Middle West -- Fiction; Short stories, American; Villages -- Fiction
The last bell had stopped when I came to the little grassy triangle
where the three churches faced. And usually, on Sunday mornings, by the
time the last bell has rung, the triangle is still except for a few
hurrying late-comers. But now, when I turned the corner and faced it, I
saw people everywhere. Before each little church the steps, the
side-walk, and out in the street, were thronged with people, and people
were flowing out into the open spaces. And in a minute I sensed it:
There wasn’t room. There wasn’t room--for there were fifteen hundred
people living in Friendship Village, and all the little churches of the
town together wouldn’t hold that many, nor even as many of them as were
assembled there that day. But instead of thinking what to do, and how
not to waste the time when so many had got together, all that kept going
through my head was those same words that I had been saying:
“What shall we _do_ to make it whole?”
And yet those words were what made me think what to do. On the steps of
our church I saw our superintendent, looking wild and worried, and I ran
right up to him, and I said two words. And in a minute those two words
went round, and they spoke them in the crowd, and they announced them
inside our church, and somebody went with those words to the other
churches. And then we were all moving out and along together to where
the two words pointed us: Shepherd’s Grove.
There’s a rough old bandstand in Shepherd’s Grove where once, long ago,
the German band used to give evening concerts. The bandstand had nearly
fallen to pieces, but it was large enough. The three ministers went up
there together, and round the base of the bandstand came gathering the
three choirs, and in a minute or two there we all were under the trees
of the Grove, the common trees, that made a home for us all, on the
common earth, under the common sky.
“Praise God from whom all blessings flow” came first, because it said
the thing that was in the hearts of us all. And then we wondered what
would be, because of the three separate sermons up there before us, all
prepared, careful, by three separate ministers, in three separate
manses, for three separate congregations. But the thing seemed to settle
itself. For it was young Elbert Kinsman who rose, and he didn’t have any
prepared sermon in his hands. His hands were empty when he stretched
them out toward us. And he said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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