The farmers worked their fields, the distant rumble of combines could be heard through the day, and at night the drone of grain dryers lay over the land like a blanket. Dale Hinshaw was confined to home, his heart weakened after a frenzied burst of evangelism during which he’d distributed his fake five-dollar bills in restaurants across the county. Four weeks later, with not one convert to show for his efforts and a host of angry waitresses in his wake, he’d taken to his bed, a shell of his former self. At Harmony Friends Meeting, Sam was compiling a file for Dale’s funeral sermon, pleasant memories he could share with mourners in the event of Dale’s demise. It was a piteously slender file, and Sam was trying to plump it up with quotes he’d culled from Reader’s Digest. “Why don’t you just stand up there and tell the truth about him?” Frank the secretary suggested, standing in the doorway of Sam’s office. “Let it be a lesson to others.” “That’s not what eulogies are for,”
