Christmas in Harmony (5 page)

Frank chuckled. “I remember that game. Third game of the ’39 World Series. I listened to it with my dad. We carried the radio out to the front porch and heard the whole game.”

He grew quiet, remembering.

You close your eyes in a dead-still room and rewind the tape. Revisit snatches of time. A late summer day with your father on the porch. You are eight years old, he is your world. Spin forward. Taking your daughter by her hand, setting her on Santa’s lap. Sorting through the Christmas trees, searching for perfection. Coming home after midnight from the Christmas Eve service, carrying your little girl up the stairs, tucking her in, then staying up to set presents under the tree.

Frank always thought his wife would be around to recollect such things, that these soft memories would be a bulwark against hard times. But it doesn’t work that way. He tries to keep busy, thinking busyness will be a sturdy brace against the heavy weight of time and sorrow. He makes his rounds, visiting the loners. But the people present don’t always make up for the people gone. He used to think having the memories almost made up for not having the person, but now he’s not so sure.

T
wo weeks before Christmas, my office phone rang. It was Miriam Hodge, informing me that a special meeting of the elders committee had been called. There went my dream of a meeting-free month.

“I thought we were going to take December off,” I said.

Miriam sighed. “Dale Hinshaw asked to have a meeting, and got Opal Majors to go along. According to the rules, if two elders ask for a meeting, we have to do it.”

“What’s he want to talk about?”

“He mentioned something about running the plans for the Nativity scene by us.”

“For crying out loud,” I said. “How hard can it be? You nail together some boards, get a few people to stand around in bathrobes, throw a cow or two in the mix and you’re halfway home. What’s the big deal?”

“I’m not sure, but he wants to meet tonight at seven.”

“Tonight! Tonight’s the night Clevis Nagle is showing
It’s a Wonderful Life
at the Royal. I promised my wife and boys I’d take them. Rats!”

“Sam, why don’t you go ahead and take them. I’ll go to the meeting, then call you tomorrow to tell you what he’s up to. Sound good?”

“Thank you, Miriam. That’s real sweet of you. I appreciate your kindness.”

Having wormed my way out of an evening with Dale Hinshaw, I was in a mood to celebrate and offered to treat Frank to lunch at the Coffee Cup. We walked down the street, pulled open the door, and the bell tinkled as we went in. Vinny Toricelli looked up from the grill. “Change the subject, boys,” he called out. “The preacher’s here.”

There’s a price to be paid for pastoring in a small town. I never hear the juicier gossip, and the jokes are limited to priest-minister-and-rabbi golfing jokes, which I’ve heard a million times but have to laugh at anyway, lest I appear to be a poor sport.

Frank and I found a corner booth, across the room from the buffet, away from the traffic. I had to endure a few minutes of good-natured insults before the diners turned on someone else and I could study the menu in peace. Friday is meat-loaf day, unless you’re Catholic; then Vinny has codfish with tartar sauce, your choice of two sides, and sweet iced tea. With sufficient catsup, the meat loaf is tolerable, so I ordered that. Frank had the codfish, in honor of his deceased Catholic grandmother, who’d married a Protestant and was disowned by her family.

Frank makes it a point to mention that he is one-fourth Catholic whenever Dale is around. Dale pleads with him to listen to Eddie on the radio and learn the real truth about Catholics, the stuff the pope doesn’t want you to know. Like how if a Protestant marries a Catholic and they divorce, the Catholic gets the kids because of a secret deal the pope made with President Kennedy. If the Catholic parent dies, the pope gets the kids, which is why the pope’s house is so big. It is full of half-Protestant children who are being brainwashed. Eddie has discovered secret documents bearing this out, and he’s written a book, which Dale bought and gave to Frank, to no avail.

The bell over the door tinkled. I saw Frank grimace, so I turned and looked. It was Dale. He slid into the booth next to me just as Penny brought our food. Frank bowed his head to pray. It was unusual for Frank to take the initiative in prayer, but Dale and I bowed our heads with him. “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive through thy bounty, through Christ, our Lord, Amen.” Then Frank crossed himself, raised his head, spread his napkin across his lap, and began eating his codfish.

Dale peered at him. “What kind of prayer was that?” he asked. “I never heard that one.”

“It’s Catholic,” Frank said. “My grandmother taught it to me. And since you bowed your head and prayed it with me, that makes you a Catholic now.”

Well, Eddie had warned about things like this on the radio, but Dale couldn’t believe he’d been tricked into joining the Roman Catholic Church. He was livid. He jumped up from the booth and stalked out of the Coffee Cup, fuming.

