Signs and Wonders Page 7

  “Uh, no.”

  “One less than there used to be, thanks to you and your balloon.”

  Dale didn’t know what to say. “You can take comfort knowing your swan’s in a better place,” he said finally.

  It troubled Dale. He’d never meant to kill a swan. He liked swans. He and the missus had three concrete swans in their front yard. He thought about giving up his salvation balloons ministry, until it occurred to him that was just what the devil would want.

  Satan’s behind this for sure, he thought. He wants to stop my ministry. Well, he can forget about that. It’s not gonna happen.

  Bea Majors and Bill Muldock came the next morning. Dale and his wife wrote out the plan of salvation four hundred times on small slips of paper while Bill and Bea inflated the balloons and tied them on. They finished in late afternoon. Dale phoned Bob Miles at the Herald, who came with his camera.

  Dale wet his finger and raised it in the air. “It’s blowing from the southwest. That oughta carry ’em toward Lake Erie. Let’s pray they’ll hit a west wind up there and head toward New York City. Lots of perverts there. Let’s pray the Lord’ll blow his breath on these balloons and take them right into the Big Apple.”

  “Amen to that,” said Bea.

  “Bill, could you raise the garage door?”

  “It’d be my honor.” He raised the garage door and they pushed the balloons out, all four hundred at once. They rose in the air, a riot of color. Bob Miles snapped a picture.

  “Glory hallelujah!” said Bea Majors. “It makes me want to play the organ.”

  Dale wiped away a tear. His wife reached over and took his hand. Even Bob Miles, a hardened journalist, was moved. “That’s some ministry you got there, Dale. I’ll be sure to write up a story about it.”

  Lord, don’t let this go to my head, Dale prayed. Keep me humble, so all the glory can go to you.

  They watched until the balloons were little dots in the northeast sky.

  “It looks like they’re headed toward Canada,” Bill Muldock observed.

  “I always wanted an international ministry,” Dale said. His wife squeezed his hand.

  Two blocks over, Sam Gardner sat on his front porch watching the balloons float away. He wasn’t sure what to think of Dale’s salvation balloons ministry. He was skeptical anytime someone boiled the wondrous mystery of salvation down to four simple points, but he didn’t doubt Dale’s sincerity. His sanity, yes, but not his sincerity. The funny thing was, Sam believed God could use the salvation balloons to reach someone. Sam preferred talking to people about God, but if Dale was more comfortable using balloons, Sam supposed God could use that, too.

  Sam was trying hard not to be a theological snob. Maybe God did want Dale to do this. Maybe tomorrow, a man walking along the shores of Lake Erie, despondent that his wife had left him, would find a shriveled balloon lying on the sand, pick it up, pray a prayer, and be flooded with peace. Maybe next week a runaway teenager in a back alley in New York City would pick up a balloon, find hope, and turn toward home. Sam hoped so.

  He thought maybe he’d talk about it in his sermon the next day. How we cast these gospel seeds out into the wind and trust God to help them grow into a radiant, glorious tree that gives shade and comfort to a weary world.

  Seven

  The Odd Fellows

  It was the eighth of July, and Harvey Muldock was waxing his 1951 Plymouth Cranbrook convertible in preparation for the Fourth of July parade. The parade had been scheduled for the fourth, but Harvey and Eunice were out of town that weekend visiting Eunice’s sister. Harvey has the only convertible in town and won’t let anyone else drive it, so the town council moved the Fourth of July parade to the middle of the month so Harvey and his Plymouth could be there.

  There was some grumbling about the Fourth of July parade being moved and a few anonymous letters to the editor. In defiance, the Shriners marched on the fourth anyway, but since Bernie, the policeman, didn’t stop traffic, the Shriners ended up spread out over several blocks. It looked more like a rash of jaywalking than a parade.

  Harvey has led the town parades—the Fourth of July parade and the Corn and Sausage Days parade—since 1963, when he took the Cranbrook in on a trade. Before that, the high-school band led the parades, but when Harvey acquired the convertible, he was promoted to the head of the line. He’d gone nearly eighty parades without a mishap and thought he was pushing his luck. The pressure was getting to him. He’d been thinking of putting the Cranbrook up on blocks and retiring from the parade.

