken up. What are you going to do about that?”

  “My apologies, Mrs. Finchum. It won’t happen again. I’d love to stay and visit, but I’ve got to get home.” He hurried across his backyard, around the garage, up the back steps, and through the screen door into the kitchen.

  “This day can’t end too soon,” he told Barbara, collapsing into a kitchen chair.

  She presented him with a long list of phone messages. “Thirteen phone calls. Not one of them from a happy person. I told them you’d call them back when you got home tonight.”

  Sam groaned. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, why did you do that? I don’t want to call these people. They’re just gonna yell at me.”

  He ate supper to boost his strength, then returned the phone calls, holding the phone away from his ear to protect his hearing. For a Christian town, people were startling in their ferocity, threatening Sam and the meeting with all manner of misfortune if he dared disturb their sleep again.

  “It wasn’t me,” Sam tried to explain. “Dale Hinshaw’s doing this on his own. We told him not to.” But that made little difference, and after five calls Sam called it a night.

  Before he went to sleep, he had the foresight to take his one remaining phone off the hook. He was asleep by nine-thirty, his body occasionally twitching, haunted by nightmares of Dale Hinshaw taking up residence as the new secretary of Harmony Friends. At the stroke of midnight, Sam sat bolt upright in bed, sensing some deep misfortune had been unleashed in his life. The house was perfectly quiet, except for the tick of the clock downstairs. He lay back down, staring at the ceiling, perceiving his world had shifted, though not knowing how and in no way eager to find out.

  Ten

  The Rock That Cracked

  If Gloria Gardner had heard her husband say it once, she’d heard him say it a thousand times. “I tell you, I got the worse luck of anyone I know. It’s like I got a cloud
hangin’ over my head. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Some days I wonder why I even bother to get out of bed.”

  He always said this within her earshot, and she’d grown immune to his lamentations and no longer took them personally.

  The testimony of the years seemed to bear him out: he was routinely audited by the IRS; while attending the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, he was beaned by a foul ball and remained unconscious the rest of the game; a year later he was struck by lightning and had been afflicted by static electricity ever since. His hair was a sight; people wouldn’t shake his hand for fear of being shocked. And he was strip-searched every time he flew, owing to his tendency to set off metal detectors just by walking near them.

  But all those were mere inconveniences compared to what befell her husband that night, for at the stroke of midnight, when every phone in town was off the hook, lest the citizenry be plagued by Dale’s telephone evangelism, Charlie Gardner had a heart attack. His arms flailed about, striking his wife, who came up out of bed, thinking the phone had rung.

  “That darn Dale. He’s pestering us again,” she muttered.

  Charlie gurgled, then went rigid. His eyes rolled back in his head, making them look like two white marbles, the big kind, the shooters.

  “Oh, Lord,” Gloria cried. “Oh, my.”

  “Call Sam,” Charlie gasped.

  She hurried from their bedroom to the phone in the kitchen, but couldn’t for the life of her remember Sam’s number. She ran back into their bedroom. “I can’t think straight. What’s his number?”

  “Fleetwood 96701,” Charlie whispered.

  Everyone in town had the same prefix. Folks over seventy remembered it as Fleetwood, while the youngsters rattled off the numbers.

  She ran back in the kitchen and punched in Sam’s number.

  A groggy voice answered the phone. “Yeah.”

  “Sam, get over here quick, your father’s dying.”

  “You got the wrong number, lady. There’s no Sam here.”

  She let out an anguished wail.