Ancient Church

by Robert W. Hegwood

From beneath a mop of dark brown hair a pale stick of a boy dressed in black dodged the hungry eyes of his classmates. His fingertips rested on the touchpad of a laptop computer connected to a television that occupied most of the blonde oak desk beside him. It smelled of lemon furniture polish. He flexed his toes on and off in his black sneakers flicking his glance now and again to the back of the classroom where his teacher, Mrs. Busby, hovered near the light switch in a cloud of White Linen and mothballs. She tipped her gold-framed glasses and dimmed the lights. The boy tapped the laptop’s touchpad and a PowerPoint presentation opened on the television’s screen.

Against a black background an old wasp-waisted bottle of Coca-Cola descended in a cone of light to the throbbing pulse of the Death Star theme. The face of Jesus twirled inside. A slice of toast popped into existence beside the bottle, another Jesus’ face smearing like peanut butter across the exposed slice of toast to the doppler of an X-wing fighter returning a staccato splat-burst of laser fire.

The boy could hear a succession of tiny gasps, and a couple of stifled snickers. He tapped again and the
screen filled with popcorn images of TV evangelists and Christian paraphernalia, bumper stickers, Serenity Prayer laden coffee mugs, Hummelesque angels, WWJD wristbands, album covers, and Bible verse band-aides. A last image, a giant yellow WYSIWYG, drifted up from the middle, then faded away. Jesus’ smiling face bobbed back and forth in the Coke bottle. Star Wars sound effects segued into banging tambourines while the toast sprang up upon one corner and began bounce and spin in rhythm. The boy tapped again and the screen went black.

“My name is Michael Peske,” he said. “This past summer we were supposed to report about a special Christian activity we did over the break. Well I didn’t do any special Christian activity. The idea gags me. This is my summer project instead about what I saw and what I have come to see.”

Tap.

Black lightened to gray to reveal the cold coals of some past weekend’s barbeque scattered on a patch of sand. Someone had lain in the cinders and flapped arms and legs back and forth a few times to make an ash angel.

“I saw the crazy old man who made this. It doesn’t matter if its dust or sand or snow or ashes. He just lays down and makes an angel. He’s been around for years. Some of you may have seen him in the park, downtown, or near the river. He’s the guy with the big backpack of aluminum cans and old bicycle parts.”

“The Trash Man,” a boy interjected from the middle of the room, “He’s a loon. Always talking to himself and other crazy stuff.” Mrs. Busby shushed the offending voice, and nodded for Mike to continue. It was clear from the expression on her face, her expectations were not high.

Tap.

An old tramp strode passed beneath an ancient spreading oak. His scruffy beard melded into the wisps of iron-gray hair that splayed out from underneath a worn green John Deere cap. He bent almost double underneath a load of metal scrap in burlap sacks lashed to a backpack frame that extended well above, or more properly, well beyond his head. Fresh char soiled the back and sides of the ratty dun colored cardigan he wore over a dirty thermal weave jersey. In some distant decade it might have been white. The dark pants that hung shapeless from his hips were of one flesh with the dirt from the knees to the hem…or rather where there was once a hem. He steadied himself on a tall walking stick, and glanced back at his photographer. The eyes smiled. In the foreground one could see the unmarred ash angel he had just made.

“That was when he fell. He tripped on a root looking back at me. The first tracks across his ash angel were mine. He was trying to get up again when I got to him. I gave him my hand and I could feel the weight he carried then for just a moment when he pulled himself up. It was a lot. I asked him if he was OK. He grunted and mumbled “thanks” and headed out again, this time limping a little. I asked where he was going, and he smiled a little smile and said, ‘Only way to know where a man’s going is to follow him. Not so sure you would have much use for where I’m headed.’ He jerked his head back towards his burden of other people’s litter. With that he pushed off across the park towards the river, towards the scrap yard where they would give him a few pennies for every pound he brought in.”

“I stared to let him go on, but I didn’t. It occurred
to me he could be my project. So, I asked if he would just let me follow him around and take pictures. He grunted as if the idea amused him. It wasn’t hard to stay up. He said nothing, but kept stopping to flatten a can with his foot, bend down, pick it up, add it to his pack and move on. How he did that time and again for every can I will never know, but I felt bad him not talking and me just watching. I offered to hold a sack for him. He grunted again in a different tone, pulled a spare sack out of a loop on one of his straps and handed it to me. Along the way as I took pictures I told him about my required summer project and this school and everything. He grunted at that too.