  The Cranbrook has lately been a source of contention in the Muldock home. Harvey and Eunice have a one-car garage, which the Cranbrook has occupied since 1963. Eunice parks her car in the driveway underneath the oak tree where the birds powder their noses. It’s a big tree. Harvey thinks it might be the largest tree in town. Eunice told him to either cut down the tree or let her park her car in the garage, out of range. She gave him forty years to get it done, and when he didn’t, she moved her car to the garage and demoted the Cranbrook to the driveway.

  Even though Harvey had been planning on retiring the Cranbrook, for Eunice to just kick it out of the garage, for her to so casually dismiss its many contributions, troubled Harvey.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into her,” he said at the Monday night meeting of the Odd Fellows. “Now she’s telling me I oughta sell it. Says we don’t have room for it. That car never did anything to her. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.”

  “Used to be a man’s garage was his castle,” Vinny Toricelli said. “Now women have even take that over. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to join the lodge.”

  The Odd Fellows Lodge is in the basement of the Herald building. It’s dark and mildewy and hasn’t been cleaned in years. There’s an old black-and-white TV in one corner. Above the TV is the Miss Lugwrench calendar, which they take down and hide whenever a member of the clergy visits. In the closet underneath the stairs is a rusty old toilet and a sink where they get the water for their coffee. No self-respecting woman would be caught dead in the place.

  The Harmony chapter of the Odd Fellows was founded in 1929, when the first lodge members swore a sacred oath to “visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead, and educate the orphans,” according to the engraved plaque next to the Miss Lugwrench calendar. Now they mostly sit around and watch ball games on the TV in the corner. They installed a phone in 1967, but when their wives started calling to track them down, they took it out. They like their privacy, the freedom to exercise their First Amendment rights in peace. They complain about their wives and how none of the younger men in town want to join their lodge. It worries them, to see the Odd Fellow legacy dwindle to an end. They think maybe a cookout would help generate interest.

  “Yeah, we gotta do that someday,” Harvey said. “We could do it at my house. Eunice wouldn’t care. Yeah, we oughta do that this summer yet.”

  Asa Peacock said, “Maybe we could plan a trip of some sort. That might stir up some interest.”

  “Where do you think we could go?” Harvey asked.

  Ellis Hodge suggested they charter a bus and tour the fish farm north of Martinsville.

  Kyle Weathers, the town’s barber, thought a trip to the barbershop museum in Connecticut might appeal to potential Odd Fellows.

  Asa Peacock told of a story he’d read the day before in the Hoosier Farmer magazine. “This fella over near Ladoga took apart a 1953 Farmall tractor and rebuilt it in the loft of his barn. They had a picture of it and everything. Maybe we could go see that.”

  They discussed other ideas, but by then Harvey wasn’t listening. His mind was fixed on that tractor in the hayloft.

  The next morning, he ate breakfast, showered, and then went outside to measure the attic of his garage. Then he measured the Cranbrook. It would just fit. Even the antenna with the raccoon tail cleared the rafters. It was meant to be.

  Harvey Muldock has never been a religious man. He’s gone to church all his marri
ed life, mostly to keep Eunice from nagging at him. He had never understood it when people would stand and talk about God leading them to do something. But seeing everything come together, he knew a force bigger than him was at work.

  It took Harvey a week to take apart the Cranbrook and reassemble it in the garage attic. He didn’t do anything else the entire time, didn’t go to work or church. He even skipped the next week’s lodge meeting, which set the Odd Fellows to speculating. They thought maybe Harvey and the Cranbrook had left town.

  “Can’t say as I blame him,” Vinny Toricelli said. “A man can take only so much, after all.”

  They complained for a while about the decline of the American family. Vinny told of hearing the Reverend Johnny LaCosta talk on TV about how the liberal Supreme Court had emasculated America’s manhood and how it was time for Christian men to stand up and be counted and assert themselves as the head of the family.

  “Ain’t he the guy who’s always talking against the Catholics?” Asa Peacock asked. “I thought you were Catholic.”

  “This is bigger than any one religion,” Vinny said. “This is about our country. This is about America’s manhood.”

