A Gracious Plenty (9 page)

William Blott couldn’t remember that the store had been closed for a solid month before it opened under new management. A lunch counter replaced the dirty-movie section. The beer cooler had been filled with deli meats and cheeses. The floors were scrubbed, the walls painted, and floral curtains coiffed above windows. Reba called her store Glory Road, and though the local rednecks had to drive a few miles to get their booze, they still bought their groceries at Reba’s.

“Who are you, anyway?” William would ask her.

“I’m the owner of this place. Name’s Reba. I told you that yesterday.”

“Where’s the beer?”

“You don’t need a drink. You need the Lord. His salvation is the biggest high a man can imagine.”

“The beer cooler?” he’d ask again, but sweetly. William was always gentle.

“There ain’t no beer on these premises,” Reba’d patiently explain. “I told you that yesterday, too. Let me fix you something to eat.”

And she’d fry him an egg or a burger, extending credit until his check came.

I couldn’t believe how loving and kind she was to the sorry old drunk. I couldn’t get Reba to lower the price on a loaf of moldy bread!

Day after day, he’d return, still toting the empty bottle he got from somewhere else, asking for beer. Reba made sure the whole town knew she was patient and steadfast in her treatment of William Blott.

“I’m always kind to him,” Reba told the newspaper reporter. “I treat him the way I’d treat Jesus if
he
came in my store, because that’s what I do. I try to treat everybody like Jesus, and that way, I know I’m doing my best.

“I didn’t know for a long time that William was
sick
. I just thought he was
drunk
. I didn’t find out about the
tumor
for a good long while—because William is the kind of man who keeps his personal life to himself.”

The newspaper article explained that Reba had gone before her Sunday school class on William’s behalf: “I told those gals that I’d met a fellow who’d had hard luck and who needed an extension of Christian generosity. Some of ’em were hard to convince and we had to meet about it three or four times before we decided to take him on as our yearly Good Samaritan project. There was another idea about hugging athletes at the Special Olympics, but we decided we could do the Lord’s work right here at home.”

So the women signed up to have him come into their homes for supper several nights each week. They didn’t turn him away if he staggered or smelled of alcohol, the newspaper said, because “Jesus in Heaven would not turn a man away.”

Even the widow ladies helped out and brought covered dishes to the homes of other people. “Of course, we didn’t invite him into homes where there wasn’t a man present,” Reba confided to the
Gazette
.

The newspaper carried the story under the title “Good Samaritans” and featured a big picture of Reba and a smaller one of the adult women’s Sunday school class. The story warmed the hearts of people all around the region—particularly people who lived far enough away not to hear the gossip on the street: “He smells so strong that we had to boil vinegar after he left”; “That man ate like there was no tomorrow, and you know, I think nearly ’bout ever tooth has rotted outta his head”; “I believe he’s on dope. Alvie tried to drive him home the other night after supper, and he jumped right out with the truck still running.”

I heard the tales about William Blott. Every time somebody came in to perch a wreath against a stone, I got a different account of how he’d smelled or behaved.

A month or so later, the reporter wanted to interview William Blott himself. He was doing a series on “The Life of the Homeless,” and he thought it’d be particularly interesting to learn how bums survived in the rural communities and small towns—without even a manhole to warm them.

“Well, he ain’t homeless,” Reba Baker declared. “He lives just a mile yonder down the road, where the kudzu gets so thick. He lives back there somewheres.”

“I thought you took him in because he was homeless,” the reporter said.

“We took him in because he’s a drunk needing God’s love. There’s plenty of people living in fine houses who could be transformed by warm meals, Christian fellowship, and the love of God.”

So the reporter decided on a follow-up story instead—after Reba told about the way William Blott repaid the class for their kindness.

“It was December twenty-third,” she said. “And William came knocking at the door. I thought at first that he needed a ride to the hospital, because he was pale and trembling. But that wasn’t what he’d come for. I opened up that door, and he began to sing. And he sang like an angel of God,” she told the reporter. “His voice would bring chill bumps to your arms. I’m telling you, he sang every verse of ‘Away in a Manger’ and it just about took my breath.

“He went to every home that had welcomed him, and he sang a carol at every door.”

The story got so much attention that the Richmond television station called her up in February and wanted to do a segment for their series “Hometown Heroes.” But the filming got delayed, first because of snow and then because William didn’t show up at the scheduled time. Reba was mad and cussed him for a week because she thought he was pulling a drunk to spite her. She cussed his name to everybody who walked through the doors.

“If this story aired on the television, think how many other churches would be inspired to help those in need,” she told me as she bagged my milk and flour. “You’d think the man would have more respect for us.”

But nobody saw him for a month or more. There was speculation that he’d moved away.

By the next time I saw her, Reba’d grown worried. At the checkout counter, beneath the “Need a Penny, Take One” jar, beneath the “Help Lindsey Graham Get a Bone-Marrow Transplant” jug, beneath the MS poster with pockets for quarters and the collection plate for the Humane Society, was a poster:
HAVE YOU SEEN WILLIAM BLOTT
? Reba’d laminated several identical copies to the black rubber roller where you lay your groceries. Instructions to inform Reba kept rolling by beneath six-packs of soda and loaves of bread.

Reba and some of her friends even looked for his house, but they couldn’t find it. They weren’t exactly sure who the land belonged to, and when Reba tried to walk back into the woods at the places where she’d seen William go in and out, the kudzu grew so thick and the vines were so tangled and the place was just so briery that she gave up.

“Beats all I ever seen,” she told me. “That man spooks me near-bout as much as you do, Finch. I swear, I can’t figure out how he goes and comes. Not a driveway on that place.”

