The Courtship of Tucker Pain

Chapter One

In the ninth grade at Bridgetown Middle School, Tucker Pain had not written his career paper on becoming the pastor of a country church. As a schoolboy, Tucker had looked around town and observed the undertaker, Mr. Sweeny, driving a Cadillac hearse and wearing a well-tailored suit, so he had declared his ambition to be a funeral director. His paper had earned him a B+ and a day with Mr. Sweeny that included a ride in his hearse. The experience had been totally cool and had reinforced Tucker’s choice of a future career. Now at the age of thirty-three and fully ordained, he was in his church office preparing a funeral sermon for the man responsible for making him the pastor of this church. He would be standing next to Mr. Sweeny at the graveside still envying the undertaker his role. Tucker felt compelled to review the steps and circumstance that had placed him in this position.

Some years before, The Second Presbyterian Church, known as the MacDougall Church, had broken off from the town church. There was still talk going around town about the reason, but Tucker had never been into listening to small talk. He wasn’t strictly Bridgetown born, so was entitled to feel slightly above hometown gossip. The wealthy farmer, Donald MacDougall, at more than ninety years old, was the grandson of the original founder and builder of this small frame church three miles outside the village limits. The MacDougall family farms had eaten up all the little farms in the area. They owned a fleet of monster machinery with sons, son-in-laws, grandsons, grandsons in law and nephews, to do the work, but the little white church with a bell in the tower that the first MacDougalls had built remained small and simple. The pews were occupied by families that had been there since the beginning, most with some linkage to the MacDougall family or the Gilligan family who had also been there at the founding. The members of the church took communion once a month. They accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.

Tucker Pain was reflecting on how he had been called to fill this pulpit of this church. The explanation was simple. He owed his salvation and his position to Donald MacDougall. Somehow in his boyhood memory he had confused the man with an angry God and now he had been called to write a funeral oration for the man, then drive with Mr. Sweeny in his Cadillac to the graveyard and commit the earthly remains of his patron to the ground. The Reverend Pain wasn’t prone to mull over incidents from his past, but now in sequence like a movie made for television the scenes were playing out in his mind.

When he was very young Tucker lived with his grandmother in the city of Detroit. His grandmother said his mother had died but she never gave him any specific information, or maybe he hadn’t asked. There was no mention of a father, but his grandmother’s name was Bent, and his was Pain. The fact that he was white and she was black had never given him concern. He had to defend his name in school and that had made him tough. When he was twelve years old Tucker had been picked up with some older kids by the police for slashing the tires of a school bus. The court stepped in and thought he would do better somewhere else and his grandmother agreed. He had lost track of his Bent grandmother. Was it his fault or hers? He had written her letters that had been returned. How could he have lost a grandmother?

Tucker was sent to a place called Boys Ranch in a village in the thumb area of Michigan. The place was a real ranch run by church people for boys in trouble with the law. He bonded with the other boys immediately. They ranged in age from eight to fourteen years. They slept in bunk beds, four to a room. As it was a working ranch, they had to clean up after the four horses, but they were allowed to ride them. Tucker had had his own special horse to ride. The food was better than at his grandmother’s house. Their Boy Ranch parents were Doris and Bob Duke, called Mom and Pop by the boys, and sometimes the Praying Dukes as the boys were expected to pray before eating and sleeping.

The ranch boys went to school with the town kids, but Tucker was cool with that and they attended the First Presbyterian Church in town. Going to church and praying all the time was the, worse part, of life at the ranch, but Tucker and his friend Stuart Bukowski, had taken a little fun from it. Stuart was the oldest kid at the ranch and had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, but Tucker had appreciated his new friend’s energy and sense of humor, and personally, he had never known any kids who didn’t have ADD.

