Home to Harmony

by Philip Gulley

  Most children don’t like church. Can’t abide the silence, the sermon, the stillness. Their heads flop from side to side in rhythmic boredom. But I liked church. I liked sitting in the fifth row with my brother Roger and my parents and God, who sat right next to me. I liked watching Miriam Hodge. I liked her neck, how long it was, how wisps of hair fell against it. I liked watching Ellis Hodge plunge his index finger into a strand and curl it around his finger. How Miriam would turn and smile at him.

  I was a morbid child, fascinated with stories of orphaned children having to stay with relatives. My Aunt Edna lived by herself in the next town over in a little house with window blinds, which she kept closed. It was a dark, joyless place. She was my father’s sister, a pinched-up woman. Once a summer, after church, we would drive the twelve miles to her house for dinner. It was pure obligation. We could barely endure it. Once my brother Roger stuck his finger down his throat and vomited on her shag carpet so we could leave early. When we got to the car, my father thanked him.

  I tried to get along with Aunt Edna because I knew if something happened to my parents I’d have to live with her, even though I didn’t want to. I wanted to live with Ellis and Miriam Hodge and asked my parents to write in their wills that I was to stay with them. They couldn’t have children. Miriam Hodge talked about it once with my mother and began to weep.

  They were sitting in our living room. I was hiding behind the couch, listening. I heard my mother say to her, “Believe me, Miriam, children are no picnic. They can drive you crazy.”

  It shocked me to hear that. I’d had no idea I was such a burden. I wondered if my father felt the same way. I worried about that. I worried about their taking me to Aunt Edna’s house and leaving me there.

  So Miriam and Ellis Hodge were a comfort to me. I could live with them. They loved me. Ellis Hodge carried jawbreakers in his pocket. If the sermon was especially tedious, he would reach back and tap my knee and drop a jawbreaker into my hand. I would suck all the color off and roll it in my mouth until it was gone. If the room was silent, you could hear it clicking against my teeth.

  Miriam and Ellis lived on a farm west of town. They were born two days apart and had grown up neighbors. When they were little, their families would joke about them growing up and marrying one another. They heard that joke so often that after a while Miriam and Ellis stopped laughing and thought Why not? and were married at the meetinghouse. Then, to their surprise, they found themselves very much in love. A few years later, Ellis’s father died and Miriam and Ellis moved into the old Hodge house just west of town. They had a barn and a pond with ducks and a horse. I could be happy there.

  But nothing happened to my parents, so I stayed with them until I graduated from high school and went to college. I came home during Christmas break and on Sunday morning sat in the fifth row, just behind the Hodges. Ellis slipped me a jawbreaker and Miriam asked about my studies and whether I had a girlfriend.

  Ellis said, “Don’t badger the boy. Let him play the field. I wish I would have. I married too soon. Yes sir, I did. I should have married Darlene Hughes. She inherited that big farm. Yes siree, I should have played the field.”

  Then he laughed. It was an old joke with them, Ellis marrying Darlene Hughes. Miriam would say, “Maybe you should have. But then when she found out what a terrible man you are, she’d have dumped you for good. That’s for sure.”

  Only people who love each other can say these things. If these things are true, if they’re actually felt, they can never be spoken. But if you’ve found your joy, if you’ve found your love, you can joke about what might have been, knowing life couldn’t possibly be better. If you’re Ellis Hodge, you joke about marrying Darlene Hughes, but at night you fall asleep thanking the good Lord for giving you Miriam instead.

  I came home for spring break. Went to meeting. Miriam wasn’t there. Ellis sat by himself in the fourth row. I asked after Miriam. He told me she wasn’t feeling well. He was so consumed with her plight, he forgot to give me a jawbreaker.

  In May, my parents came to fetch me home for the summer. As we drove past Ellis and Miriam’s farm, my mother turned from the front seat and said, “It’s a terrible thing about Miriam Hodge. She has breast cancer. Ellis is just beside himself. They have to go up to the city for an operation and treatment. Pastor Taylor told us about it last Sunday at church.”

