The Old Fisherman

by Margaux Geofferys
Lewes, Delaware, USA

Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to outpatients at the clinic. One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful-looking man. “Why, he’s hardly taller than my eight-year-old,” I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body. But the appalling thing was his face; it was lopsided from swelling and scarred, red, and raw. Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, “Good evening. I’ve come to see if you’ve a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there’s no bus ’til morning.”

He told me he’d been hunting for a room since noon with no success. No one seemed to have a room. “I guess it’s my face… I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments….”

For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: “I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning.” I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch. I went inside and finished getting supper. When we were ready, I asked the old man if he would join us. “No, thank you. I have plenty,” he said, holding up a brown paper bag.

When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with him a few minutes. It didn’t take a long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury. He didn’t tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was prefaced with a thanks to God for the blessing. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer. He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going.

At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children’s room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch.

He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if asking a great favor, he asked, “Could I please come back and stay the next time I have a treatment? I won’t put you out a bit. I can sleep fine in a chair.” I told him he was welcome to come again. On his next trip he arrived a little after seven in the morning. He brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen as gifts. He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so they’d be nice and fresh. I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m. I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.

In the years he came to stay with us, there was never a time he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden. Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special delivery — fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed.

Recently I was visiting a friend who has a greenhouse. As she showed me all of her flowers, I spotted the most beautiful one of all: a golden chrysanthemum bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise, it was growing in an old dented, rusty bucket. I said to her, “If this were my plant, I’d put it in the loveliest container I had!”

“I ran short of pots,” she explained, “and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn’t mind starting out in this old pail. It’s just for a little while, till I can put it out in the garden.”

She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly. I was imagining just such a scene in Heaven when the old fisherman was born. “Here’s an especially beautiful one,” God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman. “He won’t mind starting in this small body….” This all happened long ago. Now, in God’s garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.

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