There was a swinging bridge over a river in Bridgetown. It was the swinging bridge incident that first brought Tucker to the attention of the MacDougall. Bridgetown had a three man police force that wayward boys needed to reckon with. The first time that Tucker got in trouble with the Bridgetown police was when he and three other boys from the ranch had knocked a person off the middle of the bridge into the river. Their mark was a fat man dressed in his best Sunday suit walking slowly across the bridge so as not to loose his balance. How could the boys pass that up? Timing and cooperation was required for the success of this caper. The lads were waiting for direction from him, Tucker Pain. The action had to happen in mid-crossing. Two strong boys on each end were required to keep swinging the bridge back and forth as hard as they could, until the shrieking human being crossing the bridge was thrown into the river. The water wasn’t deep, and they had tossed kids from town in the river with no big harm coming from the incident, but one of the boys recognized the screaming fat man as being to the mayor of the town. Tucker’s team took off. Their victim made a few steps toward shore, and then fell face down into the water. Normally a person didn’t drown in three feet of water, but the mayor wasn’t getting up. Tucker waded in and helped the poor fellow to shore. He clapped him on the back until he stopped hiccupping up water. The mayor’s car was near by. Tucker found a cell phone on the front seat. The mayor was still coughing so hard he couldn’t hold the phone. Tucker called the town ambulance. It turned out that the mayor had not been hurt seriously, just shaken up and bruised with a fractured rib or two. He told Bob and Doris Duke that other ranch boys were involved, but Tucker was the ring leader, which was true after all was said and done. Naturally this had gotten back to the MacDougall. Doris and Bob Duke had taken most of the blame and they hadn’t even been there.

By the time Tucker was in high school he rejected pranks that caused physical damage to others. There was a group of town kids that were into drugs and knew where to get them but Doris and Bob made sure that their boys remained drug-free, and Tucker was not tempted by substance abuse of any kind. Then the episode happened that put Tucker under the direct eye of MacDougall.

The Boy Ranch boys were encouraged to spend time in the town library. Stuart Bukowski wasn’t a leader but he was an excellent follower. Somehow Tucker and Stuart were down in the basement checking out old magazines when the head librarian locked up for the night. When they came upstairs the library was empty. Being alone in a library presented opportunities they could not resist.

Stuart checked out the petty cash drawer, but Tucker decided it wasn’t cool to be a thief. Still he owed Stuart a little fun. In the petty cash drawer he spotted a black marker pen. On the wall in the main room was an original portrait of Andrew Carnegie, an old dead guy who had donated the money to get the library started back in the 1800s. Tucker was a good artist. He took the black marker pen. He climbed the ladder that was used for reaching high books. Very carefully he altered Andrew Carnegie’s face. He took the grim line of Mr. Carnegie’s mouth and turned it up at the corners just a bit. He wasn’t trying for a happy expression but maybe slightly goofy. He crossed the eyes and brushed the hair up on end. The changes were subtle, but Tucker might have robbed Mr. Carnegie of some of his dignity. Stuart wanted him to do a job on the painting, but the true artist in Tucker knew when enough was enough. It was time to leave the scene and Tucker put his attention on the front door. There was a tricky dead bolt, but Tucker knew how to avoid setting off the alarm system. They let themselves out of the library and ran the three miles back to the ranch. Tucker and Stuart had missed dinner, but they were given a glass of milk and a sandwich before bed. For some reason Tucker felt mildly guilty. They deserved to go to bed without their supper, but Doris and Bob were kind to bad boys. Doris Duke could find good in a serial killer.

The vandalism was not noticed immediately. The portrait was part of the library, and book people didn’t look up right away. Mr. McDougall, as head of the library board, finally did notice the alteration of Andrew Carnegie’s face. The Boy Ranch boys were always the first to be suspected, as the town people didn’t like blame cast on their own children for unacceptable behavior.

The MacDougall had them all taken out of class. The younger boys were brought over from the elementary school to the high school. He lined them up in the hallway outside the office like they were going to be shot. At that moment, Tucker observed how much MacDougall looked like Andrew Carnegie before his face had been touched up. The MacDougall had the power and responsibility to close down Boys Ranch as he believed they were bad seeds infecting the community. Tucker knew that he couldn’t let the boys down. What was the worse that could happen to him? They would send him back to his grandmother, and she would have to take him.