Snickers.

Tap.

There followed a succession of images of the old man bent beneath uncounted pounds of scrap metal in a parking lot, fishing a can with his stick from underneath a car, stepping surefooted as a goat across a plank bridge over a small creek, sidling down a pine shaded hill trying not to slip on the slick brown needles beneath them, searching for empty cans in the trash barrel of run down grocery store, waiting in the shadow of towers of crushed cars and disemboweled washing machines for someone to weigh out his haul.
“They gave him twenty-five dollars. I think he was cheated, but he never said a word.

Tap.

A new picture ghosted in, the scrap aluminum was gone from the old man’s back. Just the backpack with its web of straps and extenders remained like the folded wings of some industrial angel. Unhunched by the litter of the city he stood a little taller. “He asked me if I had enough pictures and I said for now I did. He thanked me for my company, squeezed my shoulder a little and kept on down the river road past the scrap yard. I watched him a bit then turned to go back the other way.”

Tap.

The next picture showed another man wearing grimy blue coveralls cleaning up a spill of rusty iron fillings at the edge of the scrap yard, the right half of a red rust angel just visible among the sweepings.

“I looked back to see if the old man was still on the road. I didn’t know his name and I didn’t know why he made ash angels and rust angels, or why he picked up trash. But I couldn’t follow after him to ask. He was gone. And for some reason it seemed both terrible and sad that I didn’t see him any more. So I went home, and didn’t find him again for nearly a week.”

“Did you cry?” a jocular voice asked from the middle of the third row.

“Roderick,” Mrs. Busby glared coldly over her glasses at a boy of more athletic proportion than Mike. The boy’s grin wilted and he straightened in his seat.

“Not then,” said Mike meeting Roderick’s eyes, “Not then.”

Tap.

Dogs didn’t come much uglier. A little mutt that looked like the ill-favored off-spring of a half-scalded rat and a balding Papillion stood on tip-toe pawing a welcome at whoever took its picture. Where the dog’s skin wasn’t red with scratching it was mottled three shades of gray, and what hair it had sprouted in dun colored wisps behind its jowls, on its chest, hocks, and the underside and very tip end of its tail. It was also a girl. Six recently deflated teats hung on her belly, and three sleeping white and tan puppies lay on the sun faded red blanket behind her. The only beautiful thing about her was her eyes, they were a lustrous-chestnut brown and they shown with joy.

“This is Eunice. When the old man found her she was stuck on the median at Howard Boulevard, trying to get across to the park. She probably smelled some scraps from one of the litter barrels there. Not that she could get to it. This was all a couple of weeks earlier than the first pictures of her I took, and I had gone back to the park hoping to find the old angel maker again. I caught up to him just about the time he saw the dog. That moment it decided to rain, and why I don’t have any pictures. I didn’t want to get my camera wet.”

“From where I stood on the sidewalk in the park I could see the little dog sniffing the air and trying to step down from the curb to run across, but traffic was too heavy, and cars and trucks keep zipping past and chasing her back up out of the road. Then the lights down the block changed and there was a lull in the traffic, but it took her a moment to work up her courage. By the time she stepped out into the road, the light had changed again, and when the on-rushing traffic reached her just as the rain hit she cowered on the yellow line of the turn lane, whipping her head back and forth as the cars flew by. It was hard to look. I just knew she was going to get run over. She was so terrified. I have never seen the Trash Man move that fast before or since. He just dropped his pack, stepped into the road, scooped up the mutt and hopped onto the median to wait for traffic to pause again. Once back he showed her to me. She was potbellied, and her ribs and spine stood out; the centers of her eyes were white, blind, and her uh….doggie …uh breasts were saggy with milk. She was shivering, but she didn’t seem to mind being held.”

“’Poor little thing’, he said, ‘Lost her owner.’ With one hand he dug into his pants’ pocket and pulled out two crumpled dollar bills. He gave me the money and pointed me towards a Quik-Stop and told me to get her a little can of tuna. I did that and he took her to a small picnic pavilion nearby.”

Tap.

The angel maker, dirty, disheveled, and dripping wet knelt beside a boney pot-bellied scrap of a dog devouring a pop-top can of tuna fish. Her tail hung low, but its tip seemed to be in three different places at once.

