A Change of Heart (12 page)

S
am Gardner was picking up the Christmas wrapping scattered across the living-room floor. Ordinarily a safe undertaking, it was made perilous by the remote-control cars buzzing around his feet, zipping and zooming along the hardwood floor.

“Watch out,” Levi cried, as Sam stepped toward a crumpled mound of gift wrap. Sam swung his foot wide to miss the car, lost his balance, and toppled onto the couch, shell-shocked.

Christmas was getting more dangerous by the year.

Barbara bustled in from the kitchen, the pleasant scent of roast turkey in her wake. “Sam, we don’t have time for you to take a nap. Folks will be here any minute. Let’s get cracking.”

A family Christmas dinner had been Barbara’s idea. Two weeks before, she’d convened a family meeting and laid out her platform. “We have this big house, and we just sit around on Christmas Day in our sweatpants, staring at one another and taking naps. Well, this year’s going to be different. We’re having your parents and Roger and Sabrina over and we’re going to sit at the dining-room table in our nicest clothes and use a tablecloth and enjoy a nice meal.”

Sam and the boys had been miserable ever since.

“Get off that couch, pick up this mess, and get your suit on,” she barked at Sam.

“You there,” she said, pointing to the boys. “Go take your showers, brush your teeth, and get dressed. Your father will help you tie your ties.”

“Ties!” Addison shrieked, collapsing to the floor with a tragic flourish.

“Ties?” said Sam. “We have to wear ties?”

“Sam Gardner, I am trying my best to teach our sons good manners, and you’re not helping.”

“Come on, guys. Let’s get dressed,” Sam said without the slightest hint of enthusiasm.

He deposited the boys in the shower and began pulling on his suit. The year before, Harvey Muldock had given him a tie that showed dogs playing poker. He hadn’t worn it yet, but now, in a passive-aggressive gesture, he pulled it from the tie rack, threaded it under his shirt collar, and fashioned a Windsor knot.

He hustled the boys through the bathroom, combed their hair, laid out their clothes, then clipped on their ties just as the doorbell rang. They marched down the stairs, the picture of gracious living, though thoroughly miserable.

His father, attired in his funeral suit, appeared as somber as his son and grandsons.

Sam’s mother was wearing a strand of pearls that hadn’t seen the light of day since Eisenhower was in office. She studied Sam, then licked her hand, and smoothed his cowlick. “Don’t our men look handsome,” she exulted. “Just look at them.”

Barbara ushered them into the parlor, where they sat on chairs never intended to be sat on in the first place. They smiled awkwardly at one another, unaccustomed to this holiday finery.

Somewhere in the room, a stomach gurgled. “I’ve had the worst gas,” Sam’s father announced. “Started last night. Had some cheese balls over at the Muldocks’ and been paying for it ever since.”

Sam pondered how best to respond to his father’s revelation. “Those cheese balls will do it every time,” he said after a thoughtful silence.

Roger and Sabrina arrived a half hour later, dressed in their customary black.

It took twenty minutes to eat the meal Barbara had started cooking the day before. They pushed away from the table and reminisced about past holidays.

“What did Santa bring you this year?” Sam’s father asked the boys.

They ran to their bedroom and returned with their remote-control cars.

“I hope those aren’t battery powered,” Sabrina said. “Did you know that in America we throw away enough batteries each year to fill the Empire State Building?”

“Now that’s what I don’t understand,” Sam’s father said. “How do they know that? You couldn’t fill that building with batteries, ’cause every time you opened the doors to put more in, the ones in there’d roll right out and then you’d just have to start all over again. How do they know that?”

“Batteries aren’t the worst of it,” Sabrina went on, frowning like the earnest person she was. “It’s packaging that’s the real problem. All that cardboard to hold a little toy and people throw it away with no thought of recycling it. You recycle, don’t you, Sam?”

“Religiously. Don’t want to fill up the landfills.”

Barbara stared at him, surprised by her husband’s newfound commitment to the environment.

“Hey, Dad,” Levi piped up, “remember last week when the trash man wouldn’t take that old paint and you poured it down the storm drain?”

Sam smiled weakly, pushed a sliver of turkey fat around his plate, and tried to remember why he’d been so happy when his children had learned to talk.

Sam wasn’t the only parent with problems that day. Across town, Ralph and Sandy Hodge were trying to explain to Amanda why a tourist cabin wasn’t a fitting place for a teenage girl to live.

“It isn’t that we don’t want you to be with us,” Sandy explained. “You know we do. But you wouldn’t have any privacy. There’s not even room for another bed. We need a little more time to prepare a place for you, that’s all. Then we can be together and it’ll be so much nicer. Right now, we’d just be tripping over one another.”

