Quick note here - This story is fictional, but the man in it is a real person, somewhere in the universe. Goodness knows where now, but at the time I saw him we really were in Savannah. And the annoying guy on the bus is also real, lol. I don't think this is my best, but it got Grand Champion at the county fair last year. Go figure. ~Blue
Hettie was five years old when she met Jesus. He didn’t look like Jesus, and he didn’t spout religious sermons or talk about sin and repentance and God’s love or anything like that. But as Hettie’s daddy used to say, Jesus could be peering out at you from any person walking down the street, but you’d never know unless you bothered looking.
Clouds blanketed the sky over Georgia, and a gentle sprinkling rain cooled the avenues of Savannah that day. Perhaps in other places the dreary heavens would have made the earth equally gloomy, but not here: The pewter clouds only added to the stateliness of the nineteenth-century manors, and the cemetery, where crumbling tombstones proudly proclaimed themselves to be as many as three hundred years old, only seemed more alluring and excitingly mysterious, rather than frightening.
At the moment, however, Hettie stood, not in an old manor-house or the cemetery, but in a small park, clinging to her daddy’s hand. The seven Cumberlands – Hettie, her momma and daddy, Auntie Jane and Uncle Bill, and their children Larson and Mary – in seeking refuge from the rain, had found the park, and now stayed beneath the shelter of one of several hoary live-oaks rising from the grass as they waited for a bus. Momma told Auntie Jane about the new curtains she planned to buy when they went back home to Michigan; Daddy argued politics enjoyably with Uncle Bill; Larson teased Mary and yanked at her hair until she emitted an angry, cat-like noise and proceeded to chase him through the trees. Hettie, five years old and uninterested in any of it, let her eyes wander.
Daisies!
The little brown eyes widened, the little hand slipped out of Daddy’s big one, and Hettie skipped over to the flowers. She pulled up handfuls of grass along with the white petals, heedless of it in excitement over her find. When she held as much vegetation as her tiny hands could carry, she ran back to her daddy and tugged at his t-shirt until he looked down at her.
“What is it, Hettie?” he asked.
She thrust the fistful of daisies and grass up at him.
“Thanks, sweetheart, they’re beautiful,” he said, taking the flowers before returning to his argument with Uncle Bill. Hettie squirmed with pleasure and dashed back to her daisy patch.
She started picking flowers for Momma, more careful about it now that the initial wildness brought on by discovery had calmed to a quiet, contented joy. The girl wandered further than before, on her hands and knees, until she saw the base of a tree in front of her. Looking up, she noticed a nearby bench. A man lay on the bench.
Hettie knew about poor people, and she thought this man must be poor. Lying on his back, he held a newspaper open over his head. He appeared to be reading it, although he may have been using it as a sort of umbrella, for his bench sat outside of the shelter of the live oak, and he appeared wholly unconcerned by the rain. And he wore clothing that Hettie thought maybe a poor person would wear: A gray sweater over at least one t-shirt, purple sweatpants, and shabby tennis shoes. Hettie thought that someone with money, like Momma and Daddy and Auntie Jane and Uncle Bill, would have decent tennis shoes, not ones with the soles peeling away from the uppers.
Possibly the man simply had an odd sense of fashion, and this was his style, his way of expressing his own uniqueness, but it would have seemed unlikely even if Hettie’s five-year-old brain had allowed such thoughts (which it didn’t).
She had always imagined poor people to be crazy, though, like the old man she’d seen who had prompted Daddy to tell her about money and people without it. That man had limped oddly down the street, hunching his shoulders in such a way that he looked deformed, and muttered to himself almost constantly, stopping only to ask passersby for a “donation”, at which point his practically toothless gums revealed themselves. But the man on the park bench here in Savannah appeared perfectly sane – at least to Hettie. He wasn’t muttering, anyways, or walking hunch-backed down the street. Hettie watched him to see if he would do something interesting, forgetting all about the daisies in her hand and hoping secretly that he too was waiting for the bus. Maybe if he got on the bus when her family did, she’d be able to get a better look at him. It seemed impossible to Hettie’s young mind that he wouldn’t get on the bus, since that’s what she wanted him to do.
Of course, the young mind is often disappointed. Not in this case, however: A bus pulled up to the park, whining to a stop, and the man arose, folded up his newspaper, picked up a backpack that Hettie hadn’t noticed before, and boarded the bus ahead of Hettie and her family.
