Almost Friends (5 page)

T
hat night, as the grandfather clock in Sam and Barbara’s living room struck midnight, their phone rang.

“Daggone that Dale anyway,” Sam cried out, leaping from his bed to answer the phone before it woke his children.

He didn’t bother to say hello, just jabbed at the off button in a vain effort to end the call. Dale’s voice droned on, inviting him to worship at Harmony Friends Meeting. Beside himself with fury, Sam beat the telephone into its cradle repeatedly, trying to silence Dale’s bland preachments, to no avail.

With a savage tug, he yanked the phone from the wall, stomped downstairs and across the kitchen, threw open the back door, and hurled the phone into the backyard.

“Was that necessary?” Barbara asked, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

Sam looked at her, crazy-eyed and maniacal. “He’s done it again. We told him not to call anymore, and he’s done it again.”

Their kitchen phone rang. “Please don’t throw that phone away too. I’d like to have at least one phone in my house.”

Sam snatched the phone from the kitchen wall. “Hello,” he barked.

“Sam Gardner,” Mabel Morrison screeched into his ear, “not sixteen hours ago, you promised that nutcase would stop harassing me. Now you’ve gone and done—”

Sam hung up, gently this time, and disconnected the phone from the wall jack. He slumped into a kitchen chair, his body aching from spent adrenaline and fury. “I can’t take it any longer. I’ve reached my limit. This is it. I’m quitting.”

“Now, now, let’s go back to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning. A month from now, you and Frank will be laughing about this.”

“No, I’m going to Dale’s house to cut his phone line.”

“Don’t be silly. You can’t do that. Have another talk with him tomorrow. I’m sure it was just an accident.”

He slept fitfully the rest of the night, finally falling into a deep sleep just before his alarm clock rang.

That morning found him showered, shaved, and dressed, standing on Dale Hinshaw’s front porch, knocking on his door. Dale answered the door in his pajamas, studying the booklet of instructions from his computer.

“Hey, Sam. Boy, this is the craziest thing,” he said, scratching his head. “I know I changed my computer from
AM
to
AM
. At least I thought I did. Oh well, just gonna have to keep on trying. Guess that’s all we can do. Besides, you know what Paul wrote in his letter to the Hebrews.”

“It’s a lengthy letter,” Sam said. “Perhaps you could be more specific.”

“‘Run with perseverance the race that is set before us.’ We gotta keep persevering.”

“Dale, I know you mean well, and don’t think I don’t appreciate your efforts to help our meeting grow, but you’ve got to stop. You’re making the whole town mad at us. No one’s going to come to our church after this.”

Dale began to protest, but Sam held up his hand. “Dale, I’m not going to argue with you. You’re doing this in the name of the church, and it must stop. If you don’t, I’m going to call the elders and have them speak with you.”

“Well, that’s a fine thing,” Dale said. “Somebody in our church finally starts preaching the gospel, and you’re gonna have the elders make ’em stop. That’s a fine how-do-you-do.”

“If you don’t like it, you can always attend another church,” Sam said.

It had taken him six years to invite Dale to worship elsewhere, and saying it out loud, instead of muttering it under his breath in private, felt pleasantly liberating.

“And if I left, who would head up our Evangelism Committee?” Dale asked. “Harvey Muldock? Ellis Hodge? I don’t think so. They’re nice guys, but they don’t have the heart for the gospel like I do. No, Sam, I can’t leave now. The meeting needs me.”

I will have to kill him, Sam thought to himself. It’s the only way to be shed of him. Drown him in the bathtub. Load
his body in the car trunk and throw him in the river. Maybe Frank can help me. A smile crossed his face.

Dale broke Sam’s reverie. “Don’t worry, Sam. I’ll get it right this time. You just go do your ministry and I’ll do mine, and the Lord’ll bless us both.” And with that, Dale closed the door.

Though Sam didn’t think it was possible, the day turned out worse than the one before. Wherever Sam went, he was greeted with open hostility and threats of lawsuits. Two members turned in their membership, and Miriam Hodge, a pacifist to the core, stopped by the office to inform Sam one of his parishioners was in jeopardy. “I’m telling you this now, so you can visit him in the hospital. I’m going to hit Dale Hinshaw squarely in the nose, and I’m not stopping until he’s down.”

