Life Goes On Page 6

  By the day of the march, nearly everyone in town was against Bob. If he had written these editorials in the winter, no one would have minded. It would have provided a pleasant philosophical diversion, something to argue about good-naturedly down at the Coffee Cup. But he wrote them in the summer, when the heat has everyone on edge.

  The big problem is that Dale Hinshaw doesn’t have air-conditioning, which magnifies his irritability tenfold. He sits in his vinyl recliner wearing Bermuda shorts and a plaid cotton shirt, sweat coursing down his legs into his black dress socks and leather shoes. He reads the back issues of The Mighty Men of God newsletter and listens to talk radio. Cranky with heat and fueled with propaganda, he sets about enlisting the town in some great moral crusade.

  The demonstration against Bob began at ten in the morning. Dale and his wife and Opal Majors were marching along with a noisy contingent from the Harmony Worship Center. A jet stream from the north had cooled things down. It was a comfortable eighty-two degrees with low humidity and a steady breeze. A perfect day for rabble-rousing. The marchers paraded back and forth in front of the Herald building carrying signs that read Down with Bob! and Bob Must Go!

  At ten-thirty, they began chanting for Bob to come out, confess his sin, and get right with the Lord, but he wasn’t in the building. He was sitting in the Legal Grounds across the street, with me, watching from the picture window that looked out onto Main Street.

  “That Dale sure is a piece of work,” Bob said.

  “You oughta try being his pastor.”

  Bob shook his head. “These people remind me of my father. It isn’t enough for them to have their views. They have to impose them on everyone else. I really don’t even care for Bill Clinton. I just put that in there to make them mad.”

  “Looks like it worked.”

  Across the street, Dale had rolled a burn barrel from the back of a truck and was burning copies of the Herald.

  “Is this a great country or what,” Bob said. “I am free to print anything I want and Dale is free to burn it. Isn’t that something!”

  I agreed that it was marvelous.

  “Though it is awful windy to be burning papers,” Bob observed.

  He’d no sooner said that, than a gust of wind picked up a burning section of newspaper, lifted it in the air, and carried it down the street, where it came to a smoldering stop underneath Dale’s car, which had lately been leaking puddles of oil.

  Unfortunately, Dale had worked himself into such a sanctimonious frenzy, he didn’t notice the glow of fire spreading underneath his car.

  “Do you suppose we ought to help him?” Bob asked.

  “Probably we should.”

  Bob went behind the counter and lifted down a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall near the stove. He hurried through the front door and across the street to Dale’s car, and began spraying the extinguisher in a futile effort to douse the flames, which had already reached the engine compartment and were accelerated by thirteen years of accumulated grease and oil. By the time the fire department arrived, Dale’s car was engulfed. We stood watching as the tires exploded, one by one, and the gas tank ignited in a fiery ball.

  Dale was cited for burning an open fire within town limits and holding a parade without a permit. The fire chief, Darrell Furbay, was thumbing through his code book, seeing whether he could charge Dale with any more infractions.

  Bob Miles and I stood together, surveying the wreckage.

  “I had no idea things would turn out like this,” Bob said.

  Though I didn’t say so, I wasn’t surprised. It was Dale’s custom to leave ruination in his wake. What was unusual about this, and sweetly poetic, was that only Dale had born the brunt of his lunacy. Generally, when he went down, he dragged someone else with him.

  Dale looked like a madman. His eyebrows were singed from where he’d tried to rescue his Rapture—The Only Way to Fly! license plate from the front bumper of his car.

  “This is all your fault,” he said to Bob Miles. “If you hadn’t written those editorials, this’d never have happened. Don’t think you can mock the Lord like this and get away with it.” And with that, Dale turned and stalked off toward home, his long-suffering wife in tow, laden with signs.

  To paraphrase Emerson, some people wear religion like an ill-fitting suit. And though some are improved by it, there seem to be just as many people made worse by it, folks who tried grace on and didn’t like the way it fit.

