For several days I walked around nervous and incomplete, the soggy bill in my pocket accumulating moral weight, like something stolen or unreturned. I looked for needy children. I looked for the Dirty Man. He had always ignored me as he passed, slogging along in his cloud of eau de homelessness, but I figured I could slip the money into his jacket pocket somehow. He could buy a pizza or a package of Bugler or toss it down a sewer grate like a candy wrapper—whatever he did, it would be off my hands. My conscience would be eased. But he was nowhere to be found.
At Wal-Mart the next day a child was distressed that he could not get a toy, and I thought about secretly handing him the money. But how holy is the palliation of a spoiled child? I tried to think of worthy charities where twenty dollars didn’t represent one one-hundredth of one percent of the CEO’s annual salary. It’s harder than you might think in small-town America to casually run across people in need. I walked around with increasing consternation and gloom.
My sacred day was stretching out into an eternity of worldly snags. I was ready to throw the money into the gutter or tear it up like confetti or leave it blowing across the snowy grounds of the graveyard, when I passed the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church.
Although I was aware there had been an evil pope in the fourteenth century, and Catholic ritualism often rivaled many American sporting events, I also knew that Catholic charities did good work. Every person I’d ever met who’d gone to a parochial school for any length of time had a better education than I had, and deeply inculcated guilt and a well-illustrated idea of hell usually make for more interesting and intelligent company than the average Joe with a healthy sex life and oodles of self-esteem.
Two older women were entering the church. I thought they must be very religious to be attending services on a weekday evening.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said to the one bringing up the rear. She was a bent, small woman of perhaps seventy-five years. “Are you a member of this church?”
She looked up at me, her eyes so peaceful and blue I knew I had come to the right place.
“Yes, I am,” she said.
I handed her the twenty. “Could you give this to the church? Put it in the collection plate or something.”
She accepted the money without question or even curiosity, as if this were an everyday occurrence, as if she had been expecting me.
“I’ll put it in the box by the Virgin Mother,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
She said thank you too, so radiant with peace and self-assurance I almost wanted to follow her in, become a Catholic too, except for that evil pope in the fourteenth century.
I was ready to feel good now, to go home and drink a glass of sacramental wine. But then here came the Dirty Man, plod-ding along in his mindless fugue, dressed in grimy khakis and tan leather jacket and split black brogues, the stump of a hand-rolled Bugler burning in his fingers. I slowed my pace and braced my heart. Soot-speckled snow was packed in the gutters. The sun was almost down, the sky a hazy golden pink. The rough smell of cattle in the air mingled with the stench of the Dirty Man. As he passed, he raised his head and wrung from his leather face a smile that seemed troubled and shy.
“Hello,” he said.
I was shaken. “Hello,” I returned.
I had more to say—“What’s your name?” perhaps, and, “Can I buy you a pizza?”—but he was gone.
Who knows what form will spin next from this glittering snarl of dragons and clowns we call our soul? Perhaps this time next year I will be the one walking the tracks or lifting a slice of trash-can pizza to my insane lips, while he, on good meds and cleaned up in a pressed, striped shirt, casts about for a clever way to dispose of a twenty-dollar bill. In the meantime, feeling once more the pull of the earth, I promised myself two glasses of wine that night in my warm little room, maybe even three, and then I waved to no one in particular and headed out, muttering at the sky: “Thank you, God. I know I’m a fool.”
Poe Ballantine
501 Minutes to Christ
