As far back as I can remember, the Harmony Corn and Sausage Days have been held the second week of September on the town square. The week before, men from the Optimist’s Club hang the Corn and Sausage Days banner across Main Street and the Chamber of Commerce selects the Sausage Queen, who gets to ride down Main Street in Harvey Muldock’s 1951 Plymouth Cranbrook convertible, right behind the Shriners and just in front of the Odd Fellows Lodge.
The highlight of Corn and Sausage Days is the Chicken Noodle Dinner put on by the Friendly Women’s Circle and held in the meetinghouse basement. Their motto is “Meeting All Your Noodle Needs Since 1964.” The Chicken Noodle Dinner is the event of the year for the Circle and they take it seriously—and don’t you forget it. If you are elected to the presidency of the Friendly Women’s Circle, you had better be able to pull off the Chicken Noodle Dinner or impeachment proceedings will commence.
I remember, as a child, going with my mother to the meetinghouse every Tuesday morning while she and the Friendly Women made the noodles. Their faces smudged with flour, wisps of hair hanging down. It was my job to cut the noodles. The ladies would roll the dough flat on the countertop, and I would run the noodle cutter over the dough. My mother would caution me to pay attention and cut straight. The ladies would divide the noodles and hang them on a noodle rack to dry overnight, then the next morning bag them up and store them in the freezer in the meetinghouse basement.
The freezer was bought in 1964, the first year the Friendly Women’s Circle put on the Chicken Noodle Dinner. They cleared two hundred dollars and spent it on a Crosley Shelvador freezer, which is still lumbering along, down in the basement underneath the stairs. We can hear it on Sunday morning when we’re waiting in the silence for the Lord to speak. We can hear the tick, tick, tick of the Regulator clock and the hummm of the Crosley freezer. We sit in the pews and think of those noodles and Corn and Sausage Days. Harvey Muldock thinks of his convertible. The teenage boys dream of the Sausage Queen. Then we go home at eleven-thirty, whether the Lord has spoken or not.
When I was growing up, we would walk from Sunday meeting down the sidewalk to my grandparents’ home and eat fried chicken and green beans from their garden. Mashed potatoes and corn on the cob. Afterwards, if it was summer, we would sit on the front porch and make ice cream and visit, or maybe take a nap. Sometimes Harvey Muldock, who lived across the street, would swing open his garage doors, back his 1951 convertible out of the garage, and take us for rides in the country.
Now my grandparents are gone, and the torch has been passed to my parents. We were at my parents’ house eating Sunday dinner when my mother mentioned how one of the cabinet doors in the meetinghouse kitchen had worked loose from the hinge and needed fixing. This was the week before the Chicken Noodle Dinner. My mother was in charge and wanted everything shipshape, right down to the cabinet doors. The ladies roll into the kitchen on Friday morning and do a shakedown cruise to check all the systems. By that time the Crosley is full with the year’s effort. Chicken on one side, noodles on the other.
These are not ordinary chickens. These are Rhode Island Reds, straight from Asa Peacock’s farm. Asa himself drove to the hatchery in early May and handfed those chickens all through the summer. He put a television set in the chicken coop, so the chickens would sit around and watch TV and get fat. Asa’s wife, Jessie, dressed them out the first week of September before hauling them into town to store in the Crosley. She was putting the last of the chicken away when I went downstairs to fix the cabinet door.
“Hello, Sam,” she said. “How’s your mother?”
“Getting a little nervous,” I told her. “She’s been after me to fix this door.”
I set my toolbox down and looked at the door. The wood had worn away from the screw. I’d have to drill new holes and reset the hinge. I lifted my drill from the box and looked around for a plug-in. It was an old kitchen; there weren’t many outlets. The closest one was behind the freezer. I unplugged the freezer, plugged in the drill, bored new holes, and reset the hinge. As I was cleaning up, the phone rang. It was my mother, calling to see if I’d fixed the door.
“We’re coming in this Friday. I want everything working,” she told me.
I assured her everything was fine.
