Katherine Cowley
In 2019, things carried on for the Rutleg Second Ward in much the same way as they had in 2018.
The Young Men planned and hosted a tri-stake dance, bringing in youth from across western Michigan. Young Trevor Hastings was officially banned from ever DJing a stake dance again, for while none of the songs contained swear words or explicit content, the prevalence of heavy metal music detailing the exploits of Norse gods was difficult to dance to and led to a number of youth from other stakes hiding out in the nursery room, building a six-foot-tall block tower, and eating three Costco boxes of goldfish packets. (Each box contains forty-five goldfish packets, which means that one hundred and thirty-five packets of goldfish, each containing at least fifteen goldfish, were consumed. It was basically a reverse miracle of the fishes—instead of a few fish becoming endless, our endless goldfish became three tiny goldfish, partially ground into the carpet.)
The Relief Society once again tried, and failed, to hold a canning activity. The fact that Rutleg is smack dab in the middle of Michigan’s fruit belt might lead distant observers—such as those living in Detroit—to think that we should be good at canning. The last time the Relief Society tried to hold a canning activity was seven years ago, before I was called as the ward historian, and before the Hastings moved into the ward. We attempted to make strawberry jam, but we ran out of sugar and pectin, and so the result wasn’t jam at all. While that might be considered a poor result, our most recent attempt at a canning activity was much worse in terms of impact. Sister Hastings did indeed teach some canning principles, but as four families—including the Hastings—ended up in the hospital with botulism, the activity should be considered a failure. Having sampled the canned arugula myself—fortunately without being blessed by the trial of botulism—I hope the Relief Society never attempts a canning activity again.
Seminary also had its fair share of difficulties, especially when the second oldest Hastings boy, Andy, rigged water balloons above the seminary room door. The balloons soaked Sister Crowl at five fifty-five on a Tuesday morning, and as a result she canceled seminary for the following two weeks. It was only when the regional director for seminary drove an hour and a half from Lansing to Rutleg and personally gave Sister Crowl five brand-new, never-before-used dry erase markers that she agreed to teach again.
Perhaps the most interesting event for our ward was the case of the missing sacrament bread. It really was quite a mystery, and, to no one’s surprise, the Hastings family was involved.
The initial incidence of missing sacrament bread was on the third Sunday in June. It was the first weekend after school let out for the summer, and many families had already left for family vacation. Young Trevor Hastings was the only priest still in town, and it fell upon him to bring the sacrament bread.
According to both Trevor and Brother Burt, the Young Men’s advisor who volunteered to help bless the sacrament that week, Trevor had indeed brought a bag of bread and placed it in the little sacrament preparation room off of the chapel. For some reason—unbeknownst to us all—they did not immediately place the individual slices of bread on the sacrament trays, saving that task for five minutes before the meeting was meant to start. When they finally decided to place the slices of bread in the trays, the bread was gone.
They spent the next ten minutes searching for the bread, to no avail. Since the Hastings are the only family that live within walking distance of the church, Bishop Byers sent Trevor to get more bread and started the meeting. By the time Trevor got back, the congregation had sung all five verses of “O Lord of Hosts,” all six verses of “Father in Heaven, We Do Believe,” all five verses of “God Loved Us, So He Sent His Son,” and all six verses of “Behold the Great Redeemer Die.” None of us could imagine why it was taking Trevor so long, but at least Sister Annis (the ward chorister) was happy—she always complains that we never get to sing all the verses of the longer sacrament hymns. That day, we learned something important: apparently the Hastings only buy store-bought bread when it’s intended for church consumption. The substitute loaf of homemade bread that Trevor oh-so-happily provided clung to the teeth and had an almost metallic taste.
The next Sunday, several other priests were back in town, and Angelo and Stew prepared the sacrament. Angelo brought the bread, and he and Stew placed slices in the trays a full twenty-two minutes before the meeting was meant to begin.
Everything proceeded as it ought, but when Angelo and Stew pulled back the white tablecloth at the start of the sacrament hymn so they could break the bread, each and every slice of bread was gone.
Trevor Hastings volunteered to acquire substitute bread, but the bishop sent Stew, who lives a seven-minute drive from the church, to obtain new bread. Strangely, he managed to return to the church with a new loaf of bread in only six minutes, which led many ward members to speculate that he bought the bread from the Target across the street from the church building. I, myself, have decided to not engage in such unholy speculations.
The next week, which was a fifth Sunday, the bread was present and accounted for at the start of the sacrament hymn. Trevor and Angelo broke the bread. Angelo kneeled down to say the prayer. We all closed our eyes. When we opened our eyes at the end of the prayer, Angelo exclaimed in terror. (The microphone was still on, so his scream of terror inspired terror in us all.) Two-thirds of the trays still held bread, but one-third of the trays contained only crumbs.
