I’m not sure I have the words to tell this story. Hell, I don’t know if anyone does. To see a God among men is a true site, and to try and hold that God down to our standards and the words we use… Well, I’ll try, because I want to let people know he was there. I want to tell people that He wasn’t a myth or a legend or anything else but a regular man. Except, he was all those things.

You see, back during the fallout of our great depression, the country spawned a great many shanty towns that the locals called Hoovervilles. This was a play on the name of our president at the time, Herbert Hoover.  A lot of us blamed Hoover for our unemployment and decline of social status, so we named our poor condition after him. We named a lot of bad things after him.

What you may not know is that this wasn’t isolated to the main cities. I’m sure you’ve heard stories about the New Yorkers taking up ramshackle towns in Central Park, or the Bonus Army camping out in the Anacostia Flats.  What you may not have heard about is how smaller cities were effected.

In our city, for instance, a small collection of buildings and homes on the boarder of Pensilvania and Maryland, just like in New York, Washington and Seattle we all scattered to the parks and alleys in our tents to hide from the reality that there was no place for us to go. We hid in the cracks and shadows of the world. Some of us fared a whole let better than others because we didn’t have the family to take care of. These were the lucky ones who didn’t need to watch out for anybody but themselves, and that made them fortunate. Can you believe it?  Being lonely suddenly made us more hopeful.

Now, those boys and girls who could scourge up a tent or sneak in with their neighbors who took pity on them, they were all fine and they could get cover from the rain and the snow.  That’s the problem with the tent life, though.  If it rains, good luck getting to sleep that night. Not only are you going to be breathing the smell from the socks you’ve been wearing for a month, but that rain will pound on your leaky curtain of a tent and keep you awake with every sad memory you’ve got.

There was station in our city. A train came through there about three times a month and dropped off goods for our general store. It was a big one that I;m sure the government meant to start using more once they developed more destinations.  They put a lot of time and money into this station.  The main building was above ground and two stories tall. Then, inside, you had a great big lobby and a staircase with maybe a hundred steps that lead down, underground. From there, four tunnels lead off through the hill that our town sat on. At the end of those tunnels, which ran a good half-mile in each direction, you could see sunlight as if it were the glow of a distant headlight on the front of a train.

When the depression hit, those trains coming through our town went from a trip three times a month to once a month. Then five times a year. Eventually, they stopped coming altogether.

We were a thrifty city, though. When the train quit coming, that’s when Scuffy, the station manager, decided to make use of the abandoned building. He invited people in. The cover of a full station and the use of it’s long tunnels made for a nice place to keep out of the cold of winter.  Soon, it seemed the whole city was hiding out in some corner of Scuffy’s station.

We never called it a Hoover Station. No, even though we were suffering and crying and looking for anyone to blame for our plight, we never blamed anyone but Scuffy for our sanctuary. And since he didn’t have much of a job managing the schedules of the train through his station and keeping people from ruining those tracks, he started looking after us instead.

Scuffy would spend his time wandering around the station to chat with the new folks, and keep up on the days of the folks who had been in his station for months. He never told anyone to leave and he always made room for people who needed it.

I was personally invited by Scuffy to be a member of a team of young men. Our goal was to heft a handful of un-used train cars from down the track meant to be sanctioned off for repair and bring them right up to Scuffy’s station to be used as new shelters. As a reward, I was given a whole third of that train car to settle into. I ended up sharing it with two families, but I knew what it was to be grateful of Scuffy’s generosity and I never complained. Even when the babes cried most the night or when one of the guys broke our stove, I didn’t find any reason to complain.   

One day, this real pretty, upper class girl shows up out of nowhere.  We didn’t pay her much mind because she wasn’t the first of the upper class folk to wander into our community. We’d seen lawyers, stock brokers and even a few politicians come through Scuffy’s station.

She stood there, silent and still, holing on to the last thought and hope that she had in the world.  A dress still pink and bright, and her hair neat and tidy atop her head.

