Chapter Three
Interlude: Helping the homeless
Last night.
Henry's neighbour, Jacob, was a good man. He was a man of his word, a man of honour, who would do anything to help a fellow person who was down on their luck. Henry was always hearing Jacob talk about the people he would bring in off the streets to give them a shower and hot meal. Jacob was the kind of good Samaritan that made Henry feel inadequate every time he heard about them.
It would surprise no one to learn that last night, Jacob brought home another homeless man to keep warm for the evening.
Jacob had been walking back from a quick trip to the grocery store to pick up a loaf of French bread to go with supper when he saw this man huddling in the fetal position under a tree at the edge of the park. He thought he could hear the man sobbing as he approached.
Jacob sat on an exposed root of the tree and looked closely at the man.
The man was laying in the bushes next to the tree, hiding from the people who usually would treat him badly at this time in the evening. He held his hands close to his face as if he was using them as a pillow on the cold hard ground.
Jacob could barely see his eyes as he attempted to talk to the man.
"Are you OK in there?" Jacob asked.
"You know I'm not going to hurt you." Jacob paused for a minute. "I just want to help you."
After a few minutes of silence, Jacob added, "My name is Jacob Thompson, I live just up the road from here. Maybe some of the guys from the shelter have talked about me before?"
The man sat up to talk to him after some coaxing; his face covered in blood from a wound on his hand. Jacob was offering him pieces of his bread to eat as he talked to him. It was after the loaf was gone and the man was looking pleadingly at the empty bag that Jacob decided how to help him.
He brought him to the house and got the man to take off his shoes and jacket on the porch so that he could make sure that his wound was taken care of before he got him some more food. As the man took off his jacket, Jacob noticed how badly he was hurt. There was a huge chunk of skin missing from his hand.
"What bit you?" Jacob asked as he looked at the wound a little closer.
"I dunno." The man said as he looked at his hand. "I was sleeping by that tree when I was attacked. I punched it in the face, and it ran off."
A concerned look came over Jacob's face as he looked it over, blood was continually dripping from his hand onto the man's boots.
Jacob reached into his pocket and grabbed the plastic grocery bag that the loaf of bread was in and put it over the man's bleeding hand. He offered the handles of the bag to the man and got his keys from his pocket.
"Can you hold this? We'll go downstairs to that bathroom and get you cleaned up."
Jacob opened the door to the house and walked downstairs, turning on the lights as he went. When he got to the end of the hall, Jacob turned around, expecting to see the man. Instead, all he saw was an empty hallway.
"Are you coming?" He called back.
"Oh yeah." The man responded. "Just got a little spaced there for a minute."
"Everything OK?" Henry asked.
"Not really, just trying to kick a heroin habit." The man said as Jacob heard the front door close, a dull thud as he took his boots off and smiled as he listened to the soft footsteps coming down the stairs.
"I'm down here to the right," Jacob added. "Last door."
Jacob stood in the middle of the bathroom with a towel in one hand and change of clothes in the other. To his left was an open garbage bag, to his right, a grocery bag with extra socks and underwear.
The man walked into the room and looked at Jacob with a shocked expression on his face. He partially had expected to be greeted by Jacob brandishing a knife or gun and to kill him. At this point in his life, the man had been expecting to die any day now, by his hand or through an accident.
Seeing the kindness in front of him had brought the man to tears. He did not have anything happy to cry about for the last number of years and seeing this was something of a shock to him; most people just walk by expecting someone else to deal with them instead.
"We'll get your hand cleaned up now, and when we're done, you can shower down here. There's a fresh change of clothes here and a garbage bag to throw out what you don't want or need to keep from what you're wearing." Jacob smiled and put the clothes down on top of the hamper that was beside the shower.
The man walked over to Jacob and stood next to the sink with him and looked at himself in the mirror for the first time in a while. Seeing the unrecognisable man in front of him shocked him, and he looked at Jacob.
"Do you have a razor and a comb?" He asked.
"Of course." Jacob nodded. "Right behind the mirror, there are new razors still in the package and some shaving cream. There are some scissors there as well."
