Almost Friends (2 page)

T
he following Sunday morning found Dale Hinshaw at the meetinghouse, agitated over what seemed to him to be Sam’s clear departure from the gospel. It wasn’t the first time he’d suspected Sam of sacrilege and likely wouldn’t be the last. Sam had preached on evangelism that morning, suggesting that the gospel was best told with one’s life, not one’s lips.

The life-versus-lips controversy was not a new one at Harmony Friends Meeting. It had raged for years, popping up every couple months in one form or another. Dale came down on the lip side, while Sam was squarely in the life camp. Dale believed you had to tell people the gospel. It wasn’t enough to live it. The hay had to be put down where the goats could get it. Then the goats needed to accept Jesus,
or else.

The lips-versus-life battle erupted in the usual places, mostly during hymn selection. To Dale’s great displeasure, Sam chose songs like “Take My Life and Let It Be,” which Dale believed smacked of works-righteousness. He was a big fan of “I Love
to Tell the Story” and “We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations.” Bea Majors, the organist and a fellow lips advocate, felt free to change the hymns at the last minute if they didn’t meet her theological criteria. When Sam insisted they sing a works song, she gave in, grudgingly, then warned the congregation not to be seduced by the social gospel, which the liberals put forth because they couldn’t stand the rigors of true faith.

Over the years, Dale had taken careful notes on Sam’s sermons, gathering evidence for the tribunal that would eventually charge Sam with heresy. His notes from today’s sermon were typical:

Dale tuned out Sam’s sermon halfway through and began writing a jingle for the Mighty Men of God evangelism contest, whose first prize was a month of free telephone Scripture greetings. Every household in the winner’s locale would be phoned every day and greeted with a Scripture that would
convict of them of their unrighteousness and bring them to repentance.

Dale was giddy at the thought of the entire town being hailed each day with a message from the Lord. He paused from his jingle writing to pray for God’s guidance.

The jingle not only had to convict the depraved of their sin; it had to be short enough to fit on matchbooks, which could then be distributed in taverns across the nation, where the sinners set up shop.

Seated in the quiet, still smarting from Sam’s sermon, Dale felt the fog lift from his mind and the perfect jingle descended, like a gift from above. Neatly penned underneath his reminder to kill Sam was a jingle he’d first thought of years before, when, inspired by Burma Shave ads, he’d erected signs throughout town calling his fellow Harmonians to the Lord.

If that wouldn’t bring saloon-goers to their knees, nothing would.

Dale went home and rifled through his past copies of the
Mighty Men of God
newsletter until he found the ad in the Easter edition of the newsletter. Though it was the Sabbath and he wasn’t supposed to work, he knew the Lord would understand, these being the end times and all. He sat at his Corona typewriter and pecked out his jingle like a chicken grubbing for bugs. He folded it carefully, affixed an
In God We Trust
postage stamp to the envelope, walked it down to the post office, and deposited it in the mailbox, where Clarence, the mailman, would be sure to see it first thing in the morning.

Pleased by his faithful obedience to the Lord, Dale spent the rest of the day seated on his front porch surveying his latest marvel—a wooden windmill he’d constructed, which, when the blades turned, generated enough electricity to power a lightbulb at the top of the windmill. Underneath the lightbulb, he’d painted the words
Ye Are the Light of the World!
On windy nights, people from all over town drove past to see the blades spin and the light shine in the darkness.

Charles Gardner, Sam’s father, had long maintained that Sunday was the one day when sitting around doing nothing didn’t have to be excused. Indeed, sitting around doing nothing was a sign of one’s commitment to the sixth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.” The stores closed, even Kivett’s Five and Dime, though Ned Kivett was not a churchgoer and hadn’t been since the late 1970s, when the ladies of the Circle began buying the church’s toilet paper from the Kroger, where it was eleven cents cheaper.

