A Change of Heart (2 page)

T
wo weeks passed, it was mid-April, and the crocuses around Fern Hampton’s mailbox were in bloom. Oscar Purdy had hired a small army of high-school girls to work the counter and was contemplating opening the Dairy Queen early in light of the warm weather that had graced the town.

Uly Grant had ordered in his summer supply of lawn mowers and arrayed them on the sidewalk across the front of the hardware store, drawing old men out of doors to inspect this year’s models.

“Would you look at that,” Stanley Farlow said, nudging a mower with the toe of his boot. “Nothing but plastic. I wouldn’t give you twenty dollars for the whole lot of ’em. And Hondas to boot. I tell you one thing, if Uly’d had those little nippers shooting at him in the Big War, he wouldn’t be selling their mowers. I’ll tell you that right now.”

“I got a Honda and it’s been a good mower,” Harvey Muldock ventured.

Few subjects are able to generate contention among old men like lawn mowers, lawn mowing being a religion in Harmony. Each man is a devotee of his particular brand and will argue to the death for its superiority, as if picking the right lawn mower confirms his worth as a human being.

“If you ask me, John Deere’s the way to go,” Asa Peacock said.

Stanley Farlow snorted. “You’re just paying for the green paint. Now, you take Snapper. I’ve been using the same Snapper for twenty years now, and it does just fine. Doesn’t burn a drop of oil and has a nice, even cut.”

“What are you talking about?” Harvey asked. “That yard of yours looks pitiful. I thought maybe you’d been cutting your grass with a dull ax. I’m glad you told me it was a Snapper. Now I know not to buy one.”

They stood in front of the hardware store another half hour, circling like bulldogs nipping at one another’s heels, until Uly came out and shooed them along.

Uly has been thinking of getting a restraining order against Stanley Farlow. Potential customers walking past slow down to view the mowers, which is Stanley’s cue to enlighten them. “You don’t want that mower. Nothin’ but junk. I tell you, it’s highway robbery what he’s askin’ for these mowers. He oughta be ashamed of himself. You buy that mower and you’re buying yourself a peck of trouble.”

Sam walked past several times, waiting for Stanley to leave, so he could look at the mowers without having to endure editorial comment. Sam had inherited his grandfather’s mower, which was held together with duct tape and baling wire. He’d used it for five years before pronouncing it dead and hauling it to the dump, over the objections of his father, who believed the mower was good for another ten years at least.

His father drove to the dump, retrieved it, and stored it in his garage along with all the other “perfectly good things that just need a little elbow grease and they’ll be as good as new.” Sam’s father has nine perfectly good mowers in his garage awaiting resurrection.

After a bit of haggling for a 10 percent clergy discount and a free tank of gas, Sam settled on a mower. He pushed it the four blocks to Dale Hinshaw’s house to mow his yard. It was probably a little too early to mow, but the grass was starting to look raggedy, with clumps of high grass where various dogs had applied fertilizer over the winter.

Dale is home from the hospital, but forbidden to mow. It took Sam an hour to cut the grass. Dale’s lawn isn’t large, but there’s a good bit of statuary to steer around—three concrete geese, Snow White and the seven dwarves, a wooden windmill, and two wagon wheels flanking the driveway.

For someone who’s spent his adult years warning others of the fleeting nature of human life, cautioning them to get right with God while there is yet time, Dale seems shocked to have suffered a heart attack, as if a secret deal with God had exempted him from human frailties.

Sam finished mowing, shut off the mower, and climbed the porch stairs to visit with Dale, who was watching from the porch swing. Having saved his life, Sam now feels invested in it and has become somewhat protective. “Anything else I can do while I’m here?” he asked.

“No, that’s about it. Is that a new mower?”

“Yep. Just got it.”

“I’m a Snapper man myself,” Dale said with a sniff.

“Uly was having a sale and I needed a mower, so I thought I’d give it a try.” Sam wondered why every time he was around Dale Hinshaw, he ended up feeling the need to apologize for some indiscretion.

“Well, I suppose there’s no harm done. I reckon the folks who work at Snapper can always get jobs at McDonald’s.”

This was starting to remind Sam of his first church, where he’d made the error of purchasing a used Toyota from his brother, Roger, causing his congregation to question his patriotism. Disinclined to subsidize treason, they stopped giving to the church and didn’t resume until Sam apologized, sold the Toyota, and bought a Ford. Which, incidentally, was made in Canada, though Sam thought it best not to point that out.

