Understanding Richard

Understanding Richard


Richard Davis was a tall, skinny sort with deep sunken eyes and a head full of coal black hair. I guess I knew him just about my whole life. One time in first grade, I can remember Richard having an “accident” in his pants and every kid in the class, including me, taking pleasure in his misery.  I guess that’s about the time they realized that Richard was…. well, Richard.

I remember they took him out of our class and put him in the “slow” classes. We didn’t really miss Richard then, only except we had one less kid to pick on in the class. One time I saw Richard at lunch in the cafeteria; he had green beans stuck up his nose and was in tears. Richard was constantly in tears those days, and he was always doing something to make people think that he was a lost cause. We kids were relentless on him, we use to call him “Rich-Ard the Re-Tard” and throw whatever we could find at him.

Once, when we must have been in fourth grade or so, I remember some bigger kids from Jr. High pushing Richard down when he got off the School bus and dragging him through a pile of dog feces they had spotted in the yard on the corner. All the while Richard screaming like he was on fire and the rest of us kids standing there, either pointing or laughing, but doing nothing to help Richard. This kind of treatment went on for Richard all the way through school.

Like a lot of small town people, I grew up and moved away as fast as I could get gone. Left for college and didn’t think that I would ever come back. During the time that I was gone, I don’t think that my mind ever settled on a thought of Richard Davis. Although my parents still lived in our hometown, I rarely went home to visit, and when I did I never visited with Richard Davis or anyone like him. I can recall one time after my father got sick, my mother mentioning to me on one of our brief, but mandatory, phone calls, that Richard Davis had been mowing the lawn and doing odd jobs for her. I can recall telling her to be careful with that guy Mother, he’s not right I said.

After Dad had passed on and Mother became ill with cancer, I decided, after years of being away, I would go home and take care of my Mother and her house. I took a job at the local newspaper and although it was a pay cut, I resigned myself to the fact that I could be happy here and my Mother needed me. One of my first duties was to let Richard Davis know that Mother would no longer need his services. Mother put up a fuss, but by this time she was so ill she could barely hold her head up.

When I broke the news to Richard that day, it was the first time that I had seen him in 20 years. He hadn’t changed at all; still skinny, still messy, still lost looking and still Richard.
I don’t know if he remembered me and I don’t think that I even cared. He barely made eye contact but instead just stared at his feet there on my Mothers stoop. He nodded his head after I was finished and turned slowly and walked down the long driveway. After that I only saw Richard a handful of times around town.

When Mother died that summer, I was in her house going through some of her things and trying to decide what to get rid of before selling the house. I found a box of journals that Mother had been keeping since the year I was born. I guess I remembered seeing her scribble in these over the years, but I didn’t realize until I started reading them how dedicated her writing in the journals had been. I spent days and weeks reading these, shedding some tears and even laughing out loud. When I got to the more recent ones, the ones after Dad had died, that’s when I started to see Richard Davis in a whole new light.

Mother had written in a journal about the day Richard had first come to do work for her. It was the week after Dad had died and Richard had apparently heard about his dying somewhere along the way and stopped by to see if my Mother needed any “Man work” done. This must have amused Mother because she quoted “Man Work” in her journal just this way and underlined it.  She went on to write that she knew this man, only in certain terms, and she knew he was “special”. That was her term for Richard, “Special”. She decided that she would put him to work that day and this was the beginning to what turned out to be a 12 year relationship with Richard.

As I read on those next few days, Mother had written more and more about Richard Davis. She had written of times when he would sit on the porch and drink iced tea after he was finished with some odd job or other. She would say that she would sit there in the swing while he was sitting on the stoop and the two of them silent as the grave, but with Richard having a look of pure pleasure on his face sipping his tea. Mother would talk to Richard as well; she wrote of conversations that they had over the years. Some about the weather, some about the work to be done and some about nothing at all but each one left a lasting impression on my Mother. I could tell that these conversations meant something to her by the way they were penned in her journals. I could almost see the smile on her face in the words she wrote.

Here is one of her entries regarding Richard.

"June 16, 1996
Richard came by today to finish the fence. We had a nice conversation after. We talked about the new movie theater downtown. I asked him if he thought he might go see the movie on opening night and he said, no mam, in that Richard way of his that makes me feel a hundred and forty years old. I asked why not, thinking I knew the answer already, Richard doesn’t go anywhere where there is more than three people gathered. But his reply was a typical Richard, he said “well, I already seen that movie, over in Connersville last week”. I couldn’t help but chuckle. Richard is a lot of things but predictable he’s not."

