A Local Man Died Today
By Tom Edgemon
I didn’t know him. No one really did. You can’t find anyone ever saw him leave his house. Don’t know what he did for grocery and whatnot. It was an odd thing. Man I knew used to run the mail route that way said he looked in the window one time. Squalor is the word I think he used. Windows that aint never known a rag. Dark, not but a single bare lightbulb. Floor to ceiling of junk, boxes, furniture stacked. That man got so many boxes, a hell of a lot of mail. People from all over sent him lifetimes in boxes, the lives of their recently passed kin, mothers, sons. The sum of a man’s days pushed into a box, tied up, postage applied, and sent off. All so he could be the one to write their obituaries.
And they was the most beautiful things you ever read. He wrote hundreds of em, maybe thousands. No way to find out for sure. He never wanted credit for em, you understand? Can’t really put your name on it like a painting or a book. But that’s what they was, art. Lives made shiny, no matter how grimy and worn down they was. Wouldn’t take no money for em, neither. People would send him money, a lot of it. But he always sent it back. Lord only knows how he paid the bills, the mortgage.
There’s people got a hobby of findin all the obituaries he wrote. Some folks got em in frames in they house. Treat em liked signed baseball cards or gold coins. Can’t say that ever really sat right with me. And I know most of em never bothered to know the man. Makes me sore when I think about it long. I know people paid good money for ones other people found. Had collections going, showed em off at parties and such. Momma said she could hardly think of a worse sin.
He did that for years and years, maybe decades. Like I said, no one really knew. You just read one in the paper maybe while lookin for someone else, and it just made you cry, made that man, woman, or child out to be pure blessed child of God. and it made you choke up and you knew he wrote it. William was his name. Didn’t nobody know if he went up to that university and learned to write, or just came out his momma bein that way. I ain’t a educated man so I don’t know for sure but it seems to me you can’t learn how to make people feel that a way at no school.
Him passin was a thing, too. Most people knew him personal didn’t know what he did at that lopsided desk in his musty house. Those that did know didn’t want him idolized cause that aint what he woulda wanted, aint the kinda man he was. Don’t know who wrote his death notice, neither. I like to think a bunch of folks knew him sat around a table and held up his good deeds like little pearls up to the light. Enough to make a string of em from here to Montgomery. His death notice rang true for any family ever sent him their loved one in one of those boxes: “Last Saturday, July 25th, William Thompson went to be with the Lord. He was a gentle soul who touched countless others. To know him was to love him.”
Momma reckoned he might have been an angel. Just here to salve the spirit and then move on, doin kindness from around a corner where no one could see. I was just a child in those days.
I didn’t ask him to write Momma’s when she went to be with the Lord. Don’t know what she woulda thought of that, maybe said Angels was for people who really needed help, not us onlookers.