“That’s one way to get rid of him, I suppose,” Frank said, laughing.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, treating him like that,” I said, trying to look stern, but not having much luck. “We’ll pay for that, you know.”

“Yeah, probably,” he admitted. “But I couldn’t resist.”

With Dale gone, it was a pleasant meal. At noon, the siren at the fire station sounded. We checked our watches, then Vinny flipped on the television to watch the news from the city. All over the restaurant, men set down their forks to watch the mayhem. The general consensus was the same as always—that we are fortunate to live in this town where the only wacko is Dale Hinshaw, who is annoying, but relatively harmless.

I finished my sermon that afternoon, went home, ate supper, then walked the three blocks to the Royal with my family to watch
It’s a Wonderful Life.
Clevis Nagle was there in his black pants, white shirt, and red bow tie. His daughter Nora was manning the concession stand. She is back home after a twenty-year sojourn in California, where she almost hit it big as a dancing grape in an underwear commercial.

People have been talking about her, how her success in life came too early, before she was prepared. First, being crowned Sausage Queen at our Corn and Sausage Days festival, winning the state Sausage Queen contest, then moving to Hollywood and starring in an underwear commercial. It was too much too quick. Now she’s forty and washed up, her glory years but a memory. At least that’s the talk around town. She’s back to serving popcorn at the Royal on Friday nights and working weekdays as a checkout girl at Kivett’s Five and Dime. But she doesn’t look washed up to me, and it’s hard not to watch her through the gap in the curtain, as I did when I was a teenager.

I didn’t follow the movie closely. I’ve seen it thirty-five times, every year since I was six and Clevis began showing it for free. Instead, I thought about the elders over at the meetinghouse and wondered what they were doing. I hoped Miriam was able to rein Dale in, but had my doubts. He was probably up to six signs and five wise men by now.

I dozed for a while, then came to just as Clarence the angel showed up to save Jimmy Stewart. I wished Clarence went to our church. Maybe he could work on Dale. I leaned over to my wife. “Is Clarence still alive?”

She shook her head no. “Died in 1965. Arteriosclerosis.”

So much for that idea.

I scrunched down in the seat when it got to where everyone is giving Jimmy Stewart money. I always cry at that part and didn’t want people to see me. I sat in my chair wishing Clarence were still alive. Arteriosclerosis. I’d had no idea, or I’d have sent a card. I felt terrible. A tear slid down my cheek.

Then the bell on the tree rang, Jimmy Stewart winked at Clarence, and the movie was over. Clevis Nagle turned on the house lights. We stood and stretched while our pupils shrank. My wife looked at me. “Why are your eyes red?”

“It must be the horsehair in these old seats,” I said. “I think I’m allergic to it.”

We walked past the popcorn machine. Nora Nagle glanced at me. I’m a happily married man, so I tried not to think of her riding in Ellis Hodge’s hay wagon in her dressing gown twenty-five years before. I wondered if Dale might ask her to reprise her role as Mary for this year’s Nativity. For the first time in history, wives wouldn’t have to plead with their husbands to come to a church activity. They’d show up in droves, in their funeral suits and doused in Old Spice, their hair combed over in wings, just to gaze upon the heavenly vision that was Nora Nagle.

She smiled at me. Her gaze lingered. Maybe it was my imagination, but she seemed to regret that I was married. She appeared to be saying something. She arched her eyebrows. Her lips moved. Now she was staring directly at me, as if we were the only two in the theater. She wanted to speak of regrets and love unclaimed, I could tell. I heard a voice. “Daddy, I have to go pee-pee. Can you take me?” Nora Nagle turned back to the popcorn machine, the spell broken.

It reminded me why it had been twenty-five years since we’d had a Nativity scene. It presented too great a temptation—a virgin in a bathrobe. Unless we asked Fern Hampton to play the Virgin Mary. That would stifle all thoughts of carnality.

It snowed that night, so the next morning I took my boys sledding on the hill at the park. That afternoon, the phone rang. It was Miriam Hodge. I asked her how the elders meeting went.

“Not well,” she said. “Not well at all.”

“What happened?”

“Dale wants to have a progressive Nativity scene.”

“A what?” I asked.

“A progressive Nativity scene,” she repeated.

I’d heard of progressive dinners, but never of a progressive Nativity scene. “What in the world is that?”

“He wouldn’t say. He said he wanted everyone to hear it at the same time. He’s going to talk about it during the announcement time at church tomorrow.”

This was a favorite ploy of Dale Hinshaw—to trap us in the meeting room, rise to his feet, and rattle on about all sorts of matters.