Like I said, we didn’t pay her much attention, but then along comes Scuffy. He’s out one day doing his rounds and he sees her. Being the friendly guy he is, he introduces himself. Asks her what’s wrong. At first she was reluctant to accept any kindness, as we all were at the start. But then she starts to cry against his vest and he just holds her real tight. And Scuffy, he’s got a great laugh, so infectious. And he starts doing that then, at the bottom of the staircase that is the entrance of his train station. All around him are lonely people, people who have lost everything, and he takes an extra moment to grab on to somebody just to let them cry on his vest. And he’s busy as hell, getting everything in order and making all the right choices for everyone that now lives in his station. Hundreds of them, by the way. That’s including yours truly. I never got the chance to cry on old Scuffy’s vest, but that’s not to say I wouldn’t have if I didn’t find the opportunity. He’s that type of guy.

Anyway, she pours her heart out into this stranger’s vest all because he was kind to her. And you can tell Scuffy is kind, too. The moment he says something to you. He may look big an dirty with his massive graying beard and dirt and oil stuck in all his pores and under his fingernails, and the tattered clothes he wears. But the moment he says hi to you and starts to ask you what’s the matter, you know he’s got the biggest heart you’ve ever heard of.

She told Scuffy she was scared and tired and so sad, and you know what Scuffy did?  He laughed. And I swear, there wasn’t a bit of malice in that laugh. He never laughed to be mean, Scuffy. And she knew that. And you know what else?  She started to laugh, too. Because, he explained to her, everyone was scared these days. Suddenly, she didn’t seem as lost as she might have thought, because down here, in Scuffy’s station, everyone was in the exact same boat. The kicker was, hardly any of us knew what put us there. One day you were eating pudding on their big old couch watching the news, the next day your home was just gone.

Scuffy wrapped a big arm around this pretty girl and walked her deeper into his station. He found a group of people, good ones who he knew well, and when he introduced her to them he tossed her a wink, just so she would know everything would be O.K.

That was the kind of guy that Scuffy was. A man who opened his entire train station to the people of his city. He saw giants fall to ants, stars crumble and great men become mice. There was nothing Scuffy wouldn’t do for those people, and for months he walked all over those underground hallways and talked to people and helped where he could. No one ever asked Scuffy for anything. We all appreciated him, saw him doing good, and we figured he’d done more than enough for us making sure we didn’t have to live in a tent in the park or a dumpster in an alley.

He always found those who needed a little kindness, a little extra love in a cold world, and he gave it. He gave so much.

Some of us didn’t know he was sick. Some of us watched him walk all around with a smile on his face and a couple of kind words on the tip of his tongue and we thought everything about him was dandy.

It broke my heart when I heard what happened to Scuffy. The illness ended up effecting his memory. It started easy enough, with people’s names or the time. For instance, he’d have to check both his wrists for his watch before he could find it.

Then he started losing the days. The people closer to him would remind him that it wasn’t in fact Tuesday, but Friday. And they’d have to watch as that eye of Scuffy’s that’s always so full of hope would soften and drift off as he realized he’d just lost three days of his life.

I say it broke my heart when I hear what happened because I was one of those that didn’t know at the time. He always asked me how I was doing, and if I asked him back, he always gave me the same cheery laugh.

Eventually he got worse. He would be sitting in one of his run down train cars that we’d pulled from the tracks, chatting with a group of guys that came to visit from time to time. And he would ask about the pretty young girl he’d found the other day. He’d be so proud of her because she had a fiance that was going to marry her and take her out of this dump. At first the men would laugh along, they must’ve thought Scuffy was being humorous remembering the past like it’d just happened.

Soon, though, they realize he wasn’t being humorous at all. And they’d have to tell him in the same kind voice that he’d offered them all that time ago. They’d explain that she’d left the tunnels. She did get taken away and she wasn’t engaged anymore, she was married.

And Scuffy would lick his teeth and pull on his gray beard and just lose himself in all the thought he had as he tried to catch up to the present.

Just breaks my heart to even think about that poor man.