37

Sam and Barbara drove Levi back to Purdue on Thursday. He was living off campus this semester to save money. Nine guys in a three-bedroom apartment. A hundred dollars a month each, another twenty for utilities, each boy responsible for his own meals. Levi took three cases of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Seventy-two cans of soup. Twenty-four days at three cans per day. Roughly three dollars a day to eat. Not bad. Not bad at all.

“All that sodium,” Barbara said on the way home. “His blood pressure is going to shoot through the roof. It’ll probably kill him.” She began to cry, thinking of her firstborn lying in a casket, killed by soup.

“He’ll be fine,” Sam said. “He’s young. He can take it. Besides, he likes chicken noodle soup.”

Supper was quiet that night, with the boys gone. Barbara wasn’t feeling especially romantic and swatted Sam away at bedtime. He was too distracted to mind, thinking about the meeting and what might have happened to it.

Since Monday morning, he’d been visiting members of the congregation, even the Finks, hoping one of them would rat someone out. He hadn’t come right out and asked anyone what had happened, but had dropped hints, all to no avail. Of the millions of churches in the world, he had stumbled upon the one church whose members didn’t gossip. What rotten luck.

On Friday morning, he visited Wayne and Doreen Newby. Wayne took him to the basement to show him his train set. Wayne was a talker, a regular gasbag, who droned on about model trains. Sam stuck with him, slipping in a question now and then, hoping to catch him off guard so Wayne would spill the beans. He asked Wayne how long he and Doreen had belonged to the meeting, and when Wayne said twenty years, Sam feigned fascination and asked Wayne for a brief history of the meeting.

“Tell me the high points and low points,” he said.

Wayne told him about the first pie supper, a high point, and serving on the limb committee, a low point. He told Sam about a former pastor who collected rocks and another who’d found a dozen four-leaf clovers at one time.

“That fella was something else. He could spot a four-leaf clover a mile away.”

“Amazing,” Sam said. “Simply amazing.”

“But you asked for the low points,” Wayne said.

“I’ve found that being open about our struggles can help us overcome them,” Sam said piously.

“Well, I don’t know if the others would agree, but the worst time in my memory was when we switched hymnals about four or five years ago. Personally, I was against it.”

Sam’s pulse quickened. This must have been it. He had known congregations to split over hymnals, to go at one another hammer and tongs over music to the Lord.

“Did anyone leave?” Sam asked.

Wayne thought for a moment.

“Not that I remember. Oh, I stayed away for a week, but then Doreen asked me to come back, so I did.”

“Did anything else happen a few years ago?” Sam asked, exasperated.

“Oh my, yes, that was a dreadful time,” Wayne said.

“I’ve sensed something very painful happened, but no one wants to talk about it.”

“I think it’s because, looking back, we’re kind of embarrassed it ever happened. It was one of those things that didn’t have to happen. One thing about it, though, we sure learned our lesson. It’ll never happen again. Not in this church.”

Sam was beside himself. “Would you mind telling me what happened?”

“I don’t know that I’m the one to tell you. I’m not the clerk of the limb committee. Maybe you ought to ask Hank Withers.”

“Hank told me to ask Ruby Hopper, that she was the clerk when it happened.”

Wayne paused. “Well, that’s true. She was the clerk of the meeting when it happened, but Hank was the clerk of the limb committee.”

“What’s the limb committee got to do with what happened?” Sam asked.

“It was the limb committee that dropped the ball,” Wayne said. “But don’t tell Hank I said so. He’s kind of sensitive about it.”

“What happened?”

“Well, there was this big limb that had broken off a tree and it was dangling over the meetinghouse. The meeting had asked the limb committee to take care of it before it broke off all the way and punched a hole in the meetinghouse roof. But the committee put it off and put it off and then one night a storm blew up and knocked the limb down and, sure enough, it punched a hole in the roof.”

“That’s it? A tree limb caused the meeting to lose over a hundred members?”

“I don’t remember that we lost anybody. Oh, sure, a few people were upset with Hank for dillydallying, but no one said anything to him. And he fixed the damage himself. He’s real handy with that kind of thing.”

“Did it cause a church fight?”

“No, we all get along pretty good with one another.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Sam said glumly.

Wayne launched into the history of model trains, while Sam looked for an opening to escape. Wayne wouldn’t let him depart until Sam promised to return the following week to see Wayne’s latest acquisition—a Lionel Lincoln Funeral Train.

“They brought Ol’ Abe’s body right through here, you know. Sunday, April thirtieth, eighteen hundred and sixty-five. It was raining to beat the band. My great-grandfather was there. He was just a kid. He used to tell me about it when I was little.”

Wayne began to tear up, thinking of Abraham Lincoln being dead, as if he’d just gotten the news.

“One of the soldiers guarding the casket was smoking a cigar and he threw it to the ground and my great-grandfather picked it up. It got passed down to me. Want to see it?”

Before Sam could object, Wayne was rifling through a cabinet, retrieving a brown object which he showed to Sam.

“Grandpa dipped it in varnish, so it’s held up pretty well.” Wayne studied it. “Just think, this very cigar was touched by someone who touched Abraham Lincoln. Pretty amazing when you think about it. I bet I could get some real money for it. Truth is, I’m counting on it funding my retirement. Don’t have any kids I can pass it down to. I thought I might take it to that fella on that pawnshop show on TV and have him tell me what it’s worth. I bet they’ve never seen anything like this.”

“That would be a safe bet,” Sam agreed. “They probably don’t see a lot of used cigars.”

After a lengthy discussion of Abraham Lincoln, Sam took his leave.

He’d only visited three members that week, but was already exhausted; still, he determined to press on. He was certain the meeting’s refusal to acknowledge its dark secret was the reason for its dwindling numbers. When he got home, he Googled the meeting to see if perhaps someone had been murdered in the meetinghouse. He found the meeting’s website. It hadn’t been updated since the late nineties. The pastor before last was still listed as the minister. Sam had a faint recollection of him. A large, doughy man named Fred who had a colon condition. He had given a lengthy talk about it one year at the annual pastors’ retreat. Maybe Fred had exploded in the pulpit one Sunday. That would certainly explain the exodus.

That afternoon he wrote his sermon, his first at Hope, encouraging the congregation to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Galatians 6:2.

“Let there be no secrets among us,” he wrote. “Let us share with one another those things that cause us pain, those matters we’d like to forget that still hurt us.” Then he would ask the congregation to enter into silence, giving them the opportunity to stand, as the Spirit led them, to share their burdens.

Sam loved Galatians 6:2.

He read the sermon to Barbara that evening, just before bedtime.

“Nice try,” she said. “But wouldn’t it just be easier to ask Ruby what happened?”

“Ministry is about subtlety,” he told her.

“I thought it was about honesty.”

“Well, that, too, but only as a last resort.”

With that settled, they went to sleep.