“Do Ellis and Miriam know you’re here?” Ralph asked.

“I don’t think so,” Amanda said, wiping her nose with her shirtsleeve. “I told them I was going for a walk.”

“We need to let them know you’re here,” Ralph said. “They’re probably starting to worry about you. Why don’t you call and tell them where you are?”

“First, I want to give you your Christmas present,” Amanda said, pulling a small package from her coat pocket. It was a photograph of the three of them, taken at a picture booth in a mall during a rare period of sobriety for Ralph and Sandy. Amanda appeared to be around seven, and they were all dressed up. “Remember, it was Christmas Eve and you took me to the mall and bought me a doll.” She’d kept the picture ever since, tucked between the pages of a diary she’d begun that same year.

The week before she’d bought a frame for the picture at Kivett’s Five and Dime.

Ralph and Sandy looked at the picture, not saying a word, just swallowing hard and staring. After a while, Ralph cleared his throat and pulled Amanda to him, smoothing her hair with his hand. “That’s the finest gift anyone ever gave us.”

They all embraced, sitting on the edge of the bed, the only place to sit in the tiny room.

“We’ll be getting a place real soon,” Sandy whispered to Amanda. “Then we can be together like a family should.”

They visited a while longer. Then Ralph wondered if Miriam and Ellis might be concerned about Amanda’s whereabouts. “Probably ought to drive you back home,” he said.

Back at Ellis and Miriam’s, Ellis had phoned Asa and Jessie Peacock to see if Amanda had stopped to see them.

“Nope, we’ve not seen her,” Asa reported. “You think someone kidnapped her?”

No, he hadn’t thought that. Not at least until Asa had suggested the possibility. Now he could think of little else.

“She’s been kidnapped,” he wailed to Miriam. “Somebody’s taken her. What’s the number for the police?” He paused to catch his breath. “Or maybe she’s run off with someone. Oh, Lord, did you have that talk with her yet?”

“No, not yet. I was going to, but the time never felt right.”

“Well, thanks to you she’ll come back here pregnant. You really let her down this time.”

“Will you settle down! She’s been gone less than two hours. She probably wants a little time to herself.”

“Well, if you’re not going to do anything, I guess I will,” he declared. He pulled on his barn coat, climbed in his truck, and drove toward town, slowly, peering in the ditches in the event she’d been struck by a car and was at that very moment exhaling her last feeble breath.

He saw Ralph’s car before they saw his truck and swerved across the road to block their path.

His no-good, drunken bum of a brother! He should have known. He flung himself out of his truck in a self-righteous fury, strode to Ralph’s car, which had come to a stop, yanked his door open, and punched Ralph squarely on the nose. “Kidnap my daughter again, and the next time you’ll get worse!” he said.

He’d never punched anyone on the nose, and it was hard to say which of the brothers was more surprised. But Ellis was the first to recover, and while Ralph sat staring at him and holding his nose, Ellis cuffed him again for good measure.

He then marched around the front of Ralph’s car, seized Amanda by the right arm, pulled her from the car, and half carried her to his truck.

“He was bringing me home,” she yelled. “Why’d you hit him? And, for your information, I’m not your daughter. I’m your niece. Now take me back to my dad.”

That Ellis would not do. He threw his truck into gear and tromped on the gas, spinning his rear tires and peppering Ralph’s car with gravel.

When they reached home, Amanda went straight to her room, refusing to talk. Ellis stalked back and forth across the living room, ranting about his brother in such coarse language Miriam booted him out to the barn, then collapsed in her chair, her head spinning. What has happened to my nice, quiet husband? she wondered to herself. He’s turned into a raving lunatic. She’d read in several magazines that raising children had a deleterious effect on certain people, but she’d had no idea.

As for Ralph, he was still seated in his car, his head tilted back, a handkerchief pressed to his nose to stanch the flow of blood. Getting punched in the nose, he was coming to realize, helped organize one’s thoughts, and right now he was thinking how much his brother must despise him.

He entertained the notion of driving to his brother’s farm and returning the favor, then decided against it. He and Sandy had been studying the Bible and that very morning had read about forgiveness, which had put him in a charitable frame of mind. He was grateful he hadn’t just read about God slaying the Amalekites. Who knows how it would have ended? Instead, he drove back home to Sandy and their room at the tourist cabins, where she applied a cold washrag to his nose and consoled him.

“I guess this means we’re not accepting Miriam’s invitation to come over tonight for dinner,” she said.

