More Than Words: Stories of Hope (4 page)

She grinned. “It helps me to stop worrying about my own problems if I’m busy helping others with theirs. Feeding the hungry is a nice way to spend my spare time.”

“I’m amazed,” he said, and meant it. “I don’t have a way to go…”

“I’ll come by and pick you up in the afternoons before I make my rounds,” she promised, “if you’re willing to help.”

“I’ve got nothing else to do,” he replied gently. “I don’t have anything of my own, or any other place to go except here,” he added, glancing around. “They haven’t tried to throw me out, so I suppose I can stay.”

“Don’t be silly,” Bev laughed as she joined them. “Of course you can stay, Mr. Harlowe!”

“Sam,” he corrected. “Call me Sam. Do you know about Mrs. Crandall’s new project?”

“Mary,” she corrected. “If you get to be Sam, I get to be just Mary.”

“And I’m Bev,” the older woman laughed. “Now that we’ve settled that, what’s this project, Mary?”

“Remember I told you I discovered that restaurants throw away their food at the end of the day,” Mary said.

“And they don’t save the leftovers….” Bev said with a frown.

“They can’t. It’s against the law. So all that food goes into the garbage.”

“While people go hungry,” Bev mused.

“Not anymore. I’ve talked five restaurants into giving me their leftover food,” Mary said. “I’m carrying some to a lady who’s in hiding from her husband.”

“Doesn’t she know about the battered women’s shelter?” Bev asked at once.

“She does, but she can’t go there, because her husband threatened to kill her, and she doesn’t want to endanger anyone else,” Mary said. “She’s trying to get in touch with a cousin who’ll send her bus fare home to Virginia, before her husband catches up with her. She’s got two kids. So I’m taking her food. There’s an elderly lady staying in the motel where we are, and I take some to her. But there’s still so much food left over. I thought you might like some for the shelter,” she added hopefully.

Bev smiled from ear to ear. “Would I!” she exclaimed. “Have you thought of the men’s mission and the food bank?” she added.

“Men’s mission?” Mary asked blankly.

“It’s another shelter, but just for men,” Bev said. “And the food bank provides emergency food for families in crisis—where one or both parents are sick or out of work and there’s no money for food. Or disabled people who can’t get out to shop, and elderly people who have no transportation and no money.”

Mary started to feel a warmth of spirit that she’d never had before. Her own problems suddenly seemed very small. “I’ve heard of the food bank, but I never knew much about it. And I didn’t know we had a men’s mission.”

“There’s a women’s mission, too,” Bev told her. “We have a Meals-On-Wheels program with its own volunteers who take hot meals to elderly shut-ins. There’s quite an outreach program, but you wouldn’t know unless you’d been homeless or badly down on your luck.”

“I’m ashamed to say I never knew much about those programs, and never noticed them until I got into this situation,” Mary confessed. “But now I’m wondering if there wasn’t a purpose behind what happened to me. Otherwise, I’d never have been looking into the restaurant food rescue.”

“It’s nice, isn’t it, how God finds uses for us and nudges us into them?” Bev teased.

Mary’s eyes shimmered. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought of
that before, either,” she said. “But whole new avenues of opportunity are opening up in front of me. You know, I never knew how kind people could be until I lost everything.”

“That’s another way we fit into the scheme of things, isn’t it?” Bev said. “Until we’re caught up in a particular situation, we never think of how it is with people in need. I was homeless myself,” she said surprisingly, “and I ended up in a women’s mission. That opened my eyes to a whole world that I’d never seen. When I got involved trying to better the situation of other people in trouble, my own life changed and I found a purpose I didn’t know I had. I became useful.”

Mary grinned. “That’s what I’m trying to become. And so far, so good!” She glanced at Mr. Harlowe. “I’ve just found a willing volunteer to help me parcel up and pass out food.”

Bev’s eyebrows lifted. “You, Sam?”

He nodded. “I do think I’ve just become useful, myself,” he said with a chuckle. “I can’t lift a lot of heavy things,” he added hesitantly. “I had a back injury from service in Vietnam, and it left me unable to do a lot of lifting.”

“The food parcels the children and I have been making up aren’t heavy at all,” Mary was quick to point out. “We try to make sure we have bread, vegetables, fruit and meat in each one. And dessert, too. But that was only from the one restaurant. With the four new ones added, we can make up larger ones.”

“You’ll need containers,” Bev said. “I know a woman at one
of the dollar stores who’s a good citizen. She contributes paper plates and cups to our shelter, and if you go and see her, I’ll bet she’d contribute those plastic containers for your project.”

Mary, who’d been buying such things herself, was surprised and delighted at the suggestion.