Sam counseled forgiveness and tolerance, but Miriam could tell he was insincere, that he wanted, more than anything else, to clean Dale’s clock too.

She had brought a copy of the
Quaker Faith and Practice
with her. “Do you realize there is a glaring omission in our book of order?” she asked Sam. “Nowhere does it say we can kick Dale Hinshaw out of the church.”

“I suggested to him that he worship elsewhere,” Sam said.

“How’d he take that?

“He said he could never desert the meeting, that we needed him too badly.”

“If I weren’t so mad at him, I’d be touched by his loyalty,” Miriam said. “Right now, I just want to wrap my hands
around that skinny little neck of his, right above his Adam’s apple, and squeeze for all I’m worth.”

They sat quietly, contemplating the ethereal beauty of such a circumstance.

“Well,” Sam said after a bit, “we can’t very well do that now, can we?”

“Probably not,” Miriam conceded.

“It’s times like these that test our Christian charity,” Sam pointed out.

“You’re absolutely right. I must do better,” Miriam said, standing to leave. “Thank you for reminding me of my Christian duty.”

Which isn’t to say she still didn’t want to choke Dale, just that she knew it would be wrong.

After Miriam departed, Frank poked his head in Sam’s office door. “Say, uh, Sam, I was thinking of taking tomorrow off. Is that all right with you?”

Sam consulted his pocket calendar, thinking aloud, “Hmm, sermon preparation in the morning…lunch with the ministers’ association…visitation in the afternoon…When would you do the bulletin?”

“Already got it done,” Frank said. “Stayed over yesterday and wrapped it up. The newsletter’s done and mailed out. I have the quarterly reports filled out and put in this morning’s mail.”

“My, aren’t you the picture of efficiency. Sure, you can take the day off. Got big plans?”

Frank hesitated. “I’d rather not say.”

“I tell you my secrets.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. Every one of them. I tell you when Barbara’s mad at me. You know how much I earn. You know everything about me. I’m an open book. I don’t keep anything from you. I can’t believe you don’t trust me.”

“It isn’t that I don’t trust you. I just don’t want you laughing at me,” Frank said, with uncharacteristic timidity.

“Frank, I would never laugh at you. You’re probably my best friend.”

“Well, okay then, I guess it’s all right for you to know. Miss Rudy and I are going to Cartersburg to look at a new refrigerator for her.”

Sam slapped his desk and began to chuckle. “I knew it. Sounds like it’s getting serious. Boy, wait till I tell Barbara.”

“Sam Gardner, if you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll staple your lips shut.”

“Oh, don’t get your knickers in a twist. I won’t tell anyone you and Miss Rudy are shopping for appliances.” Sam leaned back in his chair. “Be careful, Frank. This is how desperate women trap a man. They take him shopping for appliances. Innocent on the face of it, but the next thing you know you’re picking out china patterns.”

“You’re not the least bit funny, Sam.”

“Hey, Frank. Do me a favor, will you?”

“It depends.”

“Find out Miss Rudy’s first name, would you? I’ve known her all my life, and I still don’t know her first name.”

“I know it,” Frank said. “She told me.”

“What is it?”

“I promised not to tell and, unlike some people I could mention, I know how to keep a secret.”

“If you marry her and I do the wedding, I’ll have to know her first name to fill out the wedding license,” Sam pointed out.

“Maybe we’ll just live together and scandalize everyone,” Frank said. “Just think how much trouble that would cause you. Fern Hampton would be all over you, wanting you to fire me. It would make this mess with Dale Hinshaw look like a picnic.”

Sam paled. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you, Frank?”

“In a minute. Yep, they’d fire me and hire Dale Hinshaw to be your new secretary, seeing how he has his own computer. You’d make a good team, you and Dale.”

Sam felt the faint stirring of nausea.

For a church secretary, Frank had a cruel streak that showed itself at the worst times.

“Take the day off, then,” Sam grumbled. “It’ll be nice to have the place to myself for a day.”

“With or without pay?”

“Without!”

“You give it to me with pay and if I marry Miss Rudy, I’ll tell you her first name.”

“Deal,” Sam said.

“Where we gonna eat lunch?”

“Barbara packed something for me. There’s no way I’m going out in public. Not after Dale woke up the whole town last night.”

