Fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds! My word, that’s when their hormones were at peak activity. And they were already in trouble? That was not a good combination, because from the little I knew about the maturation process of male children, hormonal urges and delinquency often went hand in hand.
Lloyd! I thought. What effect would a houseful of boys only a year or so older have on him? As far as I could tell, Lloyd had not yet felt the pangs of puberty. There was, however, now that I thought of it, the occasional croak in his voice and a shadowy hint above his lip, so maybe he was already in the throes and I’d not paid attention.
—
I desperately wanted to talk to Binkie, my curly-haired lawyer, but I refrained from calling her at home. She had limited time to spend with Little Gracie and Coleman, and for all I knew they might be in the midst of bedtime stories. But first thing in the morning, I would make arrangements to get her advice as to how we could go about preventing a precipitous move by unwanted neighbors.
Madge Taylor, I thought, and sat back down on the sofa. The woman had to be suffering from a case of boredom like I’d never experienced. I knew that the cure for boredom was getting up and doing something—the more active it was, the better. And Madge must have known it, too. She was always coming up with some new plan that on the surface seemed beneficial to somebody, but which, on further examination, proved to be a repetition of something already in the works or completely untenable to put into effect.
She didn’t take it well when a plan of hers was tabled or outright rejected. She put it around that a failure by the town or by a church to adopt an idea of hers and put it into practice was a rejection of poor, suffering humanity, of which Abbotsville had its fair share. But Madge couldn’t seem to understand that the many charities and nonprofit organizations already in the town were in need of help. They would’ve welcomed her with open arms, but, no, she had to have one of her own.
You would think that sooner or later she would learn. But so far, she hadn’t. I happened to know that when she first came to town, she’d joined the First Methodist Church and left when they turned down her idea of making soup every Wednesday, opening the Fellowship Hall, and feeding the hungry—actually, anybody who walked in. The church had gone as far as putting a notice in the bulletin asking for volunteers for soup making, then shelved the idea when only one woman out of a thousand or so members on the rolls signed up for one Wednesday a month. And she’d had her right arm in a cast.
Madge had then moved her letter to a small, but very active, Baptist church—their members were always volunteering to Walk for Hunger, or Run for Something-or-Other, or collect used clothing for the unclothed, or bring in a traveling evangelist, or sign up for almost any do-gooder activity in the town. Madge seemed to feel at home there, volunteering with the best of them. But it wasn’t long before she was church shopping again. There’d been several rumors about what had happened at the little Baptist church. All Madge would say was that they had no vision. Which, interpreted by me, meant that they wouldn’t jump on some bandwagon that she’d rolled out. Later I’d heard that she’d left because she’d asked the pastor to let her preach and he wouldn’t do it—not because she was a woman, as she’d claimed, but because she wasn’t a preacher.
So now here she was in our Presbyterian church, and she’d gotten to us just as we were welcoming a new pastor. Pastor Larry Ledbetter had retired at the beginning of summer, and, perhaps unfortunately, he and his wife, Emma Sue, chose to remain in Abbotsville. Most retiring pastors moved away as soon as they could so that parishioners would look to the new preacher for pastoral care. But Pastor Ledbetter lingered on, seemingly unable to turn over the church to a callow and untried replacement.
And that new pastor was one Robert Rucker, called from a small church in the eastern part of the state, but who was a native of some midwestern state. And those in the know will understand, because of where he’d grown up, that he would be less than familiar with the way things are done in the South.
All of which is to say that when Madge showed up on our Presbyterian rolls as a new member, she found a comrade in arms. Somewhere along the line, Pastor Rucker had fallen for what was once called the Social Gospel, although more and more it was simply and incorrectly called Christianity. In other words, his mission seemed less as a teacher and caretaker of the flock—what being a Christian minister once meant—and more as a social worker and protester of civil wrongs—what the likes of him now called Missions or Outreach or some other euphemism.
Lord, I didn’t know what we were going to do with that man. Sam and I had been in church every Sunday morning since Pastor Rucker had occupied the pulpit, and all I’d heard was some bleeding-heart sermon about what we weren’t doing to lift mankind out of the morass that we’d helped make. And I don’t mean that he was speaking of evangelizing the unsaved, nor was he speaking about the great dogmas of our faith, such as atonement, redemption, and such