“You know, Dale, we live in a global economy now.”

“That’s just what the Antichrist wants you to believe, Sam. Next thing you know, we’ll all be wearing the mark of the beast and have computer chips under our skin. Won’t be able to go anywhere without Big Brother knowing where we are.”

“Just because I bought a Honda lawn mower?”

“It’s from small acorns that mighty oaks grow,” Dale said smugly.

Sam was starting to feel less protective of Dale with every passing moment.

“How’s things going at the church without me?” Dale asked.

Superbly, Sam wanted to say, but for the sake of kindness didn’t. “Oh, we’re muddling through. We’ll be glad to have you back.”

“Don’t know when that will be. Doctor told me to stay away from crowds. Said if I picked up a virus, it could go straight to my heart and I’d be a goner.”

“You stay away as long as you need to,” Sam said. He rose to leave. “You take care, Dale. Call if you need anything.”

Sam descended the porch steps, pushed his mower down the sidewalk past Snow White and her short friends, then turned toward home. A block later, he passed Bea Majors’s house. She was lifting bags of mulch from the trunk of her car, leveraging the bags up and over the lip of the trunk before letting them fall to the ground, then dragging them across the grass to the flowerbeds that ringed her home.

Sam stopped to help, even though Bea Majors was still upset with him from the month before, when he’d refused to draw and quarter Deena Morrison’s fiancé, Dr. Pierce, for expressing doubts about the Virgin Birth. She’d relinquished her seat at the organ, thinking the church would rise up, fire Sam, and carry her back to church on their shoulders. That they seemed to have gone forward without a hitch is annoying her to no end.

Sam unloaded five bags of mulch, making small talk and updating Bea on the church news. She didn’t have much to say, having suffered one indignity after another at the hands of the church. First, they hadn’t begged her to return. Then they’d had the audacity to advertise in the
Herald
for a new organist. A paid organist, at that. Twenty dollars a week, plus twenty-five dollars for weddings and funerals, plus three weeks off a year, plus a paid membership in the Church Organists of Mid-America (COMA).

Fifty years she’d played the organ at Harmony Friends and never gotten one thin dime. But let her leave, and they’d spend money like drunken sailors. She’d been thinking of billing the church for her services. Fifty-two Sundays a year for fifty years, except in 1968, when she’d missed a Sunday to attend her aunt’s funeral. As near as she could figure, the church owed her fifty-two thousand dollars, and that wasn’t including weddings and funerals. If she hadn’t needed her mulch unloaded, she wouldn’t even have spoken to Sam, she was so worked up.

Sam spread the mulch with Bea hovering over him, pointing out the thin spots and cautioning him not to smother the tulips, which had elbowed their way through the soil.

He complimented her tulips, which soothed her somewhat. She has been cross-pollinating her tulips, despite warnings from her sister, Opal, who believes the natural order shouldn’t be trifled with and that Bea will have some explaining to do come Judgment Day.

“If you don’t believe in trifling with the natural order, how come you dye your hair?” Bea had asked her.

After that Opal had piped down for a while.

“Yes, you sure do have beautiful tulips,” Sam said. “I sure wish I could grow flowers like these. I just don’t seem to have the knack for it.”

“It’s all in the soil,” Bea confided. “Coffee grounds and fish heads.”

“Fish heads?”

“Dale gives me the fish heads after he’s cleaned his fish. I bury ’em alongside the tulip bulbs. Gotta keep the cats away, though.”

“Well, it certainly appears to be working.”

“I have more tulips than anyone else in town,” Bea boasted.

“Even more than Fern Hampton?” Sam asked.

Bea snorted. “Fern Hampton couldn’t tell the difference between a tulip and her tush. She went and bought all those bulbs at Wal-Mart last fall and slapped ’em in the ground willy-nilly, and now she’s goin’ around acting like the world’s expert on tulips. You just watch and see, one spring she’ll get the root rot and they’ll be dead inside a week.”

“You think?”

“Yes I do, and I won’t shed one tear either,” Bea said emphatically.

Gardening, Sam was beginning to learn, was a blood sport.

He finished spreading the mulch, then stood, stretching his sore muscles. By that time, Bea was feeling more hospitable and scurried inside to retrieve a coffee can full of fish heads, which she offered to Sam. “You got to keep ’em cold until you use ’em.”