Tucker stepped out of line and said, Sir, it was me who did it. The other boys weren’t even in the library when it happened. I alone changed the expression on the face of Mr. Andrew Carnegie.

MacDougall glared at him. He sent the other boys back to their classes. The younger ones had to cross the field to the elementary school and they left quietly. Mr. MacDougall finally said, Tucker Pain your honesty is commendable, but the money for restoring the portrait is considerable. You will need to take on employment to pay restoration of this valuable work of art.

At the time he thought he was in for doing heavy farm work for MacDougall farms but that didn’t happen. The MacDougall didn’t think Tucker Pain was worthy of working on his farms. For the next two years Tucker cleaned the toilets in the library, plus vacuumed the floors and carried heavy books for the library ladies. When he was sixteen years old, he was given an after school job working at the grain elevator in town. He developed muscles he didn’t know he had, and his school work picked up. The MacDougall helped him obtain a social security card.

By his senior year Tucker Pain had a solid grade point average and a girlfriend from town named Sally Hannah. He had purchased an old car and could take Sally to the drive-in-theater on the Lakeshore Road. They went to their senior prom together. Sally as valedictorian gave the graduation address, and received a scholarship to Western Michigan College.

Tucker joined the army after graduation. He gave his car to Stuart when he left. Doris and Bob drove him to the airport in Flint. Sally was away with her parents visiting the college she planned on attending, so he didn’t get to say good-bye to her. He hadn’t thought to tell his grandmother Bent, but Doris said that she would write her a nice note and make sure she had his address.

He liked the army even basic training. The food was good and he made friends easily. He could drive and fix a tank better than most and that earned him stripes. He wrote to Sally and she answered his letters for a while. He was deployed to the Balkans for a couple of years and that was pleasant. Then he was deployed to Afghanistan which wasn’t pleasant. It was there that he received a letter from Sally saying that she was marrying Stuart Bukowski. She had finished college and was substitute teaching at the middle school in Bridgetown. She sent him an invitation to the wedding, but of course he couldn’t attend. He sent them fifty bucks. His grandmother had disappeared, and even Doris couldn’t find her. Doris still wrote to him and put smiley faces in her letters and on the envelope. When he got out of the army he did not return to Bridgetown. Why should he? He took what college credits he had earned in the army and went to Wayne State University in Detroit earning a B.S in business administration. He got a job working for a CPA and rented an apartment in the Detroit suburb of Southfield. He knew himself to be a fairly good looking guy. He had girlfriends. Things were going good when he received a letter from Doris that made him decide to return to Bridgetown.

Just because Doris put smiley faces in her letters didn’t mean that everything was fine with her. She and Bob had lost funding from the government and couldn’t keep the ranch going. Tucker thought that happened when he was in Afghanistan, but he wasn’t sure. The Dukes still took kids in. He didn’t know or remember how they managed but awhile after he received a letter telling him Bob had died.

The next letter said that the barn had burned down, and Black Knight had perished in the fire. Black Knight had been a young horse when Tucker was at Boys Ranch. Bob didn’t let most of the boys ride Black Knight, but Tucker could handle him. One Halloween Tucker had ridden Black Knight through town holding a big pumpkin under his arm like it was a human head. He had lost buddies in the army, one at training and two on reconnaissance. He cried over Black Knight, and he hadn’t cried before that he could remember. Black Knight had to be really old, but when a horse was your best friend when you were a kid, it kind of screwed up your head, when that horse went down in a burning barn.

Finally he had a letter saying that Doris had sold the land to pay for Bob’s illness, and now she would have to sell the house. She ended the letter with a smiley face. Tucker decided to go back to Bridgetown and straighten things out for Doris Duke.