“Well, Reba, maybe he likes his privacy.”

“I tell you what! If we could get him cleaned up and get him off the bottle, he’d be a good man for
you
.”

“Seems to me like you’re more interested in him than I am,” I told her, and I lifted the paper sack to my hip and headed on home.

Reba did get a tip, at some point. One of the local boys reported that he’d seen a woman entering and leaving those woods late at night, when hardly anybody was awake. He said he’d seen a man in a black Monte Carlo stop and pick up a woman on the side of the road.

Not long after that, William Blott returned, looking weak and skinny, with hardly the energy to speak.

“Been sick,” he said to Reba, and she started asking him all about the woman Toady Martin’s boy had seen leaving his property late at night.

“My sister,” he said.

Reba started to call the television station, but William just looked so bad. She told me later that she knew people from other communities wouldn’t understand why the Sunday school class hadn’t helped him when he was ill.

“What’s your address?” she asked William. “We’ll find you if you get sick again.”

“I’m all right now,” Blott said.

“Let’s get you fattened up, then,” Reba announced, and she helped him walk to the counter, and took her place at the grill.

Reba really
was
dedicated to the causes she took on. Nobody ever denied that. It’s just that people outside her circle couldn’t help feeling sorry for the Korean orphan they’d abandoned after a year of Good Samaritan love—or for the urban children who’d received letters and care packages for months but never got to visit because Greyhound didn’t drop its prices until the next year’s project was under way. Everybody knew that William Blott’s time was limited.

We just didn’t know
how
limited.

The TV station scheduled another filming for the last week in May. But the day before the camera crews arrived, William Blott collapsed in the parking lot of Glory Road, and Reba had to call an ambulance.

So the TV station filmed the place where William Blott had fallen. They taped lots of footage of Glory Road and the community, getting shots of Reba working the register while members of the Sunday school class, all sporting matching aprons, helped customers. The video technician did a close-up of the praying hands salt-and-pepper shakers, then of Reba’s hands in the same position.

“Ugh, can you believe that?” I asked the cat sitting at my feet. I’d turned on the TV to see the story everyone had been talking about. Someone had even passed out flyers telling the neighborhood when the clip would air. We’d all seen the TV crew roll in with the station’s logo painted on the van. Reba’s growing celebrity was no secret in these parts.

The second part of the film cut to the hospital room, where William Blott, shrunken and confused, rested in bed while Reba sat in the chair beside him. Three other blue-headed women stood behind her with their hands on the recliner’s back.

The reporter asked William how he was feeling, and he mumbled something about castor oil. The camera fixed on the tubes in his nose while Reba spoke: “He’s got liver trouble. He’s got a tumor the size of a grapefruit. And to all the children who are watching”—and Reba began to cry—“to all the children watching, this is where drinking will get you.”

The reporter said, “You’re lucky to have friends like Reba Baker and these other fine women from China Street Baptist,” and William Blott nodded, his stare empty as a collection plate.

He died four days later—the morning after the tape was broadcast—and that’s how Blott’s son found him, a day too late.

William Blott’s obituary made the front page of the local paper, along with his picture and Reba’s. It glorified his reclusiveness, calling him “sensitive” and “troubled.” It said he died of a long illness, and listed his friends at China Street Baptist among his survivors.

“They were all so nice to me,” William tells us. “They accepted me for who I was—even though I didn’t quit drinking or claim to. Reba Baker did a lot of good for me.”

And I’m thinking, Reba Baker doesn’t care for anybody but herself.

“I thought you said she wore on your nerves,” Papa mentions. He never had much tolerance for Reba, either.

“Well, she did. She nagged me all the time about my soul and about my drinking. But in spite of that, she was my friend. She didn’t make fun of me or see me as less of a person … She came to visit me in the hospital.…”

“Do you know that your son gave the Sunday school class all your belongings?” the Mediator asks him.

William pauses, then answers, “Yes, I know. I didn’t
have
much. And there’s nobody I know of who I’d rather have my things. Those ladies might be surprised, but they were friends to me and they accepted me, even when I was drinking and using drugs. They might be a little shocked at first, but I hope they’ll find something meaningful to keep. I know Reba likes music. She sings all the time, and she loved it when I sang to her. She’ll take my trumpet, I’ll bet. I told her once I used to play, and she wanted me to play in the church sometime.…”

“Did they know about your ‘Other personality’?” the Poet asks. He’s trying to be polite about it, since William’s new.

“What do you mean?” William asks.

“Did they see you dressed like a woman? Or did you just pick up that habit since you were buried?” Lucy jokes, and when she says it, I tense up in every muscle. I’m not sure what these people will say. I try to think back to whether there’ve been others who’ve been so different. We’ve had other races and other religions, but I can’t recall another man who wears ninnies. Plus, everybody knows what a ninny-wearing man likes to
do
.

But Lucy’s lightheartedness turns out to be a good thing. Everyone laughs, and even I begin to put things in perspective. So he’s got a shoulder-length curly wig now. Well, it gives baby Marcus something to bat at while he’s feeding. I can think that way, too, if I try. It just takes some work.

William admits that none of the Baptists knew he had a penchant for ladies’ things. He says it all ladylike, more ladylike than I would ever talk. He says it like a high-society lady, and that makes everyone laugh again. But then he gets serious. “There might be some of them who have a hard time when they figure it out.”

And I’m feeling a little stupid for what I said to Lucy earlier. I’m feeling a little guilty about running away when I first saw him feeding Marcus, because William Blott is nice enough. He’s just like everybody else, wanting so bad to be loved, in spite of mistakes he made along the way.