“When the rain stopped he put his pack back on and took off towards the scrap yard. His pack was full, that flattened tuna can taking up what last little room there was. The little dog trotted behind him stopping and starting in little bursts as she studied the air with her nose”

“‘She’s following,’ I said. He stopped, turned and picked her up then kept on walking. ‘You taking her home with you?’ I asked catching up to him myself.

“He shook his head, ‘Taking her to hers, the place she’s lost from. Need to sell this off first though. It’s a long walk to where she lives.’ This made me curious as to how he knew where she lived. He just said a man knows what he knows and kept walking. That was when I noticed he had a partially healed cut above his left eye, which was still a little discolored from what must have been a real shiner. He wouldn’t tell me what happened, but would grunt and shake his head and give me a “let it alone” look. “It took another twenty minutes to reach the scrap yard, and an hour and a half more walking to get where he was going back across town to where the old Burger Barn is just before the bypass off the Interstate.

Tap.

A succession of images followed, the old man picking up cans in pockets of sunshine along the road, or scrounging through the dumpsters behind an apartment complex to look for cans and other salvageables. One picture showed him hauling some old shirts out of a trash bag and another showed him rescuing a frayed and faded red blanket. The last picture in the series showed him beside a Burger Barn outdoor waste receptacle offering a cup of half melted ice and a discarded third of a burger to the little dog who sniffed the gift suspiciously.

A protracted “Eeew” from the class elicited a triple shushing from Mrs. Busby.

Tap.

The next picture showed the cattail festooned ditch just beyond the back of the Burger Barn, and beyond it an empty dirt parking lot in front of a dilapidated complex of industrial structures. Halfway across the parking lot the old man could be seen lying down in a patch of pea gravel making an angel while the little speck of a dog looked on.

“This is where Dockett’s Block Company used to be twenty years ago. I didn’t know where he was going at first, but it turned out he was going behind the old block works. I had my picture and caught up with him again as he headed towards this big concrete culvert rolled off into the back lot near where a patch of woods began. There was a big chip in the lip which was probably why they left it, but that was where he was headed.”

Tap.

The dirty white rounded hump of a six foot chipped concrete culvert rose above a purple stalked stand of young pokeweed and tall grass. Behind it a cluster of sweet gum, sassafras, and sumac offered a patch of shade that just reached to include the culvert’s hinder end.

Tap.

Within the culvert a lanky shirtless young man in befouled jeans lay curled upon a wadded nest of newspaper, plastic bags, and scraps of old carpet. In his ears hung a half dozen small steel rings. A tattooed spider web sprawled across his abdomen. Tattooed spirals of barbed wire wound about his forearms and encircled his neck. A blue Celtic trefoil knot graced his right shoulder and an ornate many lobed red and black cross overlay most of his stringy right bicep. But another kind of needle entirely had left its livid mark along the veins of his inner arm. His cheeks were sunken, his skin pale, and his sweat drenched shock of black hair fanned out lifelessly.

Michael could see the mingled looks of horror, revulsion, and pity that vied for primacy on the faces of his classmates.

“The smell was like a sewer. His cloths and bedding were all soiled. I guess he had run out of money and gone cold turkey right here, passed out in his own filth and vomit. It was gross. The old man put the dog down next to this guy and she began licking his face. He came to all startled, then when he saw the little dog, he relaxed, but then he saw the old man and his face flushed and his teeth gritted like he was going to get angry, but he then he started to shake and cry instead. The old man took the shirts he had found and the blanket and laid it in a clean space beside this guy. Then he stooped down beside him and said, “Benjamin. Benjamin, look at me. You must take care of her now. She is going to have babies and can’t take care of herself. Take care of her son, she needs you.’ Then he laid the money he got from the scrap on the blanket, twenty-six dollars. He stood to go but the guy, Benjamin, grabbed his hand and looked at him eye to eye, tears just streaming down his face; he hung on and pulled himself up to his knees and said, ‘I had to have a fix. I’m so messed up. For God’s sake I’m sorry.’ The old man pulled the guy close and kissed him on the top of the head and said, ‘God forgives and I forgive. Take care of her now. Give her a good name.’ He stood up and headed back towards the Burger Barn. But I couldn’t see how to follow right away.”

