A new Sunday school teacher stepped in almost every week at Laughing Brook Bible Church. Miss Caldwell, the latest volunteer, apparently thought she’d figured out a way to hold our interest: “Starting next week, you will be teaching the lessons to each other. Won’t that be fun?”
Kenny Matthews’s hand shot up. “Ooh, Marty should teach about Noah and the flood. He forgot to turn off the faucet in the boys’ room last week.”
Marty leaped out of his chair, which collapsed in a folded wooden heap. “Did not! I saw Chet go in after me.”
Kenny smirked. “Maybe it wasn’t the faucet, either.”
Chet Rodgers gulped down a bite of candy from the bar hidden in his pocket. “Not me. I wasn’t here last week. I had the measles pox. I might still have some. I bet if I touch Sarah on the arm, she’ll break out in red polka dots just as big as the ones on Jag’s dress.”
“Get away from me!” Sarah Tisdale jumped so hard, she knocked Mary Jane Morris right off her chair, and they both landed in a heap of frills and curls. It was the funniest thing that we boys had seen in at least thirty seconds and we howled. The girls dove around Sarah and Mary Jane, dusting them off. From somewhere inside the pile came Sarah’s voice: “It’s not measles pox, it’s chickenpox.”
Miss Caldwell lost her smile. “Class. Class! Come. To. Order!”
Something clump-clump-clumped on the other side of the wall. Old Mr. Hopkins beating on the cement block wall with his crooked stick cane. We burst out laughing again.
Miss Caldwell clapped her hands like one big gunshot. “That’s. It. Now sit down, hush up, and put on your listening ears.”
Listening ears? Marty flicked his finger through his mouth to make popping noises as Kenny pretended to pluck off his ears. “Look, I’m Mr. Potato Head. Does anybody need some listening ears? I’m not using mine.”
We nearly busted a gut again but it looked like we’d pushed Miss Caldwell about as far as was safe. Kenny snapped his pretend ears back into place. We punched each other on the shoulders until we quieted each other down.
Miss Caldwell blew a strand of hair off her forehead and rubbed her temples. “Now, as I said, starting next week, you will take turns telling the Sunday school story using the flannel board. You will illustrate each part by placing these flannel cutouts of scenery and people on the board like so . . .”
From a folder, she plucked what looked like paper dolls snipped out of cloth. One colored-in cutout looked like a tree and the other, a guy in a bathrobe. She placed them on a fuzzy, cloth-covered board sitting on an easel and rubbed them into place. They stuck without glue or Velcro or anything that I could see.
Miss Caldwell peeled the bathrobe guy off the board. “When you get to the next part of your Bible story, you’ll change the scenes. You’ll be a talking book and these are your pictures.”
Mary Jane sat up straight in her chair. “That sounds like a wonderful idea, Miss Caldwell.”
She thought she was so mature just because she was twelve already and would be graduating to the teens’ class soon. I looked down at her pointy-toed cowboy boots and decided to keep my mouth shut.
“How do we know which scenes to do when?” Mary Jane asked in her teacher’s-pet voice.
“It’s all diagrammed in the story booklet that I will give you a week before it’s your turn. Then you can practice and tell the story in your own words.”
Bash snickered. “If Mary Jane uses her own words, it’ll take three Sundays to tell the story.”
Miss Caldwell spun on her heel. “Sebastian, you have just volunteered to be the first Sunday school teacher. Next week, you will tell us the story of David and Goliath. Here’s the teacher’s booklet. Use your Bible for research. The adventure of Goliath is chapter 17 of 1 Samuel.”
Bash gaped at her with bug eyes. Then he caught a glimpse of Mary Jane’s smirk. “Thank you, Miss Caldwell. This will be the best lesson ever. You’ll see.”
Miss Caldwell paled. I shuddered. Whenever Bash vowed to do his best, I knew I was in for the worst of it.
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Back in his room after church, Bash spread the flannel-paper cutouts across his bed. He slid them this way and that, paused, shook his head, swept the cutouts back into a pile and started over again. It looked like trying to put together a puzzle from pieces spilled from three boxes.