Sam worked until late afternoon, then walked home down the alleyways, keeping to the shadows so no one would see him. He was almost home when Shirley Finchum, burning trash in her backyard barrel, spied him. “Sam Gardner, you’re just the man I wanted to see.” She wagged her cane at him. “Two nights now I’ve been woken up. What are you going to do about that?”

“My apologies, Mrs. Finchum. It won’t happen again. I’d love to stay and visit, but I’ve got to get home.” He hurried across his backyard, around the garage, up the back steps, and through the screen door into the kitchen.

“This day can’t end too soon,” he told Barbara, collapsing into a kitchen chair.

She presented him with a long list of phone messages. “Thirteen phone calls. Not one of them from a happy person. I told them you’d call them back when you got home tonight.”

Sam groaned. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, why did you do that? I don’t want to call these people. They’re just gonna yell at me.”

He ate supper to boost his strength, then returned the phone calls, holding the phone away from his ear to protect his hearing. For a Christian town, people were startling in their ferocity, threatening Sam and the meeting with all manner of misfortune if he dared disturb their sleep again.

“It wasn’t me,” Sam tried to explain. “Dale Hinshaw’s doing this on his own. We told him not to.” But that made little difference, and after five calls Sam called it a night.

Before he went to sleep, he had the foresight to take his one remaining phone off the hook. He was asleep by nine-thirty, his body occasionally twitching, haunted by nightmares of Dale Hinshaw taking up residence as the new secretary of Harmony Friends. At the stroke of midnight, Sam sat bolt upright in bed, sensing some deep misfortune had been unleashed in his life. The house was perfectly quiet, except for the tick of the clock downstairs. He lay back down, staring at the ceiling, perceiving his world had shifted, though not knowing how and in no way eager to find out.

I
f Gloria Gardner had heard her husband say it once, she’d heard him say it a thousand times. “I tell you, I got the worse luck of anyone I know. It’s like I got a cloud hangin’ over my head. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Some days I wonder why I even bother to get out of bed.”

He always said this within her earshot, and she’d grown immune to his lamentations and no longer took them personally.

The testimony of the years seemed to bear him out: he was routinely audited by the IRS; while attending the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, he was beaned by a foul ball and remained unconscious the rest of the game; a year later he was struck by lightning and had been afflicted by static electricity ever since. His hair was a sight; people wouldn’t shake his hand for fear of being shocked. And he was strip-searched every time he flew, owing to his tendency to set off metal detectors just by walking near them.

But all those were mere inconveniences compared to what befell her husband that night, for at the stroke of midnight, when every phone in town was off the hook, lest the citizenry be plagued by Dale’s telephone evangelism, Charlie Gardner had a heart attack. His arms flailed about, striking his wife, who came up out of bed, thinking the phone had rung.

“That darn Dale. He’s pestering us again,” she muttered.

Charlie gurgled, then went rigid. His eyes rolled back in his head, making them look like two white marbles, the big kind, the shooters.

“Oh, Lord,” Gloria cried. “Oh, my.”

“Call Sam,” Charlie gasped.

She hurried from their bedroom to the phone in the kitchen, but couldn’t for the life of her remember Sam’s number. She ran back into their bedroom. “I can’t think straight. What’s his number?”

“Fleetwood 96701,” Charlie whispered.

Everyone in town had the same prefix. Folks over seventy remembered it as Fleetwood, while the youngsters rattled off the numbers.

She ran back in the kitchen and punched in Sam’s number.

A groggy voice answered the phone. “Yeah.”

“Sam, get over here quick, your father’s dying.”

“You got the wrong number, lady. There’s no Sam here.”

She let out an anguished wail.

Charlie stumbled from the bedroom into the hallway, clutching his chest, the heart attack stepping up his static electricity so that he looked like Albert Einstein, his hair jutting
out and fairly crackling. He lurched down the hallway toward her. “Give me the phone,” he whispered.

He studied the keypad, dialed Sam’s number, and was rewarded with a frantic beeping. “Busy? Who in the world could he be talking to this time of night?”

Another spasm struck him, and he fell to one knee. “Call Johnny Mackey,” he wheezed, his voice the texture of broken glass.