Bev had a pen and paper. “Here. I’ll write down her name and address for you. And I’ll see if I can find you one more volunteer with a car and some free time.”

“That’s great!” Mary exclaimed.

“You borrowed a car, didn’t you?” Bev asked. “Does the person who loaned it mind if you use it for this?”

That was something Mary hadn’t asked about. She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I’ll have to go and see her and ask if it’s all right.”

“That may not be necessary. We have a patron who has an old truck that he’s offered to donate to us,” Bev volunteered. “I’ll ask him if he’s still willing to do that. You might talk to one of the independent gas stations and see if they’d donate gas.”

“Bev, you’re a wonder!” Mary exclaimed.

“I’ve learned the ropes,” Bev said simply, “and learned how to get people to follow their most generous instincts. After you’ve been in the business for a while, you’ll be able to do that, too.”

“I never knew how many people went to bed hungry in this country,” Mary commented. “I’ve learned a lot in a few days.”

“Welcome to the real world.”

Sam sighed. “Well, then, when do we begin?”

“Tonight,” Mary said enthusiastically.

“Wait just a minute,” Bev said, and went to the phone. “I want to see if I can get in touch with our patron before you go.”

Amazingly she did, and he promised to have the truck at the shelter promptly at 6:00 p.m. that evening.

“Thanks a million, Bev,” Mary said.

“We’re all working toward the same goal,” Bev reminded her. “Go see that guy about the gas, okay?”

“I’ll do it on my way back to the motel.”

Mary stopped by the gas station, introduced herself, mentioned Bev, and outlined her new project. “I know it’s a lot to ask,” she said, “and if you don’t want to do this, it’s okay. I’ve been paying for the gas myself…”

“Hey, it doesn’t hurt me to donate a little gas to a good cause,” he told Mary with a chuckle. “You bring your truck by here before you start out tonight, and I’ll fill it up for you. We’ll set up a schedule. If I’m not here, I’ll make sure my employees know what to do.”

“Thanks so much,” Mary told him.

He shrugged. “Anybody can end up homeless,” he commented, “through no fault of his or her own. It’s the times we live in.”

“I couldn’t agree more!”

Mary told the children what was going on, and how much work it was going to be. “But we do have a volunteer who’s going to help us with the deliveries,” she remarked. “It will mean getting up very early in the mornings to get your homework done, or doing it at school while you’re waiting for me to pick you up.”

“We could stay at the homework center until you get off work, instead of you coming to get us as soon as school’s out,” Bob suggested.

“Sure,” Ann agreed. “We wouldn’t mind. There’s a boy I like who’s explaining Spanish verbs to me,” she added shyly.

“This will work, I think, until we get some more volunteers,” Mary said with a smile.

“We want to help,” Ann said. “It’s not going to be that much work.”

“It’s sort of nice, helping other people. No matter how bad it is for us, it’s worse for many other people,” Bob agreed. “I like what we’re doing.”

Mary hugged them all. “When they say it’s better to give than to receive, they’re not kidding. It really is. I feel wonderful when we take these packages out to people who need them.”

“Me, too,” Ann said. “I’m going to do a paper on it for my English class.”

“Good for you!” Mary said.

“We’re doing okay, aren’t we, Mom?” Bob asked gently. He smiled at her. “Dad didn’t think we could, I’ll bet.”

The mention of her ex-husband made Mary uneasy. She’d been afraid at first that he might try to get custody of the children, just for spite. But perhaps he didn’t want the aggravation of trying to take care of three of them. Mary had never minded the responsibility. She loved her children, she enjoyed their company. As she looked at them, she felt so fortunate. Things got better every day.

That evening, she and the children went to the homeless shelter to pick up the donated truck.

“Can you drive it?” Bev asked worriedly, when she noted petite Mary climbing up into the high cab of the big, long bed, double-cabbed vehicle. It was red and a little dented, but the engine sounded good when it was started.

“I grew up on a farm,” Mary said with a grin. “I can drive most anything, I expect. I’ll bring it back, but it will be late, is that okay?”

“If I’m not here, George will be,” Bev assured her. “You keep the doors locked and be careful.”

“Don’t you worry,” Sam Harlowe said as he climbed up into the passenger seat. “I may be old, but I’m not helpless. Mary will have help if she needs it.”

“Sure she will,” Bob added, chuckling. “I play tackle on the B-team football squad.”

“Good luck, then,” Bev called to them as Mary put the truck in gear and pulled out into the street.

Mary stopped by the gas station. True to his word, the manager filled up the tank and even checked under the hood to make sure the truck was in good running shape. He checked the tires as well.

