“Walloped by Winter!” read the headline of the Harmony Herald the week of the December snowstorm. Underneath the headline was a picture of Pastor Taylor shoveling the steps of the Harmony Friends meetinghouse, where he had been the pastor. The picture was twenty-seven years old, taken during the last big snowstorm to hit Harmony. Pastor Taylor was now dead, but Bob Miles Jr. was loath to spend money on new pictures if a suitable photograph could be found in the files. So there was Pastor Taylor, resurrected and noticeably slimmer, shoveling snow.
In the foreground was a 1972 Plymouth Valiant. Pastor Taylor had loved that car. He was two years out of seminary when he came to Harmony, his wife was pregnant, and he drove a Volkswagen Beetle—a foreign car, which had not endeared him to his congregation. So in March of 1973, when he drove by Harvey Muldock’s car dealership and saw the ’72 Valiant sitting there, Pastor Taylor turned into Harvey’s lot on impulse.
Harvey had written DEEP DISCOUNT!!! with white shoe polish on the front windshield and taped a small American flag to the antenna, which had caught Pastor Taylor’s eye. He pulled alongside the Valiant, climbed from his Volkswagen, and there was Harvey, his hand extended, his smile a bit too big. It had been a slow month for Harvey and taxes were coming due.
Harvey walked around the front of the Valiant, raised the hood and proclaimed, “She has a slant-six engine with two hundred and twenty-five horse. Best engine ever made. It’s the last one on the lot. I’ll let you have it for three thousand dollars.”
Pastor Taylor gazed at the motor, trying to think of something knowledgeable to say. He opened the car door and the smell of new car rose to greet him. Gray vinyl seats, with ridges. AM radio. Seat belts snug on clips above the windows. What a beauty. But three thousand dollars…
He eased himself behind the steering wheel. Closed his eyes and inhaled the smell. Oh, such a car. His wife was pregnant. He thought of his baby riding in a nice car like this, instead of in the old Volkswagen.
Pastor Taylor had seventy-eight dollars in his savings account.
“Too rich for my blood,” he said, then stepped out and shook Harvey’s hand good-bye. He climbed in his Volkswagen, now shabby in comparison, and drove home to the parsonage.
The next week it snowed twelve inches, and when Pastor Taylor was shoveling the steps of the meetinghouse, Bob Miles Jr. of the Herald pulled up in his new car, a 1972 Plymouth Valiant, parked in front of the meetinghouse, stood on the opposite sidewalk, and snapped a picture of Pastor Taylor shoveling snow with the Valiant in the foreground.
Then he crossed the street and Pastor Taylor said, “That’s quite a car you have there, Bob Jr.”
Bob Jr. said, “Harvey made me a real deal on it. It was the last ’72 on the lot. Three thousand, three hundred dollars.”
“Well, you certainly know how to bargain,” Pastor Taylor told him. “I ought to take you with me the next time I buy a car. That’s some deal. I don’t see how Harvey can stay in business making those kinds of deals.”
Most men would have laughed at Bob Jr. Most men would have said, “I had Harvey down to three thousand,” but not Pastor Taylor. He could not preach very well. He was not very creative, but he was exceedingly kind, which explained his survival. He served twenty-seven years as the pastor of Harmony Friends Meeting. A church record. Fourteen hundred sermons, not one of them memorable. But he was loved and that was his legacy.
His first child, a daughter, was born three weeks after the 1973 snowstorm. The doctor’s bill came to seventy-five dollars, which left three dollars in Pastor Taylor’s savings account, which he spent on spark plugs for the Volkswagen and a roll of duct tape to patch the seats.
He never owned a new car. Once a year he would drive to Harvey’s dealership and smell the new cars, but he could never afford one. We never paid him enough. All those years of sacrifice, then struck down while jogging on the eve of retirement. We were going to buy him a new car for his retirement, then to be struck by a car and killed. What irony. Life is so unfair. Why couldn’t Dale Hinshaw have been hit by the car?
