Angel's Journey
by Catherine Armstrong
The folks in Longridge always wondered about old Ms. Mayer. Not
that there were too many folks in Longridge. It was a small town in
population, and rather spread-out. Most of the families there had farms
which they worked to bring in some money. But the soil was never good enough to
sustain any cash crops, so most people went into the milltown
ten miles away to work.
But not Ms. Mayer. She was long past working age. It was anyone's
guess how old she was. Maybe sixty-five, maybe eighty-five. She mostly
kept to herself though, even though she had lots of time on her hands.
Folks knew she had once had a husband, but he had died a long time ago,
and rather mysteriously at that. No one knew whether it had been a
heart attack or if he had had too much whisky one night and had just
passed out, never to wake up again. The whole incident had been talked
about quietly for a few days and then politely shoved under the rug and
out of mind. Mr. Mayer had come to Longridge only about five years
before his death, had succeeded in starting fights at every bar in the
region, had left no children or will, and had made no positive
impressions on anybody.
After he died, neighbors would try to stop by Ms. Mayer's little
cottage and see how she was making out. They'd bring her baskets of
fruit and vegetables from their farms, but she never said thank you, and
they always left her cottage feeling reluctant to ever return. She
didn't go to church except sometimes on Christmas, and she always sat in
the back and didn't speak to anybody. The good parishioners would nod
to her, send a smile her way, and shrug their shoulders when she didn't
honor them with so much as a second glance. Mr. Mayer had been dead for
at least twenty years, and after about the first two years or so, folks
just stopped coming by to see her or speak to her in church. Some of
the younger folks barely even knew she existed.
One February evening, Ms. Mayer was sitting in her rocking chair
mending a blouse. She looked out the window and saw the sun was sinking
below the horizon. She guessed it must be about 5:30. Time to start
thinking about dinner, she thought. Her stomach wasn't growling, but
she never missed a meal. It's important to keep strong when you're as
old as I am, she'd always think to herself. She got up slowly from the
chair and was heading into the small kitchen when she noticed the room
had gotten rather chilly. "Cursed kerosene," she muttered. "Them
heaters never stay where you put them." She marched over to the
kerosene heater, expecting to find that its temperature setting had
fluctuated from the seventy-two degrees she had set it on. What she
found, however, was that the heater simply wasn't working at all. Her
heart sank. It could not have run out of kerosene already, could it?
She had just filled it recently. She knelt down, the joints in her
knees and hips cracking as she did so, and unplugged the heater from its
jack in the wall. Then she fiddled with the kerosene tank to try to see
how much was left. To her horror, she had plenty. The thing plumb
wasn't working. What could she do, she wondered. The outside
temperature would drop down to below zero tonight, she imagined. And
that kerosene heater was the only thing besides a small fire in the fire
place keeping her house warm. That fire couldn't heat the whole house.
She'd be mighty cold tonight if she didn't somehow figure out a way to
get the heater fixed. She figured she'd have to go over to Mr.
hodgekins' place and ask him to take a minute and look at it. But Mr.
Hodgekins was a far distance away. It might take her twenty minutes to
walk there. But that's what she'd have to do, she reckoned. She hadn't
installed one of those new fangled telephones yet, so she couldn't call
him and ask him to come over in his Packard.
She took another look out the window. Snow had begun to fall,
blanketing the bare ground with a pristine coat of white. For an
instant, reason took hold, and she knew she was far too old to go
tramping around in the snow with a broken heater. But she couldn't wait to fix
it until tomorrow. She would be too cold tonight if she did
that. Dinner would have to wait, she decided. The idea of asking
somebody for help like this made her cringe. She had lived alone for
twenty years and sometimes liked it that way. No extra mouths to feed
or drunk husbands to put up with. And she hadn't bothered with the
well-meaning but noisome people who used to come by with their fruit
baskets saying "Oh Ms. Mayer, I'm so sorry to hear about Mr. Mayer's
passing. You must be devastated." "Huh!" she scoffed, thinking about
it. Some men just caused too much trouble in the world, and God had to
rid it of such people. Devastated was hardly the word. She went into her small
bedroom and put on another pair of socks and her old, cracked
leather boots. She didn't believe they would keep out the wet and cold,
but they were what she had. Then she put on her old wool sweater and
coat. She hunted around in her closet for a minute or so until she
found what she was looking for, a hand cart. That heater was far too
heavy to carry for a mile and a half. She rolled it out of the closet
and into the main room where the heater was. Struggling with its
weight, she loaded the heater onto the old cart with wobbling wheels and
stood up. "Oh I sure am old," she mumbled to herself.
Bill Cramer had given it to her a long time ago, at least fifteen
years, she reckoned, when she had had to carry her husband's old type
writer to his pawn shop to sell. She had no cart at the time, and he
had been horrified, good soul that he was, that a lady getting up in
years as she was would be carrying fifty pounds of type writer up the
road to his shop. Someone had brought in a hand cart the other day, and
he saw no point in trying to sell it later on for no more than a dollar.
He might as well give it to the poor woman. She remembered that look in
his eyes, a look she had certainly never seen in those of her husband.
It had been cheerful, almost dancing, like nothing in the world made him
happier than to give her that cart. She usually flat-out rejected
charity, but that look made her feel very strange, sort of alive inside,
and she simply couldn't turn him down. She wondered later if something
had come over her, but now she was glad to have the cart. She couldn't
very well do with a broken heater.
She took another look outside at the snow piling up against the
cottage. She'd have to hurry before it got too deep to roll the cart.
Opening the creaky door, she stepped back when the first blast of cold
air hit her. "I ought not be doing this," part of her brain said. But
there was simply no way around it. She tugged the cart out the door and
shut it quickly. Down her walk she went, through the snow which had now
covered the ground completely. She hoped it would stop soon so she
wouldn't have to ask Mr. Hodgekins to give her a ride home in his car.
It was so beautiful, she thought. Rarely did she have the desire or
opportunity to come out in the snow. She liked winter on the whole.
Granted, it was a lot of trouble to go anywhere during that time of the
year, but it was a time when she didn't feel guilty about staying in and
just watching the flakes drift outside. She stopped for a moment and
gazed at the puffy white flakes floating down and wondered at how very
like one of them she was. Each one just drifted down from somewhere and
was quickly covered up by the latest and greatest flake to come from the
great firmament above. Sooner or later, they would all melt away and be
forgotten.
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