Almost Friends
Authors: Philip Gulley
A Harmony Novel
This novel is dedicated to Ray Stewart,
a friend of truth
ONTENTS
F
or a one-legged man, Brother Lester the Evangelist was remarkably nimble, pacing back and forth across the front of the meeting room, stopping occasionally to pick up his Bible and wave it in the air like a sword, as if he were decapitating the infidels.
“You could be hit by a truck on your way home tonight,” he bellowed. “You could be lying in your bed just as pretty as you please, and the Lord could raise up a tornado and knock your house flat.” He paused for a moment, letting those horrific visions sink in. “You could be ate up with cancer and not even know it. Gone in the blink of an eye.” He snapped his fingers. The sound reverberated across the room like a gunshot, causing Miriam Hodge, seated in the fourth row, to flinch.
“And don’t think for a moment that your pretty clothes and your fancy homes and your college educations and big bank accounts will help you on the Day of Judgment. No siree, bob.”
Bob Miles, jolted from slumber by the mention of his name, looked wildly about as Brother Lester continued. “Now is the day of decision. Right now, while you’re still able.”
Pastor Sam Gardner sat behind the pulpit, gripping the armrests of his chair, his eyes closed, praying fervently for Brother Lester to wind down. In lieu of that, he would settle for the meetinghouse to be flattened by a tornado; anything to bring Brother Lester’s dreadful preachments to an end.
Sam’s wife, Barbara, sat with their two sons in the fifth row, a glazed look on her face. This was the last night of the revival, and she’d begged to stay home. She’d only relented when Sam had reminded her that it was healing night, and Brother Lester had promised to make the lame walk and the blind see.
Regrettably, when a healing service is advertised in the newspaper, blind people are left out of the loop. Brother Lester took a stab at healing Asa Peacock of his nearsightedness, but apparently Asa’s heart wasn’t in it, and he left the healing service still wearing his glasses. Brother Lester had modest success healing Bea Majors’s bunion. She skipped up and down the aisle and pronounced herself cured, but people had come expecting a more flamboyant miracle and were clearly disenchanted.
The revival concluded with a Sunday morning service. Brother Lester recounted the loss of his leg—a near escape involving cannibals in the heart of Africa. They’d gnawed his right calf down to the bone before he’d managed to get away. Gangrene had set in, and he’d lost his leg below his knee. His artificial leg was a bit short, causing him to list to the side.
Otherwise, Brother Lester was in fine form. He took a swipe at the Supreme Court, counseled the women to forsake pants, and said Hindus wouldn’t be starving if they’d eat some of their cows. “The problem is, they think a cow might be their uncle in another life, and who wants to eat their uncle? Not me, that’s for sure. So now they’re starving, and their false religion is to blame.”
Sam’s head began to throb. What this had to do with the Christian faith, he wasn’t sure.
Brother Lester paused from his sermonizing and cocked his head, as if listening to a voice only he could hear. “The Lord wants to know how come this church has a Furnace Committee and a Chicken Noodle Committee, but doesn’t have an Evangelism Committee.”
Dale Hinshaw, who had invited Brother Lester to revive them over the objections of the church’s elders, reddened, clearly embarrassed at being affiliated with such indifferent believers, and even though it was a rhetorical question, he blurted out from the front row, “Tell the Lord it’s not my fault. I’ve been telling ’em for years we need an Evangelism Committee. I even offered to head it up myself.”
Brother Lester turned to glare at Sam. “Woe to the church that’s lost its heart for helping the lost.”
Sam was genuinely fond of the lost. It was the folks who were found who taxed his patience. He sat in his chair, his head resting in his hands, willing Brother Lester’s rant to come to an end. He prayed for a bolt of lightning to strike Brother Lester. It wouldn’t kill him. A man with a wooden leg is safely
grounded, after all, an overlooked benefit of amputation. And as long as the Lord was throwing down lightning bolts, maybe He could singe Dale’s eyebrows. That would set the two men back a notch or two. Sam smiled at the thought.
Fortunately, after a few pointed warnings about the fast-approaching apocalypse, Brother Lester took his seat next to Sam. They sat in silence. Sam studied him with sideways glances. Brother Lester was dressed to the nines, sporting a gold ring big enough to gag a camel. He was the kind of guy who preached about the end times, then took up an offering, which he invested in twenty-year bonds.
Sam sat quietly, thinking of Brother Lester, trying not to resent him. This frantic, hyper man with his private demons driving him from one place to another. Sam felt blessed that his brokenness was not quite as visible, that he was able to hide his imperfections—his nagging fears of worthlessness—under a veneer of religious duty.
Sam heard a rustle of noise, then the clearing of a throat. He looked up just as Dale Hinshaw rose to his feet to speak in the Quaker silence.
“I want to thank Brother Lester for coming here all the way from the deep jungles of Africa to bring us the Word. I think the Lord’s anointed him mightily. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this church needs an Evangelism Committee, and I’m volunteering right here and now to be in charge of it, even if I got to do all the work myself.”