  I walked home thinking of all the money our church has given over the years to alleviate human suffering, though now I believe the world would have been better off if we’d used the money to buy Dale an air conditioner.

  Eight

  A Near Miss

  It took me sixteen days to learn pastors were expected to be perfect. I was fresh out of seminary and pastoring my first church, when I’d mentioned in a sermon that Barbara and I had fought that week. I said it in order to reveal my imperfections, to show the congregation I was one of them. It didn’t work. The elders said if we didn’t set a better example with our marriage, they’d find a minister who would.

  So much for honesty, I thought. So much for sharing your struggles with the body of believers. So much for bearing one another’s burdens and thus fulfilling the law of Christ.

  After that, Barbara and I were careful to hold hands in public and gaze fondly at one another, even when we wanted to kill each other. Others in town could trade in their spouses the way some traded in cars, and people hardly blinked. But let me mention I’d gone to bed mad at my wife, and parents would cover their children’s ears, lest they be tainted by the sacrilege.

  In my twelfth year there, we had met with a marriage counselor in the next town who turned out to be related to an elder in our church. The counselor let it slip at a family reunion, and the next week I was hauled before the Sanhedrin, where I was ordered not to discuss my personal problems with other people. In fact, I was not supposed to have problems in the first place. And if I did, why couldn’t I just go to the Lord in prayer? Could it be I no longer believed in the power of prayer? the elders wanted to know. They saw no alternative but to fire me, so they could hire a minister who took seriously Christ’s command to be perfect.

  Our biggest problem turned out to be that particular church. Once we moved, our marriage was fine. Now we get along well, so long as I don’t work too many hours or volunteer my wife for tasks in the church, both of which I am prone to do.

  To their credit, the people of Harmony Friends are more realistic when it comes to marriage, and though divorce is rare, so is passion. If I were to conduct a marriage enrichment program, no one would attend. When the pastor before me, Pastor Taylor, had preached a sermon on active listening in which he and his wife role-played effective communication in the Christian marriage, the offering for that week went down 60 percent. The next week he’d preached on sex for the Christian couple and was very nearly fired.

  Occasionally, some of the church members will come to my office to unburden themselves and tell me the deepest secrets of their marriages, which, being nosy, I find a bit thrilling. Sometimes, though, I hear things I’d rather not think about, particularly about people’s sex lives, or lack thereof. I’ve known these people most of my life and prefer to remain ignorant of certain aspects of their lives, the sex aspect being one of them.

  Though nothing surprises me anymore, I was a bit taken aback when I came to my office early one August morning to find Dolores Hinshaw awaiting my arrival. She was visibly distraught; a handkerchief was knotted in her hands, and her eyes were red and swollen.

  I pulled up a chair, sat beside her, and rested a hand on her arm. “What is it, Dolores?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but no words would come. She dabbed her eyes, blew her nose with a liquidy snort, and then blurted out, “It’s Dale.”

  “Is something wrong with Dale?” It was a question whose answer was so obvious it scarcely required a response.

  “I don’t know how mu
ch more of it I can take,” she said.

  “More of what, Dolores? What happened?”

  For the next hour, she poured out her soul, unloading forty-one years of resentment. Not only had he burned their car, he’d taken a thousand dollars she’d saved for their fiftieth anniversary cruise and given it to the Mighty Men of God ministry. “When I asked him not to, he told me the man is the head of household. If I hear him say that one more time, I might just choke him.”

  She felt guilty as soon as she said it, as if voicing her displeasure was somehow unfaithful. But after forty-one years of submission, she’d reached her limit.

  As it turns out, the Mighty Men of God had mailed Dale a letter claiming to be under attack by liberal forces and needing Dale’s “prayerful and tangible assistance” to beat back Satan’s latest assault. Dale had written back, including a check for a thousand dollars. Just the week before, another burner on their stove had gone out. They were now down to one burner. It would cost a hundred dollars to fix the stove, which Dale had refused to pay. A thousand dollars to beat back the liberal tide they could afford, but not three new burners for their stove.

