Just Shy of Harmony Read online

  “I’m not meaning to be vain,” Dale said, “but I think I should be in charge of the Scripture egg project. I think the Lord has laid this on my heart. Maybe I ought to call Sam and tell him I want to be in charge.”

  “It’s nearly midnight. Don’t you think you should wait until morning?”

  “Naw, this can’t wait. Besides, he’s a minister. He’s used to getting phone calls late at night.”

  Dale released the catch on the chair, rose up from his recliner, and walked to the phone in the kitchen to dial Sam’s number.

  Sam answered on the eighth ring.

  “Sam, this is Dale. Say, I’ve been thinking about our Scripture egg project. I want to be in charge. I believe the Lord’s laid this on my heart.”

  They talked for a while, then Dale hung up the phone and walked back into the living room to sit down.

  “Boy, that Sam sure is cranky,” Dale told his wife. “Have you noticed that lately? He nearly bit my head off. If you ask me, he was downright rude.”

  “Well, honey, it just goes to show that not everyone has a servant’s heart like you do.”

  Dale nodded. “I’ve always tried to be of service.”

  “That’s what I love about you.”

  Dale and his wife had been married nearly forty years. They met at the Ozark School of the Scriptures in 1958, where he’d taken classes on how to be a pastor and she’d studied how to be a pastor’s wife. After school they married and Dale took a church, but it didn’t work out, so he quit.

  They moved to Harmony, where Dale began selling insurance and Mrs. Dale Hinshaw joined the Friendly Women’s Circle. Not many people know her real name, which is Dolores. When she married, she folded her personality into Dale’s and became Mrs. Dale Hinshaw. That’s how she introduces herself. They raised three sons—Raymond Dale, Harold Dale, and Robert Dale. When the boys were little, the Hinshaws went to Mount Rushmore one summer. Five years ago, Dale bought a bass boat. Living the dream. But now Dale is thinking of retiring. His customers are dying off, and he hasn’t been able to replace them.

  He sits in his wood-paneled office at his green metal desk, underneath the Farmer’s Mutual Insurance calendar, waiting for the door to swing open and the bell to tinkle. But the bell isn’t tinkling much these days. He suspects people are buying their insurance off the Internet. He sees commercials on television about Internet insurance companies.

  “Will you look at that,” he says to his wife. “You think if a tornado knocks your house down, those Silicone Valley people will come see you? You think they’ll sponsor a Little League team? You think they’ll send you a windshield scraper? You think they’ll come visit you in the hospital when you’re sick and dying? Not a chance.”

  Dale visits all his customers who are in the hospital. It’s almost like being a pastor. He sits in a chair beside their bed and reads from the Bible about the Father’s house having many mansions. Even if the people aren’t dying. Even if they’re just there to have their tonsils removed. He told his wife, “There’s something about lying in a hospital bed that turns your mind toward the eternal.”

  Dale has never told anyone in Harmony that he had been a pastor. He and his wife have never talked about it. He feels guilty and ashamed. He feels he let the Lord down, that he gave up too quickly. He fears God is angry with him. But when he visits his customers in the hospital, the guilt eases and he feels at peace, as if he’s doing what he was meant to do.

  I should’ve stuck with the ministry, he tells himself.

  He thinks about retiring from the insurance business and going back in the ministry. On Sunday mornings, he sits in his pew and listens to Sam preach and thinks, I could do better. All I need is the chance to prove myself.

  He believes the Scripture egg project is that chance, that it’s God’s way of opening a door for him.

  The week following Goal-Setting Sunday, Dale and his wife spent their evenings sitting at the kitchen table writing out Scripture verses on tiny slips of paper.

  Dale thumbed through his Bible, looking for short verses that could be easily digested.

  They wrote lots of Jesus wept verses. And The wages of sin is death. If he printed especially small, he could fit This is the day the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it onto the little slip. That was Dale’s favorite verse of all. He imagined unbelievers finding that verse in their morning egg, having their hearts stirred, and coming to the Lord.

  The hardest part, Dale surmised, would be getting the chickens to eat the slips of paper. After that, it was all downhill.

