SPN FIC - Tending the Flock
charis_kalos -- here ya go. The origins of Pastor Sam. Enjoy!
Sammy shoved the door open, burst out of Jim's car, and zoomed up Mrs. Gunderson's front steps before Jim had even had a chance to turn off the engine. He didn't throttle down until he reached the welcome mat; there, still oblivious to where Jim was or what he might be doing, he stretched up and pressed the doorbell.
Characters: Pastor Jim, wee!Sam (age 5), OFC
Genre: Gen
Rating: G
Spoilers: none
Length: 1994 words
TENDING THE FLOCK
By Carol Davis
Sammy shoved the door open, burst out of Jim's car, and zoomed up Mrs. Gunderson's front steps before Jim had even had a chance to turn off the engine. He didn't throttle down until he reached the welcome mat; there, still oblivious to where Jim was or what he might be doing, he stretched up and pressed the doorbell.
That little boy was a force of nature in red sneakers, Jim thought as he climbed the steps.
"I rang already," Sam said.
"I see that."
"Is she home?"
"Let's give it a minute. Sometimes it takes a minute to get to the door."
"Like if you're in the bathroom?"
Jim bit back a smile. He had never felt the need - or the inclination - to ask Mrs. Gunderson anything at all about her use of the bathroom and whether or not it interfered with her answering the door or the phone. But leave it to Sam, with his complete lack of guile and a curiosity that unfailingly expanded to fill the available space, to repeat his question once they'd been allowed inside.
"If you're anywhere," Jim said, hoping to throw Sam off the track. "Upstairs. Or in the kitchen."
"Maybe she's making cookies."
"Maybe she is."
The inner door began to creak open, to Sam's obvious delight. "Hi, Mrs. Gunderson!" he sang out. "We came to see you."
And rousted you out of the bathroom, Jim thought.
For all that she was 85 years old, Ethel Gunderson was quick on the uptake. She'd figured out right off the bat a couple of weeks back that Sam's delight in coming here had nothing to do with cookies, or with the collection of antique toy cars that had belonged to her late husband. With the sweet, gentle smile she reserved just for Sam, she opened the catch on the screen door and pushed it open.
"Pastor Sam," she said. "Oh, I do need to talk to you."
Sam quickly made himself at home in the living room, climbing into a seat on the couch and folding his hands neatly in his lap. He waited patiently - well, as patiently as a five-year-old could wait - until his hostess and Jim had sat down, then said with a deep frown of concern, "Your door is all squeaky. I can fix it."
"That would be wonderful."
"Is there more broken stuff? I know how to fix things."
He didn't, really. Of John Winchester's two kids, Dean was the handy one, the one who could intuit what was wrong with a troublesome car or a broken toaster. But that didn't stop Sam from wanting to be useful.
And he was, in ways he was much too young to understand.
"I've been thinking, all week long," Mrs. Gunderson said. "About that problem with Noah. I think I might know the answer, but I wanted to ask you before I told anyone else. I wouldn't want to give out the wrong information, you know." As Sam nodded sagely, she picked up a magazine from the coffee table and opened it to a page she had marked with a grocery store receipt. "I think this might be it. It has several hundred rooms. Cabins, you know. On a ship, a room is a cabin, so they tell me. And there are larger rooms, for the large animals. The elephants and such."
Jim glanced at the magazine as she passed it over to Sam, and again had to smother a burst of laughter. She was showing Sam an advertisement for a cruise ship.
The Lord not only worked in mysterious ways his wonders to perform - he also seemed very capable of coming up with new and marvelous ways to test Jim's ability to maintain a poker face. Counting slowly and silently backwards from one hundred, Jim tried to ignore the mental picture of Noah building a Carnival cruise liner with a hammer and a chisel, cheerfully abetted by Kathie Lee Gifford.
"It's big," Sam agreed solemnly.
"It carries over two thousand people. Passengers and crew," said Mrs. Gunderson.
"Is that big enough?" Sam asked Jim.
Disease and famine and pestilence, Jim thought, much as Dorothy Gale and her compatriots had chanted Lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
"I suppose so," he replied.
That earned him a frown from Sam, no doubt left over from Sam's dissatisfaction of the other day, when Jim had been unable to produce a tape measure marked off in cubits. "How many kinds of animals is there?"
A lot wasn't going to fly. "This was a long time ago," Jim said. "There may have been a lot fewer kinds back then."
"A thousand?"
"Maybe so."
"If there was two thousand, then there's no room for the people." Turning to Mrs. Gunderson, Sam confided, "Noah had a lot of kids."
"That's what I heard," she nodded.
It was a conspiracy, Jim decided after fifteen or twenty minutes: between God, his parishioners, and Sam Winchester, to see if he could pat his head, rub his stomach, tap dance, and recite the Gettysburg Address, all at the same time. Faith really had no place in this particular recipe, nor did his attempts to be, in the manner of Christ, a wise and gentle teacher. Rather than let his own boat (which was, of course, not large enough to accommodate Noah, et al.) continue to be slowly swamped, he asked the location of Mrs. Gunderson's late husband's tool box, hoping it would contain a can of oil with which he could solve the squeaky door situation.
