Free Just Shy of Harmony by Philip Gulley Page B

tractor hadn’t helped. It was just one more pressure. One more thing to take care of.
    As it was, Sam had plenty enough worries. Giving had been down at church. People would drop a dollar in the plate, thinking that would do it. The chairmen of the committees would spend money the church didn’t have. Sam would point out that they didn’t have the money.
    “Well, it’s right there in the budget,” they’d say. “Itsays right there on line twelve that our committee has eight hundred dollars to spend.”
    “But if people aren’t giving money, then we don’t have it to spend, no matter what line twelve says,” Sam would explain.
    “Well, I never heard of such a thing. Pastor Taylor never said anything like that. He never talked about money.”
    Which is why our church is down to ninety-five dollars and my last three paychecks have been late, Sam wanted to say.
    He’d been thinking of taking a part-time job, in case the church had to cut his pay. A friend from seminary had become a salesman for the Eternal Life Insurance Company of Colorado Springs, Colorado. He’d called Sam the month before, long distance from the city, to ask Sam if he wanted to sell life insurance.
    “You can stay right there in Harmony and be a pastor. In fact, most of our agents are pastors. We’ll send you to school in Colorado for two weeks at our expense. You could pull in another twenty thousand dollars a year, maybe more. How about it?”
    Sam told him he’d think about it. He could use the money but wasn’t sure he had the time. He had only one day off a week as it was. Hardly saw his boys. They might as well not even have a father, for all the time he saw them.
    So when Asa and Jessie Peacock tithed their lottery winnings, Sam was greatly relieved. Maybe the church could pay him on time now. Maybe they’d even give him a raise and more time with his family.
    Sam speculated about it at his parents’ house that Sunday afternoon. He and Barbara were sitting with his parents on their porch after dinner.
    “This is sure good news for the church,” Sam said. “We can invest that money. The interest alone would pay my salary. Just think, I’d always get paid on time.”
    “Don’t count on that happening,” Charlie Gardner said. “It would make too much sense. I remember, it was about twenty years ago, when Bea and Opal’s mother died and left eighty thousand dollars to the church. That was some serious money, let me tell you.”
    “We had eighty thousand dollars? I never heard anything about it,” Sam said.
    “Yeah, well, it’s still a sore point. People don’t talk about it much. We were gonna build on to the meetinghouse, so the trustees hired some fancy architect from the city to draw up the plans and that cost sixty thousand dollars and there went our money. We had twenty thousand left, which the trustees used to put a new roof on the meetinghouse. It was a special kind of roof, guaranteed for life.”
    “But our meetinghouse roof leaks like a sieve.”
    “Yeah, the company that did it went out of business.”
    “Well, I’m sure people have learned a lesson and won’t let this money go to waste,” Barbara said.
    Charlie peered at Sam’s wife. “These are the same people who think Dale Hinshaw’s Scripture eggs are a good idea.”
    “We’re sunk,” Sam said.
    “Doomed,” added his mother.
    “You watch and see,” Charlie Gardner said. “That money will burn a hole in their pockets.”
    They sat on the porch, glum.
     
    T hat Thursday was the third Thursday of the month, the night of the monthly elders meeting. They gathered down in the basement of the meetinghouse at the folding table next to the noodle freezer.
    They were all on time for once. Miriam Hodge opened with a prayer, then steered their way in record time through the reading of the minutes and the old business.
    “Is there any new business?” she asked the elders.
    “I’d like to propose the church donate twenty thousand dollars to the