Well he had gone back and by a sequence of events, he became the pastor of the MacDougall’s church, and now he was pondering a final tribute for MacDougall. Patricia Gilligan came in and sat in the chair in front of his desk in the church office. It was the chair where members of his church sat when they needed advice or comfort from their pastor. Pat was church secretary and director of the choir. She believed that she had the right to give him advice. She said, Are you working on your tribute for Donald MacDougall?

I’m giving it some thought.

He was a bastard, and he lived to be ninety four years old. I know he paid your way through seminary, so you’ll need to give him some credit but don’t take it personal, Tucker.

How could he not take it personal? Pat had big blue eyes, but she made them bigger by outlining them with a black eye pencil. Her enormous eyes penetrated their target and let you know some things were being left unsaid. There were bad feelings between the MacDougalls and the Gilligans that went back to the founding of the church in the 1800’s. He knew Pat had been born a MacDougall and had married a Gilligan, so she had mixed feelings. He said, I think that I’ll go home and think about what to say.

I heard that he left the MacDougall mansion as parsonage for the church. It will be a lot for Doris and your wife to keep up. You are not mansion kind of people. You are a humble man of God, Tucker Pain.

He wasn’t that humble, and he and his family could adjust to living in a mansion. In the beginning he’d had trouble with sermons, but now he could preach or say a prayer on cue. He repeated, I’ll be at home if anybody wants me.

Don’t fret it. Funeral orations are your best thing. The mother of that poor boy who died in the grain accident last week, she said you were comforting beyond belief. His father said they couldn’t have gotten through it without you. You made them thankful for the nineteen years they had with their son. We credit the MacDougall for giving you to us but let’s not get carried away. He was an old man past his prime, ready to go. He had more enemies than friends.

The Reverend Pain gave her a smile and a nod, gathered his papers together, and left. The old ranch house was a mile down the road from the church. The MacDougall mansion was next door to the church. He often walked to the church because his girls needed the car to call on church people. Now walking gave him time to glance at the MacDougall mansion in passing, and think about his own journey from doubt to believing in the words he spoke so eloquently from the pulpit.

Chapter Two

There was nobody home. Where were they all? Then he remembered. They would be sorting through stuff at the mansion. His family ranged in age from a lady in her nineties, a wife, a small daughter to a toddler taking his first steps. He should have stopped in and helped them, but he might have gotten in the way. They were sorting through various items, MacDougall relatives claimed had been promised to them. The Pains did not have the funds to buy furniture for an eighteen room house, so he hoped his wife and generous Doris would not give away the items that were needed to function in a mansion.

Jack hobbled out to greet him. The dog had been thrown out on the highway in front of his car by a member of his congregation, and Doris had wanted to keep him. One of the dog’s back legs had been amputated, but the vet in town agreed with Doris that Jack could get along fine on three legs. At the moment it was just him and the dog. Even their elderly permanent guest had gone to the mansion. They had left his dinner in the refrigerator, and all Tucker had to do was put it in the microwave oven. He could handle that.

There was an exercise room in the old ranch house where he kept his equipment. He would work out, eat, build a fire in the fireplace, settle down with Jack’s head on his foot, and think about Donald MacDougall and what should be said about the man’s time on earth. MacDougall had been ready to foreclose before Tucker came on the scene but Doris was the absolute and total Christian, and it made no matter what hand was dealt to her by man or events. For Pastor Pain, the process had taken a little longer.

On his first day back to Bridgetown, he had driven down Main Street and the town had looked about the same as the day he left. The hardware store had turned into an Antique Mall but the IGA Grocery store was still there. The old opera house next door had the newspaper, The Bridgetown Leader on the street floor with the law offices of James and James on the top floor. There was the town Presbyterian Church on the corner of Main and Church Street with the town library on the other side of Main. He thought about turning down River Street and checking out the hanging bridge, but he didn’t. He turned at the light left on to Mill Road. He drove past fields of corn, past the country church past the MacDougall mansion. Everywhere he looked there was corn more than knee high because it was late August.

