The shelter has one hundred beds on the main floor, with thirty more in the basement adjacent to the men’s and women’s showers and locker rooms. (Aside from storage, the basement was used by the hotel’s employees, many of whom worked two jobs and came to work at the hotel after finishing their shifts at one of the steel mills or canneries—those too now long gone.) A third of the main floor is covered with folding tables and chairs—the dining area—and the Reverend’s office, which is a pretty decent size and doubles as his bedroom, is past the swinging doors on the right; go straight through the kitchen, turn left, you’re there.
During the holidays you’ll see more unfamiliar faces and crowded conditions because of transients on their way to Zanesville or Dayton or Columbus, bigger places where there might be actual jobs or more sympathetic welfare workers. The shelter turns no one away, but you’d damned well better behave yourself while you’re here—the Reverend might look harmless enough at first, but when you get close to him it’s easy to see that this is a guy who, if he didn’t actually invent the whup-ass can opener, can handily produce one at a moment’s notice. (Opinions are divided as to who the Reverend more resembles: Jesus Christ, Rasputin, or Charles Manson. Trust me when I tell you that he can be very scary when he wants to.)
Almost no one does anything to piss off the Reverend. The business earlier that night with Joe was a rarity—even those folks who come in here so upset you think they’ll crumble to pieces right in front of you and take anyone in the vicinity with them know that you don’t ruin things for the rest of the guests. That’s what the Reverend calls everyone, “guests,” and treats them with all the courtesy and respect you’d expect from someone who uses that word. Still, the business with Joe was enough to set everyone’s nerves on edge a bit. It wasn’t even ten-thirty yet, so the regular guests who weren’t already here would be wandering in by midnight. Of the two dozen or so guests who were here, I only recognized a few.
We had four new faces tonight, a young mother (who couldn’t have been older than twenty-three), her two children (a boy, five or six; a girl, three years old tops), and their dog (a sad-ass Beagle with an even sadder face who was so still and quiet I almost forget he was there a few times until I nearly tripped over him). It breaks my heart to see a mother and her kids in a place like this. The Thanksgiving/Christmas period’s always the worst, and the most depressing. At least for me.
“That’s about all the excitement I can stand for one night,” said Ethel, the old black woman who mans the front door. She’s a volunteer from one of the churches—St. Francis—and sits here every weeknight from seven p.m. until eleven, greeting folks as they come in, handing out all manner of pamphlets, answering questions, and you-bet’cha happy to take any donations; she’s got a shiny tin can at the edge of her folding card table marked in black letters for just such a purpose.
I smiled at her as I cleared away some more of the empty plastic plates left on the various tables. “But you gotta admit, there aren’t many places like this that offer a free floor show with dinner.” “Mind your humor there; it’s not very Christian to make light of others’ woes.” “Then how come you grinned when I said that?” “That was not a grin. I…had me some gas.” “Uh-huh.”
“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” She winked at me, then looked out at the guests. “I don’t mind doin’ the Lord’s work, not at all, and Heaven knows these poor people need all the help they can get, but I swear, sometimes....” She squinted her eyes at nothing, trying to find the right way to express what she was thinking without sounding uncharitable.
“Sometimes,” I said. Then winked back at her. “We can leave it at that and it’ll be our little secret.”
She laughed as she dumped the contents of the DONATIONS can onto the table and began counting up the coins. “Oh, bless me, will wonders never cease? It looks like we might’ve took in a small fortune tonight. Why there must be all of—” She counted out a row of dimes, then a few nickels and pennies. “—three dollars and sixteen cents here! Might put us in a higher tax bracket.”
“I’m sorry it isn’t more,” I said, digging into my pocket and coming up with thirty-three cents, which I promptly handed over. If you’ve got spare change, it goes into Ethel’s til or. She. Will. Get. You.
“Always remember, Sam,” she said to me as she took the change, “what the Good Book says: ‘What we give to the poor is what we take with us when we die.’” “Then I’m screwed to the wall.” Her eyes grew wide at my language. I looked down at my feet. “I’m sorry.” “I’m going to chalk that up to your being tired and let it go, Samuel.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Both Ethel and the Reverend (who’ve looked out for my own good as long as I’ve been here) call me “Samuel” when they’re irked at me about something. I prefer “Sam.” “Samuel” always sounded to me like the noise someone makes trying to clear their sinuses.
Ethel picked up her purse and took out a five-dollar bill and some change, adding it to the til. “I have one rule for myself, Sam—I will not, absolutely not hand the Reverend less than twenty dollars at the end of each week.”
“How often do you have to make up the difference?”
She shrugged. “That’s my and the Good Lord’s business, you needn’t bother yourself worryin’ over it.” Then she gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Maybe we’ll soon have enough saved up to get the basement wall fixed.”
“Be still my heart,” I said.
Ethel was referring to the east wall in the men’s shower room. For the last several weeks, more and more of the tile and grouting had fallen out, and the cement foundation on that side was starting to crumble. Because of an unusually damp autumn, and with the almost non-stop rain of the past week or so, the soil behind the weakening cement started oozing through the gaps, slowly transforming everything into a muddy wall that was pushing out what tile still held its ground (it didn’t help matters that there was a leak in one of the pipes running into the showers). I’d been down there with the Reverend earlier that day, piling bags of sand, wooden crates filled with canned food, and even a couple of pieces of old furniture against it. It was a fight we were going to lose unless one of the contractors the Reverend had been guilt-tripping since spring threw up their hands in surrender and donated the time, manpower, and materials to repair it. I didn’t think Ethel’s twenty dollars a week was going to help much, regardless of how often she’d been making up the difference—something I suspected she really couldn’t afford to do.
I was thinking out loud as I watched Ethel slide the money into a brown envelope with the rest of the week’s donations. “I worry that if something isn’t done soon, that whole side’s going to cave in and we’ll have a helluva mess down there.”
Ethel shook her head. “My, my—the mouth on you this evening!”