“Probably wouldn’t be wise,” Ralph sniffed. He picked up the picture of Amanda and studied it. “What a Christmas Day this has been,” he said after a while. “I gain a daughter and lose a brother.”

“We knew if we came back here, it wouldn’t be easy,” Sandy pointed out. “And let’s try to look on the bright side. At least he didn’t kill you.”

“There is that, I guess.”

“How about some Dinty Moore beef stew?” she asked. “I think we have one more can.”

“Sure, that’d be great. Getting beat up has a way of making a fella hungry.”

She plucked the can of beef stew from the top shelf of their closet, opened it, and spooned it into their saucepan, which she set on top of the hot plate resting on their chest of drawers.

“How you feeling, honey?” she asked, while warming his meal.

“Better every minute.”

“Maybe he didn’t mean to hit you. Maybe he slipped and fell and hit you on accident,” Sandy suggested.

“He hit me twice.”

She winced. “I guess you can’t call it an accident if he did it twice.”

“Probably not.”

A plume of steam rose from the saucepan. “Looks like your dinner is done.”

She poured the beef stew from the pan into a bowl, then sat beside him on the bed and watched him while he ate.

“Nothin’ better than Dinty Moore,” he said.

“Someday we’ll have a real house with a real kitchen, and I can cook you real meals.”

“But I like Dinty Moore.”

She laughed and snuggled in beside him. “One day, your brother will come to his senses and realize what a wonderful person you’ve become, and things’ll work out.”

“I hope that happens before he punches me in the nose again.”

He finished his supper, washed the bowl in the bathroom sink, then sat in the chair beside the window, watching the sun set in the December sky as another Christmas Day slipped into memory.

“Dear Lord,” he whispered, “forgive us all for all the hurt we cause.”

I
t was the last Tuesday in January before Ned Kivett finally took down his Christmas display. He makes his money at Christmas and hates to see it come to an end. Santa’s departure was duly noted by Bob Miles in that week’s “Bobservation Post,” and Owen Stout collected one dollar from every member of the Odd Fellows Lodge for correctly predicting when Ned would give Santa the boot and set up the window for Valentine’s Day.

The lottery Kyle Weathers began in July to cash in on what appeared to be Dale Hinshaw’s imminent demise had fallen by the wayside after Dale’s stunning comeback.

Dale, now seated in Kyle’s chair for his weekly neck shave, was pondering aloud why the Lord had spared him. “I can’t help but think He wants me to give the Scripture eggs ministry another try.”

Four years before, Dale’s Scripture eggs ministry had come to a tragic end when his chickens had died of a poultry disease; he’d been lamenting their loss ever since.

Kyle, desperate to change the subject before Dale got wound up, turned to Asa Peacock. “How’s life on the farm, Asa?”

“So far, so good,” Asa reported. “Say, Dale, that sure was odd how your chickens died all at once like that. I never seen anything like that before.”

“It’s like the Lord Himself wanted it to end,” Dale said glumly, still perplexed by this unfathomable evil even four years later.

Kyle unsnapped the apron from around Dale’s neck and removed it with a hurried flourish. “There you go, Dale. All done. Next!”

Dale counted out the exact change into Kyle’s hand, rubbed his hand across his reddened neck (this was the amazing thing about Dale Hinshaw—no matter the season, his neck was always red) and sauntered out the door.

It was an unusually balmy day for January, so he’d walked the three blocks to get his hair cut. On the way home, he stopped out front of Grant’s Hardware to stand on the spot he’d collapsed the spring before. He’d been after Uly to place some type of plaque there memorializing the event, but Uly had resisted, even after Dale had pointed out that reminding people of the fragility of human life might bring them a little closer to the Lord.

Nora Nagle was helping her father, Clevis, change the sign at the Royal Theater. Dale paused to rebuke them for being in league with the godless liberals in Hollywood who were causing God Almighty to withdraw His protective hand over this once God-fearing nation.

“It’s a Disney cartoon, Dale, about a fish,” Nora said. “How is that perverting America?”

“I’ll tell you right now, if you played that movie backwards, you’d see Satan worshipers. You mark my words!” he cried out, his voice rising to a fevered pitch.

Dale was feeling better than he had in months.

He stopped by the meetinghouse to see if Sam was there, but Sam had seem him coming and had slipped out the back door.

“Don’t know when he’ll be back,” Frank the secretary told Dale. “But I’ll be sure to tell him you stopped by.”

“Tell him I caught a few mistakes in his sermon this past Sunday,” Dale said.

“I’m sure he’ll be delighted to hear from you.”

“Maybe you should just have him call me.”