Then I carried my toolbox upstairs to my office and started working on my sermon. I had been preaching a sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer, which had not gotten off to a good start. The first sermon was titled “Our Father…and Our Mother, Too.” It was my effort to talk about God’s feminine, nurturing side, which the professors at seminary had told me people wanted. But they had never met these people.
Now I was up to “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This was a sermon we needed. There are people in this town I don’t like and don’t know why, except that my father didn’t like them and passed the dislike down to me, an unbroken chain of grudge and blame. Our ancestors had named this town Harmony in obedience to the apostle Paul, who encouraged the early Christians to “live in harmony with one another.” I don’t think our town was what he had in mind.
Walking home from the meetinghouse, I felt wonderfully good. Fixing the cabinet door, writing my sermon.
“This is real ministry,” I thought to myself. “This is what God created me to do. This is my life’s work.”
That Friday morning I went to the meetinghouse early to bring a devotional to the Friendly Women’s Circle. They were clustered in the kitchen, the freezer door was standing open. Pale pink chicken blood was dripping from the freezer shelves, running across the floor to the drain. There was a terrible odor. My mother was weeping.
My knees felt weak. I remembered unplugging the freezer to plug in my drill. Had I plugged the freezer back in? I couldn’t remember. I felt sick.
I asked the ladies to step aside, to let me see behind the freezer. I stood on my tiptoes and peered at the plug-in. Oh, no. The freezer was unplugged, just as I had left it. I broke out in a prickly heat. This, then, was the end of my ministry, just as I was starting to enjoy it. What should I do?
I advised the ladies to stand back. I drew back my left hand and smacked the freezer hard, while plugging in the plug with my right hand. The freezer hummed to life.
“Must have been a short,” I told them. “This freezer’s getting old. Probably time to buy a new one.”
The women were crying.
I said, “Don’t be discouraged. We can make more noodles. I’ll help you.”
It took all day and into the evening. I cut the noodles, just like I did when I was a little boy. My mother cautioned me to pay attention and cut straight. We separated the noodles and hung them up to dry. Noodles everywhere, strung on clotheslines across the basement and draped across the pews upstairs.
Jessie Peacock went to the Kroger, bought thirty chickens, boiled them, and picked off the meat, grieving the whole time they weren’t Rhode Island Reds.
We came back on Saturday morning. The noodles were dry. We cooked them tender and stirred in the chicken. The people began lining up at the doors. They streamed through for three solid hours. The women were everywhere—pouring tea, stirring noodles, cleaning dishes, and wiping tables. By two o’clock we had served the last dinner and at five o’clock the last dish was wiped dry and the floor was mopped.
It was all people talked about the next day at church. How everyone pitched in and worked hard to overcome a crisis. My mother stood and spoke of how all things work for good for them who love the Lord. Then Jessie Peacock told how I had worked harder than anyone, and how glad she was that I was their pastor and what an example of faith I was. She had forgotten all about the chickens.
I didn’t say anything. I had come to church prepared to confess. I was going to tell them I had left the freezer unplugged, but sitting there, listening to them, I decided not to. The Lord moves in mysterious ways. This had been a good thing. It had caused them to work together. It had restored their faith and renewed their confidence. Who was I to cheapen that? So I kept quiet. For their sake.
The next day I drove to Sears in the city and bought the Friendly Women’s Circle a new freezer. I bought myself a cordless drill. That Tuesday, two men delivered the new freezer, humping it down the stairs. They hauled the Crosley to the dump. The women stood around the new freezer, patting it, smiling and proud.
My mother grinned and clapped her hands. “Come on, Friendly Women, let’s make those noodles.”
I’ll tell them someday, but not anytime soon. Maybe when I’ve been here twenty-five years.
I went up to my office and began working on my new sermon, “Lead Us Not into Temptation, but Deliver Us from All Evil.”
I bowed my head to pray. “Yes, Lord, teach us this lesson. For sometimes we are too tricky for our own good. Help us to depend on You and not upon our cleverness. And Lord, if those women should ever learn the truth, protect and guard Your humble servant. Amen.”