Finally he was driving up the driveway to the old ranch house. Doris was pushing the lawn mower. She turned the motor off and came over to meet him. She obviously didn’t recognize him, but she put out her hand in greeting. He remembered her as being plump with a peachy complexion, but now she was thin, and her skin was wrinkled and brown, but when she smiled he knew she was Doris. As he remembered the ranch, there had been ten acres, of trees and a trail going from the barn to the road. Now there was the house with a front yard entirely surrounded and cut off from civilization by tall corn. Doris was living in the middle of a big corn field. He said, Doris, it’s me Tucker Pain.

Tucker Pain, I didn’t recognize you. You have grown up to be such a handsome man. Your lovely black hair is cut buzz short, but your steady blue eyes should have given me a clue. Come in and we’ll have a glass of lemonade.

Well if you don’t have any cold beer lemonade will be fine.

Oh, Tucker, you are still such a tease.

He cruised through the house and finally sat down at the kitchen table. Just a bedroom, a bathroom and the kitchen were in use. The large family room where the boys had gathered in front of the open fire on cold nights was empty of furniture except for a sofa and one chair. The bunk beds were gone from the bedroom where the boys had slept. There had been a double bed in the room where Doris and Bob slept but now there was just a cot. He sat across from her in the kitchen and said, Doris what’s going on here?"

Bob was sick for a long time. There were hospital bills, and funerals cost money, you know. Then the barn burned down, and that brought the insurance up. Mr. MacDougall gave me a good price for the land, but somehow the money is gone. I sold some of the furniture to the antique mal in town. Mr. MacDougall said he would take the old ranch house off my hands and help to move me into a nice apartment in town, more like two rooms in the old house where Winnie Fellows lives next to the library, but my rooms would be near to the bath room. Mr. MacDougall holds the mortgage on the ranch house, but he says there is no hurry in my moving. My old truck has trouble getting over the bumps in the road, especially when winter comes, and gas to heat the house cost money. I haven’t been able to get to church for quite a while but I know the Lord understands. Tucker I have some macaroni and cheese in the refrigerator. Could I heat some up for you?

He remembered that feeding guests was important to her. He said, That sounds excellent, Doris. I always loved your macaroni and cheese.

The refrigerator was run by bottle gas. It was the same one that they had when he was a boy. She didn’t have a microwave oven to heat the food. She stirred the mixture up on the gas stove. It was not the rich cheesy macaroni she used to make for the boys. The box this dinner came in was still on the counter. She put the fake macaroni on a plate he remembered. It was the good china with a gold border that her grandmother had passed on to her. The boys only rated the good china when they were sick or when it was Christmas or Thanksgiving. Somehow he suspected that this was the only plate left from the set. The rest had most likely gone to the antique mall. She poured him a glass of lemonade. He started to take a sip, stopped and bowed his head. Doris was thanking the Lord for the food, drink and him being there to share a meal with her.

After they had eaten the macaroni and a dish of her canned rhubarb for desert, he said, Doris can I stay awhile?

How long is awhile?

I’d like to stay a week or a month, a year or longer if you’ll have me.

I would love to have you stay, but a strong young man can’t live on macaroni and cheese. The bed that Bob and I slept on is gone, and the folding cot I sleep on would not accommodate you. There is still the old sofa in the family room, but it is wanting with loose springs, and your long legs would hang over. Oh dear, perhaps we could manage. I’d love to have you Tucker. It gets lonely in the winter, but I’m not good company.

He said, I have a little money and a fairly new Focus that you can drive to town and to church. I will get a job and we will pay Mr. MacDougall his due. We will sleep in beds Doris.

A tear ran down her cheek and she said, Bless you Tucker Pain. You are my lost boy who has come home, but there is no work in town.

There is always a job for them who will work.

There was a lean to in the back of the house. There was wood cut and stacked there. Tucker guessed that the MacDougall boys had left it there when they axed down the trees on the property. It was a good supply. He’d give them that. There was apple and cherry wood that would make a sweet-smelling fire. It was late in August, and there was a chill in the air. He would