Free Zion by Dayne Sherman Page A

the brokenness mended. For the first time, he understood that he needed to bury the past. Right then he resolved to leave behind the business of free range livestock and the old grudges. He resolved to leave behind Sloan Parnell’s death or to try his best to let go of the violation against his wife and home.
    After a minute passed, he let her go. He stared at her face and hair, and he promised her that he’d leave it all behind and quit grieving over the past.
    She stepped back. “I’ll say one more thing. If I can get well enough in my mind, I’m going to get a job in town. I’m tired of sitting in this damned house day after day, year after year. I won’t sit here the rest of my life.”
    “Okay,” he said.
    They embraced again, kissed, and soon went to bed and to sleep.
     
    The following Sunday, Tom, Sara, and Wesley returned to Little Zion Methodist Church after almost two months away. They sat in their regular pew. Tom could see the marshal where he sat next to his wife and daughter several pews ahead of them to the left, across the center aisle of the sanctuary. It was the Brownlow family’s turn to light the Advent candles. Donald, Mary Anne, and their daughter Priscilla gave a short Bible reading, and they played their part in the service, lighting the candles to mark the season.
    The piano played Christmas carols and hymns, and the song leader stood waving his arms to the music. They sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Away in a Manger,” “Silent Night,” “The First Noel,” and “Joy to the World.”
    After the congregation finished the hymn singing, they listened to a sermon by Reverend Poole as he preached of God’s eternal faithfulness, his fidelity and sacrifice, and our need to be holy and faithful in return, all of it bound together in a bloodstained tapestry of mercy, grace, and love. He said none of it made sense without God’s gift to the world through the birth of a little baby laid in a Bethlehem manger.
    It was the Sunday before Christmas, 1964.

PART II: NOON

CHAPTER TWELVE

    It surprised Tom how he prospered after removing the hogs and cattle from the woods. The world was changing, and he changed along with it. For seven years he had worked at the local junior college as a journeyman carpenter, and served for the past three years as the foreman of the shop. Sara worked across campus at the library, having begun her job in August 1965, several years before he took the position at the college. Tom worked at the Ponderosa, a maintenance complex based in and around a giant Quonset hut that had been salvaged from World War II surplus. The shop was named after the home of Ben Cartwright’s ranch on Bonanza. As a civil servant, Tom gave an honest day’s work for a day’s pay. As a carpenter, he worked at the college but was never really a part of the town and gown. More than once he discussed with his wife the possibility of completing his associate’s degree, but he hated to submit himself to the arrogant professors, who came in two varieties: those who held maintenance workers in contempt and those who did not even recognize their existence as human beings. He was willing to work for them, but not study under them.
    Monday, May 20, 1974, was Tom’s fiftieth birthday. Sara had made him a German chocolate cake and brought it over to the shop for lunch to share it with the men who worked there. Harvey Shaffer, a carpenter, brought fresh fillet catfish and fried them on a propane cooker outside the building, the fish turning golden brown in the big black skillet. Hours later, Tom was still full from the hearty meal.
    Dub Freeman, a student worker, helped Tom steady a sheet of plywood. They stood at the table saw in the Quonset hut. It was hot inside the metal building, even with two five-foot tall fans blowing at each end of the shop. In front of them lay the sheet of plywood he was trying to cut, ripping it down the middle with a ten-inch table saw blade. Tom flipped the switch