  He talked about it with Asa Peacock down at the Coffee Cup Restaurant one morning in early May. Asa raised chickens and was an expert on all matters fowl, but he’d never heard of anyone finding a piece of paper in an egg yolk.

  “Oddest thing I ever heard,” Asa said. “You say you read about it in Ripley’s Believe It or Not?”

  “That’s right. A man cracked open an egg and there was a piece of paper in the yolk with a name and phone number printed on it. He called the number and it was a woman in Illinois and they ended up getting married.”

  “Oddest thing I ever heard.”

  Dale stirred his coffee, then set his spoon on the napkin. “Asa, I just really believe the Lord is wanting me to move forward on this. I don’t know, it’s kinda hard to explain, but I feel His hand is on me. Can you help me?”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “I need to borrow one of your laying hens,” Dale said. “I gotta run some experiments.”

  Asa said, “Sure, I can give you a laying hen.”

  “I’ll take good care of it.”

  Asa brought him a chicken the next morning. At first, Dale kept it in his garage, but it kept escaping, so he put it in his cellar. Dale and his wife could hear the hen at night while they were lying in bed. They could hear it scratching around in the dirt in the crawlspace behind the furnace, looking for worms. So the next morning, Dale went to Grant’s Hardware and bought chicken wire and built a pen for the laying hen, next to the furnace.

  After a few days, when the chicken was relaxed, he tried to feed it a piece of paper. It wouldn’t eat it at first, so Dale tried putting peanut butter on it, but it didn’t work. The chicken liked the peanut butter, but it stuck to the roof of its beak. Then Dale tried dabbing maple syrup on the paper, and the chicken ate it right down.

  Dale fed the hen one This is the day the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it and one Jesus wept.

  That very night the chicken laid an egg, which Dale cracked open the next morning for his breakfast. There was a piece of paper in the yolk. As he fished the paper from the egg, Dale’s hands trembled. He prayed a quiet prayer, “Thank you, Lord, thank you for this opportunity to serve you.”

  He unfolded the paper and read, This is the day Jesus wept.

  Dale tried not to be discouraged. He told his wife, “I think the Lord’s testing me to see whether or not I’ll stay the course.”

  He worked out the glitches. Had it all figured out. The shorter the verse the better, and only one verse at a time. He built another pen, added two more chickens, and soon was producing three Scripture eggs a day, which he distributed to the Catholics and the Masons. “Here, have an egg,” he told them, handing them an egg.

  He wanted nine more laying hens, but Asa Peacock couldn’t spare any more, so Dale began looking for venture capitalists—Christian businessmen who not only loved the Lord but also knew a good business deal when they saw one.

  “Basically,” he told them, “what we have here is a monopoly. We’re the only folks in the U.S. of A. making Scripture eggs. The sky’s the limit.”

  But they lacked Dale’s vision, and he came up dry.

  Then, late one Saturday afternoon, Ellis Hodge came to plow Dale’s garden. Every May, Ellis drives his tractor into town to plow the gardens. All winter long people have been thumbing through seed catalogs, yearning for the feel of warm earth. By early April they can’t wait. They get
out their shovels and try to turn the soil, but after a half hour they are tired and decide to wait for Ellis to come through after he’s plowed his fields. He drives up and down the streets of town. If you want your garden plowed, you wave him down and for ten dollars he’ll plow your garden. By the time Ellis got to Dale’s house in late afternoon, his pockets were jammed with money.

  He plowed Dale’s garden, then asked Dale about his Scripture egg project.

  “I need an investor,” Dale told him. “Someone with vision and a heart for the Lord.”

  Ellis had been looking for a good investment. He’d been reading in the newspaper of the new Internet millionaires. Ellis was not a greedy man, but if he could make a little money and serve the Kingdom, then why not? Plus, he had a daughter to think of now. He needed a legacy, something to leave her.

  He asked Dale, “How do you know the eggs have Scripture in them?”

  “Some things we just have to take on faith.”

  “You got that right.”

