Life Goes On Read online

  “He always did have a flair for the dramatic.”

  “Don’t forget we have to pick out hymns too,” Johnny said. “Are there any hymns about baseball or ice cream?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. The church tends to confine its subject matter to God.”

  “How about ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’?” Johnny suggested. “It sounds real nice on the organ at the ball park.”

  “That’s probably not appropriate for a funeral. I was thinking of something a bit more dignified.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. How about ‘Now Thank We All Our God’? I always did like that song.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “That makes it sound like we’re glad Oscar died.”

  “Guess I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Johnny conceded. “I suppose you’re right.”

  We picked three hymns, then phoned the organist, Bea Majors, to report our choices. Not that it mattered. When Bea played the organ, everything sounded alike anyway.

  Wednesday morning, the day of the funeral, found Oscar and Livinia in Cincinnati, Ohio, eating breakfast at their hotel restaurant. Oscar was poring over his roadmap. “At this rate, we’ll roll into town a little after ten.”

  “I’m almost dreading it,” Livinia said. “It’ll be work, work, work getting the Dairy Queen opened up. It makes me want to keep on driving.”

  “We gotta go home sometime. We’re late as it is.”

  Coincidentally, that’s the same thing I was thinking. “Where are they with his ashes?” I asked Johnny Mackey. “Has Livinia or Myron even bothered to phone you?”

  “Actually, I haven’t talked with either one of them yet. I’ve been working with Bob Miles.”

  “Well, that’s just fine,” I said. “What if they don’t show up? What if Oscar’s late for his own funeral?”

  “That would be a first for me,” Johnny said. “Folks have generally been real good about showing up for their funerals.”

  At nine-thirty, the funeral home began filling with mourners. With no widow to comfort, they were at a loss for what to do. Johnny and I huddled in his office, where I suggested we postpone the funeral until the deceased and his widow could be present.

  “We can’t do that,” Johnny said. “These people came here expecting a funeral and we have to give them one.”

  So at ten o’clock Bea faded her organ playing to an end, and Johnny Mackey gave me the high sign to begin Oscar’s service.

  As eulogies go, it was a touching one. My voice trembled in all the right places. By the end of my tribute, even the people who’d never much cared for Oscar were dabbing their eyes.

  With no ashes to spread, I invited everyone to join us for the funeral dinner in the meetinghouse basement. People began heading to their cars and were clustered in front of the funeral home when Oscar and Livinia drove past. Oscar bumped the car horn, and Livinia waved to all their friends, who seemed rather puzzled.

  “Wonder who died?” Oscar asked.

  “I bet it was Thelma Darnell,” Livinia said. “Remember? Myron mentioned in his phone call last week that her family had taken her to the hospital.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I wished we’d known. We could’ve sent flowers.”

  “I’ll cook something tonight and take it over to them,” Livinia said.

  Back at the funeral home, we weren’t as happy as we should have been. “Would you look at that,” Fern Hampton grumped. “He didn’t even bother coming to his own funeral. How disrespectful can you get.”

  “Looks like I bought a new suit for nothing,” Asa Peacock commented to Jessie.

  Bob Miles was ecstatic. What a headline this’ll make, he thought. Local Man Comes Back from the Dead!!

  When people fail to do anything newsworthy, the successful journalist must create news, which is how Bob has lasted. What an exhilarating week he’d had! Two magnificent headlines, a half-page obituary, and a copy of my eulogy in his suit pocket, just in time for this week’s Herald.

  All in all, people took it well. If schools had fire drills and the armies had battle drills, it was probably prudent for a town to have an occasional funeral drill. We talked about it during the funeral meal in the meetinghouse basement.

  “That was a fine job you did,” Ellis Hodge told me, patting me on the back. “You had me reaching for my hankie a time or two. I’m just sorry Oscar and Livinia weren’t there to hear it.”

  “Never hurts to practice,” I said.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Ellis agreed.

  The meat loaf was superb—moist and flavorful. The Friendly Women looked on from the kitchen, beaming.

  There were several who commented that it has been the finest funeral the town had seen since Juanita Harmon’s death by stove explosion in 1967. Fine enough to make several persons wish they could expire while the town’s bereavement abilities were at their peak.

  Four

  Home

  When my wife and I had agreed to purchase Dr. Neely’s ancestral home, we had been so taken with the oak trees, brick sidewalks, and porches, we’d failed to notice the flaking paint and the rotten eaves. I don’t do well with heights, but I had, with a little prodding from my wife, been scraping and painting the lower half of the house for the past year whenever I’ve had a spare moment.

  Around the middle of May, I turned my attention to the eaves. I borrowed a ladder from my father and inched my way upward, clinging to the rungs with a white-knuckled grip. I hoped if I could build up enough layers of paint on the wood, I might not have to replace it.

  When I reached the second-story window, my knees began to tremble and I felt dizzy. Barbara was standing at the base of the ladder, holding a sofa cushion in the event I fell, which was looking more probable every moment.

  “Why don’t we hire someone to do this?” she yelled up from the ground.

  “I can do it myself,” I shouted back.