"Let's take a look at your arm then." Jacob reached out and took the handles of the bag from the man and held them out over the sink. There was only a little bit of blood in the bag, and it looked as though most of the bleeding had stopped.
Jacob took a few supplies from the shelf behind the door and tending to the man's wound. After he had cleaned the bite on his hand, Jacob left the room, and the man got in the shower to clean.
"When you're dressed call me, and we'll get some dressing on your hand." He said to the man. "There's a free clinic in the next town over so we can get you some medical attention. I'm no doctor, but this is awful."
"Sure." The man said and turned to watch Jacob leave the room and close the door behind him.
As he walked up the stairs, Jacob took the old shoes and held them in front of him at arm's length into the room. He rolled his eyes into the back of his head as he walked through the kitchen and opened the back door. He threw the shoes out into the darkness, hearing the dull thud the shoes made as they bounced off the deck boards.
Jacob nodded. "I'll get those in the morning. They can not stay in here."
He took a big breath of fresh air and turned back towards his kitchen, still standing outside in the chilly night thinking about the man he just brought in from the street.
Jacob looked back outside and into the darkness of the woods behind his house. It certainly was peaceful out here in the evenings. After a few minutes, the silence was broken. A continual light thud could be heard from next door. "Oh, Henry must be running again," Jacob said to himself.
"Huh?" The man said from inside by the dining room table.
"Oh nothing, I was just commenting that I could hear my neighbour running on his treadmill again." He smiled.
Jacob turned around and saw the man standing before him. He nodded in approval and smiled.
"You must feel great," Jacob said. "What's your name?"
"I'm Marvin." He said as he shrugged and looked down at his hand. "It's nice to meet you."
Jacob walked over to the stove and poured soup into a bowl and brought it to the table.
"Sit. Eat." He motioned to the table.
"Thanks," Marvin said.
Jacob turned around and walked back into the kitchen and got another bowl down from the cupboard to get some soup for himself. He walked back to the table noticing that the bowl of soup was already gone, along with the few rolls and butter that were on the table.
"Want anything else to eat?" Jacob smiled.
"No. I'm fine right now," Marvin answered. "I haven't been this full in ages. The food at the soup kitchen is good, but it's never enough."
Jacob nodded. He used to work at the soup kitchen back where he grew up and knew that the portions were too small for most people.
"I've got a spare room downstairs with a bed if you'd like to sleep there. Or I also have a pull out couch if you'd like to sleep on something a little harder, like what you're used to at the shelter." Jacob blushed at those words. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean..."
"It's fine. I've heard worse from priests and nuns over the last year." Marvin said.
Jacob and the man p
assed some time over the next couple of hours listening to stories that each other had to tell. Never really getting into anything too personal, many of the people Jacob had met on the streets had personal demons that they were trying to hide and he felt it best to help keep them protected.
Jacob stretched in the chair at the dining room table. A yawn escaped him.
"I'm going to bed now. The fridge is there, help yourself to anything." He pointed towards the kitchen. "I don't keep any liquor in the house anymore, I found that out the hard way."
Jacob rolled up the sleeve of his t-shirt and showed a massive scar that ran from his elbow to shoulder.
"This was courtesy of another that I helped out a few years ago." He pulled the sleeve back down. "Apparently, I didn't have the proper rum in the house and would not get any more."
Marvin whistled, shocked to see such violent behaviour against someone just trying to help.
"I never drank much. I didn't like the man that I became when I did." Marvin looked off into the distance bringing back some memories that he was pretty sure he didn't want to think about again. "That's why I started with the heroine. It let me escape from reality, but I wasn't violent."
Jacob let the thought end there. He was starting to get nervous now that personal things were starting to come around and memories were starting to surface.
Jacob stood up from the chair and walked towards the darkened hallway next to the stairs. "If you need anything, just yell."
"I'm sure I will be okay. Thank you again." The man answered, still sitting at the table looking out the front window rubbing the dressing on his hand.
Jacob watched this from the top of the stairs and glanced at the window to see if there was something that the man was seeing. Other than a few lights of cars driving down the road there was nothing unusual out there. He walked down the hall and turned on the light in his room.