THE STRANGER

There were two hardware stores in my small hometown, one owned by my father and the other, just two blocks north on Main Street, owned by the Weeks family. Business contacts between the two were infrequent, but cordial.

My father had adopted as his business slogan, “Yes, Sir, we have it!” It wasn’t true, but it was catchy. And to his credit, he taught his clerks to make every effort to treat the slogan as a store philosophy. If, in fact, we didn’t have it, we were to make every effort to get it. That included calling the Weeks to see if they had it. If they did, someone was to take money from the cash register, run up to the Weeks’ store, and buy it. It was resold to the customer with no mark up.

On a chilly winter day, but with warming, bright sunshine flooding the streets, when I was eleven or twelve years old, a customer asked my uncle (who worked for my father) for a certain size Phillips head screwdriver. We didn’t have it. With a phone call, my uncle learned that the Weeks did have it. I was dispatched to get it.

I didn’t usually like this chore, as it meant running at full speed, unable to pause to take in the sights: the bustle at the post office, the wonders in the windows of the five and dime store and at Jessie Mae’s Jewelry, the colors of the fruits and vegetables on display at Al’s Market, and the splendid languor of the checkers players across the street on the courthouse square. But this customer had said he had other errands to run and would be back in an hour or so to get the screwdriver. So there was no rush. Plus my uncle gave me an extra dime so I could treat myself to an ice cream cone at the drugstore across the street from the Weeks’ store.

On my way into Weeks’, I noticed a stranger, an old man, sitting on the public bench between the store and the offices of the weekly “Brooksville Sun” newspaper. When I came out with the screwdriver, hell bent on dashing across the street to get my ice cream cone, he called to me.

“You going to a fire, sonny?” he asked.

When I paused to tell him the reason for my haste, he licked his upper lip and said, “Hell, boy, I like ice cream. How about you come back over here and give me a lick or two?”

Those were simpler days. We weren’t taught not to talk to strangers. It was even considered impolite not to do so. Besides, this fellow looked harmless, even though the cuffs of his pants were ragged and there were holes in the sleeves of the old cardigan he clutched to his chest with both arms. He struck me as a nice old man who had simply sat down on the bench to warm himself in the bright winter sun and maybe get a little color into his ashen cheeks. I told him I’d be right back.

He didn’t respond when I came back and offered to share my ice cream cone with him. With his chin resting on his chest and his eyes closed, he seemed to have fallen asleep, but he didn’t react when I shook him a bit. I left him there and went back to deliver the screwdriver.

My great uncle Eddie owned the newspaper. It was he who called my father an hour or so later to tell him he had found a dead man sitting on the bench outside his office, and that apparently I was the last person to be seen talking to him.

The dead body was the lead story in the next edition of the newspaper. The man had no identification on him, nor was there any way to tell where he had come from or where he was going. The newspaper story said simply that the body had been “turned over to the county sheriff for appropriate disposition.” Because my family didn’t want me connected to this mysterious tragedy, my name wasn’t mentioned.

I didn’t mind too much, although the ensuing notoriety at school would have been nice. I had never seen a dead man before and I was hoping for a long hiatus before I came across another.