The Pencil Seller

When I was a boy, I used to see an old blind man outside the Kress’s store on Main Street in our town. He would sit on a little chair outside the back entrance, wearing his dark glasses, his white cane propped against his leg. He would hold out a tin cup and would extend a fistful of white pencils in the other hand, all the while hawking his wares with his impeded speech. He would say “PEN-suls! PEN-suls!” over and over. Every once in a while, some benevolent soul would stop and say “I’ll take two,” etc. and drop coins into his cup. The old man would nod in thanks, and then continue his litany.

When I was about eleven or twelve, I was downtown with three or four of my friends. Also in the group was a newcomer, a boy named Lawton. He was the sort of boy who was rather off-putting in his snide grinnings,  but who would have fit right into today’s culture. He was forever making fun of other people. A lot of what he said was indeed funny, because he was a skilled mimic and a very physical actor.

On this particular Saturday during Christmastime, we wandered down the railroad tracks and into Kress’s and browsed around. I bought my mother a set of three wooden spoons as a Christmas gift, and the other boys bought or at least browsed for gifts for family members. I remember that Lawton didn’t buy anything, but kept up a running line of patter about other shoppers. When we exited through the back entrance, we almost piled into the old blind pencil-seller. I stepped around him, as did my other friends, most of us muttering “Excuse me” as we brushed past. But Lawton stopped, bent forward in a crouch, and mimed holding a cup in one hand and pencils in the other. His face morphed into a remarkable likeness of the old man’s expression. He jutted out his lower lip, and in an eerie impersonation of the blind man’s voice, slurped out “PEN-suls! PEN-suls!”

The group of boys was surprised into laughter, and laugh we did. I remember clapping my hand over my mouth in horror even as I heard myself barking out a long string of guffaws at Lawton’s cleverness. The hand-over-the-mouth reaction was natural to me, and I saw one of the other boys doing the same thing. We knew that we were somehow sinning against God, or offending the natural order of things, or creating a disturbance in the harmony of the universe. Lawton bent double in laughter, delighted with his own skill and wit. And the old man? He sat like the statue of a Crusader on his own tomb, immobile and dignified, listening but not responding, aware of our collective young pulses, our soaped-and-scrubbed skin, our fresh breaths. Lawton finally noticed that no one was still laughing except him, and he straightened up and glared at us, then at the old blind man. The rebuke of the guilty but unrepentant.  Finally, one of us moved out onto the sidewalk, and the rest of us followed, and we left our victim still sitting at his post, unmoving, unspeaking, unseeing. Except I knew he saw. He saw what he needed to see.

I think of that old blind pencil peddler every Christmastime. I saw him on and off for years, until one year I didn’t, and youth pushed me past the troublesome questions about what happened to him, where he came from, where he went, and why his voice still came to me on chilly afternoons when the shadows stretched out like steel rails across creosoted ties. When I think of him these days, the thoughts are rusted over with regret and shame and a morbid curiosity about how and why I have committed so many thoughtless wrongs in my span of time here. Like the animals I  have accidentally killed or the people whose feelings I have blithely hurt or the thousands of unanswered, unacknowledged letters and notes and cards and kind gestures I have accumulated in that same span, I wish I could go back and find the relevant people and apologize to them and tell them I never meant any harm, tell them I need their forgiveness, their absolution, their benevolent gaze. But it is too late.

And even now, at this late hour, with the snow on the ground out in the meadow, with a sleeping dog at my side, with the soft glow of lights around me, I wish I could find that old blind man and talk to him. Even if I couldn’t talk to him, I wish I could hold his stubbled face in my hands and touch my forehead to his and try to communicate some secret and reverent thoughts.

I will never be able to do this. All I can do is remember. Perhaps someday the old pencil-seller and I will meet on a far green hill and smile at each other, and perhaps he will see me, and perhaps I will really, finally see him.

~ S.K. Orr