community guy

There was once a good man, proud man. He loved his family and loved his friends, was a real “community guy” – that’s what they called him, but tenderly – and was at the centre of any and all local issues and initiatives. He lived for it. The kids flocked to him, he had the kind of gentleness that kids can spot a mile off, and they followed him around the streets and into his garden and called him Pops. They all did. He was “Pops” to the kids and “community guy” to their parents, but each and every loved him dearly. He walked the kids to the shop on the corner every Sunday morning and paid for sweets for all with his own cash money, and the children skipped about him and chattered with excitement as he distributed the confectionary among their waiting hands. His wife had died young, long before they had children of their own, but he never remarried, preferring instead to devote himself to the community in which they had chosen to spend their life together and the ever-changing roster of families who gave it life. And besides, he had his memories, nothing could ever take those away. While Pops didn’t think of himself as a good man, not in those terms specifically, he knew nonetheless that he was one, and it made him very happy to see the children’s happiness, and to provide them with a place of some relative safety in his enclosed garden that the once-quiet surrounding streets and their now heavy traffic couldn’t begin to offer.

One Sunday Pops was taken unwell, as is commonly the case for men of his vintage, and unable to muster the necessary energy to rise from his bed for the sake of the children. They knocked at his front door, surprised and affronted by his absence, and when he didn’t answer they hammered at his bedroom window also, and he heard the handle of his door rattled, his back door, heard the knocking intensify violently, then stop, the voices of the children audible but indiscernible. He felt blessed by the insistence of their concern for his welfare and the high regard in which the community held him, and was only sorry that he was unable to open the door to explain that he was feeling slightly under the weather but had no doubt that he would be right as rain come tomorrow or the next day. After a few minutes he heard the footsteps of the children on the shingle in his driveway as they made their way away. He would give them all a little something extra next week, he thought to himself; they must be quite worried, for he was a vital figure and they each loved him quite specially. He screamed helplessly and cowered – suddenly old, afraid – when a brick smashed through the glass of his bedroom window and the glass splintered like ice on a pond and remained jagged in the frame’s edge. The brick itself landed at the foot of his bed, and he moved his legs beneath the blankets to jostle it to the floor where it fell among the fragments of glass that it crunched beneath its weight. He could not understand how this had happened, only that it must have been a kind of terrible mistake that he was sure there must be a good explanation for, which he would be certain to find out just as soon as he had rested up and was feeling a bit better. Fortunately it was a warm spell and the breeze through the smashed window was pleasant and soothing and he drifted off to sleep, which was the best thing for him to do, he thought, so didn’t try to resist.

Outside as he dozed he could hear some cars, some tools or other equipment, but mostly nothing. When he awoke he was very confused and found the father’s of several of the children encircling his bed. He tried to lift himself up on his pillows but was too weak to do so, and the father’s didn’t help him, explicitly refused him help, and their faces were very stern before him. They’ve told us everything, said one of the father’s. Everything. How could you? How could you do that to children? How could you? How? How could you? How could you? How? How? Pops was very afraid. What have you done to our children? the father continued. What have you done to them? What? What? You monster. You pervert. What have you done and how could you? Pops tried again to raise himself but unbalanced fell from the bed, hit his head on the bedside table. Please, he implored, I love your children, I would never. I love them as my own. You shameless monster how could you? the father persisted. One of the mute others kicked Pops in the ribs, those chalky old ribs, that gave easily beneath his scuffed work boot; the breadth of his rage made it impossible not to. Pops fell to his stomach and moaned and the father’s went to work on him, as these people tend to and do with a nonce.