He paused and looked around expectantly, as if hoping the congregation would burst into applause, then lift him on their
shoulders and carry him to the pulpit, where they would lay hands on him, praising God for such a man.
“You do that, Dale,” Fern Hampton called out. “Go right ahead.”
That is how Dale Hinshaw was installed as the Chief Evangelist of Harmony Friends Meeting, unleashing a series of events not even the most clairvoyant among them could have anticipated, trials that would test Sam to the core and find him sadly lacking.
I
t was a warm summer afternoon, and Sam Gardner was sitting in a lawn chair behind the Dairy Queen, eating an ice cream cone dipped in crunchies and visiting with Oscar Purdy.
“School bonds,” Oscar said sagely. “Five percent a year, and you just sock it away. Forget it’s there. That’s the secret to retirement. How do you think me and Livinia got into that trailer park in Florida? School bonds, that’s how.”
“I have my retirement with the Quakers,” Sam said. “I’ll get about two hundred a month, plus my Social Security.”
“You got a little nest egg set aside?” Oscar asked.
“I have some silver dollars my Grandpa gave me,” Sam said. “And a coin collection. You know those quarters that have the different states on them? I got one of each of those.”
“Thing is, you get those school bonds when you’re young and you’re set for life. Compound interest, that’s the trick.”
“And there’s that rocking chair Barbara got from her grandmother,” Sam said. “That’s probably worth a little something.”
“A fella can’t start planning too early for retirement,” Oscar said. “I bought my first bond when I was nineteen. Cost me one thousand dollars. Just kept plowing that money back into bonds and now that thousand dollars is worth eight thousand. Tax-free too. Won’t have to pay Uncle Sam a dime.”
Oscar leaned back in his chair, smiling at his immense good fortune. “Yep, it pays to start planning early. What’s your plan, Sam?”
“I was kind of hoping the Lord would take care of me. Maybe lead some rich Dairy Queen owner who’s invested in bonds to take pity on a poor servant of the Lord and help him out.”
“Well, I tell you, Sam, wish I could help you out, but I’m a Methodist and feel I ought to help my own kind first. Hope you don’t mind. Tell you what though, as long as I’m alive, I’ll give you free crunchies on your cones. How’s that?”
“Better than a sharp stick in the eye,” Sam said.
The two men watched the traffic pass by on Highway 36 for a few minutes. Then Oscar, peering at the outside clock on the bank down the street, said, “Time was, a dog could take a nap in the middle of that road. Now the cars just whiz past. Seven in the past three minutes. Where do all these people come from?”
“Must be out-of-towners.”
“If it keeps up, I might have to move,” Oscar said. “Getting too hectic around here to suit me.”
They watched the traffic a while longer. A fly buzzed around Sam’s head, lured by the strawberry shampoo his wife bought by the gallon at Kivett’s Five and Dime.
“Did I ever tell you my great-grandmother was a Quaker?” Oscar asked.
“No, you never mentioned that.”
“Well, she was.”
“I don’t doubt it for a minute.”
Oscar stretched in his chair and let out a contented sigh. “Yes, she surely was. But she married a Methodist and joined up with them, and that’s how I ended up a Methodist.”
“So if your Quaker great-grandmother hadn’t consorted with a Methodist, you’d be a Quaker and I wouldn’t have to worry about retirement?”
“That about sums it up,” Oscar said.
“Isn’t it funny, I mean, just think about it. Your great-grandmother falls in love with a man. Who knows why. She could just as easily have fallen in love with someone else. But she doesn’t. She falls in love with a Methodist without giving any thought to how it might affect others. And as a result, here I am, a hundred years later, barely scraping by because the Dairy Queen tithe is going to the Methodists.”
“Yeah, when you put it that way, it is kind of curious, isn’t it?”
“That’s my life story,” Sam said wistfully. “Wrong place, wrong time.”
“I’d have made a poor Quaker,” Oscar said.
“You think?”
“Yeah, I’m not too sure about that pacifist stuff. I was in the Big War, you know.”
“My secretary, Frank, went to war and he’s a Quaker,” Sam pointed out.
“But, growing up, he was a Baptist,” Oscar said. “All his people were Baptist. He didn’t become a Quaker till after the war.”
“Tell you what, Oscar. If you become a Quaker, we’ll waive the pacifist clause for you. And if a war comes along, you can go fight if you want. Just so long as you tithe.”
“Too old to fight now. Besides, who’d run the Dairy Queen if I was off at war?”
“Well, you got me there.”
“Not that I would shirk my patriotic duty, mind you. It’s just that I have a responsibility here. People count on this place being open. They want an ice cream cone, and they expect me to be here to make them one. Why, if I weren’t here, they’d have to drive all the way to Cartersburg on that narrow, twisty road to get one. Might even have a wreck and die, just because I was gone. No, my duty’s here, Sam.”