Hettie couldn’t stop staring at him from the safety of her daddy’s lap. Had she been a great deal older, she would have found the poor man very handsome; as it was, she found him extremely interesting. He had long walnut-brown hair, pulled back in a ponytail but otherwise rather unkempt-looking. His eyes were brown, and the iris of his right eye was off-center, so that he seemed to always be looking sideways. Rather than frightening Hettie, however, the man’s odd gaze only made her still more curious. She watched as he set his tattered backpack in the seat beside him and pulled some type of portfolio out of it. The expression on his face as he looked down at whatever was in his portfolio was really quite striking. Or, well: The expression itself wasn’t particularly special – just a searching, scrutinizing sort of look, like he was appraising the portfolio’s contents – but a kind of invisible light shone around him, as if he had an inner nobility or goodness or beauty that most people never saw because they never looked past his raggedy exterior. Hettie’s mind was too young for such thoughts, really, but she still recognized that the man’s expression meant that there was something special about him.
Gradually the man’s attention turned – not to Hettie herself – but to her father, drawn to him by the rather loud conversation another passenger on the bus had begun. This loud passenger, aside from being obnoxious, had several missing teeth, spiky hair, and a somewhat wild look in his eyes. Hettie listened to him and her daddy, but she kept watching the man from the park, who, though scribbling in his portfolio with a pencil, was clearly listening intently to Daddy’s conversation.
“Oh, Michigan?” the loud bus passenger said. “Yeah, man, I’ve been up there loads of times.”
“Really?” Daddy replied, in a voice that Hettie knew meant he’d rather the loud man left him alone. “How interesting.”
“Yeah, man, all those bike trails are great. I been to Kalamazoo, on a bike trail. You from Kalamazoo?”
“The other side of the state, actually,” Hettie’s daddy said stiffly. “Near Detroit.”
“Detroit? Sweet, man. ‘8-Mile’ was a rad movie.”
The bus screeched to a stop, and the loud passenger stood up.
“Hey, man, this is my stop. Nice talkin’ to ya, man.”
Hettie’s’ daddy didn’t reply, possibly because he couldn’t honestly return the compliment.
The poor man from the park now looked up from his portfolio and said to Hettie’s daddy, “Sorry about him. He can get annoying, but otherwise he’s harmless.”
He paused and then said, “You’re from Michigan, huh?”
“Oh – yes,” Daddy replied, sounding relieved to be conversing with someone soft-spoken and sane. “Macomb County.”
“Pretty nice there.”
“Yes – you’ve been there?”
“Couple times. Who’s this?” the man asked, looking at Hettie.
Daddy bounced the girl on his knee and said, “Why don’t you tell the nice man your name, sweetheart?”
Hettie shook her head. Her daddy sighed.
“This is Hettie,” he said. “Normally she’s a chatterbox – well, you know how kids are – but she seems to be feeling shy today.”
“How old are you, Hettie?” the man asked her.
Hettie considered him for a moment.
“Five,” she told him softly.
The man nodded seriously, and Hettie suddenly felt very important and grown-up.
“I saw you picking flowers in the park,” he said.
Hettie looked at the bouquet of daisies still clenched in her fist, all but forgotten, the stems squished but the plants otherwise intact. The little girl stared at them for a minute. Then, wordlessly, she held her fistful of daisies out to the man.
“For me?” he said, sounding surprised.
Hettie nodded.
The man’s face broke into a smile, the most beautiful smile Hettie had ever seen – even despite the two or three missing teeth. The words Daddy had often said – the ones about Jesus peering out at you from any person on the street – sounded in her mind, and that was when Hettie knew.
Jesus was in this man’s soul, looking out and smiling at her, thanking her for the flowers and telling her they were beautiful.
Once again, the poor man from the park took up a pencil and scrawled something on the top page in his portfolio. Then he removed the page and handed it to Hettie.
It was a sketch, a pencil drawing of a little girl in shorts and an overlarge t-shirt, crouching beneath a tree and picking flowers. In the bottom right-hand corner was a messy scrawl that might have been a signature. In the top left-hand corner were some words.
Hettie, age five, picking daisies in Savannah
Hettie studied them for a minute and then asked Daddy what they said. When he told her, she flushed with pleasure.
“What do you say to the nice man, Hettie?” Daddy asked her.
“Thank you,” Hettie said softly. She buried her face in Daddy’s shoulder, overcome with shyly embarrassed delight.
The man smiled at her again, the same stunning, transforming smile. Then he closed his portfolio, put it in his backpack, stood up, and said, “This is my stop. Goodbye, Hettie. It was nice meeting you.”
“’Bye,” Hettie said into her daddy’s shoulder.
Hettie never saw the man again, though her family returned to Savannah several times more throughout the years. She always kept his drawing of her, however, pinning it up on the wall of her bedroom in every house she ever lived in. And years after that chance meeting in Savannah, Georgia, whenever people asked who had given her the picture, Hettie still said, “Jesus.”
