Last post, I told you about a man of faith. The other two men on my list are different.

The first was a profane man. He smoked and drank and chewed tobacco, and his speech was punctuated with oaths. He was the owner and operator of the local gas station. That’s what we called it, although no one ever bought gasoline there. Every farmer had a 500 gallon tank at his farm. You filled your tractor there, filled the out-of-service milk cans you used to carry gasoline to the fields, and filled your pickup.

You went to the gas station to get a tire repaired or buy a fan belt from the hundreds hanging high on the walls. The station operator would retrieve one of them using a ten foot pole with a hook on the end, which he manipulated one handed.

You see, he only had one arm, and that was a bigger deal in the fifties than it is today.

If you are young, you may never have seen a tire removed from its rim. If you are under fifty, chances you have never seen it done without a pneumatic breaker. This station operator had only a tire vice, a heavy rubber-faced hammer, and two or three levers shaped like blunt, curved chisels. When a tire needed repair, it was the signal for the start of a violent ballet with all the farmers gathering around to watch. He would drive the tire away from the rim with a dozen powerful blows from his overdeveloped right arm, drop the hammer and insert a lever, haul it back and brace it against the center stem of the tire vice, grab the hammer and drive it deeper, grab the free end of the lever and haul it mightily sideways clear around the perimeter until the tire popped free of the rim so he could reach the tube inside. It was fast and loud as he did with one arm what the onlooking farmers could not have done with two.

Today, because of helicopters and advances in medicine, fewer soldiers die within the first hour of being wounded. As an unintended consequence, limbless persons have become common. Add to that the generation old shame for the way returning Viet Nam vets were sometimes treated, and you end up with a culture which embraces its amputees.

This was not true in the fifties. The station owner’s lost limb could have been a war wound. He was of the right age to have lost it in WWII, but I never knew. No one talked about things like that back then. And no one provided special hospitals, advanced prosthetics, or support groups. A man made it on his own, or he didn’t, with very little help.

I was impressed. I still am.

*****

I never met the third man in this trio. His name was Nigger Eddie. I won’t clean that up. It would be as wrong as changing Injun Joe’s name to clean up Tom Sawyer.

There were no black people in my little town, but Nigger Eddie lived somewhere in the county. That was the name everybody called him by; I never knew his real one. We would see him driving down the main street, which was also a state highway, face forward in his pickup, never making eye contact. People would look up as he passed by and say, “There goes Nigger Eddie.” They never waved; he never looked up.

Nigger Eddie was respected by everybody because he kept to himself and never made trouble. He drove through our lives, but he was never a part of them. Apartheid was new in the fifties, even in South Africa, but my people fully understood its basic principles.

That’s all I know. Even as a child I wondered where he lived; was he married; did he have kids; what was that family’s life like? I will never know.

Within a decade, the civil rights movement opened my eyes and began to open the eyes of the nation. Here was a black man too old to reap the benefits of that change. I hope that his children and grandchildren did.

There are three men from my childhood I would like to see again.

The first was the preacher at our church for about ten years. I can see him before me in memory, but I can’t remember his name.

Over the years I have known a lot of preachers. Some were weak men trying to do good; some weren’t worth much, no matter how hard you looked for goodness in them. The man I remember was what a preacher should be.

Our church was as tiny as our town, so we couldn’t afford a full time minister. This gentleman worked as a switchman on the railroad, in a yard in Tulsa, thirty-five miles away. He lived near his work and drove to our town every Sunday, come rain, sleet, snow, hail, or tornado. He preached the morning sermon, spent the day visiting church members, then preached again on Sunday night. Some church family invited him to dinner every Sunday after church, and that was about all the pay he got. The salary we gave him would barely cover his gasoline. Midweek, he drove up after work for prayer meeting.

Fifty years later, I still remember his sermons. They were hard, but they weren’t cold. He told of fire and Hell and the coming Armageddon in tones that would set your hair on fire, but his face was always full of kindness, sorrow, and forgiveness. When he said Christ would forgive, you could believe it when you looked into this man’s eyes.

One morning, he did not show up for Sunday service and word went around that there had been an accident. He worked between the cars, opening the couplers, and America’s rail yards have always been slaughterhouses. His hand had been caught between moving cars.

I was too young to visit him in the hospital, so I didn’t see him again until he returned weeks later. He had lost the outer half of his right hand, but he could still hold the Bible in it, and slap it down in emphasis on the pulpit. I was ten; I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I can still feel the bony oddness of it as we shook hands at the end of every service.

He preached a thousand sermons in that church, with one theme: surrender to the love of God or burn in Hell. I eventually surrendered, went down the aisle to where we sat side by side on the front pew with his arm around my shoulders while he prayed for my soul. It didn’t take, but if there were anything today that would make me change my mind about God, it would be that man’s unfaltering faith.