“He relaxed his grip slightly, but still held on. The other lady had left the store and now we were alone. Still holding on to me, he walked me over toward the door and locked it. I was too feisty and stubborn to be scared. I squirmed a little, but he was strong and it did no good. I couldn’t have escaped if I’d tried, and now with the door locked I settled down and decided just to wait and see what would happen next.
“The man was younger than I’d first realized, only a few years older than I was—in his mid-thirties. He led me, still with a strong hand, back behind the counter of the shop and into another room, which was his home, attached to the store. He sat me down in a chair, then finally let go of my arm and shoulder. He took a chair himself and sat down opposite me. He must have seen my eyes darting about already plotting my escape.
“‘There’s no way out, young lady,’ he said. ‘All the doors are locked, and even if you did manage to find a key to one of them and get out, I’m quite a fast runner and I’d catch you before you were halfway down the street. And the sheriff’s office is only two blocks away. So if I were you I’d just sit still for a moment or two.’
“His voice still had that calm, deep tone of authority. I couldn’t help but find myself arrested by it. And though I slouched back in my chair with a look of angry resignation on my face, already I found myself wondering why he hadn’t yelled at me or wasn’t already on his way to the sheriff’s with me.
“The longer I sat there, the more confused I became, although I wouldn’t have shown the man a bit of what I was thinking. He just sat there for the longest time and stared into my eyes. I found his gaze annoying and looked away. I kept looking all over the room, but still he kept focusing in on my eyes and my face. It was very disconcerting. Yet at the same time I couldn’t help thinking that there was something in his expression that I had never seen before, though I had no idea what it was.
“Finally he spoke again.
“‘Why did you try to steal from me?’ he asked.
“I shrugged.
“‘If you were hungry, why didn’t you just ask me for some food? I would have given it to you.’
“I still had nothing to say.
“‘If you needed money, why didn’t you come in and tell me about it? Perhaps I could have helped.’
“What is this? I wondered to myself. If you’re going to have me thrown in jail, then get it over with.
“Yet inside curiosity was already starting to well up in me about this strange man who didn’t seem bent on condemning me but instead sounded as if he was interested in me.
“Well, I sat there for the next hour while he continued to question me and talk to me, always in the same calm voice, with his eyes probing into me in a way no one ever had before, and gradually he began to coax some words and then some whole sentences out of me. By the end of the hour, we were actually carrying on a conversation. Over and over he kept saying, ‘I don’t think you really want to be a thief. I think you want to be a lady, but you just don’t know how.’
“I hardly knew what he meant. But the compassion and caring in his voice was real enough, and the commanding tone and the purposefulness of his eyes, slowly began to speak to me. I found myself listening with more than just my ears. I found myself wanting to listen, wanting to hear more of this strange man’s words . . . wanting to believe that he was right, wanting to believe that perhaps he really did see something of worth and value as he looked into my face, saw something that maybe I didn’t see, and had never seen myself.”
Almeda paused and took a breath, but quickly kept right on going.
“After a while he offered me something to eat. I took it eagerly. I hadn’t had much to eat all day and was famished. He heated me some soup on his stove, and poured me a cup of coffee.
“‘How about a slice of bread to go with it?’ he asked. ‘I made it just yesterday.’
“I nodded between spoonfuls of soup, half glancing up now and then with one of my eyebrows raised in puzzlement over this strange man who was treating me so nicely.
“I must have looked like a ravaged animal sitting there!”
She chuckled and the faraway gaze came into her eyes again.
“When I said earlier that my father had three beautiful daughters, I meant no boast in any way. Our faces were a curse, if anything, because they made men look upon us differently than they would have otherwise. A plain face is a young girl’s greatest gift and greatest protection against many of the cruelties of this world, though most never discover that fact for forty or fifty years. But as I sat there in that man’s kitchen, I can tell you I was anything but beautiful. My face had grown bitter, hard, calculating. There was a perpetual scowl on my brow. My cheeks were sunken, my hair ratted and messy, my clothes dirty, even torn in places. It was not an attractive sight. That man had absolutely nothing to gain by befriending me. I hadn’t bathed in two weeks, and the plain fact of the matter is that I was foul. I looked and smelled ugly, inside and out.
“But he—”
Almeda paused and looked away, suddenly overcome again with emotion. I saw her handkerchief go to her eyes once more.
“But he saw something in me. Why . . . how . . . I hadn’t any idea. I know now it was because God’s love resided in him, but I didn’t know it then. He saw something in me! Something that he considered of value. And you just can’t understand what that did to my starved, confused, lonely, encrusted heart. It was as though he took hold of my eyes, looked deeply into them, and then said, ‘Look, young lady. Look here—into my eyes. Gaze deeply into them, and you will find someone who has compassion on you, someone who cares about you as a person.’
“As I ate his food, he just kept watching me, quietly talking, and I’m sure praying too, though I was oblivious to that. And that same message kept coming through, even in his silence: Here is someone who cares about you.
