To the Keeper of a Salvation Army Mission
Someone in the Sally called you an “Arkan-Sawyer” once, and you smirked. You had the mien of a good poker player. You were older—thinning gray hair, a clean-shaven face, and glasses. If you had a Southern accent, I did not hear it. You spoke little, in a voice deep and clear, using carefully chosen words. You were tough, taciturn, and fair. You are, indubitably, dead by now.
You were the manager of the Salvation Army in Longview, Texas in January or February, 1981. I and twenty or so others slept in bunk beds in a dormitory. You woke us up at 5:00am, fed us breakfast, and made sure that we were out the door by 5:45. You tidied up during the day, ensured that dinner was ready when we came back, and enforced lights-out at 9:30. You also made sure that nobody overstayed their welcome. One week max. You were not long-term housing.
You never made us listen to a sermon to get our food, the way they did at other places.
Hundreds of guys cycled through each month. Many of them raggedy-looking white seventeen-year-old kids with long hair like me. You might have noticed I was more well-spoken and more accustomed to following orders than many of the others. Maybe I was a middle-class kid trying to escape a suffocating please-and-thank-you Northeastern upbringing. Maybe I was trying to test myself. Maybe I was unimpressed with the people I had come from, and enamored with whatever lay beyond the horizon. Maybe I had had some bad luck. You appeared to be, after all, perceptive. But I don’t see why you would have cared.
Each day, you organized the labor pool bus. After breakfast, we would walk over to a street corner where a minivan picked us up. The bus would drive us out into the sticks to a pipe yard. It was a big clearing of flat land in a pine forest, covered with acres of cast-iron pipe used, presumably, for oil and gas. We helped load and unload a machine that moved the bigger sections of pipe, which could weigh hundreds or thousands of pounds, and we’d move the smaller sections by hand. The permanent workers at the pipe yard called me “John” between themselves, because I had round glasses and long hair, like John Lennon. They thought it was hilarious when they learned my name really was “John.”
The group in the minivan stayed the same while I was there. Most were from the Sally. A short, wiry Korean War vet. A tall, quiet giant with five days’ blond stubble, blue eyes, and an addled look. A Hispanic guy who spoke no English and taught me the Spanish word for “ice.” Along with us, there were two locals; one was a portly fifty-year-old Black guy who lived in town. In the mornings, he would tell us what he’d done the night before: “I came home, played with my grandbaby, and fell asleep.” I would wiggle my toes in my wet socks and think how nice it would be to one day have a wife and grandbabies who liked me. We would stop for beer on the way home, and he would complain about how cold it was. “Get whiskey next time. This damn beer makin’ my balls shrink.” And he was right. It wasn’t just cold for Texas that week—it was cold, period, and the sun would be down by the time we left the pipe yard. But when we got back to the Sally and walked through the door, we saw that you had swept the place and turned on the lights and the heat, and we smelled that you had cooked, put out the food, and set the table. If you cared that we reeked of beer, you never let on.
“How many of us did you rip from another, better world when you turned on those lights?”
Although you kept the place clean and well-ordered, we all had someplace else we wanted to be. I only truly forgot where I was when I was asleep. Near morning most nights, I would dream of my mother’s apple pie. The whole family sitting around the teak pull-out table in the house where I grew up. Me, father, mother, sister. My mother putting the pie on the table. It would be slightly larger than life, set in a tin-foil dish, and covered with a latticework of crust that revealed the golden, sticky, sweet-smelling filling that was still bubbling from the heat of the oven. We’d be about to cut it up and eat it when you would turn on the lights and tell us, “Out of bed, gentlemen.” How many of us did you rip from another, better world when you turned on those lights?
One night, after we came in from the minivan, you looked at me over your glasses and said, with a certain tone in your voice, “Uh, Mr. Kaufmann.” I was flattered that you remembered my name, but I knew what that meant. You ran a Salvation Army, not a boarding house.
“I’ll be gone tomorrow.”
The next day, I ate two portions of breakfast, burped, told you good-bye, picked up my pack, and walked the mile or so to I-20. I stuck out my thumb, and headed west.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Kaufmann is a former big-firm lawyer and current mobile home park owner living in southern New York with his family. His writing appears, or is forthcoming, in Analecta, The High Plains Register, The Journal of the Taxation of Financial Products, The Journal of Taxation of Investments, Litro, Tax Notes, and Whatever Keeps the Lights On. For fun, he grows things and eats them.
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Header photo by Adam Thomas