“Why’d she cheat on you?”
“She never said. I asked her once, but she wouldn’t say. I can’t help but think she was lonely.”
“But that’s different. My wife wasn’t lonely. I wasn’t in Korea. I was home.”
“Loneliness isn’t about proximity. You can live with another person and still feel like there’s no one who’ll listen, like there’s no one who cares. Anyway, my point is this—that after a time we worked it out, and in the end I was so grateful to God for letting me have my Martha. I don’t know why she did what she did, but we rose above it, and so can you and Sally.”
They sat quietly in the office. The Frieda Hampton Memorial Clock in the meeting room bonged ten.
“I have a lot of thinking to do,” Wayne finally said.
“You sure do. I hope you make the right decision.”
“I’d still like to talk with Sam. Can you ask him to call me tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks for talking with me, Frank. It means a lot.”
“Take care of yourself, Wayne. I’ll be thinking of you.”
“I appreciate that.”
Wayne thought about it all that day, and again that night as he swept the aisles at the Kroger. The next morning he woke up his children, read them a story, poured their bowls of Cap’n Crunch, and sat at the table with them.
“Kids, there’s something you need to know. Your mommy will be coming home to visit us this Saturday.”
They looked puzzled, then bombarded him with questions.
“Is Mommy coming back for good?”
“Can Deena still be our friend?”
“Does this mean Mommy loves us again?”
“Kids, I don’t know quite what it means. But no matter what happens, I’ll be here for you and I’ll always take care of you. I want you to remember that.”
The phone rang. Wayne picked it up.
“Hello.”
“Hi, Wayne. This is Sam. Frank said you’d stopped by yesterday needing to talk. I’m free now. Can you come in?”
“Now’s a bad time. I don’t have a baby-sitter.”
“I’d be happy to come to your place, if you want.”
“That’d be great. I really need to talk.”
“See you in a half hour then,” Sam said, and hung up the phone.
Wayne looked around the trailer. It was a mess. He clapped his hands. “All right, kids, breakfast is over. Let’s get things picked up.” He filled the sink with soapsuds and handed Adam a dishcloth. “You’re in charge of dishes, son.”
The girls picked up the clutter while Wayne vacuumed. Little Kate yelled at him over the roar of the sweeper. “Can we stay up late when Mommy comes home?”
“We’ll see,” Wayne said.
He finished sweeping, wound the cord around the handle, and pushed the sweeper into the closet just as Sam Gardner knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Wayne called out.
Sam pushed open the door and walked in the small trailer. Lord, what do they do on days when it rains? No wonder Sally ran off, Sam thought.
He and Wayne shook hands. Sam rubbed the kids’ heads.
“Okay, kids, Daddy needs to talk with Sam. I need you to go outside to play. Be sure to stay back from the road.”
Wayne sat on the couch. Sam sat opposite him in a saggy, green chair with worn armrests.
“We’re so happy to have you and Deena and the kids coming to church,” Sam said. “I take it things are going all right with the two of you?”
“Going really well. We enjoy each other’s company.” Wayne sighed, fidgeted on the sofa, then plunged ahead.
“My wife called last month and wants me to take her back. She’s coming in this Saturday to see the kids and to talk with me. And I don’t know what to do.”
Sam leaned forward in his chair. “Wow, how did Deena take it?”
“The thing is, I haven’t really gotten around to telling Deena yet.”
“Well, it’s none of my business, but don’t you think you oughta tell her before Saturday?”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” Wayne leaned forward and covered his face with his hands. “What a mess. Why did this have to happen? Deena and I were doing so well. Now everything’s falling apart. Why couldn’t Sally have stayed gone?”
Sam had taken several counseling classes in seminary, but his teachers had never covered this particular topic—what to do if your spouse runs off and you fall in love with a wonderful person only to have your spouse come home.
What a mess, Sam thought.
He’d been trained in the counseling classes never to tell people what to do. The key was to help people find the answers for themselves through skillful, insightful questioning. Sam had never been very good at it.
“Well, I tell you what I’d do,” Sam said. “I’d forget about her. She abandoned you and the kids. Just walked off for no good reason. If that isn’t a reason to divorce, I don’t know what is.”
“You think so? Frank told me I should take her back.”
“He what?”
“He told me I should give Sally another chance. That I wouldn’t regret it.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“Yesterday at your office. You weren’t there, so I talked with Frank instead. Actually, what he said made a lot of sense.”
Darn that Frank, Sam thought. That’s what I get for taking a day off.
“Well, Wayne, you’re free to talk with Frank or anyone else for that matter, but I’d advise keeping your own counsel. Everyone’s gonna have a different idea of what you should do, and if you don’t do what they suggest, they’ll be mad.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. It’s just that I’m not sure what the right thing is. I’ve been praying about it, but God’s not given me any kind of answer.”
Good luck there, Sam thought. I’ve been asking God to do something in the church for over a year and nothing’s happened.
“Why do you suppose God hasn’t given me an answer?” Wayne asked.
“I’m not sure, Wayne.”
“It makes it kind of hard to believe in God. If you know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
Sam suddenly felt very tired. He sagged in the green chair.