  Meanwhile, back at the Muldocks’, Harvey’s manhood was exhausted. Carrying a car up a ladder was hard work, even if you did it in pieces. He took a shower, went to bed, and fell asleep almost immediately.

  Around six in the morning, just as the sun was coming up, Harvey heard a crash. He thought it was a burglar trying to kick in their back door, until he remembered they never locked it. He got out of bed, put on his bathrobe, and went downstairs to look around. Everything was fine. He went outside and walked around the house.

  Walking past the garage, he noticed the roof was sagging. He swung open the garage doors, and there was the Cranbrook, balanced neatly on top of Eunice’s car. Remarkably, the Cranbrook was hardly scratched. Eunice’s car, apart from the top two feet, was in pretty good shape, too. If you slouched down in the seat, you could probably still drive it.

  Harvey was trying to figure out the best way to tell Eunice when she appeared at his side. To her credit, she didn’t say much. The benefit of being married to a car dealer is that when he crushes your car, he can get you a new one. She just looked at the Cranbrook perched on top of her car, shook her head, and said, “Would you like some coffee?” Yes, he thought he would. They went inside, sat at the kitchen table, and drank their coffee.

  “I suppose maybe I should have thought about reinforcing the attic floor,” Harvey admitted over his second cup of coffee. “It’s the heaviest car Plymouth made in 1951. Three thousand, three hundred pounds.”

  “Probably that would have been a good idea,” Eunice said. She wanted to say more, but she didn’t. She drank more coffee to keep from saying anything. She was already on her fifth cup.

  Harvey took a shower, got dressed, and went out to the garage to start Eunice’s car. There wasn’t much headroom. He had to lie down across the front seat to fit in, but it did start. He eased the gearshift down one notch to reverse, but the cars, stacked one atop the other, wouldn’t clear the garage door. He turned off the engine and began reflecting on the situation, still lying down across the front seat.

  Charlie Gardner, watching from his front porch across the street, walked over to observe the proceedings. This was a scenario Harvey had hoped to avoid.

  Charlie was trying hard not to laugh, as if two cars stacked one atop the other was an everyday occurrence.

  “I’m no expert at these kinds of things, never having had this happen to me,” he said, “but I’ve heard that people in similar situations have let the air out of the tires on the bottom car. You might try that. It might buy you four or five inches.”

  Harvey hadn’t thought of that. It might just work. He let the air out of the tires, and the cars just cleared the door. Now, instead of the cars being hidden in the garage, they were in plain view of everyone driving past. Before long, a small crowd had gathered. They all had suggestions, most of them dumb. Dale Hinshaw thought they could tie helium balloons to the Cranbrook and float it off Eunice’s car.

  For the next two days Harvey sat in his lawn chair under the oak tree looking at the cars and reflecting. On Thursday night, he telephoned the Odd Fellows, all fifty-three of them, and invited them to his house the next evening for a cookout. They all came, mostly to look at the cars.

  Harvey fed them beans and wienies. After they ate, he looped four stout ropes under the Cranbrook, climbed a ladder leaning against the oak tree, and pulled the ropes over two thick branches situated just above the car. “Okay, men, all of you now, grab a rope and, on the count of three, pull.”

  “Are you crazy?” Kyle Weathers said. “We can’t lift that car. You’re crazy.”

  “Thirty-three hundred pounds divided by fifty-three men equals sixty-two pounds apiece. It’s not that heavy if we all pull together. But if you don’t think you can do it, if you’re not strong enough, you don’t have to help.”

  Suddenly, lifting the Cranbrook was a test of manhood. The Supreme Court might have tried to emasculate America’s manhood, but they had not succeeded in the Harmony chapter of the Odd Fellows Lodge.

  They rose from their lawn chairs. Yes, they could do it. Sixty-two pounds was a lark, a walk in the park for an Odd Fellow, who, after all, had taken a sacred oath to relieve the distressed, and Harvey was distressed, was he not?

  They spit on their hands and grabbed the ropes.

  “Pull!” Harvey cried. The Odd Fellows pulled on the ropes, and the Cranbrook rose in the air, tentatively at first, but then confidently and with purpose.

