31
They held their garage sale the middle weekend of June. Sam was a keeper, and Barbara was a thrower-away. They spent the week before the sale bickering and negotiating. Sam promised to dispose of his three-wheeled lawn mower if he could keep the wagon wheel passed down from his great-great-great-grandfather. It was said to be from the covered wagon the family came west in, in 1827, all the way from Cincinnati. Fifty miles of flat prairie ground, which they covered in three days, there being no major rivers to cross. They had been aiming for California, but got as far as Harmony, where they renounced their Lutheran faith and joined up with the Quakers. They had been there ever since, stagnating.
Sam’s father came by the first morning of the sale.
“You’re selling this?” he asked, incredulous, holding up a shovel with a cracked blade. “You can take this over to Ernie Matthews’s and have him weld that blade. You’d think you were made of money.”
“Or you can buy it from me for twenty-five cents and take it to Ernie yourself,” Sam suggested.
“You’d charge your own father a quarter for this?”
“How about twenty cents?”
Sam and his father bickered back and forth before agreeing on fifteen cents.
“Can you believe Barbara wanted me to sell our wagon wheel?” Sam told his father.
“You’re kidding me! The family wagon wheel?”
“The very one,” Sam said. “She has no regard for history.”
Barbara toyed with the idea of buying the shovel herself and smacking them both on the head.
The sale was wildly successful, Harmony being a small town and people liking nothing more than snooping through one another’s belongings. Townspeople still talked about how Harvey Muldock’s brother, Howard, sold off his collection of girlie magazines in 1982. When his dalliance with smut became public knowledge, he was booted out of the church, and had to close his business and move to the city, where people were accustomed to decadence.
But there were no such secrets in the Gardners’ sale, just some old tools and children’s videos, some of Sam’s old clothes that no longer fit, Tupperware permanently stained with microwaved tomato sauce, and a smattering of pictures and plaques with Scripture verses that Sam had been given over the years. Three this-is-the-day-the-Lord-hath-made, two for-God-so-loved-the-world, and one the-wages-of-sin-is-death Scripture plaque, which Dale Hinshaw had given him the year before, after Sam had preached a sermon series on forgiveness.
The sale began at 8 a.m., and by 2:30 p.m. they were cleaned out. Harvey Muldock came past as they were folding the tables and putting them away, studied the wagon wheel, then offered Sam one hundred dollars, which Sam declined.
“I’m saving it for my sons,” Sam said, and was promptly informed by his sons they wanted nothing to do with it, so Sam sold that, too, since Harvey was his third cousin, twice removed, and therefore practically family.
In all they made $126, which didn’t seem worth the effort, but it gave them the excuse to get rid of things that would have otherwise cluttered their lives, so it was worthwhile. Sam divided the money between his sons, sixty-three dollars apiece.
“That’s the closest thing you’ll ever get to an inheritance,” he told them. “Invest it wisely.”
The next morning they left on their last family vacation. Camping, the only trip they could afford. They left their cell phones at home and drove four hours north to Lake Michigan, where they pitched their tent in a state park, perhaps the last remaining tent in the entire state. It was hot and humid and everyone else was camping in air-conditioned RVs, hooked up to cable television.
“That isn’t camping,” Sam said. “They might as well have stayed home.”
They cooked over a campfire, bacon and eggs and Dinty Moore beef stew, and drank tepid lemonade. At night they roasted marshmallows and slapped mosquitoes and reminisced about past vacations, then spread out their sleeping bags on the tent floor and fell to sleep, hot and dirty but indescribably happy.
When the boys were younger, maybe even just a few years before, they would have whined the whole time, but now they were old enough to appreciate their last family vacation. One evening they drove to the nearest town and watched a movie at a drive-in theater, a thriller about terrorists seizing the White House and being thwarted by a minister from Iowa who had brought his family to Washington, D.C., to see the sights. The minister, it turns out, had once been a Navy SEAL, but had told no one, not even his wife, so everyone was surprised when he single-handedly rendered three dozen terrorists unconscious with a variety of jujitsu moves.
Sam, having on several occasions imagined himself doing much the same thing, loved the movie.