“You got it, buddy,” Frank said, as he eased Dale out the door.

It was almost noon, time for Brother Lester’s radio program, so Dale hurried home. He’d written Brother Lester the month before inviting him to speak at the meetinghouse, but hadn’t heard back. Brother Lester had mentioned the many requests he’d received, but that with one leg he could only do so much. Not only that, he’d been sequestered away doing research and was now poised to reveal a dark secret the Vatican had tried in vain to keep quiet.

Dale rushed along, positively gleeful at the prospect of this sordid revelation. Five minutes later, he was seated at the kitchen table next to Dolores, listening to Brother Lester labor for the Truth. What a blissful day it was turning out to be, full of opportunities to correct and reprove the wayward and lukewarm! Now to hear Brother Lester confirm what he’d always expected—that the pope himself was a member of the Masonic Lodge and had met regularly with Bill Clinton, a closet Mason, to plot a new world order—elevated his mood to mountainous heights.

“I knew it!” he said, slapping the table. “Didn’t I tell you? Well, their secret’s out now.”

He thought of picketing the Masonic Lodge in Cartersburg that very evening and would have, except that he had a meeting of the church’s Furnace Committee. Instead, he wrote a blistering editorial to the
Harmony Herald
and hand-delivered it to Bob Miles an hour later, demanding it be placed on the top half of the front page and not buried in small print in the classifieds, where Bob ordinarily ran his letters.

“You know, Dale, there are some people in this town who get tired of reading your letters. We can’t run them every week,” Bob pointed out.

“That’s the problem with today’s generation. They don’t want the truth. They wanna have their ears tickled and keep going in their filthy sin and not be called to righteousness.”

“Truth? You want to talk about truth? Do you really think God gave you a new heart so you could write nasty letters to people? Why don’t you make yourself useful?”

Dale turned beet red and tried to speak, but could only sputter, he was so indignant. “Bob Miles, that’s the…You’ll not ever see me again…Why, I’ll never buy your newspaper again.” A harmless threat, since the newspaper was free.

He turned and stalked from the office, then spent the rest of the day preparing his devotional for the Furnace Committee meeting. He’d missed the last six meetings, what with his heart problems, and was concerned the committee had grown spiritually lax in his absence. It seemed to be a trend among certain townspeople. So he prepared a devotional explaining the history of the furnace in the Bible, recalling when three men of faith—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—were tossed in the flames by the wretched Nebuchadnezzar.

“I tell you, if it hadn’t been for the furnace, we wouldn’t even have that story,” he said at that night’s meeting. “And what about in Matthew, chapter thirteen, when the Lord Himself said he’ll send his angels to throw the evildoers in the furnace. Now how’s He gonna do that unless we have furnaces?” He thought briefly of Bob Miles burning to a nice turn.

“I don’t think Jesus really said that,” Asa Peacock said.

“Yeah, I don’t think God would do that to people,” Harvey Muldock conjectured.

Dale shook his head in disgust. The committee’s waywardness was worse than he’d feared.

But that battle would have to wait; he had more pressing matters to resolve, namely, the church’s utter contempt for its Furnace Committee. That very month, the Budget Committee, headed up by Fern Hampton, who had been against the Furnace Committee from the very start, had decided not to give the committee its annual three hundred dollars for furnace maintenance.

Dale was fit to be tied. “These people have forgotten what it’s like to be without a furnace. I say we shut down the furnace this Sunday morning and let ’em freeze their keesters off. That’ll make ’em think twice about not giving us our money.”

“We can’t do that,” Ellis Hodge said. “They’ll just go home.”

“Not if we lock ’em inside,” Dale said. “The kids start losing their fingers and toes, and three hundred dollars for the Furnace Committee looks pretty cheap.”

“What about you, Dale?” Asa asked. “You told me you had to stay warm on account of your heart transplant.”

That doused Dale’s fire considerably. Children losing their digits didn’t faze him a bit, but his own discomfort was another matter entirely.

“I know what we could do,” Dale suggested. “Let’s all of us start designating our offerings to the Furnace Committee. Then we’d have all the money we need. Let me run some figures here. How much money do you give the church each week, Asa?”

Asa hesitated before telling Dale what he gave was a private matter.

“Yeah, I don’t think it’s anybody’s business what someone else gives,” Ellis Hodge added.

“Now that’s where you’re wrong,” Dale said. “Acts, chapter five. Ananias and Sapphira didn’t come clean and the Lord struck ’em dead.”

“I don’t think that really happened,” Asa said.

“Yeah, Sam said someone probably wrote that to scare people into giving money to the church,” Ellis Hodge said.

