Our Friend Dave

I guess it's different now, but in the middle of the last century, even in the States, there were places that were far enough out of the way that secrets could be kept. I don't mean the kind of secrets that one person might have, or even the secrets of one family; no, I mean the sort that a whole town might guard; the kind that might last for generations and that might bring people together and make them stay together.

Out of respect for those days I tell this story without place names, and changing all of the given and family names too. The world, it seems to me, is full of folks who are of the opinion that if something special happens somewhere or to someone, then that place, or that person becomes common property. The last thing I want is to bring down an avalanche of curiosity, you might say nosiness, on good people who still live in the good place I will tell you about.

Nonetheless, there is a story that needs to be told; it needs to be told for all the small towns that have welcomed strangers, and for the all the honest folks who some would dismiss on sight as no more than rednecks. Small towns and small town folks can be the most forgiving and tolerant people in all the world; in many places this is a habit learned of necessity, and that we don’t shout about it is testament to our ingrained discretion, not our lack of principles.

I shall say that our friend was called Dave; by the time he died in the mid-1960s he had been a member of our community, a trusted counsellor and healer to us for a very long time indeed. His funeral was quite something; there was a fine turn out to send him on his way to a Better Place. I can’t think of anyone from the town who did not come; naturally enough though, Dave’s kin were not there. I like to think that had they been they would have been more than happy with the way the thing was done.

Strange as it is to admit, even after nearly a century no-one was sure if Dave was a Christian. We could all say well enough that he always behaved towards us as a true Christian gentleman, but he had never been into church, and no-one could recall him ever talking about God. Well, we were resolved that in this, as in all things, we would treat him as one of us: he had his own plot in the cemetery and he had the preacher there to make sure that the service was just what any of us would want for ourselves or our loved ones.

The headstone couldn’t say the usual things. We didn’t know when Dave had been born, or where; we didn’t know his full name, or rather I should say his real name, the name his own people must have given him. “Dave came into our lives” the stone read, “1871. Died 1966.” Underneath these bare facts we had finally agreed upon having engraved part of a verse from The Book of Kings:

Behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, which parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven

There were plenty of folks who wanted to say their own piece about what Dave had meant to them over the years; I even said a few words myself. Mostly people spoke about their health, and how, when the town’s doctors over the years had come up against problems they just couldn't solve, they had often turned to Dave. It wasn’t that he worked miracles, no-one wanted to suggest blasphemy, it was just that he understood things about medicine, things, shall we say, a long way in advance of those techniques normally available to a country sawbones. ‘I am a better doctor than I ever could have dreamed of being’ old Dr Tanner stood up and said, ‘and that is all thanks to Dave.’

There were folks who wanted to remind everyone that Dave had saved their lives, or that he had saved their kids. It wasn’t just that he made himself available down at the hospital; Dave had lived a long time in the town and had come to the rescue in the literal sense on numerous occasions. Although in later years he did become less active, and much less inclined to leave his home, many of the stories from his earlier years in the town emphasise his speed and strength: you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone better to have at the end of a rope, at the top of a ladder, or going into a burning building to pull people out of it than Dave.

More modest perhaps, but nonetheless much valued by all, were Dave’s contributions to farming and to the town’s telephone system. For most of the Twentieth Century we were years ahead of the rest of the country with our telephones, although it has to be admitted that the men that worked on the lines and exchanges had great difficulty explaining exactly what Dave had done. Also, pretty much all of the farms in the county were organic long before the word was even in common use to mean farming without chemicals. Dave used to call it ecological agriculture and after what he did with the phones, well, people listened.

No-one who spoke up at the funeral mentioned Dave’s appearance; we had all learned the art of avoiding the subject. Dave had never wandered down Main Street in shirt sleeves, not because we might be frightened, but because, especially after the Second War, there were often people passing through, people from other towns.

No-one talked either about how Dave had arrived. These details were not important in the grand scheme of things. When our town was founded it was on the frontier and all of our families had come from somewhere else; often they had fled tragedy or had secrets they could not tell. The truth is that the people who came often looked pretty strange as well, not as strange as Dave perhaps, but then that was just a matter of degree.

I suppose that now I can tell a little more about Dave than we shared in the cemetery on that spring morning in 1966. After all, most of it will never be believed, and that part of it which might be shan’t help anyone find the town or anything that remains there of Dave.

My Grandfather was forty the year Dave arrived, and this is the way he recounted it to me: on that night there was not a cloud in the sky, just stars from horizon to horizon, the way it used to be before the inter-state was put through. Grampa was sitting on his porch smoking his pipe when all of a sudden the cicadas fell silent, and the distant cry of a coyote was cut off in a sorrowful yelp.

There were lights dancing high up in the night sky and then much lower a fiery ball shot over the valley and was seen clear across the county. Grampa used to say that he heard a loud bang like an explosion, but some will tell you that there were at least three explosions that night. In any event the folks who lived nearby didn’t wait until morning; they started off in the direction of the column of smoke that was rising into the darkness from the direction of the Atkinson Place.

There was burnt brush and blackened earth, and the Atkinsons were scared out of their wits; all outside they were, looking stunned, clinging to one another, the children so terrified that they weren’t even crying, and all that the first people to arrive could get out of them were mumblings.

The great scrape in the ground, a blackened gouge that I remember looking at when I was little, that is to say some fifteen or maybe even twenty years later, came to an end about a quarter of a mile away from the farmstead where a high mound had been thrown up as if someone had put dynamite under the earth.

But the Atkinson’s dogs weren’t interested in the mound or the blackened ground; they were whining and growling at the barn. And sure enough it was in the barn that those first brave people to arrive that night, a group that included Grampa, found Dave.

It took a while for the first tentative greetings to grow into mutual trust and then friendship, but it came naturally enough to the townsfolk to help someone who was evidently in desperate need. Healed as best they knew how, Dave was put up in an empty house just on the edge of town, and there he would pass most of the century that followed. I think he came to see it as home, and lived the best life he could have hoped for in such exile.

This town you see and many like it, was founded on a degree of wilful forgetfulness. It never mattered here whether your family had come from one country or another; it never mattered if your skin was one colour or another, or which side you had fought on in the War Between the States, or in any war, as long as you didn’t bring the war here with you. It didn’t matter whether you’d come by wagon or by railroad, or out of the desert with only a mule to your name; it didn’t matter whether you’d fallen out of the sky.

Well, Dave is gone, and I dare say we will never see his like again. I fear that it will not be so, but I pray to God that we remember the most important thing of all that we learned when we welcomed him among us.