Bash frowned over the paper dollies like he expected them to talk. He scratched his ear. “God might be calling me to be a preacher. I better find out.”
All that week, Preacher Bash locked me out of our room for a couple hours a day so he could study the story of David and play with his flannel dollies instead of me.
“They’re not dolls,” he snapped through the closed door when I pounded on it Wednesday. “They’re flannel teaching tools. All of us preachers use them to teach you little kids.”
“It’s a Sunday school lesson. And I’m still older than you. And taller.”
“Fatter too. I guess Miss Caldwell knows maturity when she sees it.”
My back to the door, I slid down until I thumped to the floor. I heard Bash slide down his side of the door. He mumbled like he was reading something. I heard rustling noises, maybe like flannel dollies swishing across the floor. More mumbling. More swishing. For weeks, I wished he’d just leave me alone and out of his crazy schemes. Now that he did, I couldn’t stand it.
“C’mon, Bash, tell me what you’re going to do.”
“Nope. It’s a surprise. But it’ll be good.”
“Does your mom know?”
“That’s why I can’t tell you. You’ll blab.”
“Will not. And why won’t you tell your mom?”
“It’ll ruin the surprise.”
I heard him clambering about. I scrambled to my feet just as the bedroom door whipped open. Bash bounded out with a giant green and yellow backpack in hand. “Stay here. I gotta go see if the supplies will fit.”
“What supplies? Miss Caldwell gave you everything.”
Bash stuck out his chest. “For a regular, boring lesson, sure. But we’re going to have the best lesson ever with visual aids way better than flannel doll . . . I mean, flannel teaching tools.”
“Let me help.” I can’t believe I just said that.
“No. You stay here.”
“Please.” Idiot!
Bash scratched his head with the backpack. It looked big enough to carry a tent. Or to be the tent. “Tell you what. Round up some old tin cans. I need ’em for the lesson. And find Pops’s old work boots, the ones he hardly ever uses anymore. And I promise, Sunday morning, I’ll let you help with the lesson.
“Oh, and tell Ma I had to run to Bonkers’s house to pick up visual aids for the lesson.”
What visual aids? Bonkers had cats, dogs, gerbils, snakes, rabbits, birds, mice, toads, and I don’t know what else. I knew enough about Bible stories to know that nothing at Bonkers’s place had anything to do with a giant warrior like Goliath.
Fine! If twerpy-twerp Bash wanted to play with Bonkers’s kittens instead of letting me help him with his flannel dollies, let him. Big deal.
I stomped outside after him. While Bash darted toward the woods, I rooted through trash and recycling containers behind the house for tomato soup cans or whatever might be handy. But I wasn’t rinsing them out. If he wouldn’t tell me his secrets, Bash could wash out his own tin cans.
Sunday morning finally came. Just before we left for church, the Basher darted to the barn and came back clutching the giant backpack with both hands. He stashed it in the trunk of the family car and wouldn’t talk about it.
Aunt Tillie’s eye ticked a flap or two. “Bash, please tell me that you aren’t smuggling your water cannon to church again.”
“Nah, I’m teaching about David and Goliath, not the Battle of Jericho. Besides, I was a little kid then. I thought they used cannons in the Bible.” Bash shrugged. “But I got the other part right. When Mrs. Ledder got to the part about blowing the trumpets and shouting, she was so busy puttin’ stuff on the flannel board that she never saw us whip out our horns and kazoos. She tried to knock the wall down by herself when we blew our horns. We didn’t know she’d play along so well.”
Uncle Rollie rubbed his chin. “You know, it’s been eight months and Elsie Ledder still hasn’t returned to church.”
Aunt Tillie shook her head. “She listens to services on the radio now. She says she feels safer having church where she can triple lock the door.”
Bash’s eyes fairly glittered with the same horrible sparkle I saw just before I tried tipping over a cow. The same sparkle I saw when he taunted me into riding a cow. And just before I surfed a hay bale off a loaded wagon.
My stomach lurched. I bet that the radio preacher was about to have a lot more business.