  Ellis gave Dale sixty dollars to buy nine laying hens and chicken wire. His investment bought him 49 percent ownership in the Scripture egg business.

  Now Dale had twelve chickens going. All of them good layers. Dale told his wife, “It’s like they know they’re doing the Lord’s work.”

  He stored the eggs in his refrigerator and every Saturday he loaded up five dozen eggs, climbed in his car, sat behind the wheel, and prayed, “Lord, these are your eggs. Just show me where you want them. Lead me, Lord.”

  Then he would begin driving and passing out eggs, and he wouldn’t come home until the eggs were gone.

  Dale’s dream was to go to Salt Lake City to pass out eggs to the Mormons, or to maybe stand outside a Kingdom Hall up in the city and pass out eggs as the Jehovah’s Witnesses left their services.

  “Here, have an egg. Take two—they’re small.”

  He wished he had someone to help him. He wished Sam would help him, but Sam didn’t seem very interested. Dale wondered about Sam.

  He told his wife, “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not judging Sam. It’s just that he doesn’t seem on fire for the Lord. I’ve asked him several times now to preach on the Scripture egg project, and he won’t do it. I know he grew up here and I know folks like him, but I don’t see much faith there.”

  When Ellis Hodge gave him the sixty dollars, Dale took it as a sign that God wanted the Scripture egg project to go forward. He sat in his pew the next Sunday morning and was moved to tears thinking about it—a ministry of his very own after all these years!

  He’d begun to worry that the Lord was done with him. But now, in the autumn of his life, God had given him another chance.

  Not everyone shared his enthusiasm. One day Sam was complaining to Miriam Hodge about the Scripture egg project. She assured him, “Dale might be a little odd, but even odd people need to feel useful.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Sam said. “I need to be more charitable. I just wish he’d stop pestering the Catholics.”

  “Yes, I should probably speak to him about that.”

  Often, Dale would stand during the Quaker silence and talk about how God was using his Scripture eggs. The people would smile and, after worship, shake his hand and encourage him.

  Miriam reminded Sam they were Quakers, after all, and we should accept the idea that people might feel led to do something odd. And who’s to say, in the economy of God, what is peculiar and what is not? Oddity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What one person rejects as lunacy, another reveres as truth.

  Three

  When a Man Loves a Woman

  Kyle Weathers returned to Harmony this past spring and is back cutting hair, after being gone a couple years. He’d closed his shop and moved to California to see a woman he’d met on the Internet in a hairstylists’ chat room. But it didn’t work out and now he’s back home and not talking about what happened, despite dogged efforts to uncover the sordid details.

  Most of the men were glad to have Kyle back. They were looking chopped up from cutting their own hair. Some of the more progressive men had gone to Kathy at the Kut ’N’ Kurl. At the time, it seemed a drastic step, to have your hair cut in a beauty shop. The men were a little uneasy at first, but Kathy is easy on the eyes and she runs her hands through your hair to plump it up. You’re sorry when the haircut is finished. Kyle never runs his hands through your hair, and you wouldn’t want him to. You’d look at him kind of funny if he did.

  Another difference is that Kathy asks how you want your hair cut. Kyle has one haircut he gives to all the men—a buzz cut with whitewalls. One-Style Kyle, they call him.

  Kathy asks how you want your hair cut, and if you aren’t sure, she offers suggestions of haircuts she’s seen in the movies.

  “Honey, you remind me of Harrison Ford in a rugged and handsome kind of way. Let’s try his Raiders of the Lost Ark look.”

  Or she might say, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like that new James Bond guy? With the right haircut, you could be his twin.”

  Kyle would never do that, and the only person you look like when Kyle is done cutting your hair is Sergeant Carter from Gomer Pyle. But Kyle does have his merits, one of them being his ability to keep a secret, which is why Wayne Fleming told him about being in love with Deena Morrison.

  Deena had moved to town the year before, fresh from law school. Twenty-five years old and the picture of beauty. She’d opened a law practice, but people were suspicious of a beautiful woman lawyer and her practice folded after a few months. That’s when she opened the Legal Grounds Coffee Shop. She sold coffee and answered any two legal questions for ten dollars.

