The Old Man
On the corner of Kent Street and the Promenade, there appeared one day an old man who wore a fishing hat pulled low over his eyes. He came every day thereafter with the rising sun, and sat upon a bench with a large rucksack at his feet and watched the people pass by along the Promenade. Mila remembered him very clearly, even though she had never spoken a word to him, because he had the same boots as her father. The big heavy ones that meant you had been in the military for a time. Her father only ever wore them when he was working construction, or when they went hiking along the ridge that ran from Jonathan Dickinson to Juno. This man wore then all the time, and as a child Mila thought perhaps he didn’t have any other shoes. When she had asked her mother, she had only been hushed and quickly ushered by. Looking back, Mila supposed it had been embarrassing for her mother, to have a child ask loudly who the man was and if he had any shoes right in front of his face. Yet as she grew, and met more and more people, and heard more and more of their stories, she began to wish that she had asked again.
She had wondered if the old man was a war hero, like her Papa. It would make sense, because he had the big war boots and once, when some of the horrid boys that lived across the railroad tracks from the Promenade were haranguing him and throwing stones, his hat fell off and Mila saw that he had a great angry scar running across his left eye. Or perhaps he was an old pirate who had lost his ship somehow. Mila liked this idea better because it was interesting. There were many war heroes in Juno, but very few pirates. No one ever spoke of his past, and the man was a stranger, so she was not allowed to ask him herself. Instead, she strained her ears whenever she passed by to try and catch the words he sometimes muttered to himself.
On Sundays, when the shops along the Promenade were closed for the day, the old man attended church with the rest of the town. Even in the little wooden building, where the barefooted pastor spoke of friendship and acceptance and other things that seemed funnily obvious to Mila, she saw that no one ever spoke to the man. He sat alone in one of the old pews at the rear of the building. He was always present before Mila and her family arrived, and he always stayed long after they and everyone else had left. She liked to think that maybe he played at the organ when no one was around, or perhaps spoke to God, even though her Papa grumbled about the “deadbeat old loon smoking and sleeping in the church like it were his own private hotel.” She nodded sagely when her mother told him that to make such assumptions of a man he had never even spoken to was wrong. Her mother was the smartest person in the world, after all, so she must know far more about the strange man than Mila herself. Mila liked him anyhow.
At eighteen, Mila left for the writing school in the city. When she returned to Juno years later, the old man was no longer on the bench beneath the banyan on the Promenade. She did not ask about him, but collected through the filtering of conversation that he had died one night in the old church. Passing beneath the tree on her way home, she wondered again if perhaps she should have stopped one day and asked his name. Before leaving, she had been old enough to ask the questions again, and this time to not have been shushed. She wondered if she had been right about his boots. But she hadn’t, and neither had anyone else, it seemed, so she only had the stories she had made up in her mind of the stranger and his boots, and never the real thing.