Sam thanked her profusely, feigning enthusiasm. He pushed his new lawn mower around the corner and down the sidewalk past Hester Gladden’s house, then crossed the street, turned into his driveway, and rolled the mower into his garage, maneuvering between his sons’ skateboards and bicycles. He carried the fish heads inside and placed them in the refrigerator, then washed his hands and took a nap.

His wife, Barbara, found them early the next morning while Sam was still asleep. He was awakened by a shriek, then the clatter of a can striking the kitchen floor. He pulled on his robe and eased his way down the stairs and into the kitchen. A fish head lay on the rug in front of the sink, leering up at his wife with a bulging eye.

“What is that?” she asked.

“A peace offering, I think.”

“Whatever it is, get it out of my house.”

Sam picked up the fish remains, placed them in a grocery sack, and carried them out the back door, down the brick walk next to the driveway, and around behind the garage to the burn barrel in the alley. He struck an Ohio Blue Tip and lit the sack, watching as curls of flame consumed the paper.

Shirley Finchum spied him from her kitchen window, wondering what he was burning so early in the morning. Probably dirty magazines, she thought. Sneaking out to do his filthy business while everyone was still asleep. She’d never trusted Sam Gardner, not since he was in the seventh grade and she’d worked at the Rexall and caught him hiding behind the comic rack, ogling that month’s issue of the
Police Gazette.

She phoned Bea Majors. “Guess what that pastor of yours is doing?”

“What?”

“Standing out in the alley in his bathrobe up to no good.”

“Is that all he’s doing, just standing out there?”

“He’s burning something. Dirty magazines, I think,” Shirley conjectured.

“And to think I let him touch my tulips,” Bea said with a shudder of disgust.

They bemoaned the lack of morality, how the town was going to Hades in a handbasket, and it was all Sam’s fault.

“Did you know he’s a Democrat?” Shirley asked.

“No, but I suspected as much. And to think I gave him fish heads.”

Sam walked past Bea’s on his way to the meetinghouse. She was out front, surveying her flowers.

“Good morning, Bea,” Sam said cheerfully.

“You owe me fifty-two thousand dollars,” Bea snapped.

“Excuse me?”

“And I want my fish heads back too.”

Sam was going to stop, but thought better of it. He smiled, gave a little wave, and kept on walking. There are some things mere mortals are not meant to understand, and Bea Majors is one of them.

Strolling to his office, he turned his mind to more pleasant pursuits, namely, the summer stretching before him, an unpainted canvas of relaxation, when life downshifted. Sunday school ebbed to a close. Storm windows were taken out of house windows and carried to the attic and the screens set in place. The bugs were vacuumed from the window sills. Rockers and swings were hauled up from the basement and installed on the porch.

Sam passed the Dairy Queen. The sign out front read
Free Sprinkles on Every Cone
on one side and
Opening Today
on the other. His heart gave a happy leap. A new mower, summer looming on the horizon, and evening walks to the Dairy Queen, where he would sit with his family on the long bench watching the cars drive past on Highway 36 while chasing sprinkles around his cone.

I
t was early May, and Miss Rudy was making her rounds through the town, gathering books for the annual book sale held in the basement of the library. It is the 101st anniversary of the library. When the library was built, they carved the year in Roman numerals above the doorway. Unfortunately, people don’t know Roman numerals like they used to, and the 100th anniversary slipped by.

They were six months into the 101st year before Miss Rudy noticed. She promptly hired Judy Iverson to paint a banner announcing the 100th anniversary, then hung it over the Roman numerals above the doorway. She didn’t mention her oversight to the Library Board. They’ve been looking for evidence of senility and she didn’t want to give them any ammunition.

Miss Rudy’s dementia is the only thing that’s kept her in Harmony. If she were in full control of her faculties, she’d have left long ago for some brighter shore where people value enlightenment.

For forty-five years, Miss Rudy has waged her private war against intellectual sloth. Each new crop of town council members wants to cut the library’s funding. “We already got enough books,” they tell her. “Why do we need more?”

She corrects their grammar in public, which doesn’t endear them to her cause. “We already
have
enough books. And no, we don’t.”

Lovers of the written word are viewed with suspicion in Harmony. If Shakespeare had grown up here, he’d have been told to quit goofing off and get a real job. His parents would have urged him toward blacksmithing.

Every year, Miss Rudy hopes it will be different, that when she goes forth to solicit books for the sale she will uncover a first edition of
To Kill a Mockingbird
or
The Grapes of Wrath.
Instead, she is inundated with paperback romances with titles like
Passion in Paris
or
Summer Fling.
People leave them in stacks at the book door of the library, after hours, when no one is likely to discover their depravity.

