Читать книгу Safety Harbor - Chuck Cooper - Страница 30

The mayor wasn’t a man to be alone. He preferred the voices of humans, the barking of dogs, and the sound of the tide. He was never happier than when he was generally mixing with his constituents on the streets of Safety Harbor, feeling the wind, and smelling the salt air. Now he had been sidelined at one of the most important events ever to happen in his city. He felt it deeply. Lesser men than he had arisen to higher office, but Lou was happy to live in a small town where he could be in personal touch with his people.

He had been challenged for election over the years for this office, but he had been successful in fending off all comers. There were some, perhaps growing in number, who felt that Lou had served his time and his usefulness to the city.

He believed in God, but he wasn’t sure of much beyond that. His parents had taken him to a Presbyterian Church. Now, he went to church on occasion, once, maybe twice a month, at different congregations, more for his relationships with his constituents than anything else. He always put a generous check in the offering, which, he theorized, made people remember that he had been there and they would forgive him for not being there more often. He felt closer to Father Callaghan than any other clergy in town, although he had grown up to suspect the Papacy of corruption and superstition.

“All that mumbo jumbo,” his father had once said after they had attended a Catholic funeral. “Up and down and up and down! Thinking that those saltines are Christ! I don’t know much, but I know a cracker when I see one!”

He often called the priest “Frank” without any titles. Hope said it was disrespectful, but he had a feeling that Father enjoyed just being called by his first name once in a while by someone who didn’t want anything from him.

He knew that he would have fought Joe tooth and nail on this parade business if he had been present, but since he was not, he had been ganged up on by the Steering Committee and undermined by his own wife. But, now he could see that he had been wrong. He didn’t know what would come of this, but something about this parade seemed right.

Lou had always been highly aware of image, both his and the city’s. He didn’t see them apart from one another. He had been afraid of what people would think of this kind of a parade. But now something transformative was going on within him. He was, suddenly, very much at peace with the parade bringing out into the light those who were usually kept in the shadows, the disabled, the poor, and yes, the “dippy hippies,” as Lou had once called them. Yet, at the same time, the business community was involved, the schools, the arts community, and others.

No decent mayor, Lou often said, could care for only a few of the citizens. The blind, the mentally disabled, yes the poor who had taken up residence in the Pastor Luther’s shelter. They were citizens too. They were all his people. What had bothered him most was that Joe hadn’t consulted him ahead of time about the changes, and for the first time he was not chairing the Steering Committee for the parade. Joe was in charge, absent or present.

“We can do this out of our love and respect for him this year,” Hope had said. “We don’t know what the future holds.”

Now, it was as if some fated plan beyond the parade was being carried out, an inevitable event, the outcome of which was yet to be realized. He sat back in his hospital bed, watching the people around him, sad that he wasn’t downtown, still, all in all, happy to have such loving friends and family around him.