Everyone, and I must admit that I was among this number, believed that Trevor Hastings had done it, with the help of his younger brother Andy, who was one of the deacons standing just inches away from the bread in question. After all, between the water balloons and the heavy metal music, and their other exploits which I detailed in my 2017 and 2018 notes, they have quite the track record against them.
At this point, three Sundays had now been disrupted by missing sacrament bread, so it was not a huge surprise that instead of holding the combined fifth Sunday lesson on temple attendance, the bishop spent the entire time talking about not pulling pranks at church. Despite the many glares sent Trevor and Andy’s way, neither of them showed any contrition.
The following Sunday, the Hastings were attending a family funeral in Ohio. To be honest, the fact that both Brother and Sister Hastings grew up in Ohio explains a lot about their family. Case in point: A bit of Michigan-Ohio rivalry is healthy (at football games, I myself have participated in a number of anti-Ohio chants), but the Hastings take it too far. Whenever the University of Michigan loses a football game, everyone in the family wears Ohio State ties to church. Including their two-year-old girl, Emma Hastings. Worse, Emma’s favorite thing to do during boring talks is to take off her shoes, hold them aloft, and shout, “The Ohio State! The Ohio State!” Unfortunately, Emma has high standards on what constitutes non-boring talks and does this at least once a week. But I’m losing focus—the task of a ward historian is not to comment on a single family’s eccentricities.
The Hastings were gone in Ohio, celebrating life and death, and we all were happy knowing that our sacrament bread would be safe.
But alas, we were proven wrong. Once again, when Angelo and Stew lifted the white covering at the start of the sacrament hymn, all of the bread was gone. The bishop had a panic attack, and the stake president, who was visiting for the day, ended up taking over the meeting.
Speculations about the missing bread ran wild on the ward Facebook page. Sister Lagor insisted that one of the other youth must be responsible and chastised all the parents in the ward. Brother Underwood blamed the Protestant megachurch down the street, because eighteen years ago one of their pastors had paid for a billboard warning against the evils of Mormonism. Half the ward came to the megachurch’s defense, requesting that we not blame other denominations for our troubles, even if they had, in the distant past, been unfriendly to us. Brother Underwood doubled down and insisted that the megachurch was the great and abominable church spoken of in First Nephi. Sister Meecher disagreed with this statement, but then argued that their TV commercials are both abominable and great in number, which is a fact that no one in their right mind would debate. Finally Brother Bentley, who always falls for conspiracy theories, brought our focus back to the missing bread by blaming the Democrats, aliens, and the nearby state park.
Things were complicated when we learned that the Rutleg First Ward—which meets after us on odd years—had also had their sacrament bread go missing, and that they blamed us for the problem. (I still think members of the first ward shouldn’t be allowed in the second ward’s Facebook group, but no one has ever listened to my suggestions on the matter.)
Unfortunately, this escalated into a bigger problem. The Rutleg First Ward holds their youth activities on Tuesday nights, and apparently someone stole the cupcakes that had been set in the kitchen, leaving only wads of pink frosting on the carpet. While our ward has been known to finish off food items left by the First Ward in the fridge—if it’s not labeled and it’s there for more than two weeks, it really should be treated as fair game—no one in our ward would have gone to the church building and taken the cupcakes that were clearly laid out for their youth activity. And if we had, we wouldn’t have left frosting on the floor.
It’s true that the Hastings returned from Ohio that afternoon, and that Trevor did enter the church during the activity, but he was only using the open building as an opportunity to begin a more thorough investigation into the missing bread. The Second Ward supported him in this endeavor. (On Sunday, when the Hastings were in Ohio and we still lost the sacrament bread, all of us hastily and thoroughly repented of our false accusations and uncharitable thoughts towards the Hastings. To prove that we truly had repented of our ways, all of us—except for Sister Lagor, who has it out for the youth—now gave Trevor our unwavering support.)
Yet the Rutleg First Ward would not forgive the cupcakes, even after we posted messages such as “we weren’t responsible, but we regret that this happened to you” on their Facebook page.
They took out their frustrations on us by sabotaging our Wednesday night youth activities. Every single table and chair in the building was used to block both the Young Women’s room and stage—both rooms we needed—and they did a Reverse Heart Attack, taping broken hearts all around the building, each with unfriendly, very hurtful messages about our ward. Trevor Hastings recruited all the other youth in our ward who owned cell phones to text the stake presidency. The stake presidency spoke to the First Ward and seven members of the First Ward admitted to creating the barricade and the Reverse Heart Attack. However, no one in the First Ward would admit to leaving shredded paper (which appeared to come from a hymnal!) in random locations around the church.
Ultimately, it was the First and Second Ward terrorism and counterterrorism that ended up uniting our ward. Rather than seeing the Hastings as a body part that did offend and should be cut off, we began to see them as an essential and worthy part of our ward, so much so that three different families texted young Trevor and asked him to solve the mystery of the missing sacrament bread.