She’s also swamped with back issues of
Reader’s Digest,
Upper Room devotionals, and the Friendly Women’s Circle cookbook. Confident it would hit the best-seller list, the Friendly Women had 5,000 copies printed in 1983 and managed to sell 432 of them. The remainder are stored in the attics and basements of Friendly Women all over town. For years they’ve unloaded them on Miss Rudy. They are the zucchini of books—everyone has more than they could possibly use. Miss Rudy hauls them to the recycling center in Cartersburg.

She stopped by Kivett’s Five and Dime to see if Ned had any books to donate. Ned was gone, but Nora Nagle was working the checkout counter. She’s been reading Emily Post’s book on wedding etiquette. She isn’t engaged, but wants to be prepared in case the right man happens along, though she is starting to think she might have to settle for the wrong man.

Nora Nagle was the 1975 Indiana Sausage Queen. She moved to Hollywood, where she starred as a dancing grape in an underwear commercial, but doesn’t have a romantic prospect in the world. She is too beautiful; men are frightened of her. So they ask out less attractive women while Nora Nagle sits at home. She’s been thinking of marring her perfection so she won’t be so intimidating, maybe breaking her nose or letting her eyebrows grow together.

She gave the wedding book to Miss Rudy for the sale, who made a mental note to set it aside for Deena Morrison. A goodly number of people have taken a deep interest in Deena’s wedding, which is drawing perilously close. Bob Miles has been running a countdown in the upper left corner of the front page of the
Herald,
next to the weather.
Seasonal temperatures expected, though variations might occur. Thirty-nine days until the big day!

Deena found the wedding dress she wanted in a magazine at the library. Miss Rudy relaxed her rule about not letting people check out current magazines so Deena could show it to Miriam Hodge, who is sewing her wedding dress.

In the midst of all the wedding planning, Deena’s computer crashed. Self-proclaimed computer healers from around town laid hands on it, trying to resurrect it, but apparently lacked faith because it’s still broken. She’s been using the computer at the library, trolling the Internet with Miss Rudy for wedding ideas.

Deena is having the kind of wedding Miss Rudy wishes she could have had, but never did. It isn’t just the wedding Miss Rudy wanted; it’s the marriage, the sharing of life. When she was Deena’s age, she was caring for her parents, who’d had her late in life. After they died, she went off to college, then moved to Harmony to work at the library. The years passed, piling one on top of the other, and now she’s seventy-seven and the sand has nearly run out of her hourglass.

It’s tolerable in the daytime, when she’s at the library. People are in and out, and there are books to shelve and the occasional teenager to rein in. In the spring, she has the book sale to occupy her attention. It’s the evenings that wear her down. The library closes at seven. She turns off the lights and locks up at five after, then walks the half block to her darkened, silent house.

Across the street, she can see Owen Stout and his wife, Mildred, sitting in their chairs, talking or watching TV or playing Scrabble. Behind her, on the other side of the alley, the Grants can be seen going about their evening—the boys at the kitchen table doing their homework, Uly and his wife standing at the sink washing the supper dishes.

She’d had someone once, a long time ago. He’d moved to town to work for the phone company. They’d met at church. He moved a pew closer each week, until on the fifth Sunday he’d worked up the nerve to sit in her pew and share a hymnal. He’d stopped by the library the next day, glancing at her from the biographies. The next morning he was back, asking permission to call on her that evening.

It was late spring. He arrived at her house a little before eight. She’d hurried home from work to shower, iron a new dress, and dab perfume on her wrist. They sat on her porch swing. He’d grown up in a small town just like this one, he’d told her, then had graduated from high school, was sent to Korea, came home alive and grateful, and had been with the phone company ever since. Never married.

He visited every night for a week and sat on her porch. On the fifth night he held her hand, the next night they kissed, and two nights later she invited him inside for a game of Rummikub, even though she knew people would talk. Two months passed, he proposed, and she accepted. The date was set for early November. Then there was a car wreck. He lasted two days at a hospital in the city, all alone, before she managed to find him. He was buried the day they were to be married, in South Cemetery by the Co-op.