“Thanks,” she told him.

He grinned. “My pleasure. Drive carefully.”

“I will,” she promised.

She pulled out into the sparse traffic and headed toward the first of the five restaurants. “We’ll probably have to wait a while at first, until we get into some sort of routine.”

“No problem,” Bob said. “We all brought books to read.”

Sam laughed. “Great minds run in the same direction.” He pulled out a well-worn copy of Herodotus, the Histories, and displayed it.

“I’ve got my piecework, as well,” Mary said, indicating a small canvas bag with knitting needles and a ball of yarn. “I’m making hats for people in the shelters. I can only knit in a straight line, but hats are simple.”

“I wouldn’t call knitting simple,” Sam assured her.

She laughed. “It keeps my hands busy. Okay, here we are,” she added, pulling into the parking lot of the first restaurant.

The waiting was the only bad part. They had to arrive at or near closing time in order to gather the leftovers. On the first night, the last restaurant was already closed by the time they got to it.

“We’ll have to do better than this,” Mary murmured worriedly. “I hadn’t realized how long it would take to do this.”

“First times are notoriously hard,” Sam said. “We’ll get better at it. But perhaps we can find one more volunteer to go to the last two restaurants for us and pick up the leftovers.”

“There aren’t a lot of volunteers who can work at night,” Mary fretted.

“Listen, if things are meant to happen, the details take care of themselves,” Sam said. “You wait and see. Everything’s going to fall into place like clockwork, and you’ll wonder why you ever worried in the first place.”

Mary glanced at him and was reassured by his smile. She smiled back. “Okay. I’ll go along with that optimism and see what happens.”

Sam glanced out his window confidently. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

A
s the days passed, Mary and her helpers got more efficient at picking up the food and parceling it out. The truck ran perfectly, and Mary got better at managing her finances. She picked up two more cleaning jobs, which was the maximum she could fit into the week.

Debbie, who’d loaned her the car, also suggested that a slight raise in her hourly rate would provide her with more money. Mary was hesitant to do that, for fear of losing customers.

“You just tell them that I raised you two dollars an hour and they’ll be ashamed not to follow suit,” Debbie said firmly.

“What if they let me go?” Mary worried.

“You’ve come a long way in a short time,” Debbie said.
“You’re much more confident, more poised, and you’re a whiz at organization. I’m amazed at the change in you.”

“I’ve changed?” Mary asked hesitantly.

“You’ve taken charge of your own life, and the lives of your children. You’ve organized a food rescue program to benefit needy people, you’ve kept the children in school and up with their homework, you’ve found a decent place to live and you’re on your way to financial independence.” Debbie grinned. “I’m proud of you.”

Mary smiled. “Really?”

“Really. You just keep going the way you’ve been going. You’re going to make it, Mary. I’m sure of it.”

That confidence made Mary feel on top of the world. “You’re sure you don’t want the car back now?”

“When you can afford one of your own,” Debbie said, “you can give mine back. Listen, honey, it sits in the garage all day and hardly ever gets driven. You’re actually doing us a favor by keeping it on the road, so that it doesn’t gum up and stop working.”

“You make things seem so easy,” Mary said. “You’ve done so much for us. I don’t know how to repay you.”

“I’m doing it for selfish motives,” Debbie whispered conspiratorially. “If you leave, my husband will divorce me when the dishes and the laundry pile up and start to mold.”

Mary knew that wasn’t true. Debbie did, too. But they both smiled.

The food rescue program was growing. Mary now had ten restaurants on her list, and two more volunteers who helped to gather the food and make it up into packages. One of the new volunteers had a car. And his identity was a shock.

It was Matt Clark, the policeman they’d met their first night in the car. He was wearing a neat new sports shirt and khaki slacks with a brown leather bomber jacket. He’d had a haircut and he looked younger.

“I’ve never seen him look so neat off duty,” Bev whispered wickedly as Mary entered the shelter with armloads of packaged food. “I think he’s dressing up for somebody. Three guesses who.”

“Hush!” Mary exclaimed, blushing.

“Well, hello,” Matt greeted her, taking some of the containers from her arms. “I had some free time and I heard you were looking for help. So here I am.”

“We’re happy to have you here,” Mary replied breathlessly. “There’s so much food to pick up and deliver, and it takes a lot of time.”

“I don’t see how you managed, when you were doing it alone,” Matt remarked as they put the food parcels on the long table.

“I’m beginning to wonder that, myself,” Mary had to admit. She smiled shyly at him. “This is just the first load. There are two more in the truck, at least, and the other volunteers will be along soon with even more.”

“Where do all these go?” Matt asked.