“That’s the thing about us ministers,” he told his family that night in their tent. “There are things we learned in our former lives that we can’t talk about. They lie just beneath the surface, ready to be used should we ever need them.”
“You told us you had always been a pastor,” Addison said.
“You were too young to know the truth,” Sam said. “Suffice it to say that I’ve done things I can’t talk about. Secrets from long ago, before I met your mother. Matters too painful to talk about, that were utterly necessary at the time. I suppose I became a pastor to make up in some small way for the things I once had to do for my nation.”
“Oh, brother,” Barbara said.
Levi and Addison wanted desperately to believe their father was more interesting than he appeared, so they believed him. For the most part. They believed he had once done things he preferred not to talk about. It might even have been something exciting. Something involving espionage. Probably not, but one never knew.
They camped ten days, then returned so Addison could say good-bye to his friends before shipping out for basic training in Oklahoma. They drove him to the recruiter’s office in Cartersburg the last day of June. Addison had given his family strict instructions not to cry in front of the recruiter, so they bravely shook his hand good-bye, his mother hugged him, then they returned to their car, where Sam began to sob.
“He’s never coming home,” Sam wailed. “We’ll never see him again.”
“Don’t say that,” Barbara snapped. “You want to jinx him?”
“Did Dad cry like this when I went away to college?” Levi asked from the backseat.
“All the way home,” Barbara said. “He was distraught. We had to pull over several times.”
Levi smiled, pleased his departure was the cause of parental sorrow.
“I was thinking,” he said, “that with Addison gone for the next four years, I could maybe turn his bedroom into a game room.”
“You’ll have to take that up with the new owners,” Barbara said. “We’re moving next month. Remember?”
“Besides, you’ll be back to college in a month’s time,” Sam pointed out, his voice catching. “Both our little boys, gone.”
Sam could barely see to drive, so he pulled over to let Barbara take the wheel.
They began to pack as soon as they reached home. Sam borrowed Uly Grant’s truck from the hardware store and began filling it with their belongings. They started in the attic, hauling boxes of Christmas decorations down two flights of stairs and out to the truck. After a few hours, Sam suggested they burn the house down and start all over, fresh.
“We’d probably make a profit,” he pointed out. “That’s the nice thing about a fire. It destroys all the evidence. We could tell them we lost a Picasso and get an extra half a million.”
“I’m sure our insurance company would believe we owned a Picasso,” Barbara said.
It took them two days to work their way through the attic, with numerous runs to the dump and a trip to the Amvets in Cartersburg. They moved on to the basement, which had a tendency to fill with water so had been kept mostly empty. They boxed up Addison’s things, then hauled the first load up to the city to the parsonage. Hank and Norma Withers met them there and helped them unload the truck, then took them to eat supper at Arby’s.
“So I heard you go to Purdue?” Hank commented to Levi.
“Yes, sir. I’m a Boilermaker.”
“Went to Ohio State myself. Studied architecture. What’s your major?”
“It was engineering, then I switched to sociology. But I have a buddy who’s an acting major, so I’m thinking of doing that.”
This was news to Sam and Barbara, who tried not to act surprised.
“Lot of money in acting,” Hank Withers said. “If you hit it big. Of course, most actors don’t. They end up waiting tables. Not that there’s anything wrong with waiting tables. Did it myself during college.”
“I was also thinking of maybe majoring in engineering again. I kind of miss it.”
Hank nodded. “A noble profession, engineering. If it weren’t for engineers, we’d still be living in caves and pooping outdoors.”
“Yeah, we engineers are pretty much responsible for modern civilization,” Levi said, now proudly numbering himself among that accomplished tribe.
After dinner, they bid a warm good-bye to Hank and Norma, then returned to the parsonage. With no television, Levi took it upon himself to regale them with stories of engineering’s finer moments in history.
“Herbert Hoover was an engineer. Did you know that, Dad?”
“And a president, and a Quaker,” Levi added. “We engineers are multifaceted.”
It had been a long day, and before long Sam and Barbara fell to sleep on their air mattress while Levi spoke of splendid and sundry wonders.