I tried to put it out of my mind, but the prospect of Dale Hinshaw hijacking worship chilled my enthusiasm for Christian community. I went to bed early that night, but couldn’t sleep for thinking about Dale and what he might do. Downstairs, I could hear the clock strike two. I sighed. Barbara rolled over to me. “Having trouble sleeping?” she asked.

“Yeah. Sorry. Didn’t aim to keep you up.”

“Oh, that’s okay. What are you thinking about?”

“Dale, of course. You know, I spent twenty hours this week working on my sermon, and now people won’t even be in the mood to hear it. Dale’ll stand and babble for twenty minutes and people will be worn out before it’s even time for the sermon.”

“Well, the good thing is, if they don’t pay attention to your sermon tomorrow, you can always preach it again next Sunday and they’ll never notice.”

I chuckled.

“Whose idea was it to put Dale Hinshaw in charge of the Christmas program anyway?” she asked.

I didn’t say anything for a moment. It didn’t take her long to figure out. “I thought it would help him feel included,” I explained.

I could feel her stare in the dark. “Why didn’t you just invite him out for coffee?”

Why, indeed.

Sunday morning dawned bright and cold. I skipped Sunday school in order to preserve my strength for worship. Sunday school was a discouragement to me. Nineteen adults sitting around two tables in the basement while Bea Majors read aloud from
The Sword of the Lord
magazine was not my idea of Christian education.

I had given serious thought to skipping the announcements, but realized that wouldn’t help. Dale would stand anyway, probably at the most inopportune moment, during the middle of my sermon for instance, and begin distributing mimeographed handouts of his latest scheme. I decided to get it over with.

My usual practice was to first read the announcements in the bulletin, the necessity of which mystified me. These were literate people; they knew how to read. But reading the bulletin aloud was a cherished tradition, so I was stuck with the task. Then I would ask if anyone had any additional announcements. This morning, I skipped right to that part. Dale hesitated. My going out of order had thrown him off. He glanced around, then rose to his feet. “Uh, there’s something I need to announce.”

I could hear faint sighs around the meetinghouse.

In an effort to appear pastoral, I smiled at Dale. “Yes, Dale?”

“Well, I just want to encourage everyone to attend our first annual progressive Nativity scene.” The first annual progressive Nativity scene! Now we were doomed to repeat it, year after year, until Dale died.

“When I started workin’ on this,” Dale said, “I didn’t realize just how big your average Nativity scene was. You got your manger and your Holy Family and your shepherds and angels and wise men, not to mention your cows and pigs and geese. Then there’s all the signs for your corporate sponsors, and your concession stand. Then on top of that, you got the angel of the Lord and the spotlights and the sound system. Well, there just ain’t no one place big enough. So I set to praying on it, and the Lord told me what to do. He said, ‘Dale, I want you to spread out the Nativity scene all over town.’ So that’s what we’re gonna do. We’ll start with the manger in my yard and put the livestock in Sam’s yard. The Holy Family can go in Asa and Jessie’s yard, and the wise men, they can go in Bea’s yard. Now Fern said she’d be happy to put the shepherds at her place. And here’s the good part. We can draw us up a map and give it to folks for a ten-dollar donation, like them ministers do on TV, and folks can drive past the various scenes in the order they appear in Scripture.”

To say we were stunned was an understatement.

I glanced over at Miriam Hodge. Ordinarily unflappable, she sat with her eyes rolled back in her head. Her husband, Ellis, was fanning her with a “Jesus at the Last Supper” cardboard fan, compliments of the Johnny Mackey Funeral Parlor.

This image would stay indelibly fixed in my mind—Dale Hinshaw smiling triumphantly while the congregation looked on in various degrees of shock and dismay. I glanced at my wife. She had rocked back in her pew, not exactly charmed with the idea of livestock foraging in our front yard.

But Dale wasn’t finished. “Uh, I’m gonna need the ushers to meet at Asa Peacock’s farm this Tuesday for target practice, just in case some wacko terrorist tries infiltratin’ our progressive Nativity scene.” And with that, he sat down.

It is a sad fact that the topics a pastor studies in seminary seldom cover the exigencies of real life. There is no class on Dale Hinshaw. Lacking such knowledge, I descended to my baser self and did something of which I am ashamed to this day. I bowed my head and prayed that God, in His tender mercy, might strike Dale down. Nothing fatal, I specified to the Lord, just something sufficiently miserable to confine him to bed. Maybe temporary paralysis from a spider bite, or a two-week coma followed by a miraculous recovery.

“And quickly, Lord,” I added. “Before word gets out.”