  The next day was Sunday. Pastor Taylor asked if there were any prayer concerns. My father raised his hand and asked for prayers for Ellis and Miriam. Ellis reached over and pulled Miriam to him. I could see her shoulders shaking and could hear her soft weeping. Ellis swiped across his eyes with his arm. They were to go to the city that very week.

  They didn’t like the city. It scared them. They went only once a year, in December, to see the Christmas lights downtown. They drove their pickup truck and held fast in the right-hand lane. Doors locked. One year they ate lunch at a restaurant and it cost fifteen dollars, an outrageous sum. It ruined their day. After that, they packed their lunch and would eat it in the truck with the doors locked.

  People would ask them why they went to see the Christmas lights in the daytime when the lights showed up better at night.

  Ellis would say, “You won’t catch me in the city at night. No siree. Why, a fella could get killed up there. I watch TV. I read the newspaper. I know what happens. You won’t get me up there at night.”

  So they’d go in the daytime and use their imaginations.

  Then Miriam came down with cancer and Dr. Neely was sending her to a hospital in the city for an operation. They were terribly upset. Pastor Taylor prayed for them, then we sang “Abide with Me.”

  Miriam and Ellis left the next morning. They had to be there at noon. They left at eight o’clock, holding fast to the right-hand lane. They got turned around a few times and went the wrong way down a one-way street. Red-faced people honked their horns. Ellis didn’t understand the principle behind a one-way street.

  He said to Miriam, “What good is a street if you can’t use it both ways? What are these people thinking of?”

  They wanted to turn around, go home, and take their chances. But after a while they found the hospital and parked their truck and locked the doors. Ellis had read newspaper stories of cars being stolen in the city and didn’t want their 1981 Ford pickup to be an easy target. They walked into the hospital and showed the lady behind the desk the piece of paper Dr. Neely had given them.

  There was a man standing near the desk, looking at them. Ellis put his hand on his wallet. He’d read stories in the newspapers about people having their wallets stolen in the city. The lady called the man over and asked if he would be so kind to show Ellis and Miriam where they were to go.

  The man asked them their names, told them his, and asked what brought them to the hospital.

  Ellis said, “It’s my wife. She has the cancer. They’ll be operating on her tomorrow.” He could barely say it without crying.

  The man asked, “Can I put you on the prayer list at our church so we can pray for you?”

  Well, this shocked Ellis. He thought people in the city didn’t pray, that they just took drugs and sat around in bars and fired guns at one another and unleashed pit bulls on small children. Then to meet this young man who wanted to pray for them—what a comfort that was.

  They ran tests on Miriam all that day. That evening, they wheeled her into her room. She was tired and frightened. Ellis sat next to her, rubbing her hair, plunging in an index finger and twirling a lock of hair around it. He wanted to spend the night with her, in the chair next to her bed. But the nurse said he couldn’t stay past visiting hours. This upset Ellis. They had been together every night for twenty years, and now this—absent the one night she needed him the most. He didn’t know what to think.

  The nurse told him of a place across the street where he could sleep for free. So that’s where he went, and where he stayed for the next week while Miriam lay in the hospital.

  He’d get up every morning
and walk across the street, up the stairs to Miriam’s room. He didn’t trust elevators. He’d read stories in the newspaper of people being stuck on elevators for days at a time. Each day at noon, Ellis phoned Pastor Taylor with an update. Things were looking good, he reported. The doctors think they got it all. But she wasn’t out of the woods yet. Keep praying.

  Every evening, after visiting hours, he’d walk back across the street to his room. The first few nights he went straight to his room, then he took to lingering in the big room with all the other people. They’d talk about their loved ones being operated on across the way. They would cry, and sometimes they would laugh, and sometimes they would pray. They wrote their telephone numbers on slips of paper and promised to keep in touch. It was a great comfort to Ellis to visit with these people. It reminded him of church.

  Some evenings a Catholic priest, Father Leopold, would visit. At first, Ellis was suspicious. He had never met a Catholic priest but had heard they drank wine, which was something good Christians did not do. But Father Leopold was a kind man who always remembered Ellis’s name and always asked about Miriam. After a while, Ellis thought maybe a little wine every now and then was no great sin.

