Good Old Man

Every day, Shauna walked to school, she would pass his house. Every day she would see him peering through the window. His eyes were piercing like a hawk. His nose was pointed like a beak. His skin was wrinkled and pale. Sometimes, Shauna would see him come out of his house to tend his garden. He was a thin tall man.

His house was a large, brick house with an oddly sharp and pointy roof. His lawn was well kept, but mysteriously so. You could see the man tending his garden from time to time, but no one ever saw him cut the grass, which one could swear that his lawn never increased in height. During the hot summer months, the neighborhood lawns were always brown and scorched by the sun. The old man’s lawn was always a strange shade of green. If you saw his yard from a distance, you would think that it was a lush lively color, but if you got closer, it almost appears as if the grass would change to a sickly dark shade of green.

           The whole neighborhood knew of the man but no one actually knew him or his name. He kept to himself and never spoke to anyone else. Most thought he was dark and mysterious. Many thought he was creepy. All of the neighborhood children told fantastical stories, about how they would see him kidnap other children under the cover of darkness, or how he would smuggle dead corpses in and out of his house in the early morning hours.

           Shauna thought of him like most of the other children did. She believed him to be odd, but also felt a great deal of pity for him. Sometimes, when she would walk past his house on the way to or from school, she would think, “He must be lonely there”. No one ever saw a car in his garage, or saw anyone come visit him. Periodically neighbors would gossip about how the man would get groceries because he never left the boundaries of his yard.

           Life for Shauna was a difficult one. She was only 9 years old, and she did not frequently play as other children did. She had 4 younger siblings that she often had to take care of by herself. Her mother had grown quite sickly after the birth of her youngest brother. She would often have little strength or energy. She would do everything she could for her children but some mornings she would get out of bed, and fall to the floor.

 Her father was a truck driver who would be gone for months at a time. When he was home, Shauna felt as though she was the most beautiful princess in all the world. Her father would take care of his children, and their mother with tenderness and love, but that would only happen while he was at home, and then he would leave again. He would often call home and talk to Shauna before she had to leave for school. Sometimes he would simply call the house to leave a message on the answering machine, that simply let them know that he loved them.

Shauna’s father often talked with his wife about trying to hire a housekeeper, but they could never seem to have enough money. Sometimes, Shauna’s aunt would come over and take care of them, but she also worked a lot and had little time and money.

One day, as Shauna walked to school, she felt very low. Her father was traveling in northern Alaska and had not been able to call home due to bad cell reception. Her younger brothers had been more difficult than usual as a result. Her mother appeared to be feeling worse than usual, to a point that scared Shauna greatly. She had overheard her aunt and mother say something about cancer. Shauna didn’t understand what that meant but it did not sound good. She was walking by herself because her brothers wanted to run to school, and so she sought to entertain herself by kicking a pebble down the sidewalk as she walked.

As she passed the mysterious old man’s house, she felt an outburst of anger at her situation. She kicked with such force, she lost her balance and fell on the concrete. Shauna felt a burning pain on her leg. She looked down and saw blood. Someone had left broken glass on the sidewalk, and saw some of the glass embedded in her leg. She began to weep. She couldn’t handle the stress, the absence of her father, and the fear of losing her mother.

As she was weeping, she felt thin, but strangely strong hands pick her up. She felt so distraught, she hardly noticed as she was carried to the patio of the house and set down in a rocking chair. She felt as though she was a baby in a cradle. The mysterious owner of the hands gave her a warm hug until she stopped crying.

After several minutes the old man started removing the shards from her leg. She looked to her left and saw a glass of lemonade. She had loved homemade lemonade. Her mother used to make it for her before she got sick. She took a sip, and it was exactly like her mothers.

           When he had finished cleaning and bandaging her wound, he gazed at her with a deep mysterious look in his eye. He looked as though he was in pain. She had never seen him look that way before. He said nothing he only gazed at her. She finally broke the silence. “Thank you for helping me”, she said. “What is your name?”. The man said nothing. He reached in his pocket and withdrew a small pad of paper and pen. He wrote out, “I am deaf”. Then, he showed it to her. Then he wrote something else, “You should probably get going to school or you will be late”. Shauna nodded, then she got up and went to school.

           After school, she walked past his house on the way home. She saw the old man tending his garden. Having her own garden had always been a dream that she had, but she never knew how to start one, or had the time to do the work. She wondered if he would let her help, so she wrote out the question on a slip of paper and walked over to him and gave it to the man. The man looked confused when he saw her approach him. Then, he read the note, smiled, and happily nodded.

           For several weeks, Shauna would look to see if he was tending his garden, and if she was able to, she would slip away to help him garden for a half hour or so. They would work in silence. Periodically the man would point at something, and write a message on his pad of paper to explain what he was doing.

           Over the course of several months, Shauna and the man became good friends. She found out his name was Gabriel. He had a wife and child that had died decades before in a house fire. Gabriel was a man who could not relate with ordinary people. He had been deaf from birth and had found great solace in a wife who understood him. Since then, he had worked at a factory and retired, to a home of isolation. Now his greatest joy was his garden, and his new friend.