It’s thirty years later, and Ned has still not forgiven them. Once a month he unloads on Sam. “All the years I’ve been a member of this church, teaching the high-school class and sponsoring a Little League team and setting up tables for the Chicken Noodle Dinner, and this is how you repay me? You people claim to be Christian, but I don’t know. You think if St.

Peter had owned a Five and Dime, Jesus would have forsaken his friend to save a little money? You oughta be ashamed.”

Ned was a tither, and the Five and Dime had prospered over the years. Whenever anyone moaned about the church’s money problems, it was all Sam could do not to mention that the Circle’s desire to save eleven cents had cost the church a hundred thousand dollars, some of which could have plumped up his salary. Instead, Ned wakes up early on Sundays, loads his pickup truck, and goes fishing at Raccoon Lake. Except in the winter, when he and his wife drive over to Cartersburg for the Sunday buffet at the Holiday Inn.

Sam would love a secular Sunday, but there was little chance of that. Even when he didn’t speak, he was expected to be at church. The people who were most adamant about not working on Sundays never seemed to mind Sam working on Sundays.

He brought it up with his wife on their Sunday afternoon walk. “I tell you what drives me crazy. They not only work me like a borrowed mule; they’re all the time saying how nice it must be to only have to work one day a week. Next time anyone says that to me, I’m gonna punch him in the nose.”

They rounded the corner and walked down Main Street, past all the closed stores. “Am I the only one in this town who works on Sunday?”

“For crying out loud, Sam, you’re a minister. Do you expect them to move worship to Thursdays, just so you can have a free weekend?”

“And what would be wrong with that? Most people get off work on Fridays and have the whole weekend ahead of them to enjoy. I have to spend Saturdays getting ready for Sunday, then spend Sunday at church.”

“You get Mondays off,” Barbara pointed out.

“Unless someone is in the hospital or has an emergency or wants me to do something, which is just about every week.”

“Sam Gardner, you are so cynical. Why can’t you be more positive?”

“I’ve been talking with the other ministers. We’re thinking of going on strike until they move worship to a different day,” Sam said.

“You mean have a different day be the Sabbath?”

“That’s right.”

“Then the new day would be the Sabbath and you’d still have to work.”

Sam paused for a moment, then frowned. “Well, I guess we hadn’t thought about that.”

“You have some real Einsteins in that ministerial association,” Barbara laughed.

“What I need,” Sam announced, “is a sabbatical. They’re supposed to give you one every seven years. I’ve been doing this eighteen years without hardly a break. Eighteen years!”

Barbara reached over and took his hand. Her voice softened. “Why not ask them for some time off, honey. You could spend time with your Dad. You’re always saying you don’t see him enough. And he’s getting older. He won’t be around forever. Maybe you could take a little vacation with
him. Go visit some hardware stores or whatever it is you men like to do. Maybe even take the boys with you. They’ll be off to college before you know it.”

“Wouldn’t work,” Sam said. “They’d never let me off. And if they did, they wouldn’t pay me. Can’t afford to take time off without pay.”

“Maybe I could get a temporary job. Deena’s told me I could come work full-time at the Legal Grounds anytime I wanted.”

“Nah, I’ll be all right. You know me, I just like having something to moan about.”

They ambled past Dale Hinshaw’s house. Dale waved to them from the front porch.

“Don’t stop,” Sam whispered.

“Hey, Sam. You’re just the man I needed to see.”

“I can’t go anywhere,” Sam muttered under his breath.

Barbara spoke to Dale. “Perhaps it could wait until Tuesday. Sam’s off the clock right now.”

Dale went on, oblivious. “I’ve been thinking about this Evangelism Committee we’ve got going, and I think it’s time we got a little more serious about things. I got this idea I want to tell you about.”

“Not today, Dale,” Barbara said. “No more work for Sam today. And tomorrow’s his day off. But he’d be happy to talk with you on Tuesday.”

A pouty look crossed Dale’s face. “One of these one-houra-week Christians, eh?”