  The first night there, Ellis had gone to a grocery store and bought seven cans of ravioli. He loved ravioli in a can, but never got to eat it because Miriam didn’t believe in eating food from cans. She worried that the metal fragments from opening the cans fell in the food and poisoned your body. Ellis missed his ravioli.

  He ate ravioli every night for seven nights. On the last night, he invited Father Leopold to eat with him. Father Leopold brought a bottle of wine. They ate ravioli and drank red wine in Dixie cups from the bathroom.

  The next morning it was time to go home. Ellis pulled the truck up to the hospital entrance. The nurse wheeled Miriam through the hospital, out the door, and right up to the truck, hugged her, kissed her cheek, and said, “You get better now. We’ll be thinking of you.”

  Father Leopold was there. He prayed for Miriam and Ellis and rubbed a little holy water on their foreheads. Ellis worried all the way home that they’d been secretly baptized into the Catholic church. He’d read stories in the newspaper of that happening.

  Once a month afterward, Miriam and Ellis drove up to the hospital for tests, then every six weeks, then every three months. Now, just once a year.

  They’ve started breathing again. Relaxing. Sometimes whole days will pass with them forgetting.

  One Sunday during prayer time, Ellis stood and talked about how God had always seemed especially near in the fourth row at Harmony Friends, but that now he knew better. Now he knew God was everywhere, even up in the city.

  That night, he and Miriam were lying in bed like spoons, holding one another. Ellis was not a demonstrative man, was not a man given to flowery speech, but lying there next to his wife, he was overcome.

  He said to her, “I love you more than anything. I’m glad you’re better. I can’t imagine life without you.”

  She said, “Oh, you’d have married Darlene Hughes and lived on that big farm. You’d have gotten over me pretty quick.”

  Then they laughed the gentle laugh of people in love.

  Ellis said, “Say, this Christmas, why don’t we drive up to the city and stay in one of those fancy hotels and see the Christmas lights at night? I bet they’d be pretty at night.”

  “Can we eat in a restaurant?” Miriam asked.

  He said, “Why not? Let’s live a little.”

  She said, “Yes, let’s. Let’s live a little.”

  Ellis and Miriam still live west of town on the old Hodge place, and every Sunday morning they sit in the fourth row at Harmony Friends Meeting. I’m their pastor now. If my sermon is a bit tedious, Ellis reaches back and taps my sons on their knees and slips them jawbreakers, which they suck down to nothing.

  To look at Miriam and Ellis, you wouldn’t think there was anything special about them. But love has a way of making ordinary people seem remarkable, and in that sense, Miriam and Ellis are the most fascinating people I know.

  Twenty

  Memory

  “Walloped by Winter!” read the headline of the Harmony Herald the week of the December snowstorm. Underneath the headline was a picture of Pastor Taylor shoveling the steps of the Harmony Friends meetinghouse, where he had been the pastor. The picture was twenty-seven years old, taken during the last big snowstorm to hit Harmony. Pastor Taylor was now dead, but Bob Miles Jr. was loath to spend money on new pictures if a suitable photograph could be found in the files. So there was Pastor Taylor, resurrected and noticeably slimmer, shoveling snow.

  In the foreground was a 1972 Plymouth Valiant. Pastor Taylor had loved that car. He was two years out of seminary when he came to Harmony, his wife was pregnant, and he drove a Volkswagen Beetle—a foreign car, which had not endeared him to his congregation. So in March of 1973, when he drove by Harvey Muldock’s car dealership and saw the ’72 Valiant sitting there, Pastor Taylor turned into Harvey’s lot on impulse.

  Harvey had written DEEP DISCOUNT!!! with white shoe polish on the front windshield and taped a small American flag to the antenna, which had caught Pastor Taylor’s eye. He pulled alongside the Valiant, climbed from his Volkswagen, and there was Harvey, his hand extended, his smile a bit too big. It had been a slow month for Harvey and taxes were coming due.

  Harvey walked around the front of the Valiant, raised the hood and proclaimed, “She has a slant-six engine with two hundred and twenty-five horse. Best engine ever made. It’s the last one on the lot. I’ll let you have it for three thousand dollars.”