  “I was so mad, I could have spit,” she told me. “First the car, then the stove, and now our money’s gone.”

  The month before, Miriam Hodge had given her a book written by an evangelical woman who had kicked off the traces and was challenging the Church to set its women free. Dolores had wrapped it in a plain brown wrapper and was reading it under the covers with a flashlight after Dale fell asleep. She had been thinking of taking the wrapper off and giving him a jolt.

  But forty-one years of passivity was not easily overcome, so Dolores’s rebellion had taken quieter forms. Dale hates wasting food, so she had begun adding large amounts of salt to his food, just for the pleasure of watching him choke it down with water, which she had also salted. When he complained about the food, she blamed it on the stove. “I must have got confused trying to cook three dishes on one burner. I’ll try not to let it happen again,” she said, as she spooned another portion onto his plate.

  She wasn’t proud of this, she told me, but felt she had no recourse.

  Then she invited the town’s most notorious liberals, Mabel and Deena Morrison, to their home for dinner. She didn’t salt their food, but loaded down Dale’s pretty good. When he complained, Mabel and Deena said it was probably his imagination, that their food tasted fine.

  Mabel studied him closely. “Maybe you have this disease I was reading about the other day. Everything tastes salty and you’re always thirsty. Next thing you know, you’re worried all the time and your gums bleed when you brush your teeth and then you’re dead, just like that,” she said, with a snap of her fingers. “It’s one of those diseases you get from mosquitoes.”

  The thing was, Dale had been noticing blood on his toothbrush lately.

  “Have you been worried?” Mabel persisted.

  “There’s a godless, liberal assault against Bible-believing Americans,” he’d said. “How could I not be worried?”

  And two of them were right there at his dinner table. Deena Morrison was the worst of all. She was wearing a toe ring, which Dolores admired out loud, knowing it would irritate Dale, who believed toe rings were a sign of immorality.

  “I went out and bought one just to make him mad,” Dolores confided.

  He had hit the roof. He was certain there was a verse against toe rings in the Bible, but after an exhaustive search couldn’t find it. “If it’s not against the Scriptures, it should be,” he’d told her, and had ordered her to take it off; she was a mother, not a dance hall girl, he’d said.

  The next day was trash day. She’d upped the ante by cutting slits in the trash bags, so the bottom would give out halfway down the driveway when Dale was carrying the trash to the curb. She’d watched from the kitchen window as the coffee grounds had trailed behind him like a snake. A soup can fell out about a quarter of the way down, which was when it first occurred to Dale he might have a problem. He’d picked up the pace and tried to make it to the curb before the bag split open.

  It took Dolores three bags to get it right. If the slit was too small, Dale could make it to the curb without a hitch. If it was too big, he’d notice and use the wheelbarrow. Three inches turned out to be the optimum slit.

  Thinking the bags were defective, he’d returned them to the Kroger for a refund and bought a new box. Dolores had lain low for a week to lull him into complacency, then struck with a vengeance—a three-inch slit with a rock in the bottom and spoiled chicken livers mixed with rotten eggs.

  She confessed she had been thinking of leaving him, of moving to the city and living with her sister, but couldn’t bring herself to walk away from forty-one years of marriage. Instead, she had tried not talking with him, which hadn’t worked. “I could set myself on fire and he wouldn’t notice,” she told me. “All he does is ramble on about the church and liberals. He doesn’t even ask me what I think. Last month it was Bob Miles and the Herald. This month it’s the ushers.”

  There are two aisles at the Harmony meetinghouse. For years we’ve run an usher up each aisle, which requires only two ushers a week, so the rest of the ushers don’t get much playing time. There had been some mumbling among the bench warmers, who wanted to switch to a zone collection, two men up each aisle with a floating usher in case of an injury. Five ushers a week, instead of two. It was a big change, something not to be taken lightly, so Dale had been holding regular meetings to pray about it.