“It started to rain again, hard. Benjamin tried to go out in the rain to wash off, but was too weak and sick to stand and he hung on to the edge of the culvert to keep steady. I wasn’t sure what to do. The only cover was the culvert, and it stank. It was better to get wet. Benjamin took a step toward the trees, where the rain was running off the branches, but slipped down. He was too shaky to get up so he crawled. I don’t know why or how but all my disgust just melted and the smell didn’t bother me anymore. I helped him stand up and strip down and wash off in the rain. We turned his pants inside out and hung them from a limb. He scrubbed down with some grass and leaves. When clean I helped him pull all the soiled material from the culvert and dragged it off a few paces. He wrapped up in the blanket the little dog curled in his arms.”

“He started to say something like thanks but it came out, ‘Don’t be like me.’ I nodded and asked what he was going to call her. ‘Don’t know,’ he said, ‘But something good.’”

Tap

A picture of the newly washed Benjamin hunched inside a culvert, wrapped in a faded red blanket with a little dog nestled in his arms.

A girl on the front row, a plump-faced brunette pointed. “I’ve seen him. He delivers pizza on a bicycle across town near those new Richfield apartments. He’s got that pizza box thing on the back and a little basket in front.”

“Bet he’s your boyfriend,” the voice named Roderick rejoined.

“Bet he’s yours,” the girl said.

“Children! Please. This is a Christian School.” The lights flicked on and off. “One more outburst like that and you may repeat your remarks to the principal and your parents. Continue Michael.”

Tap

It was the ugly dog picture again, this time from a little further out and a little wider angle. A surplus Army tent had sprouted below the culvert under the limbs of the nearer trees. It rested on a bed of shipping pallets overlaid with cardboard. The blanket, puppies, and the happy little dog were nested just outside the front flap under a short awning made from a folded blue tarp suspended from the limbs of the trees. Under the far edge of the tarp a trio of white plastic five gallon buckets stood to receive the rain.

“Benjamin said the puppies were born the day after we first met. He named the dog ‘Eunice’ because it reminded him of ‘you nice’, and a great aunt Eunice he had who always got him something he wanted for Christmas when he was little. Actually the dog’s full name is “Eunice Supreme Scrounger Queen of all Dumpsters.”

Tap.

The next image was a close up of an open box of 64 crayons. They were new, the points still sharp and the colors vivid.

“I used to love the smell of crayons,” the plump girl inhaled softly at the memory. A general murmur of agreement rippled through the classroom.

“I got these from Benjamin, the last time I saw him. He was coming out of the dollar store across the street from the park. I had gone back to try and find the old angel maker again. But I didn’t see him that day, just Benjamin. He waved and came over to me. That was when I noticed we were both standing in one of the old man’s angels.

Tap.

A knees-down picture faded in of four sneaker shod feet standing on a bare patch of sandy soil edged by scruffy St. Augustine grass. Each pair stood upon the shoulders of an angel figure recently flapped into the dust.

“Too do doo do, Too do doo do,” someone from the back lilted the Twilight Zone theme.

“Ben told me where the trail was through the woods just on past the turn in the road beyond the scrap yard. ‘Go till you see a stump,’ he said. There’s a stump just off the edge of the road and his cat waits for him there. ‘If you see the cat on the stump, he’s not home.’”

“I asked how he knew where the old man lived and he said that he had gone looking for him to thank him. After several days with no luck it dawned on Benjamin to watch and wait near the junkyard were the old man sold off. He had dozed off waiting when the old man came up to him and said to come with him, that he had something he needed. So Benjamin followed him down to his camp in the woods and there the old man gave him that red bicycle Benjamin uses now to deliver pizza. He had built it good as new out of scrap parts.”

That’s when Benjamin said he broke down all over again. He said it was like standing in a fire of shame and you just want to run hide but you can’t cause you want to stay too. I know what he means. Sometimes just walking with old man and him doing hardly more than answering my questions with grunts it was like the air was more air and light was more light and colors were more colorful…you just smelled things and saw things and heard things that you had never noticed before. It was like he was salt and just by being around you could taste the world. But just like you saw the world clearer you saw yourself clearer, and you didn’t always like what you saw.”

“Once walking with him a roach ran out from under some pine straw and I stepped on it. He didn’t say a thing but something changed. You could feel it. I looked at him and there was a touch of sadness in his _expression. ‘Was that wrong?’ I asked. He said, ‘It was just a pity for the bug.’ And I felt so ashamed…like I had betrayed someone’s trust. It was an awful few minutes. I can’t imagine how Benjamin felt…he had beaten and robbed the old man and now the same guy was giving him a bike to get around on and this on top of all the rest. But Benjamin stayed. I think they became good friends after that. Strange, that’s the way things worked around the old man; litter turned into gift money, blind starving dogs saved lives, cockroaches got some respect, and despair turned into hope, enemies became friends.”