  Pastor Taylor gazed at the motor, trying to think of something knowledgeable to say. He opened the car door and the smell of new car rose to greet him. Gray vinyl seats, with ridges. AM radio. Seat belts snug on clips above the windows. What a beauty. But three thousand dollars…

  He eased himself behind the steering wheel. Closed his eyes and inhaled the smell. Oh, such a car. His wife was pregnant. He thought of his baby riding in a nice car like this, instead of in the old Volkswagen.

  Pastor Taylor had seventy-eight dollars in his savings account.

  “Too rich for my blood,” he said, then stepped out and shook Harvey’s hand good-bye. He climbed in his Volkswagen, now shabby in comparison, and drove home to the parsonage.

  The next week it snowed twelve inches, and when Pastor Taylor was shoveling the steps of the meetinghouse, Bob Miles Jr. of the Herald pulled up in his new car, a 1972 Plymouth Valiant, parked in front of the meetinghouse, stood on the opposite sidewalk, and snapped a picture of Pastor Taylor shoveling snow with the Valiant in the foreground.

  Then he crossed the street and Pastor Taylor said, “That’s quite a car you have there, Bob Jr.”

  Bob Jr. said, “Harvey made me a real deal on it. It was the last ’72 on the lot. Three thousand, three hundred dollars.”

  “Well, you certainly know how to bargain,” Pastor Taylor told him. “I ought to take you with me the next time I buy a car. That’s some deal. I don’t see how Harvey can stay in business making those kinds of deals.”

  Most men would have laughed at Bob Jr. Most men would have said, “I had Harvey down to three thousand,” but not Pastor Taylor. He could not preach very well. He was not very creative, but he was exceedingly kind, which explained his survival. He served twenty-seven years as the pastor of Harmony Friends Meeting. A church record. Fourteen hundred sermons, not one of them memorable. But he was loved and that was his legacy.

  His first child, a daughter, was born three weeks after the 1973 snowstorm. The doctor’s bill came to seventy-five dollars, which left three dollars in Pastor Taylor’s savings account, which he spent on spark plugs for the Volkswagen and a roll of duct tape to patch the seats.

  He never owned a new car. Once a year he would drive to Harvey’s dealership and smell the new cars, but he could never afford one. We never paid him enough. All those years of sacrifice, then struck down while jogging on the eve of reti
rement. We were going to buy him a new car for his retirement, then to be struck by a car and killed. What irony. Life is so unfair. Why couldn’t Dale Hinshaw have been hit by the car?

  When I became pastor, it was Dale Hinshaw who called to say it would be my job to shovel the walk and spread the salt. I told him I hadn’t gone to seminary so I could shovel snow. That was when he quoted from the book of James that faith without works is dead. Dale Hinshaw knew just enough Scripture to be annoying but not enough to be transformed.

  He was all the time talking about how Pastor Taylor did things: “Pastor Taylor cooked for the men’s breakfasts” or “Pastor Taylor came to see us once a month” or “Pastor Taylor never complained about shoveling the walk.”

  After our big December snowstorm it was Dale Hinshaw who cut out the old picture of Pastor Taylor shoveling snow and thumbtacked it to the meetinghouse bulletin board, a serious breach of protocol. The bulletin board was administered by the Friendly Women’s Circle. Before my grandmother died, the church bulletin board had been her responsibility as president of the circle. Once a month they met to change it. People in the meeting were free to offer bulletin-board suggestions, which the Friendly Women’s Circle would vote on and then make using construction paper and pictures from magazines. There were Christmas themes and Easter bulletin boards. Their summer vacation bulletin board had proclaimed, “That my joy may be in you, and your joy might be full.” It showed a family playing volleyball and waterskiing. Everyone was smiling. It didn’t look like any vacation I’d ever taken.

  Then there was the bulletin board Dale Hinshaw had suggested, which his wife rammed through the Friendly Women’s Circle. It read, Don’t Retire in the Lake of Fire. It had a picture of tormented souls screaming amidst a ball of flame. One of the tormented souls looked suspiciously like my grandmother, whom Mrs. Dale Hinshaw had not particularly cared for ever since the women of the Friendly Circle voted her out as president and my grandmother in.