And where, I wondered, was the highly odoriferous Ronnie? I’d not caught even a whiff of his presence in the house.
Chapter 9
As soon as I walked into the kitchen at home, Lillian said, “That new preacher of yours call an’ say can you come over to his office.”
“Right now?”
“He didn’t say when, jus’ can you come.”
“Well,” I said, sighing, “it’s suppertime, so, no, I can’t. Is Lloyd home?”
“No’m, not yet.”
“Then I’ll call and see when the pastor wants me. I declare, you’d think he would’ve been more specific.”
I wasn’t any more pleased with Pastor Rucker’s summons after speaking with him than I’d been when I’d first heard of his call. What he’d wanted was for me to meet with him and Madge Taylor to discuss my problem—that had been the way he’d put it—my problem.
“The three of us,” he’d said, “can get together here in my office and dialogue. You and Madge can present your differing points of view, and I will moderate. I’m sure we can come to a consensus that way, and everybody can go home happy.”
“Pastor,” I’d said, trembling with anger, “first of all, I am not interested in meeting with Madge at all, much less to dialogue. And second of all, dialogue—mentally spelled correctly, I hope—is a noun, not a verb. And thirdly, there is no way that you can be an impartial moderator. You’ve already declared yourself, so what you really want is for me to submit to a brainwashing by the two of you.”
“Well,” he replied, soothingly, “I would hope that you’d be openminded enough to at least listen to what Madge has to say. Do you realize, Mrs. Murdoch, that there are more than two hundred homeless children in this county?”
That stopped me for a minute. “Two hundred? Madge isn’t planning to house them all, is she?” I could picture the Cochran house bulging with children.
“One must start somewhere,” the pastor said, somewhat piously.
“Well, tell me this: Where are all these children staying now? Surely they aren’t sleeping on sidewalks, are they?”
“The legal definition of the homeless is this: individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. So some stay over with various friends or different relatives or in shelters if beds are available.”
“Well,” I said, “if the idea is simply to provide a regular, adequate bed each night, then the churches should set up beds in their Sunday school classrooms, none of which is used except for one hour a week, and often not even then. That would be a whole lot better than warehousing as few as half a dozen in one small single-family house.”
“Oh,” Pastor Rucker said in a condescending tone, “I wouldn’t use the term warehousing.”
“I would, because I believe in calling a spade a spade. And, Pastor, it seems to me that you and Madge are tackling the problem from the wrong end. It’s the parents, not community activists, who should be caring for these children. What’re you doing about them?”
“Many times it’s the parents themselves who’re the problem.”
“That’s my point. It seems to me that you should be working on the underlying problem, not just the results of the problem.”
He sighed. “Madge can explain all that to you. Will you meet with us? It would show your good faith if you would.”
My good faith? What did that mean?
“I’ll think about it,” I said and brought that unproductive phone conversation to an end.
—
After supper and after sitting for a while afterward talking with Lloyd, I found I was too stiff from all the walking I’d done that day to take on another visitation. The older one gets, the more one has to pace oneself. Pursuant to that, I called the pastor, who by this time was at home, to tell him I would be happy to meet with him and his confederate some evening later in the week.
Ordinarily I would not call the pastor after hours when he was at home with his family—unless, of course, it was an emergency, in which case I’m not sure I would call him at all. But that was neither here nor there. Besides, he never hesitated to call me at home and at any hour he was moved to do so.
“Lloyd,” I said as he came downstairs later, signaling that he was through with homework and ready for a snack. “Let me ask you something. If you didn’t have a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence, would you want to live in a group home with several others in like circumstances?”
His head swiveled around to look at me, a frown expressing his surprise at the question. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve never thought about it.”
And why should he, as he had two fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residences? On the other hand, he’d been barely nine years old when his father had expired over the steering wheel of his new Buick Park Avenue parked right out there in my driveway, leaving Lloyd and his mother, for all anyone knew, penniless. Hazel Marie had had no group home to turn to at that time, so she’d left him on my doorstep—an outrage of the first order that turned out to be the turning point of my life.
I doubted, however, that Lloyd at that age had understood his mother’s desperate attempt to house him, and I certainly was not going to bring it up at this late date.
“Well, just think about it,” I said, and explained to him the possible influx of homeless boys next door to his mother’s house. “Would you enjoy living with five or six boys you didn’t know and be overseen by houseparents and counselors from the Department of Social Services?”
“No’m, not me. I don’t like constant company, somebody after me all the time. I like to be by myself when I’m studying or thinking or just hanging out.”
“So do I,” I said, confirming what I’d thought all along.
“On the other hand,” he said, “I guess if I really had
