Bent Hope. Tim J Huff
Читать онлайн книгу.
off on humiliation. All of it spiraling around a little girl who was living out just one more horrific episode.
The mindless confusion lifted like a slow fog as they finally stumbled away, cursing and laughing. Overwhelmed and outraged, huffing and puffing, I dropped to my knees beside her. She ran the left cuff of her jacket over her mouth, spat out the taste of a stranger’s bladder and smiled at me.
Social justice? Contemporary evangelism? Practical ministry? Blah, blah, blah. Words. All just words. Words tossed around like silly treats spilling from a piñata. Candy-coated words that sound tasty in lecture halls and church sanctuaries, and juicy in deep-thinking books. But in the here and now of it all, they just felt like stupid meaningless words, lost in the unforgiving darkness of a child living an undignified life worse than death.
Payback! Revenge! Even divine wrath! In the moment these were the words that really made sense. Anything that would lower a boom, and preferably cause some pain.
But if forced to concede to upright and even-keeled words, the best I could do was righteous anger. While my behaviour during this hideous incident was ten parts instinct and zero parts prayer, one of the inevitables of the street is living out, and wrestling with, righteous anger. The notion of it alone has kept me sane on many occasions. And while my fit of rage may have been a poor excuse for manifesting righteous anger, and could have gotten me in trouble, I have often justified my actions (for better or worse) by believing that it is godly to be angry when God is angry.
Her slight hands dragged the wet hair from her face. I looked into her eyes with sickening regret, lost for anything meaningful to do or say. And she looked back at me, as though she felt bad for me—that she couldn’t make me feel any better. It was a mind-boggling response. She was magnificent in her fortitude.
She continued to dry off her face with the cuff of her torn sleeve, and with a forced smile offered, “It’s no big deal.”
Revolting! Degrading! Unthinkable! Mortifying! No words, no absurd combination of words could do any justice to what had just occurred. It was a million ridiculous things, and everything except “no big deal!” But so broken, so early in life, these were the first words from the mouth of one of God’s own precious children, curled up on a wet curb on an ugly October night. His little miracle, still surviving and surviving and surviving.
Her name was Amy. Soft-spoken and sweet, trying desperately to hide in the camouflage of those who might simply be ignored if they make no fuss. Overlooked by scholars and homemakers, criminals and preachers—hundreds of passersby each day who look down their noses at her with contempt and arrogance.
Very few words later, she looked up at me again with another half smile.
“I’m kind of hungry,” she sighed, ever so matter-of-factly.
Amy fumbled through her canvas backpack and pulled out an old brown apple. Bruised and wrinkled. She took a small bite, looked up, and smiled still one more time.
Fifteen. Death scars. Tired eyes. Educated urine in her hair. And the courage to smile; valour that no one can steal. Once again, the miracle of endurance met with the cold effects of numbness. Incongruous and glorious all at once.
Dear Amy. A treasure lost and forgotten. Just one of a legion of sheepish survivors who need to learn to feel again. To believe in more than pain and hurt and humiliation. To have history erased. To truly be 15 years old. And to be honoured over and over again, in this life and in the next, as a child of God.
But on this night, she was having a hard time finding someone who would simply put fifty cents in her empty coffee cup and smile back at her. Makes it more than difficult to believe in the rest. Makes it impossible.
The smell of liquored urine filled the air. I closed my eyes and allowed my mind to throw punches at God, the same way my arms threw them at the drunks. Angrily, awkwardly. But the one-sided fight was interrupted by a sweet voice, ringing with unflappable charity and charm.
“You wanna bite?” She lifted her little brown apple towards me.
Left hand, of course.
3. Hobo Rails: May 1995
There is something even more valiant than victory. Something much more gallant found in the person who goes down swinging. Something extraordinary about the resolve to simply keep on keepin’ on.
When an ebullient 18-year-old, with a corncob pipe clenched between his teeth, winked at me and, racing after a moving boxcar, called out “at least I’ll go down swinging,” it was hard not to believe that he would get a lucky shot in before he hit the mat, and somehow at least get a split decision in the prize fight of life. With an adolescent Mickey Rooney charm and an old-school James Cagney tenacity, Smoothy personified the sonnets and fables of hoboism and magically made them his own. A boy who could have lit up the silver screen as a rising star as easily as crawled out from sleeping in a haystack, ready to wander into whatever came next. More character and charisma than any teenager I had ever known.
The term “hobo” became prevalent in the late 1860s, as the U.S. Civil War came to an end, referring to soldiers who were “homeward bound.” Most often, by riding the nearly fifty thousand miles of train rail that had been built throughout the United States. By the time World War One ended and the Great Depression had begun, tens of thousands of homeless men, women and children were riding the extensive and rapidly growing web of rails that criss-crossed Canada and the U.S.
As the dramatic history of North America’s railways unfolded, hobo culture cultivated its own special folklore. The early twentieth century perceptions (built on both truth and legend) of scary strangers outrunning criminal pasts had widened to include a subculture of harmless wandering homeless people, predominantly men, who would fix a barn door, cobble a pair of shoes or play a bit of banjo in exchange for a piece of pie and a night of shut-eye in the back shed before moving on in the morning.
Smoothy knew the history of these kindred spirits well. And he was committed to their tradition, spirit and unwritten code. While I knew him for less than one full day, I learned more about hobos and rail-runners in that time than I had heard, or imagined, in my life: calculating the timing of a safe jump, how to land and tumble from a moving freight car, shimming a sliding door so it looks locked but isn’t, rolling your belongings so they won’t spill in a foot chase, and building smoke-free fires in small enclosures. While kids his age book-learned academic sciences, he figured out the sciences he required on his own. Rather than feeling stuck with his lot in life, he embraced it.
The rest of society would find his lifestyle disturbing. To the general population, his modus operandi would be considered somewhere between nomad, scavenger and pirate. But still, I found him more alive than most people I knew. And in some obscure way, more noble. While countless teenagers were sprawled out on couches for countless hours, watching reruns and testing out the newest mind-numbing video games, stuffing their faces with snack cakes and high-octane cola, this boy lived the breathtaking and heart-wrenching escapade of real-life survival on his own terms. Smoothy made his peril an adventure and turned his crushed young life into a storybook.
I met Smoothy beneath the long shadow of the CN Tower. There, less than two blocks west of Toronto’s Union Station, is a fabulous and often overlooked memorial facing the nine parallel tracks that bleed into a wild weave entering the boarding stations. It was erected in honour of the seventeen thousand-plus workers from the province of Kwangtung (now Guangdong), China who came to Canada to work on the treacherous western section of the Canadian Pacific Railway. More than four thousand lost their lives in the process. The memorial has always had a special place in my heart and imagination because of the beautiful and tragic words on its mounted plaque. In particular, “With no means of going back to China when their labour was no longer needed, thousands drifted in near destitution along the completed track. All of them remain nameless in the history of Canada.”
One of the secret joys of street work is discovering the interesting nooks and crannies of the city—the missed sites and out-of-the-way offerings only appreciated by those moving slowly. Every city has a rich history that can only be realized on foot. Small monuments and brass plaques sadly undervalued in the now,