Bedlam Christian School had been closed for four days after the accident. This was their first day back. A glum and heavily bandaged Gordon Winkle sat at the table in the Bedlam faculty lounge, his finger lightly tracing the burnt stubble beneath his nose where his once glorious moustache had resided.

No one sat beside him. No one really knew what to say. After all, how do you address a colleague who burned down nearly a quarter of the school building? How do you comfort someone who is facing the possible end of his career? How can you reassure someone who destroyed the principal’s car and was now the subject of an investigation by the insurance company, a probe by the school board, and the ire of his colleagues? Even Rex Kane, the erstwhile PE teacher who would normally befriend his portly pal, was now in a separate corner of the room, his back to the shop teacher as he fiddled surreptitiously with something inside his coat. So Gord sat alone, staring absently into space.

English teacher Christina Lopez walked into the lounge, placed a bag of popcorn into the microwave, and punched a few buttons. She then turned to the rest of the room, her nose scrunched up and her eyes watering.

“What is that horrid smell?” she demanded. Gord did not respond. He had showered a half-dozen times to rid himself of the smoky odor, and was certain he was not the source of the smell.

“Yeah,” said Cal VanderMeer, looking up from the newspaper he was reading. “I thought I smelled something funky too. Kinda like a skunk.”

“Funky?” asked Lopez incredulously. “Try vile. It’s putrescent.”

“More along the musky line, I think,” noted Cal. “What do you think, Rex?”

Rex, who had his back to all of them, threw a nervous glance over his shoulder, then stared back at his own lap as he said, “Yeah, I could go for a pizza too.”

This comment surprised no one, as Rex was famous for his non sequiturs. But the shifty behavior was unlike him.

“What do you have there, Rex?” Christina asked.

“Nothing,” Rex mumbled. “Just leave me alone.”

Christina crossed the room. As she approached Rex, he turned away and huddled over his lap.

“Geez Louise,” Christina said, cupping her hand over her nose. “It smells awful over here, Rex. When is the last time you changed your socks?”

“Tuesday,” Rex said. “Now buzz off, Lopez.” A chittering sound rose from his lap.

Alarmed, but still determined to see what Rex was concealing, Christina grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him in his chair. A look of guilty pleasure on his face, he cradled what appeared to be an adolescent ferret. The ferret, wearing a miniature Bedlam varsity sweater, snuggled against Rex’s chest, and seemed to grin at a horrified Christina.

Meanwhile, Christina’s forgotten popcorn had slowed its popping, then stopped entirely, and then began to smoke. Just as Christina’s scream broke free, the bag burst into flame inside the microwave. The smoke alarm in the room sounded, and Gord immediately bellowed in pain, dove under the table, and curled into a ball.

He was there again—the flames hissing, the acrid smoke filling his lungs, the meatball sandwich—oh, the sandwich—disappearing into the blaze. Above all, the feeling of utter hopelessness. He was having another flashback …

It had been a busy day. Gord had arrived at school at 5:30 that morning to work on some of the sets for the upcoming musical version of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” An emergency faculty meeting just before school preempted his planning time. Then chapel ran over by twenty minutes, shortening all the periods in the rest of the day. When lunchtime arrived, he spent ten minutes teaching Rudy Menchner to run the drill press for his independent project creating a replica of a Tardis (whatever that was). The whole morning he had been craving the remaining eighteen inches of a three-foot meatball sandwich he had brought for lunch. He bought one every Saturday at Rigatoni’s Ristorante, the “Home of the Meatball as Big as Your Head.”

He made it to the teacher’s lounge just as the first bell for fifth period rang. With a sad whimper, he had grabbed the sandwich from the fridge (still cold) and hurried back to his room.

Fifth period was Advanced Auto Mechanics. The students were going to learn to change the oil in different kinds of cars. Gord had put out his usual call to the faculty for volunteer cars, and so Jon Kleinhut’s vintage Camaro and Principal VanderHaar’s minivan were up on the lifts. They had gone over the procedure in class the day before, so Gord got the two student teams started and proceeded to watch them from his desk. He was famished by that point, and so he did what he had often done: he wrapped the meatball sandwich in aluminum foil, clamped it very gently in a vise, and wheeled the acetylene torch over to warm up the sandwich and toast the bread just enough. He was mere seconds from toasty, meatbally goodness when Irwin Smith and Joann Nye had a disagreement about which was the right wrench for the job. These arguments had been constant ever since prom (Irwin had asked Joann and she had agreed, but he had been very upset when he picked her up and she was wearing a dress made of duct tape. Gord had seen the dress. It was marvelous. He didn’t know what Irwin’s problem was.) At any rate, Gord figured he would shut down the torch and go help them work it out, when apparently the wrench that Joann was holding while gesticulating wildly flew from her hand, across the room, and hit Gord on the back of the head.