“Anyway, I wanted to see where he lived and what he wanted the colors for.”

Tap.

If it weren’t a pitch-black night no one could have missed the over-sized feline lounging on last mortal remains of what was once a tree of some standing. But it was gone now leaving behind a gray barkless stump cut on a slant of sufficient girth that a slab of it might have done duty as a dinner table. A lone power line that crossed the road nearby and ran on towards the scrap yard stood in mute testimony as to why the old giant had been laid low. But the giant that sprawled across the stump was not mute.

“That cat did not shut up from the moment he saw me. I couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed that I wasn’t who he was expecting, or whether he didn’t care just so long as I fed him. And I did feed him with a stick of beef jerky I had brought for a snack. He liked it well enough to let me pet him. He kept sniffing my fingers and meowing but he purred too and pressed the back of his ears hard into my fingertips. That was when the old angel maker showed up. His pack was empty and a half eaten bag of peanuts showed from his shirt pocket. ‘Looks like you done met Rafael,’ he said. That’s when I gave him the box of crayons Ben had sent and told him why I was looking for his place. ‘Taint a lot to see. No palaces in these here woods.’ From the base of the stump a foot trail led down a shallow embankment and through the woods down towards the river. That’s the way we went; Rafael dashed on ahead. All the way down the old man talked about how glad he was to get the colors, how pretty they were, and how they would work just fine and I was to thank Benjamin for him if I did not mind the next time I saw him. I didn’t mind I said.”

Tap.

It wasn’t old forest, not old like that stump had been but it was not new either. At one time this had been a scrap yard of sorts too. A baker’s dozen of rusting moss encrusted trucks, trailers, and cars lay overgrown by the re-emergent wood. Some of it was old Army surplus, the rest just old and surplus from a time a half-century or so before. Two battered trailers were segregated from the rest by a fence of rusted of tin siding overrun by a riot of vine honeysuckle, wisteria, and trumpet creeper.

Tap.

Inside the fence the old man had made his place. He had overlaid the space between the trailers with scrap lumber, and that with old carpet and clay, both of which were overlain by a green cascade of drooping muscadine. Behind the curtain of leaf and vine the butt end of a folding cot could be seen. And across from it a squat green trunk rested on short brick pilings. Outside, against the exposed front ends of the trailers, cracked and weathered car seats settled upon five gallon plastic buckets served as sofas and a sawhorse table abutting the fence holding only a little one eyed propane stove, a sooty, chipped blue enamel tea kettle, and a faded green wash pan comprised what must have been the kitchen. Above the table hung a mismatched array of cups, wooden utensils, and an iron skillet from a row of nails driven into the fence’s lathing. Underneath the table another blue plastic bucket tipped out of frame.

Tap.

A tan plastic dish of dry cat food had been set beneath the sawhorse table, and Raphael sat hunched before it, nose pressed to the plate, eyes closed in contentment. But he had company. Perched on the edge of the plate, a brownish-gray mouse helped itself to a peanut the old man had laid among the chicken and fish flavored bits.

“That’s Tobias. He and Rafael are friends according to the old man. Exactly how that came to be he didn’t say. But there it is. The whole time I was there the mouse and the cat stayed together. When Rafael and Tobias were settled he asked if I would like some coffee or tea, but I said no thank you. I would have felt too ashamed to take what little he had and to be honest I really didn’t want to drink out of one of those cups. He made a cup of tea for himself and found a little tin of gingersnaps and offered one of those. That I took. Then he showed me what was in his trunk.”

Tap.

The trunk lid stood open, an old Army footlocker. One side was stacked a set of sketch books on the other was inset a smaller box filled with brilliantly colored postcard size images of ancient saints all portrayed in some archaic, beautiful, but not quite realistic style. They jumbled together like a pile of flat jewels. On the inner lid of the trunk were taped images of Mary and Christ in those same rich colors and that same strange skewed perspective. All Mary’s images attached to the left side and all of Christ’s to the right all arranged to fit the entire available space.

A girl’s voice quipped, “That looks Catholic. They all worship Mary and have pictures and all like that. They got statues they worship too.”

“Yeah.” Some other student made assent.

“I didn’t see any statues,” said Michael. “He never said what faith he was. He didn’t talk much about God either.”