“And then another strange and unexpected thing happened. As I was finishing up my second bowl of soup and starting to think about being on my way—that is, if he was going to let me go instead of having me thrown in jail—the man got up, pulled a book from a shelf nearby, sat back down, and said, ‘Did you know there’s a description of you in the Bible?’
“No,” I answered.
“‘Well there is,’ he replied, ‘and I want to read it to you.’
“No harm in that, I thought as I kept eating.
“He flipped through the pages, stopped, and then began to read: Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. . . .
“I found myself listening more than I let on. Was this the man’s idea of a cruel joke, calling me virtuous? Me! Couldn’t he see that I was anything but good? I didn’t even have a husband, but if I did I’d be the last person on earth anyone would say such things about! I had just tried to rob this storekeeper, and now he was reading words like, She will do him good and not evil, and saying it was a description of me!
“But when he got to the end, he paused a moment, then looked intently into my eyes with a piercing gaze and said: Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all. Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised. That’s when I suddenly knew beyond any doubt that I’d landed in the house of a man whose wits had left him. There was that word virtue again! I knew how black I was inside! That hidden part of me that I tried so hard to keep anyone from seeing—I knew that part was selfish and horrid through and through!
“But even if he was a madman, he had been nice to me, after all. So I simply finished up my soup, then stood and asked if I was free to go.
“‘If you want to,’ he replied. “‘But the day’s almost over. It’s going to be cold tonight. Do you need a place to stay?’
“So that’s it, I thought to myself. All this just to lure me into his lair! He’s no different from everyone e
lse!
“Then he added, ‘I have a guest room. I’d be happy to put you up for the night. You could take a hot bath, have breakfast with me in the morning, and then be on your way.’
“I eyed him carefully, squinting to see if I could detect some motive. But try as I might, I could see nothing. I don’t think the man would have been capable of taking advantage of another. And even if he did try something, I thought, I could take care of myself.
“So I shrugged, and said, ‘Sure, I suppose a bath and clean bed would feel good for a change.’
“That night changed everything, and altered the whole course of my life. The man could not have been a more perfect gentleman. He treated me like a queen, heated water for my bath, gave me clean clothes to sleep in, fixed me tea and brought it with some crackers to my room before I went to bed. I didn’t know it at the time, but when I was bathing he took my clothes out to be cleaned by a lady around the corner.
“You can imagine the changes I was going through in my mind as I lay there that night. One part of me was laughing inside that anyone could be such a sap. I would sneak down in the middle of the night, find my way into the store again, and make off not with just three or four pieces of jewelry, but with everything in the case. My head was resting on a nice clean pillow cover that would hold everything.
“But somehow another part of me was feeling things I had never felt in my life. This storekeeper—madman or sap or religious nut, whatever he was!—had treated me with courtesy and respect and kindness and graciousness like no other human being in the world ever had. So the deeper part of me was hardly anxious to leave! It felt good to have someone care and treat me kindly. I was not consciously aware of these feelings at the time. Inside I was still pretending it was all ridiculous.
“But he had shown me my first real glimpse of love. He had reached out, looked into my face, and said, ‘I see a person of value and worth inside there.’ He’d even used that silly word virtue and said the passage he read was a description of me. No matter how I might rave and bluster on the outside about it all being syrupy and stupid, I couldn’t help feeling cared about and loved.
“So even though I lay there plotting and scheming my escape and all the loot I would make off with, the deeper part of me gradually went contentedly to sleep. And I slept like a baby and didn’t wake until I heard the man’s familiar voice. I opened my eyes. Sunlight was streaming in through the window, and there he stood with a tray in his hands and a cup of steaming coffee on it, and saying with a bright expression, ‘Good morning, young lady. I hope you slept well!’
“In just a few short hours, this place—a place I had walked into to rob, run by this man standing there whose name I didn’t even know yet—had become more like a true home to me than any I had ever known. And as I lay there, suddenly the most unexpected thing happened. I felt tears in my eyes. I looked up at him, blinking them back as best I could, and then another unexpected thing happened. A smile came across my lips, and I said, ‘Yes, I did. Thank you.’
“He left the coffee, and I lay back in the bed and cried. But they were like no tears that had ever come from my eyes before.”
Almeda glanced over at me and smiled. Her eyes were glistening.
“Needless to say,” she went on, “I didn’t leave immediately, or rob him, or anything like that. I stayed for breakfast and for all that day, then for another night, and before I knew it I had been there a week. He gave me new clothes from his shop, he fed me, I had a bath every day and a room completely to myself. Within a couple of weeks he moved me into a boarding house just down the street and offered me a job in his store.
“The long and the short of it is—I became a new person. Life such as I had never known began to come up out of me. I began to notice things that had been dead to me before. People took on a whole new meaning, and I found within myself a desire to reach into them and find out about them.
“Well . . . if you haven’t guessed it by now, the man who took me under his wing and helped me to believe in my own worth was none other than Mr. Parrish. The year after I first wandered into his shop I became his wife.