Ironically, not five years before, Charlie Gardner had led the charge against the town installing 911 service. “For crying out loud, if we got problems, we can dial four extra numbers. What’s the big deal? How long can that take?” A few naysayers can keep an entire populace in the Dark Ages and his voice, along with that of Dale Hinshaw, who’d spoken at length against the one-world government, had been enough to scotch the enterprise.

“What’s Johnny Mackey’s number?” Gloria asked. “Where’s the phone book?”

But Charlie’s sun was setting in the west, and he didn’t respond.

In the end, she ran across the street to Harvey Muldock’s, who phoned Johnny Mackey, the town mortician and owner of the sole ambulance in a twenty-mile radius. Unfortunately, having been wakened from his slumber the past two nights by Dale’s phone ministry, Johnny, like the rest of the town, had taken his phone off the hook.

That left Harvey Muldock to load Charlie in the backseat of his car and drive the twenty-five miles with Gloria to
Cartersburg. Every mile or so, he would reach into the backseat and thump Charlie sharply on the chest and shout encouragement. “Hang in there, buddy. We’re almost there.”

When they arrived at the hospital, Charlie was stiff as a fish, his skin a moonlike, ghastly white.

Sam, back at his house, was up and pacing, sensing danger, his mind dismissing one possibility even as another rushed to fill the void. He studied his wife and sons to see if they were breathing. He walked through the house checking the doors, then went outside and walked the perimeter of his home. Everything seemed fine. No fire, no burst water pipes, no serial killer crouching in the bushes waiting to maim his family.

He heard the slight scuff of shoes against pavement and saw a motion in the corner of his vision. My Lord, he was about to be mugged. Probably beaten within an inch of his life. Maybe even killed. He’d read numerous newspaper stories of such things, though they usually happened in places far from Harmony, which meant they were overdue here.

A lifetime of Quaker pacifism had rendered him defenseless in such matters, and he fell to the ground where he curled in a ball, his hands covering his head.

“Sam!”

The mugger knew his name. A killer in their midst all these years.

“Sam, it’s me, Eunice Muldock. What are you doing on the ground?”

“Checking for aphids,” Sam said. “They’ve infested our roses. What are you doing out this time of night?”

“It’s your father. Something’s wrong with him. They tried calling you, but couldn’t get through. Harvey’s taking him to the hospital.”

“Dad? What’s wrong with him?”

“We don’t know. Your mom thought maybe he’d had a heart attack. He looks pretty bad. Now when Harvey had his heart attack, he didn’t even know it. He thought it was gas. Then later on they ran a test on him, and it showed he’d had a heart attack. He thinks he had it shoveling snow, but he’s not sure. So now he doesn’t shovel snow. We have the Grant boy shovel our walks. ’Course a young fella like you can shovel your own snow, but when you get to be as old as us, you got to hire it done.”

This was typical of emergencies in Harmony. A house could erupt in flames, spitting fireballs and igniting every residence within a hundred yards, and the neighbors would stop the firefighters to chat about past infernos. “Yeah, now this here, it’s a pretty good fire, but I remember in 1964, no, it was ’63, when Myron Farlow’s barn went up. You could see the flames all the way into town. Boy, now that was some fire. Bubbled the paint on the water tower half a mile away, I swear to God. Fires, they burnt a lot hotter back in those days. These fires today, I don’t know, they just don’t seem all that hot.”

While Eunice chattered on, Sam turned and rushed into his house, up the stairs into their bedroom, where he proceeded to pull on his clothes. He roused Barbara from her sleep. “Dad’s been taken to the hospital. I’m going down there. You stay here with the boys, and I’ll call you when I
find something out. Put the phone back on the hook. See you later.” He bent down and kissed her good-bye, hoping his words had registered with her.

On the drive to Cartersburg, his mind was in turmoil contemplating his father’s death. Barbara had been urging him to spend more time with his father, which he’d neglected to do, even after his father had invited him to go on a fishing trip. “Dear Lord, please let him live. I’ll spend all my time with him. Just let him live.” He prayed aloud the entire way, driving as fast as he dared on the twisty, narrow country roads.

Harvey and his mother were in the emergency room when he arrived. His mother was a knot of worry, twisting her hands and peering every few seconds at the doors, willing a doctor to emerge with good news. Sam rushed to her side and hugged her. “What’s wrong? How’s Dad?”

“Oh, Sam, it was awful. He’s all pale and everything.”