  “Then he comes home and turns on the TV and watches those kooks on Channel 41,” she said. The “kooks” are the Reverend Rod Duvall and his pink-haired wife, who are prone to fits of crying, especially when they’re asking for money, which is every other day. “I can’t even sleep for listening to those two caterwauling.”

  I knew I was supposed to urge her to forgive Dale and be reconciled with him, but by then I was so worked up, I wanted to choke him myself.

  Instead, I put my hand on her arm and prayed for her and for Dale and their marriage, then gave her a box of Kleenex to take with her. I suspected she’d need it.

  At three o’clock the next morning, my telephone rang. It was Dolores, calling from the hospital in Cartersburg. She was hysterical. “It’s Dale,” she cried. “I think I’ve killed him.”

  He’d awakened several hours before, his head reeling, unable to walk for the room spinning. He’d crawled into the bathroom and vomited. She’d taken one look at him and ran to the phone to call Johnny Mackey to come with his ambulance. It took Johnny forty-five minutes to get there. He wasn’t feeling all that well himself. But they finally made it to the hospital in Cartersburg, where they took Dale’s blood pressure, then took it again just to be sure.

  “It’s a wonder you haven’t exploded,” the doctor told Dale. “Do you put a lot of salt in your food?”

  “No, lately it’s been salty enough,” Dale said.

  Dolores paled.

  “That’s probably why you’re dizzy. You’re retaining water, and it’s messed up your inner ears and your equilibrium. Salt will do that every time. I’m putting you on a low-sodium diet.” The doctor shook his head as he wrote. “It’s a wonder you didn’t have a stroke and die.”

  That was when she’d phoned me.

  Dale’s blood pressure was so high, they kept him in the hospital overnight. I drove over the next morning to visit him. Dolores was seated in a chair next to his bed, stroking his hair.

  I visited for a while, then said a prayer for Dale. I thanked God for sparing his life, then went from prayer to editorializing, pondering aloud whether our brushes with death might be the Lord’s way of causing us to reflect on certain things, like how we treat our spouses, for instance.

  Then I said “Amen” and promised Dale I would visit him the next day. Dolores followed me out of the room.

  “You won’t tell him what I did, will you?” she asked, when we were out of earshot of Dale.

  “I won’t tell a soul,”
I promised. “But maybe you and Dale should get some marriage counseling.”

  “He’d never do it. He doesn’t believe in it. Besides, he’d never listen. He doesn’t listen to anyone.”

  I gave her a hug. “You come see me whenever you need to blow off a little steam. It’s probably better than salting him to death.”

  I walked out of the hospital, thinking back on the first years of my marriage. Sometimes I marvel that we’ve made it. When Dolores had mentioned how Dale never listened, I tried not to think of all the evenings I’d spent in my recliner, responding to my wife with monosyllabic grunts.

  To be heard, to have someone who will listen, might be our deepest human need. I marvel that Dolores had gone forty-one years without it.

  I didn’t go to the office. I went home instead. My wife was upstairs, folding laundry on our bed. I asked her where the boys were. Over at the Grants’ house playing, she said. She asked what I was doing home. I told her I missed her. She smiled, and then she talked, and as she spoke I listened, lying on my back, my feet propped on the footboard.

  Then we did something else, which I won’t talk about, preferring to keep that aspect of our lives a private matter.

  “What’s that on your foot?” I asked afterward.

  “A toe ring,” she said. “How do you like it?”

  “I like it very much, though don’t you think it’s a bit racy for a minister’s wife?”

  “It depends on the minister’s wife,” she said. “I say if you’ve got the toes for it, then why not.”

  Why not, indeed.

  Nine

  Love and Rumors of Love

  The heat had continued through much of July and into August, but was broken the second week of August by a thunderstorm that ushered in a cool breeze from the north, carrying with it the scent of pine trees and lakes. All over town, people turned off their air conditioners and opened their windows.