“Well how could you tell if he was a Christian or a Catholic if he didn’t talk about God? Did he have a Bible?” a boy from the middle of the class asked.

“Maybe. I didn’t exactly see one.” There was an unexpected catch in Michael’s voice. “I asked him what all the pictures were for, the sketchbooks and all. He showed me. He copied the pictures in the sketchbooks or pieces of them. There were pages and pages of just eyes, hands, and feet. But he did each one till he got his copy as near perfect as possible.”

“I couldn’t see from the way I had come up, but he had built a…a…I don’t know what to call it behind the trailers he lived out of. It was a kind of extended half dome. It was made out cane, the kind they make fishing poles from. It was all woven together like a giant basket and he covered the outside with a mixture of clay and straw and then laid old scraps of carpet over that, and that was just overgrown with wisteria and muscadine and for all the world it looked just like a big tangle of brush from the outside. But inside he had smoothed the clay all down, and had plastered sections of it and smoothed all that together too.”

“You asked how I know if he was a Christian. You tell me.”

Tap

A slide show began. Light as if filtered through a forest’s branches revealed a hemisphere twenty feet across and ten feet high, the floor a polished slab of oil finished red clay. A blaze of brilliant red extended four-feet up the wall surmounted by a checkerboard band of blue, and green. And then there were images, hundreds of jewel bright, crayon wrought images. Serene faces bathed in light starred out of eternity. Some held books, others held scrolls, and yet others crosses. They all watched as if through windows from another place. Little names in strange red letters scribed by a careful hand floated next to the faces. And two faces shown greater and more brightly than the rest. At the far end of the dome two images loomed side by side larger than all the rest. One was a Madonna like one sees sometimes on religious Christmas cards. Her eyes asked questions ancient and sad, her head wrapped in a dark blue mantle that draped over her shoulders like an enfolding mystery. On one arm a Christ child of an almost adult proportion pressed his lips to her cheek, but as he did so he also looked out to where her gaze was directed…right at the one standing before her. With her other hand she gestured towards her child as if to say both, ‘This is my son,’ and ‘Be careful what you do with him.’ Beside this image stood one of Christ, one hand raised in a gesture of blessing yet directed simultaneously to the viewer and to the open book he held inscribed in some ancient tongue. His gaze while directed towards the viewer looked beyond him as if the one standing there was but a shadow cast backwards out of eternity, an indistinct outline of the true person yet to be, whose eyes he met outside of time. Two small locks of hair fell across his forehead and a nimbus of golden light surrounded his head just as it did those in all the other images, but this one was different. Etched into it were three bars of a cross, the fourth presumably hidden behind his neck. And on the bars of that cross were set three jewels, each inscribed with a letter from that same old alphabet. Run together they looked like they might have spelled WON, but there was no way to tell what they meant.

“That’s when I cried,” said Michael. “I have never seen such beauty. I can never forget that beauty. And if God doesn’t guide the hand of that old trash man then I cannot explain what I saw, or what I felt standing there. I could hardly breathe it was so beautiful.

Tap.

One bare place remained upon the wall near the door. Upon it a roughly sketched angel looked upon three women huddled together while he gestured to the empty space beside him.

“It was clouding up when I left. The forecast had mentioned the possibility of rain that night. It’s been a wet summer. Strange, but we had almost twice as much rain as normal that time of year. Now they say it’s dryer than normal, probably something to do with global warming. Anyway, I went home before the rain, but it didn’t rain that night. It waited till dawn the next morning. The thunder woke me up. When I looked out my window I could see the old man rummaging in the trash cans across the street. He wore a poncho, but the way it began to rain it could not have helped much. I went down to invite him to wait out the worst of it on our front porch. That was the cleanest I had ever seen him, the dirt had all washed away. He accepted the invitation and sat there with me a long while not saying much of anything while he dripped dry. He asked about my project but seemed distracted when I told him. His eyes kept returning to the run-off from the eaves. Finally I asked what he was looking at. While still pondering on the rain he said, ‘Do you ever wonder why the ocean is great?’ No, I said, not really. Why? Then he said, ‘I can’t tell you as well as I can show you.’ And with that the wind gusted and threw a sheet of water right across the porch drenching us both. He said that since I was wet already just to follow him and he would show me. There’s no explaining why but when he struck out back into the rain, I followed even though I was just wearing a T-shirt and some boxers. The rain was cold.”

There were some snickers and a whispered exchange or two before Michael continued.