“There’s a list,” Sam volunteered as he joined them, grinning, with an armload of food. “How’s it going, Matt?”

“Fair to middling, Sam,” came the reply. The two men smiled and shook hands, and then Sam went back to collect some more food packs.

“You know each other?” Mary asked Matt curiously, in a low voice.

“Before he retired, Sam worked for the city as a building inspector,” Matt told her. “I had to rescue him from an irate client once. We had a beer together and discovered we had a lot in common. We were having lunch once a month until Sam’s bad luck.” Matt shook his head. “Pity about what happened to him. I remember a time when ethics were the most important part of business. Now it seems to be that only the corrupt prosper.”

“I know what you mean,” Mary agreed. “It’s nice of you. Helping us make the deliveries, I mean.”

He smiled at her. “It isn’t as if I have a hectic social life. Mostly I work.”

“Same here!” she laughed.

He hesitated, his dark eyes quiet and searching. “You’re an amazing person,” he commented quietly. “Most people would be thinking about themselves in your position, not about helping others.”

“I wasn’t always like this,” she said. “I can remember a time when I was afraid of street people. It makes me a little ashamed.”

“All of us have to learn about the world, Mary,” he said gently. “We’re not born knowing how hard life can be for unfortunate people. For instance, Sam there—” he nodded toward the elderly man “—was a decorated hero in Vietnam. He’s had a bad shake all the way around. His wife left him while he was overseas and took their daughter with her. They were both killed in a car wreck the week after Sam got home from the war. He remarried, and his second wife died of cancer. Now, his retirement’s gone with his thieving nephew, after he worked like a dog to become self-sufficient. The nephew was only related to him by marriage, which makes it even worse.” He shook his head. “Some people get a bad shake all around. And Sam’s a good man.”

“I noticed that,” she said. “He’s proud, too.”

“That’s the problem that keeps so many people out of the very social programs that would help them,” he said philosophically. “Pride. Some people are too proud to even ask for help. Those are the ones who fall into the cracks. People like Sam. He could get assistance, God knows he’d qualify. But he’s too proud to admit that he needs relief.”

She smoothed over a food package. “Is there any way we could help him?”

He grinned. “I’m working on something. Let you know when I have any good ideas, okay?”

She grinned back. “Okay.”

Sam returned with four more big containers of food. “Been talking about me behind my back, I guess?” he asked them.

“We don’t know that many interesting people, Sam,” Matt pointed out.

Sam shrugged, shook his head and went back inside with the packages.

Matt drove the truck, giving Mary a brief rest. It had been an especially long day, because one of her employers wanted to take down and wash and press all the heavy curtains in the house. It had been a backbreaking job, although the house certainly looked better afterward. Bob and Ann had stayed after school for their individual sports programs. The extracurricular activities were important to them and Mary was going to make sure that they had as normal a life as possible, even with all the complications of the moment.

“Where are the kids?” Matt asked, as if he’d sensed her thoughts.

“At sports and band practice,” she said. “I arranged rides for them back to the motel, and the manager’s promised to keep an eye on them.”

“And the youngest?”

She grinned. “My friend, Tammy, is keeping John tonight until we get through. I have to pick him up at her house.”

“I’ll drive you,” Matt offered. “Don’t argue, Mary,” he added gently. “I wouldn’t offer if it was going to be an imposition. Okay?”

Sam glanced at her. “I’d give in, if I were you. He’s the most persistent man I ever met.”

She laughed. “All right, then. Thank you,” she told Matt.

Their first stop was at the men’s mission. Mary had passed by the building many times in the past, and never paid it much attention. She’d had a vague idea of the sort of people who stayed there, and not a very flattering one.

But now she took time to look, to really look, at them. There were several sitting in the lobby watching a single television. Two were paraplegics. One was blind. Five were elderly. Two were amputees. She could understand without asking a single question why they were here.

“We brought you some food,” Mary told the shelter’s manager, a portly gentleman named Larry who had a beard and long hair.

“This is a treasure trove!” Larry exclaimed. “Where did you get this?”

“From restaurants in town,” Mary said simply as Matt and Sam started bringing in the parcels. “They have to throw away their leftovers, so I’ve asked for them. Now I’m finding more places to donate them.”

“You can put us on your list, and many thanks!” Larry ex
claimed, lifting the lid on one of the plastic containers. “Good Lord, this is beef Stroganoff! I haven’t had it in six years!”

Mary grinned. “There’s a price,” she told him. “You have to wash the containers so that I can pick them up when I bring your next delivery. I thought maybe Monday, Wednesday and Friday?”

“That would be great,” Larry said enthusiastically. “Thanks. What’s your name?”

