Taking stuff to John
There’s a story my mother liked to tell about the time she had been recovering from another operation on her bad leg, the one she’d had polio in as a child. It seems she’d been in the hospital for about a month and when she got home, she’d been sleeping on the living room sofa because she couldn’t manage to climb the stairs to the bedroom. She was still able to hop around and fix dinner and all, though. I was away at college, so she didn’t have to worry about me, and Harriet was gone, as well, having eloped that spring. Mom didn’t talk about that very much, since Harriet had eloped with a goy. So, there wsa only Dad to worry about.
One day, it came to her that she hadn’t seen old John for quite a few months, even before she had gone to the hospital.
Old John was just about the ugliest black man I had ever seen. He was very, very black, had a long scar on his face, very strong arms and legs so bowed that if it weren’t for his only being about five feet tall, I could easily have crawled through his legs as a child. He was a hunchback and had very deep black eyes and shiny white teeth, which made him very frightening to me. To my mother, though, he was a “godsend.” He’d actually worked for my grandmother in her grocery store while my mother was growing up, doing all the hard work like carting boxes of canned goods, sweeping up, taking the trash out and things like that. After my grandmother died, he seemed to have adopted my mother, even though she didn’t have the grocery store. I don’t think he had any regular schedule, but he always seemed to be there when the snow was three feet deep or when there was a heat wave or such. He would come to do lots of odd jobs, put coal in the furnace, go to the grocery store in the snow, stack wallpaper in my father’s storage room, and take care of the vegetables in our victory garden, making sure they were watered, mow the lawn, paint the porch, stuff like that.
At any rate, Mom’s leg was feeling better and she decided to visit old John.
She hobbled to our station wagon, put her cane on the passenger seat, and managed to ensconce herself on the seat with her bad right leg on the seat and her good left leg free to work the pedals. “I went to John’s sister’s place, which was the last place I knew he lived,” she told me. “Then, I went to the door and knocked. John’s sister came to the door and told me John was in the old age home near the vinegar works on Cold Spring Lane, so I got back into the car and rode to the old age home near the vinegar works. It was ugly and dark and smelled of rotten apples form the vinegar works,” she told me.
When she got to the old age home, she found that John was on the third floor where the sickest men stayed and he couldn’t come down because he was too ill, so she somehow climbed those three flights of stairs. “I couldn’t have made it except that there was a handrail that went all the way up and I held onto that.” It had taken her the better part of a half hour to climb the stairs.
“Once I caught my breath, I looked around the room and it was so gloomy I could hardly see anything. ‘John,’ I called out. A couple of voices responded, but I recognized John’s voice and looked toward him. It was too dark to see him until a couple of people turned on their lamps. Then, I saw him sitting on a bed almost at the end of the floor. He’d got so skinny I could hardly recognize him. I went to him and he was very glad to see me. We talked a while and then I had to leave. I told him I’d come back next week.”
During the next couple of days, Mom called her friends, plump Margaret whose husband was an electrician and who had moved to Aberdeen, but was always ready when Mom called; pretty Helen whose husband was a race course blacksmith who travelled a lot; skinny Estelle, whose husband had been a paperhanger like my dad, until he died of cancer at 35; Joan, whose husband looked like the Joker from the Batman comics and who worked as a garbage collector.
By the next Wednesday, they had managed to gather together enough stuff to fill the back of the station wagon with the seat down, and Mom went back to the old age home.
“I got some of the people who worked in the old age home to carry the stuff upstairs. There were a couple of boxes of clothing and sweaters so they wouldn’t have to wear those dingy gray pyjamas all the time and could stay warm in the winter. There were a half dozen nice lamps, even one that stood on the floor and held three bulbs. There were a couple of mirrors, some shaving equipment, a phonograph with some records, a couple of radios so they could have some enjoyment, even a small TV for John to watch.
“You should have seen their faces. They were so happy, those that could get out of bed gathering around the boxes, picking out stuff. Then they turned on a few of the new lamps and the room lit up. Their faces lit up, too. I was so happy. Then, one of them turned on a radio and started playing that awful schwartze music and I had to leave.”
Words of My Father 
Leave a comment