“He stood next to the street under the light and pointed back to my house, to the roof. ‘Look at the rain, boy. What’s it doing?’ Falling out of the sky onto the roof I said. ‘Exactly,’ he said back, ‘but what happens next?’ He pointed to the eaves. I saw all the rain gathered together and running down in little sheets and steams as it fell off the roof and I told him what I saw. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘Now what?’ All I could see was that what didn’t soak into the ground ran across the lawn into the gutter and then down the street drain. That’s what I told him. He clapped me on the shoulder and point in succession from the sky to the roof to the ground to the gutter. ‘Tell me then what is the rain doing every inch of the way. Falling, I said…going to the next lower level or something. “That’s it. Now you know why the ocean is great.’” And at that moment a sun faded soda can came floating by. He flicked it out of the muddy rush of water with his cane and bent to pick it up. ‘It’s lower than everything else and water always seeks the lowest place just like you said.’

Then I got mad…not mad mad…just irritated mad. And I said ‘You brought me out in this storm, me barefoot and in my sleep cloths to tell me rain falls down and water seeks the lowest place. You could have told me that on the porch.’ He just grunted and chased down a wad of aluminum foil from some old cookout likely washed from the bed of someone’s pickup down the street. I had just started up the steps when he called out from down the block, ‘You ever wonder why God is great, boy?’ I could have sworn there was thunder, but there was no lightening, still I stood there for a long time starring up at the rain.”

“Anyway a week or so, almost two, after I took this picture of the unfinished angel the rains kept coming and we had that big flash flood upstate. I had heard on the news the river was rising and was expected to crest past flood stage so I went to warn old man in case he didn’t know. When I got there the waters were already higher than I expected. I had to wade across a low place just to get to him. I called but there was no answer. I thought he might have gone to high ground but I wanted to be sure so I went in. I went back to his inner place where his pictures are. Benjamin had beat me there, and his eyes were red. He didn’t say much except that the old man had caught a cold that turned into pneumonia, but he wouldn’t go to the doctor. That was when…” And Michel’s voice trailed off as tears began to seep from his eyes.

Tap

The angel-maker’s cot had been set under the big images of Mary and Christ and on it lay the old man like he was asleep, a dark gray blanket pulled up to his elbows. Raphael lay beside him, eyes closed asleep as well. A small oil lamp illuminated the room from a crate serving as a table at the head of the cot.

Tap

It was a close-up of the old man. He held one of the battered saint prints in his weathered hands that pressed the image to his heart. The lettering on this one was in English and read, “St. Luke.” But it was no blanket that covered him, rather he lay shrouded by thousands of mice, each one’s eyes as stricken and searching as those of Mary who looked on.

“They were so sad. I’ve never seen anything like it, never imagined anything like it. But they were sad for him…and Rafael too. The old cat could not bear it. I wanted to take more pictures but I couldn’t. Benjamin grabbed my arm and showed me the water that was starting to run across the floor. Then there was a shuddering along the right wall, and big cracks began open through the ranks of the saints, and chunks of mud and plaster started to fall. The river had cut too close and a big part of the bank had sloughed off and was taking a piece of the old man’s chapel with it. We barely got out of there but we managed to save his trunk of pictures. It was water-tight and we hung on to it just in case as we went back to the road. What had been knee deep when I first came was almost to my waist by then. I didn’t know it was rising so fast. Benjamin kept the box. I made it to the scrap yard told the man there what was happening and he called the police and the fire department. But it was all too late by the time they got there. The river was too high. They never found his body.”

A couple of days later I went back after the river went down. Most of the old man’s camp was gone. The river had cut clean through it. Just the back end of his chapel thing was left…just the part around the door really. There’s a bluff there now straight down to the water. This is all that made it…mostly”

Michael reached down to a backpack shoved under the desk. From it he pulled out a heavy cardboard box and from within the box he brought forth a plastered slab of red cob. On it framed by the dark mouth of a cave sat an angel all in white gazing at the broken emptiness on one side of him and pointing to the broken emptiness beyond. It was greeted with a few oohs, and a few ahs, and more than couple of sour looks that regarded it with same disdain Elijah might have reserved for the idols of Baal. He did not notice. Mrs. Busby raised the lights and he tapped the touchpad one last time to end the presentation.

“This has been my project about what I did this summer. I met a man who lay down in the dirt and when he got up…there were angels.”

In Michael’s shirt pocket a small life stirred, felt but unseen, attending to an unfinished peanut.

The End