When I became pastor, it was Dale Hinshaw who called to say it would be my job to shovel the walk and spread the salt. I told him I hadn’t gone to seminary so I could shovel snow. That was when he quoted from the book of James that faith without works is dead. Dale Hinshaw knew just enough Scripture to be annoying but not enough to be transformed.
He was all the time talking about how Pastor Taylor did things: “Pastor Taylor cooked for the men’s breakfasts” or “Pastor Taylor came to see us once a month” or “Pastor Taylor never complained about shoveling the walk.”
After our big December snowstorm it was Dale Hinshaw who cut out the old picture of Pastor Taylor shoveling snow and thumbtacked it to the meetinghouse bulletin board, a serious breach of protocol. The bulletin board was administered by the Friendly Women’s Circle. Before my grandmother died, the church bulletin board had been her responsibility as president of the circle. Once a month they met to change it. People in the meeting were free to offer bulletin-board suggestions, which the Friendly Women’s Circle would vote on and then make using construction paper and pictures from magazines. There were Christmas themes and Easter bulletin boards. Their summer vacation bulletin board had proclaimed, “That my joy may be in you, and your joy might be full.” It showed a family playing volleyball and waterskiing. Everyone was smiling. It didn’t look like any vacation I’d ever taken.
Then there was the bulletin board Dale Hinshaw had suggested, which his wife rammed through the Friendly Women’s Circle. It read, Don’t Retire in the Lake of Fire. It had a picture of tormented souls screaming amidst a ball of flame. One of the tormented souls looked suspiciously like my grandmother, whom Mrs. Dale Hinshaw had not particularly cared for ever since the women of the Friendly Circle voted her out as president and my grandmother in.
I loved my grandmother, and when she died from a stroke I was beyond consoling. I had gone to visit her one morning and had let myself in. She never locked her doors. I once asked her why and she told me someone might need to get in, which they wouldn’t be able to do if the door was locked. Because she felt no malice toward anyone, she never suspected it from others. It’s the suspicious people who get preyed upon the most.
I remember one morning pushing open her door and calling her name. There was no reply, no slight laugh, no “Come in, Sam.” Just silence. I found her in bed, cold to the touch. I called my parents and Mackey’s Funeral Home, then sat beside her and smoothed her hair. I wanted her to look her best. Pretty soon my mother and father came, then Johnny Mackey with his hearse.
That was eight years ago, but when anything happens to me I think, I ought to call Grandma and tell her. Then I remember and grieve all over again.
Pastor Taylor presided at her funeral. I can’t recall a thing he said. What I do recollect is my brother Roger and me walking through Grandma’s house, room by room, dividing her earthly goods. The stool my grandfather made so Grandma could reach the punch bowl in the top cabinet. The cast-iron doorstop that propped open the front door. The cookie jar with the rooster on it that I remember reaching into as a child. It was high up on the counter; I had to stand on the stool my grandfather made.
I wanted it all, as if by surrounding myself with her things I could keep her alive. I wanted to touch the things she had touched. I went to turn off the kitchen light and stood there wondering how many times Grandma had touched that very switch. My finger lingered there, a flickering connection to that saintly woman.
I thought of this as I shoveled the church walk, thought of how uncertain life was and how having Grandma around had seemed to calm the whirlwind. Grandma sitting in that same old pew in the same old meetinghouse in the same old town. Then walking home down the same old sidewalk, careful not to stumble where the maple tree had heaved up the concrete. Cooked Sunday dinner at the same old stove and fed us on the same old Sunday china.
Then I thought of Dale Hinshaw and my anger fell away. We’re more alike than we are different. We’re both holding on to that which is no more, both wanting what used to be. So when he opened the Herald and there was Pastor Taylor from 1973, it took him back and brought him peace. And he thought if it brought him peace, it would do the same for others. So he clipped it out and thumbtacked it to the church bulletin board.
It’s still there. The Friendly Women’s Circle wanted to take it down and put up a Christmas bulletin board, but I asked them to leave it up a while longer. I told them that sometimes all we have is memory, that sometimes it’s all that gets us through, and we ought be really careful before letting it go.