“That’s the funny thing about it,” Harvey piped up. “I turned red when I had my heart attack. Came in from shoveling snow just as red as a tomato. I remember because Eunice took one look at me and said, ‘Harvey Muldock, you’re red as a tomato.’ Now I didn’t know at the time I’d had a heart attack, but they say I did. So I don’t shovel snow anymore. You know who shovels our snow?”

“The Grant boy.”

“That’s right. How’d you know that?”

“Just a lucky guess,” Sam said.

“He does a pretty good job, I suppose. ’Course he ought to for what I pay him. Ten dollars.”

Sam turned to his mother. “Have you talked with the doctors yet? What are they saying?”

“Not yet. We’ve only been here a little while. They said it might be an hour before they knew something.”

“We made pretty good time,” Harvey said proudly. “Thirty-four minutes, door to door. That’s going the short way, past the Hodges’. What way did you come?”

“Same way.”

Harvey leaned back in his chair. “Now I remember when my Uncle Harvey had his heart attack. I was named for him, you know. Anyway, it was the second day of July, nineteen and sixty-nine. We went that way and the bridge was out just past the Hodges’ place. You know that bridge, there over White Lick Creek. Big storm that day had knocked the bridge out. Ten inches of rain, most rain we ever had. That’s how I remembered the date. Anyway, we had to turn around and bring him back through town and take the long way past Jessups’ farm and through Tilden. Fifty-six minutes it took us that time. He nearly died. He looked the same as your Dad. That’s how I knew your Dad was in bad shape, on account of it happening to my uncle.”

He paused to breathe and was commencing to launch into a detailed review of other heart attack victims he’d known when Sam cut him short.

“Sure appreciate you bringing Mom and Dad down here, Harvey. Eunice seemed awful worried, so maybe you ought to go back and be with her. I’ll call you just as soon as we find something out.”

“Oh, I can wait,” Harvey assured Sam. “Besides, I’m curious to see how things turn out.”

Heart attacks, Sam had learned over the years, were a spectator sport in certain Harmony circles. Like veterans swapping stories of their army days, Harvey and the old men of the Coffee Cup regaled one another with tales of aortic embolisms and arteriosclerosis. Sam wasn’t anxious for his father to be the heart du jour at the Coffee Cup. He placed his hand under Harvey’s elbow and helped him to his feet. “We’ll be talking with you then, Harvey. Thanks again for all your help.”

“Anytime, Sam. You call me anytime you need me.”

“Thank you, Harvey,” Gloria Gardner added. “You’re a good neighbor.”

“Well, we do what we can,” Harvey said modestly, pulling his pants higher with a mighty tug. Harvey Muldock had the highest waistline of anyone in town; his belt landed scant inches below his armpits. “You keep in touch now.”

“Will do,” Sam assured him.

Sam and his mother sat quietly in the waiting room. A man entered after a while, pressing a bloody bandage to his arm. A nurse whisked him away.

“Wonder what happened to him?” Sam said.

“Maybe he’s a burglar and he cut his arm breaking out a window,” his mother speculated.

“Could be he got hurt rescuing a small child,” Sam said, trying to be positive.

“I bet he got drunk and got cut in a bar fight.”

“Mother, let’s try being a little more charitable, shall we.”

It felt odd scolding his mother. Then again, he was her pastor, and it was his job to appeal to her nobler qualities.

“You’re absolutely right,” she said, patting his hand. “You’re a good minister, son.”

“Thank you, Mom.”

The double doors opened with a whoosh of air; a doctor walked into the waiting room and came toward them. “Mrs. Gardner?”

“Yes, that’s me.” Sam’s mother rose to greet him. “This is my son, Sam. He’s a minister.”

The doctor smiled politely and shook Sam’s hand. “Well, the Lord must have heard your prayers. It looks like your father’s going to make it.”

“Thank God,” they chorused.

“He’s not out of the woods, but he is stable. He’s going to need a bypass operation. We don’t do that here, of course. He’ll need to go to the city. My nurse is going to work with you to set up a date for that. Sooner the better, though.”

Sam reached his arm around his mother and pulled her to him.

“Thank you, Lord,” he whispered. But even as he prayed, he knew the landscape of his world had altered, that the rock who’d been his father had cracked and no mortar on God’s earth, however strong, could repair it.