The next Sunday, Trevor showed up to church a full two hours early. He installed trip wires on the ramp and other areas around the altar and asked the sister missionaries—a neutral party when it came to ward members and their complicated histories—to stand guard with him.
It really was a perfect summer Sunday. Birds could be heard from outside the chapel, chirping to each other. The emergency exit, a glass door that was the only source of natural light in the room, let in as much sunlight as it could. Someone had gone above and beyond in magnifying their calling and placed a vase of real, fresh flowers next to the podium, which truly counts as electron microscope-level magnification in terms of calling performance. The air conditioner was on at full blast, making about 10% of the ward comfortable, and leaving the rest of us shivering (half of the Young Women had planned for this and brought coats and blankets, providing a strong example of self-reliance).
Prior to the meeting, Angelo and Stew laid the bread on the trays. Trevor and the sister missionaries watched, and we watched them. During the sacrament hymn, Angelo and Stew broke the bread as Trevor and the sister missionaries stood by. Not a soul paid attention to the ward chorister, Sister Annis—in fact, her attention was on the sacrament table as well, and she kept singing even after the organ stopped, finally realizing that she was the only one in the chapel making any noise.
Then Stew began the prayer on the bread, and I must admit that it was not only Trevor who kept his eyes open.
Three squirrels, two full-sized and one baby, scurried out of the sacrament preparation room. They avoided the trip wires with such skill that it seemed as if they had been circus-trained for the task of navigating church obstacle courses. The squirrels climbed up the side of the altar and shoved bread into their mouths. They paused, seemingly surprised that all eyes on the room were upon them—they had counted on our natural reverence to keep their theft undetected. No one moved, not even Andy Hastings, who seemed quite frightened by the fact that squirrels stood just a foot in front of his face. The biggest squirrel used its little hands—paws? claws?—to grab one more piece of bread and shove it in its mouth, and then all three squirrels scurried back down the altar, across the floor, and into the sacrament preparation room. Bishop, who was almost hyperventilating, called a halt to the meeting, and Trevor pushed open the door to the little room and followed them inside.
A minute later, Trevor came back.
“There’s a squirrel nest in the wall!” he declared, as if he were Captain Moroni holding aloft the Title of Liberty. Then, more thoughtfully, he added, “They look really hungry.”
Animal control was called, and the Rutleg Second Ward squirrels were rehomed to Rutleg Lake State Park. (Brother Bentley, who still won’t admit that he has a conspiracy theory problem, now claims that instead of believing the state park was to blame for the missing sacrament bread, he meant that the state park needed to be part of the solution.)
For once, the Hastings family was not responsible for a problem, though arguably, they were at least a little responsible. In fact, every member of both the second and first wards could be said to hold equal blame, for when we examined the church cleaning logs in the janitor’s closet, we found that in the four months prior to the case of the missing bread, not a single individual who helped with Saturday church cleaning had even pretended to clean the sacrament preparation room. And no one bothered to take out the trash from the room.
Before I forget to mention it, there was one other squirrel-related incident. One of the sister missionaries who helped guard the sacrament table was Sister Winchell from Rigby, Idaho. After Trevor found the squirrel nest, she tripped on one of the trip wires and broke her wrist. This was actually a blessing in disguise because she ended up teaching the gospel to the emergency room doctor, who, along with her husband and three kids, joined the church three weeks later. Clearly, this would not have happened were it not for Trevor’s overenthusiastic (and dare I say inspired) application of trip wire. The sad part of the story is that the doctor lives just one block west of Acker Lane, which puts her family of five in the Rutleg First Ward instead of ours. However, we did our part to claim them by having fifty-six members of our ward show up to their baptism day. We’re hopeful that if they ever decide to buy a new house, they choose one within the boundaries of the clearly superior Rutleg Second Ward.
The next notable event for 2019 was the stake Young Men’s high adventure activity in the Upper Peninsula, and the blame for the loss of thirteen tents and twenty-five bicycles truly does lie on young Trevor Hastings and his father, Trevor Hastings, Sr. . . .
Katherine Cowley is a member of the Kalamazoo First Ward, which does not have a rivalry with the Kalamazoo Second Ward, though her seminary students do love to pull pranks. Her debut novel, The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet, was the winner of LDSPMA’s Praiseworthy Award for Best Suspense/Mystery novel, and was a finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and for the Whitney Awards. Her other novels are The True Confessions of a London Spy and The Lady’s Guide to Death and Deception. Her LDS fiction has appeared in the Mormon Lit Blitz and Segullah. She has taught writing classes at Brigham Young University, Mesa Community College, and Western Michigan University. She lives in western Michigan with her husband and three daughters.