“He’ll see you on Tuesday,” Barbara told Dale, taking Sam by the elbow and steering him down the sidewalk. “There
are days I’d like to choke that man,” she muttered, when they were out of earshot.

Sam figured every member of every Harmony Friends Meeting had entertained the notion of choking Dale Hinshaw at one time or another.

They turned the corner and approached Sam’s parents’ home.

“It looks like they’re taking a nap,” Barbara observed.

“Let’s wake them up.”

They walked up the sidewalk and clomped hard up the wooden stairs to the porch. His parents stirred to life. His father stood and stretched, then sat back down on the swing, sliding over to make room for Sam and Barbara.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Gloria Gardner noted.

“It certainly is,” Sam agreed.

“I’m glad you came by,” his mother said. “I was talking with Fern this morning about fixing up the nursery, and we wanted to know if you could help us paint tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s his day off,” Barbara said.

“It’s not like it’s church work. It’s more like helping your mother. Your father would do it, but he’s been having these bad headaches lately, and the paint fumes make it worse.”

“Feels like someone is just peeling the skin right off my head,” Sam’s dad blurted out. He had a way of describing his headaches that gave everyone else a headache. “It’s like they’ve sawed right through my skull and started beating my brain with a hammer. Man, it hurts.”

“I get the picture,” Sam said. “Can we change the subject?”

“So can you help your poor, saintly mother tomorrow?” his mom asked again.

“Well, it was my day off…” Sam said.

“Day off! What the heck you need a day off for? You only work one day a week as it is. Boy, I wish I had a job like that,” his dad said, then adjusted his pants, which were riding up, stretched one more time, closed his eyes, and resumed his Sabbath slumber.

S
ome people come kicking and screaming to ministry; others seem born for it, slipping into it as easily as a hand slides into a silken glove. For as long as she could remember, Krista Riley had wanted to be a priest, and although her parents had always told her she could be anything she wanted, they apparently hadn’t counted on the pope’s inflexibility on that particular matter.

As a child she would sit and watch the priest holding the host aloft, his face radiant, and she longed to do what he did. The church’s only concession was to let her be an altar girl, which placed her in the vicinity of the altar, but not close enough to satisfy; it was like sitting on the sidelines and never getting to play.

The week she turned thirteen, her grandfather died in their living room, on the hospital bed they’d rented from the drugstore. She’d spent the day holding her grandpa’s hand, wondering how many other people had rented this bed to die on. Everyone else had drifted in and out of the room, uneasy with death, but she had stayed by his side,
strangely at ease, every now and then patting his hand and wiping his brow. By the time the priest had arrived to anoint her grandpa’s pale head and pray for him, Krista knew God had called her to the ministry, just as surely as if Jesus had appeared in the room, pointed an elegant finger at her, and said, “Follow thou me.”

“I want to be a priest,” she’d told her mother that night.

“You can’t. You’re a girl. They don’t allow women to be priests.”

“You’ve always told me I can be anything I want.”

There is a tendency among the young and idealistic to believe if people are simply presented with the facts, they will make a reasonable decision. “I’ve been thinking,” Krista told her mother later that evening, “and unless there’s something you haven’t told me, the big difference between men and women is that men have a…well, you know…and we don’t.”

Her mother blushed.

“I know all about it,” Krista went on. “They told us about it in health class. They have one and we don’t and that’s the big difference. Right?”

“There are others, of course, but I’d say that’s the more obvious one,” her mother admitted.

“So, practically speaking, there’s no good reason to keep a woman from being a priest?”

“That’s right, dear. Though I think it’s written in the Bible that women can’t be priests.”

It took Krista two days to find the verse her mother had mentioned, but it was there, in Paul’s first letter to Timothy,
chapter 2, verse 12: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.”

A careful reading of the verse indicated that, although the Apostle Paul permitted no woman to teach, God’s opinion of women leaders was left unstated. When she pointed this out to her mother, her mother said, “I think they believe the Apostle Paul is speaking for God.”