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What happened next was, to be honest, conjecture. Gord figured he blacked out for a minute, fell forward, and got his head stuck in the vise. The torch must have fallen and the twist in the oxygen line must have pulled it under the lab table, where some student (probably Ian “Lunky” Rigatoni) had been stashing his failed tests. The students ran over to the vise to help their beloved teacher. Gord’s head, meanwhile, was pressed up against nearly red-hot tin foil, burning off half of his moustache, his left eyebrow, and a good portion of his hair.

He came to hearing Irwin and Joann having an argument about whether vises indeed followed the “righty tighty, lefty loosey” rule. With his moustache still on fire, Gord pulled his face from the vise and ran for the sink. The students followed.

Seconds later, as he pulled his head from the sink and turned to face his students, Gord saw the vise table on fire mere inches from the acetylene and oxygen tanks. Fearing for the lives of all the students in the school, he ran to the tanks, grabbed the dolly they were on, and shoved it with almost superhuman strength away from the fire. Unfortunately, he pushed it in the direction of the controls for the lift.

The heavy dolly smashed through the control console. The lift that held Kleinhut’s car began tilting at an impossible angle, and Gord realized the Camaro was going to fall the remaining four feet to the ground. At the same time, the minivan was rising higher and higher, fast approaching the ceiling girders. The Bauer kid (Gord could never remember his name) pulled on Gord’s shop apron and pointed with a look of horror on his face: the fire had spread to the bottom of the shelf where the oil and other flammables were stored. Gord first thought of the kids, so he ushered them out of the room as the sprinklers came on full force and he heard the near-simultaneous crash of the Camaro and the mash of the minivan. When the kids were clear, he turned back to see what he could do, but it was too late. The wall with the oil shelf was on fire (the shelf was shielding the fire from the sprinklers), the cars entrusted to his care were just so much scrap metal, and when the flames hit the oil, things were really going to get hot. Soaked to the skin, Gord turned from the conflagration to go call the office and meet the firefighters (he could hear the sirens in the distance). As he slogged out of the building, his foot kicked something. It was the charred and soggy remains of his once glorious sandwich. He had no choice but to keep walking and abandon it to the flames …

The memory faded and Gord found himself sobbing under the long table in the staff room. He could see that the legs of his colleagues had pushed back from the table. No one knew what to do. He closed his eyes and prayed, but it was like no sort of prayer he had ever prayed before. He had struggled with other things since taking this teaching job. He had dealt with budget cuts and unmotivated kids, destructive pranks and unreasonable parents, bad teacher evaluations and board members who thought a shop program had no place in a college preparatory Christian school. But in every case, he had been able to turn to God and say, “God, you called me to this job. If you want me to continue, I leave it in your hands.” Always, things had worked out.

But this was quite beyond all that. He stood to lose his job; he had already lost his friends and colleagues; his wife was pushing him to see a counselor or join Weight Watchers or both; he was sure his kids were hearing all about his incompetence from their classmates; and he had done damage to the school he loved with all his heart. He prayed to God a prayer of lament and anger and disappointment and despair. He had nowhere to go. He didn’t care what God called him to do. He didn’t want to answer. Finally, when he could think of nothing more to say, he said, “Amen,” and opened his eyes.

And there, in front of him, sitting cross-legged, was Rex Kane, holding what appeared to be a large rodent wearing Bedlam gear.

“Hey Buddy,” Rex laid a hand on Gord’s shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.”

Gord shoved the hand away. “What do you know? You’ve still got a job!”

“Hey, hey, hey, let’s not plump the pillow before the pastrami is in the pigpen,” Rex winked. “They haven’t fired you yet, chum.”

Gord started sobbing again. Again, Rex put a hand on Gord’s shoulder. “Look,” he said, “I have only got one thing I can think of to say in a situation like this, but it is pretty important. The day before the accident happened, God was in charge of the universe, and he loved you. The day after the accident, God was still in charge of the universe, and he still loves you. It’s like the Good Book says, ‘If he cares for even the stinky ferrets in the fields, will he not care for you?’”

And with that, Rex reached out his other hand and deposited the ferret in Gordon’s lap. As Gord held it, he could feel its tiny little heart beating, and he could hear it making a sound that was not completely unlike a purr.

In the days that followed, the multiple interviews with insurance people and the fire chiefs, the scolding from the principal, the jokes from colleagues and students, and the tense time of waiting for the board to make a decision about his future, Gord found he still had flashbacks to Meatball Monday, but more often, he found himself remembering what it felt like to feel the ferret’s heartbeat, remember Rex’s odd kindness, and know again that God loved him.

Jan Kaarsvlam is a former Christian School teacher and freelance writer who has decided that he would be an excellent chaplain for Redeemer University in Ontario. He has written to them, describing his new idea for having a spiritual development retreat based on a cross between the television show Survivor and the videogame Grand Theft Auto. He is awaiting an offer of employment. (He welcomes counteroffers from Dordt, Trinity, King’s, and Calvin.)