“Mary Crandall,” she said, shaking hands.

“I’m Larry Blake,” he said, “and I’m very happy to meet you. Thanks a million!”

One of the men, a paraplegic, wheeled over to ask what was going on. He took a sniff. “Is that lasagna?” he queried hopefully.

“It is,” Mary said. “And there’s tiramisu and cake and all sorts of pastries for dessert, too.”

“I think I have died and gone to heaven,” the man in the wheelchair said with a sad smile. “Thank you.”

She noticed that his wheelchair had no footrests and that it squeaked terribly. One of the tires was missing part of its rubber tread. She wished with all her heart she had a little extra money so that she could offer it to him for a newer chair.

He saw her sad glance and he smiled. “I can see what you’re thinking, but I don’t want a new chair. This is my lucky one. That sticky wheel kept me from going off the edge of a building when I got lost. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

She smiled. “So much for women’s intuition,” she said.

He chuckled. “Never you mind. Thanks for the food!”

“My pleasure,” she replied.

Their second stop was a small village of tents and boxes that moved from time to time when the authorities made halfhearted efforts to clear away the homeless people. It was a temporary measure at best, because the homeless had no place to go except shelters, and most of the people in the moveable village didn’t like being shut up inside.

“These are the real hard cases,” Matt said quietly as they stopped. “They don’t want to be subject to rules of any kind. Periodically the police are asked to break up these camps, but they just set up across town all over again.”

“Why are so many people homeless?” Mary asked absently.

“Thousands of reasons,” Matt told her. “Some are mentally ill and have no family and no place to go. Some are alcoholics. Some are drug users. A few have relatives who are trying to forget all about them. Society today is so mobile that extended families just don’t exist in one town anymore. This never happened a century ago, because families stayed put and were required by morality to take care of their own and be responsible for them. These days, morality is very widely interpreted.”

“In other words, everybody’s looking out for number one,” Sam murmured.

Matt nodded. “In a nutshell, yes.”

“I think the old way of taking care of one’s own was better,” Sam said with a sigh.

Several people from the camp came close, hesitantly, looking around suspiciously. “What do you want?” a man asked.

“We brought you some food,” Mary said, indicating the boxes in the bed of the pickup truck.

“That don’t look like cans,” the man commented.

“It isn’t.” Mary took down one of the bags, opened it, took out a plastic container and opened it. “Smell.”

The man sniffed, stood very still, then sniffed again. “That’s beef. That’s beef!”

“It is,” Mary said. “In fact, it’s beef Stroganoff, and you should eat it while it’s still warm. Do you have something to put it in?”

The man went running back to the others. They came back with a motley assortment of plates and cups and bent utensils. Mary and the men filled all the plates and cups to capacity, adding a bag of bread and another with containers of fruit and vegetables.

A ragged old woman came shyly up to Mary and took her hand. “’Ank oo,” she managed to say.

“That’s old Bess,” the man introduced the little woman,
who took her plate and waddled away. “She’s deaf, so she don’t speak plain. She said thank you.”

Mary had to bite back tears. “She’s very welcome. All of you are. I’ll come back Friday with more, about this same time.”

The man hesitated. “They’re making us move tomorrow,” he said dully. “We never get to stay noplace long.”

“Where will you go?” Mary asked.

He shrugged.

“When you have another place, get in touch with the shelter on Blair Street, can you do that? They’ll get word to me,” Mary said.

He nodded slowly, then smiled. “Thanks.”

She sighed. “We’re all victims of circumstance, in one way or another,” she told him. “We have to help each other.”

“Good!” An unshaven man with overlarge eyes was tugging on Mary’s sleeve. “Good, lady, good!” he said, pointing his spoon at the food in his cup. “Good!”

He turned away, eating hungrily.

“That’s Billy,” the man said. “He’s not quite right in the head. Nobody wanted him, so he lives with us. My name’s Art.”

“I’m Mary,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

“I’ll get word to you,” he said after a minute, nodding politely at Matt and Sam. He went back with the others into the darkness of the camp.

The three companions were very quiet as they drove toward the nearby women’s mission.

“That hurts,” Sam spoke for all of them.

“Yes,” Mary agreed. “But we’re doing something to help.”

“And every little bit does help,” Matt added quietly. He glanced at Mary. “I’m glad I came tonight.”

“Me, too,” Sam said. “I’ll never feel sorry for myself again.”

Mary smiled tiredly. “That’s exactly how I feel.”

The women’s mission was very much like the men’s mission, but the women seemed a little livelier and more receptive to the visitors.

Three of them were doing handwork in the lobby, where an old movie was playing on a black-and-white television. Two others were filling out forms.