  “Hold her steady, men,” Harvey shouted. He leaped in Eunice’s car, lay across the seat, fired up the engine, slid the gearshift down one notch, and backed it out from underneath the Cranbrook.

  “Now ease her down,” he cried out. “Gentle, gentle.”

  They lowered the Cranbrook to the ground, unblemished. Oh, they were proud. Fifty-three Odd Fellows celebrating their manhood and upholding their pledge to relieve the distressed. They walked around the Cranbrook, admiring it and patting each other on the back.

  “Too bad Bob Miles wasn’t here to take a picture for the Herald,” Asa Peacock said.

  “I could go fetch him,” said Ellis Hodge. He climbed in his truck and returned ten minutes later with Bob and his camera. They hoisted the Cranbrook into the air while Bob snapped a picture; then they lowered it to the ground.

  They raised and lowered the car five more times that night, as word got out and people came past to behold this miracle of physics. Some of the younger men who came by wanted to lift the car, but the Odd Fellows wouldn’t let them. “Members only,” they said. “Of course, if you want to join, we’d be happy to have you.” They signed up a dozen new members that night alone. One dozen strapping young men lined up in Harvey’s driveway pledging to visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead, and educate the orphans. It brought tears to Harvey’s eyes.

  The next morning dawned bright and sunny. Harvey waxed the Cranbrook, then drove it to the school where they were assembling for the Fourth of July parade. Harvey took his place at the head of the line. It wasn’t about what he wanted, he knew that now. It was about duty, about destiny. The Cranbrook didn’t belong locked away in a garage for only Harvey to enjoy. There were parades to lead and the distressed in need of relief. If he didn’t do it, who would?

  He patted the Cranbrook on the dashboard. “You’re looking good, old girl.”

  Bernie, the policeman, blew his whistle. Harvey moved the gearshift down three notches and eased forward. He didn’t even have to steer. After eighty parades, the Cranbrook knew the way. Harvey sat behind the wheel, waving to the crowds. Someday, he knew, he’d have to pass on the glory to someone else. But today was not that day.

  Eight

  True Riches

  It’s been two years since Ellis and Miriam adopted Amanda from Ellis’s no-good brother, Ralph. They had to pay Ralph thirty thous
and dollars, all the money they had in the world. At the time it seemed like the right thing to do, but ever since Ellis has worried about going broke. He’s had to borrow money to run the farm and thinks he might have to sell it off, move into town, and get a job at the glove factory in Cartersburg.

  Amanda is fourteen now and poised to enter the eighth grade. In the sixth grade, she won the National Spelling Bee and shook the president’s hand. She’s the closest thing Harmony ever had to a celebrity, and in a fit of excitement they made her the Lifetime Honorary Grand Marshall of the Corn and Sausage Days parade and erected a sign at the town limits: Welcome to Harmony! The Home of Amanda Hodge! Winner of the Natunal Spelling Bee! Ervin Matthews painted the sign, but misspelled the word national, a sad irony for a sign honoring the winner of a spelling bee. The next winter, the sign was knocked over by a snowplow and, preferring to leave well enough alone, no one bothered to put it back.

  Meanwhile, Amanda has moved on to other triumphs. This past winter, she was invited to join the Future Problem Solvers of America, which involved a five-day trip to Atlanta over spring break for the Future Problem Solvers of America’s annual convention. Although Ellis was proud of her, he was weary of shelling out travel money. When he was a kid, he belonged to the 4-H, which involved a visit to Charlie Barker’s Angus farm and a bus trip to the state fair. They packed their lunches, ate on the bus, and were home in time to milk cows that evening.

  He asked Amanda what kind of problems she was supposed to solve in Atlanta.

  “Oh, global warming and overpopulation and things like that,” she said.

  He let out a little snort. He tried not to snort around Amanda, but sometimes it couldn’t be helped.

  “What is it with the schools these days?” he complained to Miriam. “Why are they sending her all the way to Atlanta to solve problems? There’s lots of problems around here that need solving, if you ask me. Like how I’m gonna pay for her to go to Atlanta. Why can’t she just join a softball team and stay home.”