“Is anything wrong, Sam?”
“Hey, I’m not here to tell you my problems. I’m here to help you.”
“I don’t mind listening.”
“Really?”
“Not at all. And I can keep a secret.”
Sitting in that little trailer on the worn green chair, Sam felt like he was in a confessional. Safe and anonymous. Far away from Dale Hinshaw and Fern Hampton. Maybe it would be all right to tell Wayne his doubts.
He remembered back to when he was first called to the ministry, how he’d gone to Pastor Taylor to talk with him about being a pastor.
“There’ll be times,” Pastor Taylor had told Sam in a quiet, hesitant voice, “when your flock will minister to you. Dark nights of the soul when it feels you’ve lost your way. And you have to let them. Sam, you have to let them help you.”
Sam was young then, brimming with the conviction of youth. He couldn’t imagine such a time. He’d almost forgotten that long-ago conversation. Now it returned to his mind. He knew precisely what Pastor Taylor had been trying to say.
“It’s like this, Wayne. Being a pastor and all, people expect me to have a strong faith, but here lately…well, here lately I’ve been struggling.”
“Struggling? What do you mean by ‘struggling’?”
“I mean there are times I’m sitting in church or preaching and it occurs to me that I don’t believe in God anymore.”
The moment Sam said it, he regretted it. His secret was out. There was no going back.
“How can you not believe in God?”
“I’m just not seeing Him do anything. Our Goal-Setting Sunday was a joke. People are always fighting with each other. Now we got all this money and the elder
s want to build a gymnasium onto the meetinghouse. And I’m not doing anybody a lick of good, either. I pray and pray for something to happen, for God to use me, for God to change the church, but nothing happens. Nothing at all.”
“Have you told anyone? Have you talked with the elders?”
“Not a soul, except for you and my wife.”
Wayne sat quietly on the couch for a moment. He could hear the children playing outside and the occasional hum of a passing car.
“Do you want my advice?” asked Wayne.
“Sure. I’m not promising I’ll take it, but I’m curious to know your thoughts.”
“I haven’t been a Christian very long, but I’ve been reading the Bible you gave me. It talks a lot about honesty. Why don’t you just tell folks the truth about how you feel? Talk about it with the elders. Tell them your doubts. Maybe they can help you. Maybe they’ll pray for you or something.”
Sam laughed. “Yeah, they’ll pray for me all right, right before they fire me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Well, I can’t imagine they’d want to have a pastor who doesn’t believe in God. I mean, belief in God is kind of in the job description.”
“Still, I think it pays to be honest and up front.”
“Boy, that’s not easy.”
“You got that right. Why do you think I haven’t told Deena about my wife coming in this Saturday?”
“It looks like we both have some work ahead of us, doesn’t it?”
Wayne nodded in agreement.
They talked about other things, about Asa and Jessie giving the money to the church, about Deena, about the Corn and Sausage Days festival the upcoming weekend.
Finally, Sam stood from the green chair. “Good luck talking with Deena.”
“Good luck talking with the elders.”
Sam walked toward the door, and Wayne followed.
“Hey, Sam, I know you don’t think God’s doing much in our little church, but I want you to know He’s doing something in me. Even with all my troubles, I’m feeling a sense of hope I’ve never felt before. And I want you to know something else. Even though you think you’re not doing any good, you’ve helped me more than you know.”
He hugged Sam to him.
Sam’s eyes burned. He squeezed Wayne back.
“Thank you, Wayne. Pray for me, could you?”
“You know I will.”
Sam pushed open the trailer door, walked outside, climbed into his car, and drove past the fields and farms toward town. Past Harvey Muldock’s car dealership. He pulled into town, passing beneath the Corn and Sausage Days banner strung across Main Street between Kivett’s Five and Dime and the Kroger.
Kyle Weathers was out front of his barbershop, hanging up a sign. Corn and Sausage Days Special! Haircuts While U Wait!
Sam pulled the car behind the meetinghouse and walked inside. Frank looked up from his desk.
“How’d your visit go with Wayne?” he asked.
“Better than I’d hoped.”
“Hope. Isn’t that a lovely word?”
In his advancing years, Frank is softening. He’s taken down the sign over his desk that read, I Can Only Help One Person Each Day. Today Is Not Your Day. Tomorrow Doesn’t Look Good Either.
“It is a lovely word,” Sam agreed.
“You know what Emily Dickinson said about hope, don’t you?”
“It doesn’t come to mind.”
“She said, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.’”
“That’s beautiful. What’s it mean?”
“I’m not exactly certain. But I think it means that hope keeps singing its song. And even if we can’t always hear it, it’s still being sung.”
Sam thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I suppose that’s precisely what it means.”
Eleven
Jessie and Asa Come to Terms
Asa and Jessie Peacock hadn’t realized being rich could be such a tribulation. They’d been wealthy only a month and a half and were already tired.
Vernley Stout from the bank had met with them to plan their investments. “The trick,” Vernley explained, “is to let your money work for you.”