“That’s the whole problem right there,” Dale said. “We got ourselves a pastor who doesn’t fear the Lord and the next thing you know they’re cutting the funds to the Furnace Committee and the world’s goin’ to Hades in a handbasket and it’s all Sam’s fault. Boy, they stopped stoning people too soon, if you ask me.”

This was Dale Hinshaw at peak form—singling out one person whose well-deserved death would solve all the world’s ills. Unfortunately, people who apparently didn’t love the Lord as much as Dale had made it nearly impossible to kill heretics, so he took another tack. “I hate to do this, but I’m afraid you all will have to step down from this committee. It’s clear to me you’re not spiritually qualified to serve.”

Asa, Harvey, and Ellis looked at Dale, aghast.

“You can’t do that,” Ellis Hodge said. “You can’t kick us off the committee. The Nominating Committee appointed us.”

This was a technicality Dale was willing to overlook. “You serve on this committee at my pleasure, and I’m asking you to leave.”

Harvey burst out laughing. “Dale, I think that operation made you loony. You’re not the president of the United States. In fact, you’re not even the clerk of the committee. Ellis is.”

“I am?” Ellis asked.

“Yep. Remember, we take turns. Asa was clerk last year. You are this year. Next year it’s my turn, and then Dale is clerk.”

“Well, when it’s my turn to be clerk, I’m going to throw off the whole lot of you,” Dale screeched.

“You do that, Dale,” Asa said. “We’ll probably be ready to take a little break just about then.”

With that matter settled, they played poker with matchsticks for two hours, then adjourned.

“Boy, it’s a good thing I didn’t die,” Dale told his wife when he got home. “That whole committee has given themselves over to the devil. No tellin’ what would have happened if I hadn’t been there.”

“I didn’t think you’d be gone that long. I was starting to worry. How are you feeling?” Dolores asked him.

“I tell you what, this new heart is a champion. I don’t know who it belonged to, but the Lord sure did bless him with a good ticker. I feel better than I’ve felt in years. Think I might even start up my Scripture eggs ministry again.”

“Let’s not overdo it, honey. You don’t want to overextend yourself.”

Cleaning up after the laying hens Dale had kept in their basement had soured Dolores on poultry evangelism, and she’d been vastly relieved when the Lord, in His inscrutable ways, had snuffed them out.

Dolores changed the subject. “You know, we haven’t even met the donor family. I wish we knew who they were so we could thank them properly.”

Despite his disappointment at not being able to fire the Furnace Committee, Dale was feeling magnanimous. “Why not let’s call the hospital tomorrow and see if they can arrange a meeting? It might cheer them up to see what good use I’m making of my new heart.”

“Let’s do it,” Dolores agreed.

“Say, Sam Gardner didn’t call, did he?”

“Phone hasn’t rang all evening.”

“Huh. Frank said he’d have him call me. He must have forgotten. I’ll call him.”

“Honey, it’s nearly eleven. He’s probably in bed.”

“Oh, he’ll want to talk with me. It’s about the sermon he gave on Sunday.”

Dale dialed Sam’s house.

“Hello,” Sam answered rather groggily, after eight rings.

“Dale here. Just wanted to go over your sermon with you. Been a little concerned. Don’t get me wrong, I think you need to talk about grace every now and again, but I’m concerned you’re letting sinners off the hook. Thinking maybe it’s time you preached on Romans 3:10.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Dale. Thanks for your suggestion.”

“‘None is righteous, not one.’ Can’t go wrong with that verse,” Dale said. “I tell you, Sam, if you only knew what sinners there were in this town, some of them right in our own church, you’d think twice about preaching on this grace stuff.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Dale. Can I go back to sleep now?”

“Not just yet. I’ve got a few more verses I want to share with you.”

“Why don’t you write them down and bring them by the office tomorrow. No, wait, don’t do that. Just put them in the mail. I’ll be looking forward to getting them, Dale. You take care now. Good night.” And with that, Sam hung up the phone.

Dale brushed his teeth, put on his pajamas, and slid into bed next to Dolores.

What a day, he thought. He’d prophesied against the Nagles and their dalliance with Hollywood liberals, written an editorial against Bill Clinton and the Catholics, was on his way to restoring the Furnace Committee to its former glory, and had urged Sam to crack the whip on some sinners.

He pulled the blankets around himself, thanked God for his strong new heart, whose previous owner was obviously a God-fearing Christian, snuggled in next to Dolores, and then fell asleep dreaming of his Scripture eggs and the numerous heathens they would bring to the Lord.