She has the wedding rings they bought at the jewelry store in Cartersburg. She keeps them in a jewelry box on her bureau, and at night, when she is especially lonesome, she holds them and remembers better days. She has one picture of him, which she keeps next to her bed—the picture accompanying their engagement announcement in the
Herald.
But that was a long time ago, and people have forgotten. They walk past his grave and see his name and wonder who he was and why he’s buried there. No one remembers, except Miss Rudy.

She has a handkerchief he gave her the night he proposed. She was crying, and he pulled it from his pocket to dab her tears. She kept it to launder, but never got around to giving it back.

All of that came to mind while she was standing in Kivett’s Five and Dime, these unbidden memories, never far from the surface.

She thanked Nora for the wedding book. When she returned to the library, she phoned Deena, asking her to stop past that evening on her way home from the Legal Grounds.

Deena knocked on her door at fifteen after eight. Miss Rudy was washing the supper dishes. She invited Deena in, poured them glasses of tea, and then gave her the book. They sat at the kitchen table, thumbing through the book and discussing the upcoming nuptials. Miss Rudy asked if she had something borrowed.

“What do you mean?”

“For your wedding day,” Miss Rudy said. “You have to wear something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.”

“Oh, that. I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

Miss Rudy rose from the table, walked into her bedroom, reached into the top drawer of her bureau, and pulled the handkerchief from it. She went back into the kitchen and pressed it into Deena’s hand. “You can borrow this, if you wish.”

Then, for reasons she still doesn’t understand, she told Deena how she’d come to possess it. She regretted it immediately. Deena began to cry.

“Oh, I should never have told you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad. Please forgive me.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m glad you told me,” Deena said, leaning over to put her arm around Miss Rudy. “How difficult that must have been for you.”

They sat that way the longest time, Deena patting Miss Rudy. A silence enveloped them. In the front room, the mantel clock ticked on, as it always had, with a certain detached cadence. Across the alley, Uly Grant yelled out the back door for his sons to come in for the night.

“Just look at us,” Miss Rudy said, “sitting here being melancholy when the happiest day of your life is fast approaching. Let’s be done with these silly tears.”

Miss Rudy stood and smoothed out her dress, then carried the tea glasses into the kitchen. Deena rose and followed her, standing in the doorway. “I want you to be in my wedding.”

“Excuse me?” Miss Rudy said.

“I would be honored if you would be my maid of honor.”

“Me? Why would you want a dried-up, old woman like me in your wedding? Surely you have a young friend or a family member.”

“I have a brother, but I don’t think he’d look good in a dress.”

“You’re being silly,” responded Miss Rudy, waving her hand in a gesture of dismissal.

“I am most certainly not. It’s the prerogative of a bride to pick her maid of honor, and I want you. After all, you’ve been a great help to me.”

Miss Rudy looked at Deena for a long moment. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Then say yes.”

“You’re sure?” Miss Rudy asked.

“Absolutely positive.”

“Then, yes, I’ll do it—provided I don’t have to wear a dress that shows my cleavage. That’s unseemly for a woman of seventy-seven.”

“You’ll be the picture of modesty,” Deena promised.

Deena stayed another half hour, then excused herself to go home. It was a warm, late spring night. Miss Rudy finished washing the dishes, then went out to her front porch. Ernie Matthews had come the week before to carry her porch furniture up from the basement. She sat on the porch swing, the one she’d shared so long ago, dreaming and hoping and holding hands.

The paint had flecked off. Ernie had offered to paint it. She had thanked him, then politely declined. She wanted it just as it had been, when there was joy and life was good. The swing was bowed on the left side, where she’d always sat. She on the left, he on the right, pushing back and forth in a pleasant rhythm.

Across the street, Owen and Mildred Stout rose from their game of Scrabble at the dining-room table and walked through the house, turning off the downstairs lights. She saw the bathroom light upstairs flicker on, then five minutes later fall dark. A faint glow from Mildred’s bedside table bathed the room in a soft orange. A shadow appeared behind their bedroom curtains. It was Owen, easing open the window for fresh air.

Up and down the street, windows darkened.

Miss Rudy rose and went inside, slipped out of her clothes and into her nightgown, brushed her teeth, climbed in bed, and then reached for the picture beside her bed. It had yellowed over the years and her eyes weren’t as good, but she could still make him out. The strong jaw, the kind smile, the thatch of unruly hair. “Bachelor hair,” he’d called it, with a laugh.

She returned the picture to her bedside table, turned off the light, and lay in the dark, remembering. They’d met forty years ago this past Sunday. Forty years. There were some dates she forgot, but not that one. Never that one.