  It would stagger the mind to know how many men in Harmony have perished while saying, “I can do it myself”—that brief, seemingly harmless declaration, followed by an explosion or anguished scream or severed limb.

  I peered at the wood sill beneath the window. It looked spongy. I pulled a screwdriver from my back pocket and began probing. The screwdriver sank in up to its hilt.

  “Remind me to replace this piece,” I called down to Barbara.

  “Do you know how to do that?”

  “No, but I can read a book about it.”

  My books on home repairs are a source of merriment to the other men in town, who consider directions an affront to their masculinity. These men also believe it’s immoral to hire someone to work on their houses so long as they can stand erect. Consequently, most of the houses in town are monuments to the half-finished project.

  Two winters before, Bill Muldock’s roof had sprung a leak. He’d covered the entire roof with blue plastic sheets until the weather was warm enough to reshingle the roof, which he still hasn’t gotten around to doing. Kyle Weathers is his neighbor and thought about complaining to Bill, but then he’d have had to fill in the hole in his own yard from when the sewer pipe had burst the year before.

  Bill had read in a magazine about a new type of roofing material that can be sprayed on using a garden hose, and he’s waiting for Uly Grant to order it in at the hardware store. Kyle isn’t filling in the hole because he’s been thinking of putting in an ornamental pond in that very spot, just as soon as he has time.

  I would be the same way if Barbara didn’t step in and finish the jobs I’d started. As a result, she is well versed in home repair and can often be seen in Grant’s Hardware buying plumbing innards and various tools. I hear about it whenever I visit the Coffee Cup.

  “Say, Sam, I saw your wife buying duct tape last week. What’d you mess up this time?”

  After painting the first level of our home, I decided it would be less embarrassing to hire Ernie Matthews to finish the job than it would be for the Coffee Cup men to drive past, see my wife perched
on the ladder, paintbrush in hand, and taunt me for the remainder of my life.

  So in late May I stopped by Ernie’s house. I’d never been inside Ernie’s house before, and seeing it in person didn’t increase my confidence in his abilities. The screen was torn out of the front door and the floor of the porch was rotted through. Even before I crossed the porch, I detected an unpleasant odor. I knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” Ernie yelled from inside the house.

  “It’s me, Sam Gardner.”

  “Oh, come on in, Sam. But watch where you step. Haven’t had time to clean things up this week.”

  From the looks of it, Ernie hadn’t had time to clean things up for several years. Cages were stacked around the living room and kitchen. Ernie was seated on the couch, wedged between two cages, a TV remote control in his hand, which he was jabbing vigorously in the direction of the television.

  “Hey, Sam.”

  “Hi, Ernie,” I said in a strained voice, trying not to breathe.

  “What’s up?”

  “Just wanted to know if you could maybe paint the top half of my house.”

  “I’m not doing much painting these days,” Ernie said. “Been too busy.” He continued working the remote control, cycling through the stations. “I’m in the ferret business. Wanna buy a ferret?”

  “Not right now,” I said. “Maybe later.”

  “So how come you just want the top half of your house painted?” Ernie asked.

  “Uh, well, I did the bottom part myself. But I’m not so good on ladders.”

  Ernie thought for a moment, then looked around, surveying his ferrets. “I got my hands full here, what with all my corporate interests, but maybe I could finish paintin’ your house. But I got to warn you, I sent Oprah a picture of me and my ferrets and if she calls and wants us on her show, we’re off to Hollywood.”

  “I’m willing to take that chance. Could you start tomorrow?”

  “Don’t see why not.”

  The next morning, Ernie still hadn’t arrived by the time I was ready to leave for work. “Have him start on the front of the house first,” I told Barbara. At any given time, Ernie was painting three or four houses in town, moving from one to the other as the mood struck him. If he painted the front first, it would look nice from the street for the remaining two months it took him to finish the job.

  I phoned at noon to see if Ernie had started.

  “He’s here,” Barbara reported. “And I told him to start on the front of the house, just like you said. But something doesn’t look quite right. Maybe you ought to come home.”

  It’s a three-block walk from the meetinghouse to home, which I covered in just under two minutes. My wife was standing on the sidewalk, her hands on her hips, inspecting the house from a variety of angles.

  “That doesn’t look like the right color,” she said as I approached. “What do you think?”

  I studied our home. “I think you’re right. Hey, Ernie, what color of paint is that?”

  “Eggshell.”

  I groaned. “That’s the wrong color. I told you ecru.”

  Ernie climbed down the ladder. “I had some eggshell left over from Hester Gladden’s house. With all the trees in your front yard, people won’t be able to tell the difference.”

  “I can tell the difference,” my wife yelled from the sidewalk.

  I was in a predicament. If I made Ernie mad, he’d pack his paintbrushes and leave. Still, I didn’t think it was asking too much for Ernie to paint the upper half of our house the same color as the lower half. I lowered my voice conspiratorially, draped my arm around Ernie, and steered him out of earshot of my wife. “Personally, Ernie, I think it looks just fine. But you know how picky women can be.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Ernie said.