“But how can they be sure? Isn’t it dangerous to assume someone else is always speaking for God?”

Her mother sighed, then rubbed her temples. “Krista, honey, I love you to death. But these questions of yours give me a headache. Tell you what, honey, why don’t you write our priest a letter and ask him these things?”

But Krista had always been told to go to the top, so she wrote the pope instead.

It was amazingly simple. She wrote the letter on unlined paper, in neat rows and tidy script, expressing her desire to be a priest and wanting to know if the pope might make an exception in her case. “Though I don’t have everything a man has”—she thought he’d know what she meant, so she didn’t elaborate—“I do love God and believe I’m called to spend my life serving Him.” She studied the word
Him
. She didn’t for a moment believe God was a Him, but she let it stand, just so the pope wouldn’t think she was a radical out to make a point.

Then she rode her bicycle to the post office, where they gave her the address for the Vatican, which she carefully copied onto the envelope, before sealing it closed and sliding it down the chute into the bin of stamped mail.

While she waited to hear back from the pope, she practiced being a priest. She conducted three funerals for neighborhood pets and visited Mrs. Harvey, down the street, who’d broken her ankle while carrying in the groceries.

Though Mrs. Harvey had never married and was technically not a Mrs., it seemed odd to call a woman of her age “Miss.” Krista, in addition to being taught she could be anything she wanted and to always go to the top, had also been advised to call adults Mr. or Mrs. Though Mrs. Harvey had a heavy mustache, she was clearly a woman in other respects.

Like Krista, Mrs. Harvey was Catholic, and when Krista told her about wanting to be a priest, the ponderous woman flopped back in her recliner and rolled her eyes heavenward, her many chins quivering in alarm. “You can’t be a priest. They don’t allow it.”

“How come?”

“Because you’re a girl.”

“Could you please explain why that should make a difference?”

Mrs. Harvey frowned. “Should the church change its mind and allow women to be priests, you need to keep something in mind.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s impolite to visit someone in their home under the pretense of consoling them, and then argue religion with them.”

Krista thought for a moment. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. I’m sorry. How is your ankle?”

“Not well at all. The doctor thinks he might have to operate.”

“Would you like me to pray for you?”

“Yes, I suppose there’d be no harm in that.”

Krista laid her hand on Mrs. Harvey’s bruised and swollen ankle. “Dear Lord, thank you for Mrs. Harvey and the gift of her life. Please grant her peace in these arduous days and, if it be your will, heal her ankle. Amen.”

Krista seldom used words like
grant
and
arduous,
but they seemed fitting words for a prayer and, besides, it never hurt to expand one’s vocabulary.

“Thank you, Krista. That was a lovely prayer. I feel better already.” Mrs. Harvey leaned back in her recliner with a contented sigh and closed her eyes.

Krista looked around the room. Beams of sunlight were blazing through the window, lighting up the dust motes. In the next room, Mrs. Harvey’s dog napped under the dining room table, his rib cage rising and falling with a wiffling snore, his whitened muzzle occasionally twitching to the rhythm of a canine dream.

“How old is your dog?” Krista asked.

“Fourteen.”

Krista thought for a moment, calculating figures in her head, then said, “That’s ninety-eight in dog years. If he dies anytime soon, I’ll be happy to do his funeral.”

“Thank you, Krista.”

“It wouldn’t be my first funeral. I’ve done three so far. Two cats and a squirrel.”

“Who had a squirrel?”

“I’m not certain who he belonged to. I found him on the road in front of our house. He was starting to stink, so I had to bury him quick.”

“That was very kind of you,” Mrs. Harvey said. “The animals are God’s children too.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”

“If you had a husband, he could help you,” Krista pointed out. “Why didn’t you ever marry?”

Mrs. Harvey opened her eyes and heaved herself forward in the recliner. “It’s impolite to ask questions about one’s marital status. People might think you’re a gossip, and no one likes a gossip.”