“What a transformation took place within me during that year! That wonderful man simply reclaimed me from Boston’s gutters, pulled me up, gave me a place to stand, loved me, believed in me, spoke encouragement and worth into me, and showed me how to live. He was God’s provision for me. I was dead to all that life was, and he rescued me. I became a new person, thanks to him—completely new, the person the two of you know today.
“Do you know what he did?” Almeda smiled tenderly at the memory.
“After that first day, he read that passage from Proverbs 31 to me every day until we were married. He kept reading it to me, over and over, and kept saying to me, ‘You are that woman of virtue, Almeda. You are virtuous and pure and capable.’ He kept telling me that, and kept reading those words to me, until they began to sink into my soul. God began to wash me clean with those words, and with many other passages from the Bible. Washed me clean from my past, at the same time as he was implanting within me a new picture of the person I could become. It was really quite a wonderful process, nothing short of a full transformation. The old fell away under the influences of this man’s love and God’s love, leaving the new free to emerge and then eventually to spill out onto others. All my life I had lived under a dark cloud—first from feeling unwanted, then from the awful things my father did, and then finally the cloud of my own blackness of heart that I had been carrying for many years. The clouds were swept away. Someone did want me and did love me. The horrible memories of my father were replaced by the present reality of a man who was caring and compassionate, a man who loved me and would never hurt me. And the blackness in my heart was cleansed and healed by his belief in me, and by his gentle and tender and encouraging words. The sun came out for the first time in my life. He gave me a place to stand in life, a place of warmth and smiles, and a contented feeling when I went to sleep at night.
“Of course, on a deeper level what was really happening was that he was giving me my first glimpse of God’s nature and character. For what he did was exactly what Jesus did when he encountered people—he looked into their eyes and reached down inside them to touch the real person down at the core. That is what God is always trying to do in people’s lives, in a million ways, sometimes using other people, sometimes on his own. He has a million ways to love us, a million ways to try to get through to us, if we’re only able to hear that voice that is sometimes so hard to hear. We are locked away in the cocoons that life surrounds us with. Yet all the while the freedom of the butterfly lies hidden deep inside, and God is constantly trying to find ways to loose our wings and let us soar and be happy in the flight of his life.
“That’s what Mr. Parrish did. He looked inside me and said, ‘You are someone special. You are a gem that can shine—all we have to do is polish it a bit.’ And he went to work polishing.
“At first it was just his words, his kindness, his caring, his love. He made me believe in myself, and believe that he loved me. I listened to him read the Scriptures, and I listened to everything he said about God, but the Lord was still distant. God was not someone who had yet touched my life in a real way. I listened and I probably absorbed more than I realized. But it was still some time later when I awoke to the immediacy of God’s relation to me—me personally! It took some time for God to steal closer and closer, until that moment when I was ready to surrender my heart to Him, as well as to Mr. Parrish.”
Chapter 38
Encounter with the Father
How influences from our Father in heaven begin to penetrate our consciousness,” Almeda continued, “is one of life’s great mysteries. I know ever since the moment I met Mr. Parrish, God began speaking more directly to me. But for a long while, as I said, I was not aware of it.
“We worked together in the store, then expanded the business a little, and by and by built a pretty good life there in Boston. I was obviously not what
you would call a ‘society lady,’ yet in a way my husband did succeed in making a lady of me. He would take me to the theater and sometimes to social gatherings, without the least shame in the kind of person I had once been. He knew everything about my past—about my father, about the men who had been in my life, about the baby. Yet nothing could stop him from continually saying to me, ‘You, Almeda, are a woman of virtue and uprightness and righteousness. God made you in his image. He loves you, and I love you. Yesterday’s gone. Your past has been washed clean.’
“All that couldn’t help but make all of life new to me. The sun was brighter. The raindrops sparkled with a new radiance. Flowers took on such a wonderful new meaning. One day a little bee flew against our window and stunned himself and fell to the ground. I scooped him carefully into my palm, and just gazed upon him with a tenderness I didn’t even know was in my heart. When he began to come to, I lifted him into the wind and blew him off my palm. And as I watched him fly away, tears came to my eyes, although I didn’t even know why.
“Life was happening all around me, but it wasn’t an impersonal life. Somehow everything was very personal. It all seemed to touch my heart so. To breathe in deeply of the fragrance of an orange or yellow rose touched chords in my being I can’t even describe. The smell itself was holy, as if it went back to the very foundation of the world itself, and then had come into being just for me, that I might smell that rose on that particular day. There are no words to convey what I felt. The smell was almost sad in a way, calling forth a yearning for something more than just the aroma of the rose’s perfume, but a longing for something that could never be had, never be found. I think that’s what it was with the bee too, a longing after something, a hunger—oh, I don’t know!—to somehow be a sister, a friend, to that bee in the shared life of the creation we were both in. Yet the bee was just a bee, without the capacity to let me share his life, without even the capacity to know that such a thing as people existed. And somehow as a result I found tears in my eyes.
A Place in the Sun Page 19