“…there was only one person in the world he wanted to have it. He said, ‘The boy next door. The one who shines my shoes without being asked.” Reverend Hollis opened his hand and showed us what he had carried in his coat pocket all the way from St. Louis. It was a flat leather case, worn pale at the corners. Inside, on a bed of yellowed satin, lay a gold pocket watch. The face was ivory, the numbers black, and across the lid, in tiny letters, someone had engraved a line. Andre did not look at it. He was still staring at the thing in his own fist, and his shoulders were shaking. “Open your hand, son,” the reverend said gently. “Let your mother see.”
Andre unclenched his fingers one at a time. In his palm lay a small brass key, tarnished almost black, on a loop of faded blue ribbon. I had no idea what it opened. The reverend smiled, a tired, tender smile, and he lifted the watch from its case and turned it so the porch light fell on the engraving. “In January of 1958,” he said, “a blizzard stopped the Super Chief outside Raton Pass for two days. There were two hundred passengers, mostly families. My uncle was the porter on car nine. He walked the aisles in the dark for forty hours with a coal oil lantern. He carried babies. He warmed bottles on a stove he built from a bread tin.”
He read the inscription aloud, slowly, because his own voice was not steady. “To Henry Hollis, who kept every passenger home. January 1958.” Andre made a sound in his throat. “The railroad gave it to him at a banquet,” the reverend went on. “And they would not let him sit at the table. He had to stand by the kitchen door and accept it. He never wore it again. He kept it in the shoeshine box, under the felt, for sixty seven years.” He looked at me. “He told me that a man is not measured by the room that will have him. He is measured by whether he keeps people home. And he said there was only one person on that street who did that for him.”
A gold watch in a shoeshine box was never meant for a pocket, only for the boy who kept the shoes ready for church.
I sat down on the step on the other side of my son and put my arm around him. For eleven years I had watched him do something small and unnoticed, and I had told myself that the world would never pay him for it. I had been wrong, but not in the way I expected. The pay was not money. It was the quiet knowledge, in the heart of an old and proud man, that somebody had been faithful. Andre rested his head against my shoulder, a thing he had not done since he was thirteen, and said, in a small voice, “Mama, I never wanted anything. I just did not want him to walk in looking dull.”
“Now, the key,” the reverend said, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. “That belongs to the box itself. Look underneath the felt.” Andre lifted the lining. Beneath it, in the bottom of the wooden box, was a small brass lock, set flush into the wood. The key slid in as if it had been made yesterday.
It turned with a soft click, and a thin drawer, which none of us had known existed, slid out. Inside was a bankbook from the credit union on Prospect Avenue, and a single folded sheet of paper. Andre unfolded the paper. It was written in a hand so careful and upright that every letter looked like a fence post.
He read it aloud, and I will give it to you as he read it. Andre, I could not say thank you. My father taught me that a man who says thank you too easily is a man who has not been hurt enough. That was a poor lesson. I should have said it every Sunday. You polished my shoes for eleven years, and in all that time you never once looked at me as if I were old. The watch is for the man who keeps people home. The bankbook is for the school. Wear the watch to church. Walk in sharp. A smile broke through the tears of Andre, and he laughed once, helplessly, and the sound rang down the street.
The bankbook held eighteen thousand, four hundred dollars. The deacon had been putting away a little each month since the first Sunday, when Andre was seven. The reverend told us the account was set up so that it could be used only for tuition. Andre sat staring at the number for a long time. “Mama,” he said, “I can go to Rockhurst. I can study nursing.” He had wanted that since he was fifteen, and had never said so, because he knew what it would cost. I took the bankbook in both hands and held it against my chest, and I whispered a prayer of thanks for an old porter I had never properly thanked.
That Sunday, Andre wore the watch to Mt. Zion. He clipped it to his one good vest, and the chain caught the light as he walked down the aisle. The congregation turned. An usher with white gloves leaned over and whispered something to the woman beside him, and she put a hand to her mouth. After the service, the pastor called Andre forward and told the church what the deacon had done. He did not hold back. Three hundred people rose to their feet. Andre stood in the aisle with his back straight and his shoes shining like black glass, and he did not cry, and he did not look away.
Reverend Hollis stayed for the afternoon meal. He and Andre walked together next door, to the empty porch, and Andre sat on the step where he had sat for eleven years. From the brass handle of the shoeshine box, he took the brushes and the tin of polish, and knelt in front of the reverends dusty shoes. “Small circles,” Andre said softly. The reverend laughed, a cracked and joyful laugh, and held out his foot. I watched from our porch, across the lawn, with a dish towel in my hands. In the late sun, the hands of my son moved in the old rhythm, and the leather began to shine.