Mother had countless of entries about Richard, some funny, some interesting and others just plain Richard. Reading her journals made me realize not only how lonely Mother was after Dad died, but it made me realize probably for the first time, that Richard Davis was a person, I mean an actual human being. Through conversations and investigations, Mother had learned just about all there was to know about Richard. Like how he became “Special” for instance. He told Mother that when he was just a baby, he got really sick with the flu, and had a very bad fever for days. The Doctor told his Mother afterwards that he had some minor Brain damage as a result.

She also found that Richard lived in the one room apartment above the “Kittens Den” bar on Main Street, and that he slept at night with ear muffs on his head that his uncle Chuck from Magasaw had sent him for Christmas one year, in order to block out all the noise from downstairs. Mother learned that Richard collected bottle caps and had been collecting them for years. He said he liked to put them in an old sock and shake them because he liked the way it sounded. He said no matter how many you put in, it always sounded like a lot, like more than he could count and he could count almost to two hundred now. She found out that Richard’s mother died several years ago and Richard had been working doing odd jobs since he left school. I guess Mother new all there was to know about Richard, but most importantly she knew that Richard was “Special”.

This spring while in my office at the News paper my phone rang. It was our source at the Police dispatch office. She told me some news that made me sick to my stomach. Richard Davis had been electrocuted to death while trying to fix an old generator for Bernice Hakney.
He had been doing odd jobs for Bernice, just like he did for Mother, these past few months. I slowly put the phone down and began to cry.

Two days later, I prepared myself to go to yet another funeral. As a small town News Paper man I find myself at too many funerals with too many mourners to question. This time I guessed that since this was Richard’s funeral at least there wouldn’t be that many folks to deal with. I guessed maybe that beside me, Henry Marker the owner of the Kittens Den, and possibly a handful of others, there wouldn’t be a crowd at all.

Well I was wrong, as soon as I started down Clements Street, the traffic was backed up. Nearly a mile from the Funeral Home, cars and people lined up like this was a funeral for the Governor not Richard Davis. When I finally made it to Morris’s Funeral Home, it was standing room only. I recognized some, pondered about others and had not a clue about who most of the people were.

It turns out that there were people there from all over the tri-state area. People that had never stepped foot in our little burg before and probably never would again. As diverse and spread out a crowd it was, they all had one thing in common, Richard.

As I made my way through the crowd listening and eve dropping as I went, I began to understand. I mean really see for the first time what a person like Richard is. It seemed like each story or tale that I heard that day about Richard shed more and more light on him as a person to me. The things he had done, like cut firewood for Mrs. Grieves and stacking it on her shed porch, all at night so she couldn’t see him, because she would try to give him money and he wouldn’t take it from her because he knew she “didn’t have much”. One fella talked about how Richard had fixed his snow blower for him and wouldn’t take any money but wanted to use it to clear the fella’s neighbor’s drives instead, all for free. One elderly gentleman from over in Connersville said that Richard rode his bike over every week so he could help him bring in his groceries, now that by itself seems silly but add the fact that Connersville was an hour away for Richard on his bike and that puts it in a different sort of light.           

All of these little stories about Richard, and looking at the countless number of people there who he touched, made me realize that maybe my Mother was on to something. Richard was “Special” alright. I think he was really special. One of my Mother’s last entries in her Journal sticks with me when I think of Richard these days.  She wrote:

"July, 15 2007
Richard by today, just to check on me. He brought me some fresh apples from Mrs. Napier’s. When I tried to pay him for them he said he does some work for her and she lets him pick apples when he wants. I have learned that Richard does work for just about everybody in five counties. Richard must have known that I was having a bad day with the medicine, he tried to cheer me up with a joke, but he forgot the punch line. Oh Richard, I laughed any way and so did he. I understand Richard now, I don’t know if I really did in the beginning, but I do now. He would rather do for you than do for him and he doesn’t have a bad thought in his head. I know people call Richard a dummy or a retard, but they just don’t understand him the way I do, the way he really is. Richard may not be smart, but he is good and good is all he wants to be. I don’t know what I would have done without him these last few years, thank God for Richard and thank God for letting me understand him for what he truly is, a blessing. "         
 
I ran a series of stories about Richard in our little paper over the past few months. I have been writing for several years now and nothing that I have ever written has given me more pleasure or generated more of a response than this has. God bless Richard Davis. I feel so blessed now because I understand him. Only I’m sorry that I didn’t try to understand him when he was here and when it truly mattered. Too often people don't bother with what they don't feel comfortable with or understand, and we are all lucky that Richard Davis was not one of those people. He cared for people because they were people, whether he understood them or not.