“I was just wondering.”

“Ministers must be discreet. That means you don’t ask people personal questions unless they volunteer the information.”

“People ask me personal questions all the time.”

“You are under no obligation to answer them,” Mrs. Harvey said. “Why do people think every question must be answered? When I was a child, people knew to mind their own business.”

“I think I’ll be going now,” Krista said. “Thank you for letting me visit you.”

“What have you learned today?”

“I learned not to argue theology with people in their homes, that prayer makes you feel better, not to ask personal questions, that no one likes a gossip, that ministers should be
discreet, and not to answer a question just because someone asks it.”

“Very good, Krista. Come back tomorrow and I’ll teach you more.”

“Okay, I’ll see you then.”

But her best friend’s hamster died the next day, so Krista spent the day making funeral arrangements and cheering her friend in her time of loss. It was well after supper before she’d remembered her promise to visit Mrs. Harvey, and by then it was too late. She had the distinct feeling that one of Mrs. Harvey’s rules for clergy concerned the proper hours for visitation.

If she was going to be a priest, she would have to learn to keep better track of her time.

A month passed before she heard back from the Vatican. The letter was in Latin, which she asked her priest to translate. He did, but grew distressed when he discovered one of his parishioners had gone over his head to the pope. “There’s a rule for things like this,” he told her. “First, you ask your parents, and if they can’t help you, you ask me. If I don’t know the answer, we go to the bishop, and if he doesn’t know, we go to the cardinal. You don’t start out with the pope. Now what is it you wanted to know?”

“I think God is calling me to be a priest,” Krista said.

“Impossible,” the priest said. “God doesn’t call women to be priests. It’s against the rules. You think God is going to break His own rules?”

“How do we know that’s God’s rule?”

“We just know, that’s how.”

“Did God tell you that was His rule?”

“A long time ago, many hundreds of years, God told the pope. Then the pope told the cardinals, the cardinals told the bishops, the bishops told the priests, and we told the people.”

“I know that game,” Krista said. “We played it once at school. The teacher whispered something in my ear, and I whispered it to someone else, and it went all around the room. Anyway, by the time it got back to the teacher, it wasn’t anything close to what she’d told me. Maybe God told the pope He wanted women to be priests, but by the time it got to us, it was all mixed up.”

“That doesn’t happen in the church,” the priest said, a hint of exasperation creeping into his voice. “God protects His church from error.”

“What about Galileo?”

“What about Galileo?” the priest asked.

“The church told Galileo he was wrong, but he turned out to be right, which means the church was wrong.”

“Who told you that?”

“My catechism teacher, Sister Therese.”

“Well, there you go,” the priest said, changing the subject. “You could be a nun like Sister Therese.”

“I don’t want to be a nun. I want to be a priest. Sister Therese doesn’t want to be a nun anymore either. She wants to be a priest. She told me so herself.”

The priest mumbled something about relocating Sister Therese to another parish.

For as long as she lived at home, Krista was determined to be a priest, but the church stood firm. So she went to college and became a teacher, and though it was gratifying work, it wasn’t enough, like ordering chocolate ice cream and having to settle for vanilla. It was good, but it wasn’t her first choice.

Even though Krista was not married, the children in her class addressed her as Mrs. Riley. When she turned thirty she stopped correcting them. Occasionally, one of her students would ask her why she didn’t have a husband.

“It’s impolite to ask questions about one’s marital status. People might think you’re a gossip, and no one likes a gossip,” she would tell them.

But it didn’t keep them from wondering.

With nuns in scarce supply, she taught the catechism classes at church. But every Sunday, she longed to stand where the priest stood, elevating the host and reciting the beautiful cadence of the Mass. But no one moves as slowly as those who hoard God’s blessings for themselves, so year after year she sat and watched and kept her calling to herself, lest the ire of fearful souls kill it off.