  Wayne loves her but he wants it kept quiet, on account of he’s still married, though he hasn’t seen his wife for over a year. She ran off with a trucker, and he hasn’t heard from her. At least that’s the rumor going around town. It’s just him and the kids in their trailer east of town. Wayne feels guilty even thinking about Deena, being a married man and all, but it can’t be helped. She’s so nice, and he’s so lonely.

  So when he was in Kyle’s shop getting his hair cut and it was just the two of them in there and the subject turned to women, Wayne let it slip.

  It was the music that loosened his tongue. Ever since Kyle returned from California, he’s been listening to old love songs on his record player in the barbershop. He plays “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” The 1962 Tony Bennett version. If Kyle is there by himself, he sings along in a wistful voice.

  Kyle told Wayne a little about the woman in California. As he confided his love, he began to weep. When he was in California, he joined a men’s group where he met his inner child and learned to cry.

  Then Percy Sledge sang “When a Man Loves a Woman” and that’s when Wayne, his defenses down, told Kyle about Deena and his feelings for her. “It’s wishful thinking,” Wayne admitted. “What would a beautiful woman like that see in me? She probably doesn’t even know I’m alive.”

  “You’re probably right,” Kyle agreed. “We’re nothing but playthings to them. Toys for the heart, that’s all.”

  “I’m a fool for even thinking about a woman, after what my wife did,” Wayne said.

  But he lies in bed and dreams about marching over to the Legal Grounds Coffee Shop, throwing open the door, striding across the wooden floor, drawing Deena to him, and kissing her flush on her lips. Just like in the movies. Just like Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.

  Then his alarm clock sounds and he gets up, cleans the trailer, and fixes supper for the kids. Then he goes to the Kroger, where he works nights, mopping the floors.

  Wayne has three children—a boy and two girls. Right in a row. Adam is seven, Rachel six, and Kate five. A neighbor lady watches them when Wayne is at work and once a month when Kyle cuts his hair.

  Things are leveling out. When their mommy ran off, the kids kept asking when she’d be home. They’d cry at bedtime. Now they’re kind of forgetting about her. Aft
er a while, Wayne took the old family picture down from the wall, drove the kids into the city to Sears, and had a new photo taken of just him and the kids.

  Sometimes, after the children are in bed and he has the night off, he goes outside and sits on the trailer steps. He leaves the door open so he can hear the kids. Sitting there, listening to the crickets, he contemplates life with Deena. He laughs at the craziness of it. She is a lawyer and owns her own business. I mop floors at the Kroger and live in a trailer with three kids. What do I have to offer that fine woman? Not a thing. Besides, I’m a married man. I need to put her out of my mind.

  But he can’t.

  There’s a college in the next county. Once, on his day off, Wayne drove over and met with a woman in the admissions department. He handed her his high-school records. She gazed at them, then smiled at Wayne and said, “You know, Mr. Fleming, college isn’t for everyone.”

  “I’m a hard worker,” Wayne told her. “I have a family now, and I need to make something of myself. I can do the work.”

  Wayne had always wanted to be a teacher. He had wanted to go to college, but in the summer after high school he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant. They were married, and Wayne went to work instead. That was seven years ago.

  His parents won’t let him forget. They talk about Wayne’s brother, who went to college, and how well he’s doing. “That could have been you,” they tell Wayne.

  The college let him in on probation. He takes a class at a time, one day a week, and will graduate in twelve years. Then he’ll become a teacher and an example to his children.

  He wants better for them. He reads to them and goes without so his kids can wear new clothes and look nice. He takes them to the museums in the city and teaches his son to open the door for his sisters.

  He told them, “We may be poor, but we’re not ill-mannered.”

  The week after his haircut at Kyle’s, Wayne dressed Adam, Rachel, and Kate in their nicest clothes and drove to the Legal Grounds Coffee Shop. It was a Saturday morning. Deena cleaned off a table for them and—to Wayne’s deep joy—sat down at their table, admiring the children. Wayne was faint with bliss.