"What am I going to do?" She demanded, sitting in wheelchair with her legs spread lightly apart supporting her elbows while holding onto a magazine, and frowning at the faces passing by her, "What am I going to do?" she murmured again, not to anyone in particular at the old Folks Farm, off White Bear Avenue, in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the early days of the winter of '86; a newspaper on the floor beside her, a grieving tone to her voice, and slow moving dark brown eyes. Sherwood Van Buren, humming to himself, standing in the hallway had just put out a cigarette and watched the middle-aged woman in the wheelchair and the many faces that passed her...
She sat in the wheelchair with her white nightgown on, re-read something in the magazine, she read it over and over, then laying it face down on her lap, lit a corncob pipe, only to have a nurse insist she put it out.
A draft of wind from the front door being opened and shut blew her pipe smoke into Sherwood's face, before the nurse grabbed the pipe from her. The chill of the open door drew to her bare feet, as Sherwood leaned against the protective walls.
An old man came walking by, spat over a chair trying to hit a spittoon, but missed. One man jumped out of his wheelchair when the winter wind slammed the facility door with a bang. Another old woman was talking to a nurse she had a bad cold, who seemed uninterested in the problems of life and of living.
Instinctively Sherwood looked upon them so being in another world, where everyone waited quietly, patiently until a certain moment, and then with quickness and accuracy of a banshee, at a kill speed, they pounced their wants and needs upon the ruthless authorities. He saw the vague uncertain look that came into the eyes of the unsuccessful.
When as a boy he had come to visit the Old Folks Farm-back in the late fifties, he watched the movement of the people, as they made their handicrafts in leather, sold them to whomever, he bought a billfold once from an old man who always planted himself on the stairway, but never recognized-no one took notice of a boy running through the lobbies, hallways and up and down the stairways. Perhaps he was more like a pet dog to the residents.
Sherwood had not lost vision that he had come here as a boy with boyish eyes, but then he never listened to the talk, back then. For the most part he went about his way; quietly, making friends, looked about. Today was much different, outside the world was that of a roar and bustle, and pert near thirty-year had passed, but he hadn't lost his love for visiting the old folk's home.
Humming from room to room through the farm facility, converted to what it was now-a three story building with uncountable rooms, looking at worn carpet, pairs of slippers, greeting people just to greet them, saying a prayer with people wanting company and someone to lead in a prayer, he joined them all. He saw a man playing a violin; he stopped and listened to him. He noticed younger sisters were sitting with their older sisters, nurses combing the hair of older women, and younger men shaving older men. He had seen it all before. And there was that middle-aged woman reappearing at a few different rooms he was visiting, to see what he was up to, with her unsteady wheelchair, a noisy building indeed when all the activity is clustered together, thought Sherwood.
Nothing much came of the acquaintance between Miss Rice and Sherwood Van Buren, her growing interest in him, and the fact that in him was kind of sacredness, near a blind devotion befell her; or perhaps it was blind curiosity. There was something she could not herself understand.
Once she had talked to Sherwood of the matter, "God is fine, and to have a relationship with him, and meet him in heaven, requires only that you accept him as Lord and Savior," Sherwood told Miss Rice this, adding "perhaps my visit here is purposeful, I know in my heart he is trying to bring you home!" He said, thinking Miss Rice was seeking salvation. But she said, right then and there, she said she was grieving, and had been for ten-long-years, since her father died.
"I want my father to talk to me, I want to be with him, if God is there okay, but I want to be with my father," she explained.
There was something about her Sherwood didn't understand. He felt she liked him, but didn't understand all the same. This chance acquaintance had rapidly grown into a friendship. She even admired his reserve, made a kind of hero out of him. He had spent hour after hour talking to her during these visits, still absorbed in her father's death, near mocking God in the process, if not angry at him, that he took him from her. She believed in God, as much as the devil does, but it was her father she worshiped. She was absorbed in her own thoughts and getting her own impressions of what heaven would be like without her father, until one day she was all fed up with it, said to Sherwood:
"I'd rather go to hell and be with my father for eternity there, than be in heaven with all the glorious angels, and God Himself, without him."
Not wanting to be animated, or gloomy and cantankerous, he slipped away to another room, amused and lightly irritated as the circumstances marred the joviality of the evening. Oh, this night he put his hands into his trouser pockets, and walked out of the Old Folks Farm, to look at the vastness of life before him, and never returned.
No: 792 (4-7-2011) SA
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