Old Oscar was an odd old fellow, whom never quite put
together Chick Evens’ capriciousness. Had become accustomed to his abrupt
visits that he viewed them all as matters of course, never knowing the
underlining reasons for them. Should it ever be necessary to be told them,
perhaps he would have?
Evens,
always asking questions, as the old man quietly looked up at his face. Not once
leaving the bench in the garden at the Poor Farm, till the last.
“Best
leave and let you get some afternoon rest,” said Evens, more often than not,
when he felt the old man was tired, or he was tired and wanted to leave. The
old man with his warm flannel shirt, and thick wool socks on, and sweater in the
scorching heat of a Minnesota summer; he was eighty years of age or more: of
which he had sat facing White Bear Avenue, sat in the same iron and wooden
bench each day—day after day, after lunch, the old farm house in back of him,
rebuilt to accommodate the old, dying, and handicapped of the city. The last
home they’d ever see.
Old Oscar
had no friends, his family never visited him, what was left of it, but Evens,
and as long as Evens visited him, which was on each Saturday throughout the
summer of 1986, he had that friend: half past noon he’d arrive. Oscar would
take his friend by the hand and ask warmly, “I’d sure like some ice-cream,” and
Evens would walk down a half mile and fetch him some, bringing it back half
melted, but nonetheless, the old man never complained.
The old
man got to love him: well, love is a big word, perhaps, care for him is well
enough, at least well enough to ask for that treat now and then.
Thus,
Saturday after Saturday passed, and they talked to each other, and Evens
continued to ask questions, telling himself, ‘The sooner I have all this down
the better,’ he was in a way getting tired of running out to the old farm each
Saturday, although he was starting to like the old man.
The old
man started to say time and again, “I’m tired to death of living, in this
rundown cold, smoky, cracking—once upon a time farmhouse; all night long
groaning, dismal. I shall be dead by autumn, I hope.”
And so
was the notion of the old man, and Evens on his way home would write all this
down for his psychology class at the University of Minnesota, where he was
studying: it was to him a project.
“What is
the purpose you keep coming?” asked Oscar, once again.
He could
have told him, but he told him “I can’t say,” as if threading a needle. And
then autumn came, and Evens’ project was over and he went to see Oscar, and he
was no longer there: the bench was empty.
To bear a
noteworthy resemblance to old Oscar, the bench had somehow accumulated the old
man’s residue, leaving within it, a part of his character, he could sense
this—that is, to that of Chick Evens of our story, it was most unexplained.
His
reports had been several of a gaunt and grizzled old man: aging, dying, no
longer healthy, in a wholesome sense: friendless, alone and lonesome, feeble
but somehow, holding onto a smile while in quicksand. On the other hand, some secret impediment had
debarred Evens from the enjoyment and riches of his passing “A”, in his
psychology class. Perhaps for concealing his motive, which is to say, at any
rate: Oscar had died without him disclosing the ‘reason,’ the real reason, for
the visits.
Now he
felt a lurking distrust within his character, difficult to account for, if even
to try and describe. “Yes,” cried his soul, “Tomorrow I will set about it.” But
the deeper he thought about it, the more it became irrevocably lost to some
hidden vault within his mind, and only once put onto paper with ink in the form
of a poem, cynically cover in a shroud,
published in his first book, yet to be published, covered in
metaphor/personification, and hence, unrecognizable—and thereafter, buried in
the truth—sunken in the sea for twenty-six years, only now to resurface for one
last recall, in the form of this vignette, which is in real time, and bona fide
truth.
#957
(8-25-2012)