“I can see that now, Oscar.”
Sam rose from his lawn chair and stretched. “Well, I’m off.”
“Where you going?”
“Over to Grant’s Hardware to look at the pocketknives.”
“Good seeing you, Sam.”
“Nice seeing you, Oscar. You take care now.”
“Will do. And Sam, don’t forget, school bonds.”
“Got it,” Sam said, tapping the side of his head.
In all the years Sam Gardner has lived in Harmony, he’s never actually known anyone to retire, except for Miss Fishbeck, his
sixth-grade teacher, who retired and moved to Las Vegas to help her sister, or so she said. It wasn’t until after she left that people remembered she was an only child. They have no idea what she’s up to out there but suspect she isn’t teaching Sunday school.
People, of course, talk about retirement, then come up with a reason for avoiding it.
“My cousin, he retired after working forty-two years for the electric company, and his first day off he had a heart attack and fell over dead, just like that.”
This is Harvey Muldock’s unvarying excuse whenever his wife, Eunice, nags at him to turn their Plymouth dealership over to their children so she and Harvey can move to Florida for the winter.
“Your cousin weighed three hundred and fifty pounds and smoked like a chimney. He’s lucky he made it that long,” Eunice points out.
But Harvey isn’t taking any chances.
If one is forced to retire, if he has no say in the matter, then he must volunteer to head up a committee at the church, fill an office at the Odd Fellows Lodge, or work part-time for Uly Grant at the hardware store. Staying home to watch TV is not an option, unless one has a thick hide and can endure the ridicule: “Must be nice to just sit around and do nothing. I wish I could do that. How do you get a job like that anyway?”
When Fern Hampton retired from teaching school, she took over the Friendly Women’s Circle and has been running it ever since, even though Sam’s mom had been elected president
the past four years. Fern is intractable, an unyielding oak of a woman. Hit her with an ax, which Sam has been tempted to do many times, and it would bounce back and smack you in the head.
The right people never move to Las Vegas.
Once a month Fern marches into Sam’s office and complains that the younger women in the church aren’t pulling their weight. “They don’t join the Circle. They don’t make noodles. They barely show up for the Chicken Noodle Dinner.”
“Most of them work in the daytime,” Sam points out. “Maybe if you were to hold the meetings at night, more of them could come.”
“The ladies don’t like being out at night. You know that.” To hear Fern tell it, Harmony after dark is inner-city Detroit. Murderers lurking on every corner, when mostly it’s just Stanley Farlow taking his wife’s poodle out for a tinkle.
The year before, Fern Hampton had urged the town board to sponsor a “Take Back the Streets Night,” when everyone would leave their porch lights on and visit with their neighbors after dark. Fern had read about it in a magazine at the Kut ’n’ Kurl. “That’s what this town needs,” she’d said. “Got to stand up to the criminal element.” But taking back the streets implies someone has stolen them in the first place.
Nevertheless, the town board agreed, and everyone left their porch lights on, which gave some teenagers sufficient light to carry Fern Hampton’s porch furniture up to her roof after she’d gone to bed. When word got out, there were letters to the
Herald,
written by people with short memories. People
who, in their youth, had tipped over outhouses, smeared Limburger cheese on the radiators at the school, and emptied the town water tank onto Main Street. When the mayhem isn’t their idea, they’re dead set against it. But get them together at a class reunion and they’ll chortle and snort at their misspent youth, when they did things that would get them jailed today.
Sam’s church is full of these people, most of them useful citizens whom he genuinely loves. But a handful have caused him to study world religions, wondering if the grass might be greener on the other side of the theological fence. As far as he knows, the Buddhists don’t have a Friendly Women’s Circle. Or Dale Hinshaw.
He wanted to suggest to Fern that if she would retire from the Circle, it would open a slot for one of the younger women. But he held his tongue. Besides, Quakers seldom step aside. They have to be eased out or die. Fern has hinted that if they named the kitchen after her, she would retire from the Circle, but no one believes her. Her mother was the president of the Circle and in her dying words passed the legacy on to Fern. She made Fern promise she’d keep the presidency in the family. The only impediment to the Hampton dynasty is that Fern never married. She says she draws hope from the biblical story of Sarah, who bore a child at the age of ninety.
While Sam was at the library studying world religions, he saw Fern in the science section, over in the 500s, reading a book about artificial insemination. She’d once expressed the
hope to Sam that God might miraculously impregnate her in order to continue the Hampton legacy, but God has not seen fit and no one’s volunteered. Her hopes for a miracle dashed, she has now apparently turned to science.
Retirement and resignation are ways of letting go, something most people find difficult to do. So these Quakers labor on, some long after their usefulness, many to the point of annoyance. “Well, you do it however you want to,” Fern tells the ladies whenever they float a new idea, and then proceeds to sabotage their every effort.
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.