  Ernie is forty-two and has never been married, due to the pickiness of women, who for some reason don’t feel romantically inclined toward a man who never shaves his neck.

  “Darn women,” Ernie said.

  “You got that right.”

  Now it was us guys standing united against the women of the world. I was halfway home. “We’re probably better off just painting it the way she wants it.”

  Ernie glanced at Barbara. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”

  With the crisis averted, I went in the house for lunch. A grilled cheese and tomato soup with peaches in heavy syrup. My favorite.

  By one o’clock I was back at my desk, working on my sermon. People haven’t been listening as closely to my sermons as they once did. They appear bored. The month before, I had purchased a new book on the writing and delivery of sermons called From Humdrum to Hallelujah! The first chapter concerned itself with the appropriate facial expressions a pastor should employ while preaching. The author advised keeping the eyebrows raised throughout the sermon to convey enthusiasm, the idea being that the congregation won’t be enthusiastic if the minister isn’t.

  The next Sunday, I kept my eyebrows raised during the entire sermon, but only succeeded in giving myself a headache.

  On the walk home, Barbara asked me if anything was wrong with me during my sermon.

  “I was trying to appear enthusiastic,” I said.

  “You looked alarmed, like you had to use the bathroom.”

  The book also suggested working personal anecdotes into the sermon that revealed the pastor’s frailties. So while preaching on the text, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” I confessed my struggle with lust.

  Fortunately for me, no one was paying attention except my wife, whose job it is to look enthralled with my every public utterance. But she was less than enthralled with my confession and for the next several days grilled me on the object of my lust. When I said it was her, she snorted. “That shows what you know,” she said. “You can’t lust after your own spouse.”

  “You most certainly can.” I’d looked up the word in the dictionary. “Lust means to have an intense desire or need for someone or something. Why can’t I have an intense desire or need for you?”

  That mollified her somewhat. The next day I gave From Humdrum to Hallelujah! to Pastor Jimmy of the Harmony Worship Center, hoping it would make his life as miserable as it had my own.

  This is our fourth year back home. All things considered, it’s been a good move. I like it because I have to be only slightly better than the other men in town, and the competition is not very stiff. As long as my neck is shaved and I refrain from wearing a seed-corn cap, I’m head and shoulders above the crowd.

  It occurs to me that most of the people in town are content with the humdrum. If they wanted hallelujah, they’d live someplace where excellence isn’t suspect. Ernie Matthews is right. No one would have noticed if our house had been painted two colors. It’s the same way with my sermons. If they’re bad, I’m the only one who notices. Everyone still shakes my hand and says, “Nice sermon, Pastor,” whether it was or not.

  Ernie finished painting our house on a Friday, after an unusually quick two weeks. That evening, we stood out front underneath the oak trees marveling at our home. There are few moments as pleasant as surveying your freshly painted house, knowing you’re good for another ten years.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” I said.

  “It looks very nice,” my wife agreed. “Ernie did a good job.”

  “Don’t forget that I painted the bottom half.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. I still haven’t scraped all the paint off the windows.”

  We walked up the sidewalk to the porch and sat down on the swing, rocking back and forth, enjoying a slight breeze from the west, watching our boys play baseball in the side yard.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “I catch myself thinking of the boys being grown and gone away and it being just you and I rattling around in this old house.”

  “You like that feeling?”

  “I do,” I said. “I really do.”

  We continued to swing in a companionable silence.

  “I hope
the boys don’t move too far away,” Barbara said after a while.

  “Maybe just far enough away to meet some nice girls and get married,” I said. “Then they can move back here and start having babies and help me paint the house.”

  Barbara laughed. She reached over and took my hand. “You know what I love about you?”

  “My rugged good looks?”

  “Besides that.”

  “I give up. What?”

  “A lot of men would never admit they were too scared to get up on a ladder and paint their house, but not you.”

  “It’s not that I was afraid to do it, or that I couldn’t do it,” I explained. “I just knew Ernie needed the work. I did it to help Ernie.”

  “That’s another thing I love about you. You’re always thinking of other people.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It isn’t always easy to point to a particular instance and say, “That was the moment our house became our home.” But I knew this was such a time—sitting on the porch swing, my arm around my beloved, whom I intensely desired and needed, listening to the slap of a ball in a baseball mitt.

  “Now all we need is a new roof,” Barbara said.

  “Funny you should mention that. Bill Muldock told me about something you can spray on your roof that keeps you from having to replace it. He read about it in a magazine.”

  My wife sighed.

  Yes, this was the moment, I thought. Fully aware of my home’s every blemish, but loving it just the same.

  Five

  The Gift

  It was early in June, and the church was holding its annual meeting to decide whether they’d keep me on another year. Theoretically, we were to wait quietly upon the Lord to discern His will in the matter. But the way it really worked was that I could keep the job so long as I didn’t annoy a majority of the congregation. Dale Hinshaw wanted to know where I stood on the evolution issue and suggested I was derelict in my duties for not preaching about hell. Miriam Hodge gave him his customary five minutes to rant before announcing it was the Lord’s will for me to stay. The congregation rumbled their approval and, with that, I was on the payroll for another year.