The Green Ledger and the Furnace Fund

The Kitchen Line

“It’s being managed better now, Vernon,” Warren Teague said, and he went right on stirring sugar into his coffee like I had asked him about the weather.

We were standing in the kitchen at Pleasant Ridge Baptist, a little after eight on a Wednesday night in October, the prayer meeting folks drifting out to their trucks.

I had come in with a simple errand. Dewey Strand, who runs the heating and air shop in Elk Fork, needed a deposit by the fifteenth to order our new furnace. I wanted the check.

Warren is the chairman of our finance board. He has been since January, when Ardith Boone laid down the church books after thirty-one years.

So I asked him for the check from the Dunagan furnace fund, the way I would ask a man to pass the salt.

That is when he said it. Managed better.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means it was sitting in a savings account at the Farmers and Merchants earning next to nothing,” he said. “I moved it into a managed account. It’s working for us now. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

“Moved it where?”

“A firm I trust.” He tapped the spoon on the rim of the cup, twice, and set it in the sink. “It’ll be there when we need it.”

“We need it by the fifteenth.”

“Then we’ll talk about the fifteenth.” He smiled at me. It was the same warm smile he gives at the door on Sunday morning when he shakes your hand.

I have been a deacon at that church for nineteen years. I have been a Christian a good deal longer than that, and a feed store manager for thirty-eight.

In the feed business you learn to hear the difference between a man who is telling you the truth and a man who is telling you a smooth thing.

Warren was telling me a smooth thing. I felt it in my stomach before I could name it.

I am sixty-six years old, and I will tell you all of it, the part I am proud of and the part I am not.

The Man Who Kept the Furnace

You cannot understand what that money meant without Orville Dunagan.

Orville was eighty-four when he died last February. He had gone down the basement stairs at Pleasant Ridge at six o’clock every Sunday morning, October through April, for forty-one years.

Our furnace is a 1961 floor furnace, a squat iron thing the whole church calls the Octopus because of the big round ducts that reach out from it under the sanctuary floor.

It has one great brass register in the middle aisle, and on a cold morning the old women sit nearest it and fight politely over the draft on their ankles.

Orville was the only man alive who could coax it. He knew by sound whether it wanted a tap on the left side or a cup of oil on the bearing.

“Nobody ever got saved in a cold pew,” he used to say. It was his one sermon, and he preached it every fall.

When Orville passed in February, on the eleventh, the whole county turned out. We held the funeral in the sanctuary, and it was nineteen degrees outside, and the Octopus ran like it knew.

His wife, Ina, is eighty-one. She is a tiny woman with a back like a plumb line, and she did not cry once in the service.

At the dinner in the fellowship hall afterward, she stood up with her hand on the back of a folding chair.

“Orville would not want flowers,” she said. “He’d want that furnace replaced before it kills somebody. If you’ve got something to give, put it in the jar.”

That is how the fund began. We did not call it anything fancy. The bulletin called it the Dunagan Furnace Fund, and it said so every Sunday, right under the prayer list.

The 4-H kids held a pie auction. The quilting circle raffled a Double Wedding Ring. Elmer Ritter, who is ninety-one and has not been able to drive since Easter, mailed a check from the nursing home with a note that said only, “Heat.”

By the end of August we had counted fourteen thousand six hundred and fifty dollars. Dewey’s estimate for a new furnace and the ductwork was thirteen thousand nine hundred.

That is the money Warren Teague had moved somewhere I could not see, and called managed better.