Jessie was a little put out with Vernley. When they had opened their savings account twenty years ago, the bank had given them a free toaster, which was now on the blink. She had thought of buying a toaster, but had decided against it. “Let’s wait and see what the bank will do,” she’d told Asa.
She kept waiting for Vernley to say something about a new toaster, but he hadn’t. Instead, he’d talked about mutual funds and annuities and other complexities Jessie and Asa didn’t understand.
She began to drop hints to Vernley about wanting a new toaster.
“I sure could use a new toaster,” she remarked one day in his office. “Ours is worn out. I heard the bank over in Cartersburg is giving a toaster away with every new account. And not a piddly two-slot toaster either. A four-slotter with a built-in bagel slicer.”
But Vernley never took the hint.
Jessie wasn’t accustomed to having all this money. She’d walk down the small-appliance aisle at Kivett’s Five and Dime, studying the toasters. Reading the prices, she’d shake her head.
Maybe I can pick one up at a garage sale somewhere, she’d think.
It was the little things that threw her. Deciding to give her church three hundred and fifty thousand dollars came automatically. But spending thirty dollars on a toaster had preoccupied her for weeks.
She thought the money would ease her life, though that hadn’t happened. She had been getting irate letters from an antigambling organization, the Network Against Gambling (NAG). When she’d first refused the lottery money, they’d written a story about her in the NAG newsletter. She had been the NAG poster child. But now that she’d accepted the money, the members of NAG were turning on her.
One day Clarence the mailman brought a letter from a woman up north near Fort Wayne. Jessie sat at her kitchen table and read it.
Your decision to refuse the money gave me such hope. I’d just become a Christian and your testimony was an inspiration to me, to think there were people like you out there in the world. When you changed your mind and took the money after all, I was devastated. I now wonder if I should even be a Christian. I just thought you should know.
I’ve caused a little one to stumble. Lord, forgive me, Jessie prayed.
She showed the letter to Asa.
“Well, all I can say is she must not have had much of a faith to start with,” he said. “A person like that, they have a head cold and it causes them to question the Lord. Don’t worry about it, Jessie—it’s not your fault.”
But she did worry about it. The newspaper from the city had carried a story about NAG falling on hard times. The president of NAG laid it right at Jessie’s feet.
“Basically, we’re out of money. When you can’t even persuade Christians not to gamble, you’re sunk. The donations have dried up. We’re twelve thousand dollars in the hole. We’ll probably have to close our doors, and then, mark my words, there’ll be casinos and organized crime and harlots prowling our streets. You watch and see.”
Lord, what have I done? I cared only for my own comfort. I sold out. Lord, forgive me, Jessie prayed.
There’d been no consoling her. It had been the worst month and a half of her life. She called the state lottery office to see if they’d take the money back, but they wouldn’t. She wanted to buy a toaster, then give the rest of the money away. She talked about it with Asa at the supper table in late September.
“We need to be shed of that money. Every day it sits in our bank account is a charge against our souls,” she warned.
“I thought I could use some of it to finish rebuilding the barn. I need to get that barn up. I’ve nowhere to put the tractor.”
“That barn is becoming a monument to our sin. We’ve made a
mistake. Let’s not compound our error.”
Asa groaned. “Aw, Jessie, can’t we keep the money? It’s been so nice having a little extra. And what about our kids? Sure, they’re on their own and doing okay, but what if one of them got sick? What then?”
“We can do what we did before we had the money. We can trust God to care for our needs.”
“Oh, Jessie, you know I trust the Lord. You know I do.”
“Good, then getting rid of that money will be an easy matter.”
But it hadn’t been easy. They had put over three million dollars in certificates of deposit at Vernley’s bank. Every month, Vernley sends them a check for twenty thousand dollars. Jessie and Asa have no idea what to do with it.
Jessie had sent ten thousand dollars to Brother Norman’s shoe ministry to the Choctaw Indians, which infuriated the Friendly Women’s Circle of Harmony Friends Meeting. The Circle had raised seven hundred dollars for Brother Norman at their annual Chicken Noodle Dinner during the Corn and Sausage Days festival. They were so proud. It was the most money they’d ever raised for the shoe ministry.
Jessie was the treasurer of the Circle. She’d sent Brother Norman a check from the Circle, and had enclosed her personal check for ten thousand dollars. Brother Norman had sent a thank-you card, which Frank the secretary had posted on the meetinghouse bulletin board.
Dear Jessie:
Thank you so much for your generous gift to our shoe ministry. You are truly a saint. I can’t thank you enough.
Sincerely,
Brother Norman
P.S. Can you also thank the ladies for their donation?
“This is a fine state of affairs,” Fern Hampton complained. “You work all year making noodles and you get a little P.S. thank you. But you can sell your soul and hit it rich, and people call you a saint. That’s a fine how-do-you-do.”
Every time Jessie and Asa gave money away, it made someone mad. They donated another ten thousand dollars to the town for a new playground for the children. They’d done it anonymously, but Bob Miles had figured it out and written about it in the Herald. Anonymous Donors Give Money for Playground read the headline, but he had put Jessie and Asa’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary picture underneath it.
Just Shy of Harmony Page 8