Trash taking out the Trash (Cumberland Saga)

Stanley 5-1/2 Bench Plane. Image from handplane.com

Sig was dog-tired as he led the Sunday Services. The attendance was phenomenal. The Doxstader’s living-room was packed and there were knots of people listening at the windows and outside the doors.

Everybody heard the “thunder” in the night and were more-than-politely curious about the details.

Sig ditched his prepared sermon and “Called an audible” as Gregor called it. He preached from Romans Chapter 6.

“Sometimes Paul is complicated and difficult to understand but he is very clear in Romans, Chapter 6. We were joined with Christ in baptism and our old self was crucified and died and we arise as men called to be filled with Grace with the waters of Baptism.” Sig said.

“Paul exhorts us to not pledge our body to being instruments of evil but rather to pledge our entire being to be tools of God’s will, as best we can discern it.” 

"Imagine Jesus working in  his father's shop" Sig said as he held his hands as if he were holding his Stanley 5-1/2 wood plane. The position of his gnarled hands evoked the hiss of a razor-sharp blade turning pine or spruce into long, fragrant curls of shavings as the master-craftsman squared what was warped, fitted what was not true and pared off what was stained and scarred by weather-and-use.

 

"When we allow ourselves to be God's tools, He is gripping our souls with both hands just like a carpenter using his tools" Sig lifting his hands slightly and shook and pulled as if somebody were trying to pull away his wood plane.

 

"When we die, if we are acting as God's tools, nobody...certainly not Lucifer...can rip us away from Him. There is no surer sign of Grace."

“Death is not a tragedy. It will happen to all of us. The tragedy is to not be in a state-of-Grace when we die, to not be a tool in the hands of God.

“Sadly, there are many who choose to be instruments of Satan. If we should die while committing grave sin, then we die with Lucifer gripping our soul with both of his hands. And while God could rip our souls out of Lucifer's hands...what reason have we given him to do so?” 

 

"That is the true tragedy because we will be sent to hell where we would see the radiant, blissful faces of those who died in a state of grace even as the flames of hell engulf us.”

 

“It is a simple choice. It is either one or the other. Simple is not the same as easy but God did not promise us easy.”

 

“Know that God continues to bless His people in Copperhead Cove.”

“Evil men, followers of Satan attempted to force their way into a home in the Cove. They failed and were sent away.”

“Be vigilant. Satan stalks God’s people like a lion pacing around a fire searching for the unwary and unprepared.”

The most discerning easily saw the shattered railing on Roger's porch and the blood stains that Alice had tried to scrub away. They saw the congealed blood on the cobbles of the second hairpin of the two-track. They had a pretty good idea of how much blood a man-sized animal can lose and survive.

 

They could read between the lines. Hard men had done hard things, righteous things in the dark of the night. Things not to be talked about casually.

 

What was warped had been squared and what was not-true had been fitted. The shavings had been swept into the fire.

They bowed their heads and prayed for the families of the deceased. They knew all too well that even children of the most righteous parents will sometimes choose Satan’s way. They thanked God that none of their Godly men had been hurt.

***

Deputy Rosa Canina wrinkled her nose as she stood near the abandoned car that had been reported to 9-1-1.

There was very little room beside the road and her cruiser and the old SUV took up most of it. Unfortunately, the only good place for her to stand was downwind of the SUV. The bodies in the vehicle had been shot. Whoever killed the men clearly believed that anybody worth shooting once was worth shooting a dozen times.

Their manner-of-death made the immediate area a crime-scene and protocol required that she maintain chain-of-evidence, for all the good that would come of it. She could see that at least a couple of the men had gang-tats.

The DA was notoriously lax on pursuing gang-crime. Some of it was economics. You could sink a boat-load of resources into investigation and odds were you would never secure enough evidence for a conviction. Part of it was cowardice. Gangs had no inhibitions about whacking county officials.

Nope. The official photographer would show up and take a bunch of pictures. The medical examiner would do the same at the morgue. Then they would be fed into an AI service that would spider through social media looking for images of thugs bragging about doing the deed. Some of them were stupid that way.

To her way of thinking, it would be a blessing if they all killed each other. One of the men she had gone to academy had been shot during a drug raid. The bullet penetrated through the stretch webbing beneath his arm and double-lunged him. Golden BB they called it. Sid was in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong angle.

Trash-taking-out-the-trash. That is what it was.

***

Two packages addressed to Sarah showed up at the end of the drive that were puzzling.

One was a package of tiny plants. The twigs were no taller than the breadth of Sarah’s hand and the roots were encased in soil in the size and shape of a half-cucumber. The twigs showed the tiniest bit of green cracking of their buds.

They were labeled with hand-written tags: Thiessen, Northline, Titania, Red Lake and Hinnonmaki Red. They were packed with a note that read “Please put these in the ground and care for them. They need full sun. I will be there soon. A”

Sarah wracked her brain trying to remember anybody from the Cove whose name started with “A” who would entrust her with such a task. She came up empty-handed.

The second package that showed up was even more puzzling. It was filled with “Kastanie”, not quite as large the Horse-Chestnuts that grew in the Dayton town square or the Yellow Buckeyes that grew on the moister, forested sites near Copperhead Cove. The nuts reminded her of the nuts Alice called "marones" that the locals called “chinky-pins” that grew over at the Frozen Head Park. Weighing the nuts in her hand, she judged them to be five or ten times heavier than chinky-pins.

Glancing at the return address, she saw the package was originally from Olive Hill, Kentucky and had been remailed from St Louis, Missouri.

The note in this package said “Seed-nuts. Please put them in a cool, moist spot. -A”

Curiouser and curiouser.

 

 ***

 

A tip of the fedora to Kevin Alviti for woodworking advice. He is a fellow blogger, a wood-worker and small-holder.

 

Bonus Link: The Touch of the Master's Hand