Your own fault, he reminded himself as he made his way out to the garage. And it was; he'd had no one prompting him to take Sam along to visit the flock while Dean had another lesson in car repair from his father. He could easily have left Sam to read or watch TV, or pester Caroline Lundquist. But at the time - three community visits ago - it had seemed like a good plan to introduce Sam to some of the shut-ins. The elderly responded well to visits from children, more often than not, provided that the children were well-behaved, and Sam was certainly that. He was also creative, energetic, compassionate, and kind, and was drawn to any or all of that in others.
Two visits ago, Mrs. Gunderson had taken to calling him Pastor Sam, which had made him beam.
Jim doubted it would make Sam's father beam.
Listening with half an ear to the conversation in the living room, Jim began to apply oil to the hinges of the squeaky door. Not enough time had passed for Sam and Mrs. Gunderson to have moved on very far from Noah and the available accommodations on the ships of the Carnival fleet - unlike Dean, who could switch topics at dizzying speed, Sam preferred to progress logically, one step at a time.
With the occasional leap.
"Jesus's mom was Mary," Sam announced to Mrs. Gunderson.
"That's right," she confirmed.
"My mom was Mary, too. She died."
"Yes, I know. I'm sorry."
"Did Jesus's mom die?"
Jim glanced toward the living room and caught Mrs. Gunderson's eye. She smiled back, told him silently that she had the conversation well in hand.
"Yes, she did, Sam. She lived a long time ago."
"Oh," Sam said.
Then he took the leap.
"If God let Jesus come back, and not be dead any more," Sam asked, "how come he didn't let Jesus's mom not be dead too?"
For all her good intentions, Mrs. Gunderson was 85 years old. Jim was several decades shy of that, but he was no more capable than she of replying fast enough to prevent Sam from leaping right off the edge of the cliff he'd gone thundering toward.
"How come he can't let my mom not be dead?"
"Oh, dear heart," Mrs. Gunderson said.
Jim set the oil can down on the small table Mrs. Gunderson used as a repository for keys and mail and a variety of other odds and ends.
"Oh, Sam," Mrs. Gunderson said.
When Jim sat down alongside him on the couch, Sam turned to him with a face that reflected not sorrow and grief, or any sense that he'd been rather cosmically short-changed, but rather, a simple and genuine desire for an explanation. God made no more and no less sense to Sam than his own father, and he was generally willing to accept both of them on their own terms. But once in a while, both God and John Winchester were a little too mysterious for Sam's taste.
"God had a job for Jesus to do," Jim said. "A very special job."
"All by himself?"
"All by himself."
"But who took care of him?"
"Everyone who loves him."
"Oh," Sam said.
"We all have our time on earth, Sam. Sometimes it's a long time, and sometimes it's short. But eventually, we all die."
"And we join our Father in heaven," Mrs. Gunderson piped up.
That wasn't a given, not by any means; Jim had seen enough during his own time on earth to know better, but there was no point in adding that to the mix. For a five-year-old, and an 85-year-old, heaven was enough of an answer. "Do you understand, Sam?" he asked the little boy.
"Jesus's dad told him he would be okay without his mom," Sam replied.
Jim opened his mouth to respond, but Sam had already moved on. With a Well, okay, then look on his face Sam nodded and climbed down off the couch, then scuttled over to Mrs. Gunderson's front door to check on the results of Jim's work with the oil can.
"Oh, dear," Mrs. Gunderson said. "I didn't mean to -"
"Not your fault," Jim replied, and patted her on the arm.
Unsatisfied with the condition of the hinges, Sam seized the oil can and applied several more drops to the bottom hinge. For such a small boy, Jim thought, he was diligent about everything he did.
Resilient, too.
"Is it time to go see the next person?" Sam asked when Jim walked into the foyer.
"How's that door?" Jim countered.
Dutifully, Sam swung the door back and forth a couple of times. "It's good."
No thanks to me, Jim thought. "Should we go see Mr. Collins?"
Sam pondered that for a moment, then nodded. "We better check on his dogs. Sometimes they don't have enough water."
"Let's do that, then."
With a sing-song goodbye to Mrs. Gunderson, Sam let himself out onto the porch, scampered down the steps and set off toward the Collins house, three doors down the street. As was par for the course with him, he paid no attention to whether or not Jim was following - and seemed assured that eventually, Jim would show up.
To assist.
"He's a good boy," Mrs. Gunderson said as she came into the foyer to bid Jim goodbye. "I hope I didn't upset him."
"I don't think so," Jim replied.
"It's a terrible shame about his mother."
Not the word I'd pick, Jim thought. "Thank you for talking to him. He…spends a little too much time boxed up with his father and his brother. It's good for him to get to know other people."
"He's a sweet little boy."
"He's a force of nature," Jim said. "In red sneakers."
Mrs. Gunderson chuckled softly at that. With a nod and a murmured goodbye, Jim stepped out onto the porch and stood there for a moment as Mrs. Gunderson closed the now-silent door behind him. When he glanced down the street he could see Sam waiting patiently at the foot of Joe Collins's front steps. He seemed to be examining something - a caterpillar, maybe, or a crack in the sidewalk he thought he could fix.
With a rush of fondness for the little boy that was replaced for barely a moment by a nagging twinge of foreboding, Jim walked down the steps and set off to join Sam.
~~~~~~~~~~~~