The Rag Man

The Rag Man by Al deAprix Myths wrap themselves around our lives like thick comforters, intimately binding us into stories that amuse, indoctrinate, or maybe even frighten us a bit. Like their predecessors that were artfully contrived in shadowed times, our personal myths are either created by us to make sense of the unexplainable in our world or imposed upon us by others to nudge us toward an ordained behavior. The Rag Man was a myth of my childhood, one to which I was introduced at age three or four by my grandmother. My grandparents lived in a three-family home on lower Whitwell Street, down at the base of Cranch, or Nanny Goat, Hill in Quincy, Massachusetts. That part of the city, lying just to the west of downtown, consisted of several steep hills that separated the downtown from the Quarries, where granite for the city’s buildings, home foundations, and street curbs had for years been cut out of the bedrock that underlaid the area, leaving behind several deep, steep-sided lakes which we were never permitted to visit, but did anyways as we grew a little older and bolder. Whitwell Street started climbing Nanny Goat Hill just a few doors north of my grandparents’ flat, where Glendale Road veered off to head towards John Adams’ home. Rising behind my grandparent’s back yard, Presidents’ Hill made its ascent toward one of Quincy’s more prestigious neighborhoods, with its procession of near-mansions framed by spacious, meticulously-groomed lawns adorning that hill’s crest. Whenever my grandmother suspected that I might get into some mischief in the neighborhood, she would sternly threaten to sell me to the Rag Man. For a young boy, the thought of slaving away on that old man’s rag pile in some lost corner of the city, never to see family or friends again, induced a grudging compliance with her tough rules. My friends’ parents also invoked the Rag Man to compel good behavior, with the result that every young boy in the neighborhood was terrified of him. Whenever one of our playmates moved away, we were certain that the Rag Man was behind his disappearance, no matter what the adults told us. When I was six years old, I spent much of that summer’s vacation with my grandparents. My mother had to help care for my grandmother after she suffered one of the strokes in her long struggle with heart disease. Her movements were a bit slow, but her mind remained sharp. Grandmother was a stern Scotswoman who tolerated, and almost without exception received, very little discord from children. On the other hand, she always had a little treat for me if I was good, be it a bottle of 7-Up, some cookies, or a little spending money to help me buy the model soldiers and military vehicles that we boys enjoyed assembling. The Rag Man was a character from an era even then long past. He was old, but my youthful comprehension of what constituted old age was not then too well-honed; today, I would guess that at that time he was probably about 65 or 70. He wore old clothes that we boys swore must have come from his rag pile. His dingy shirts were wrinkled and frayed, his pants, baggy, held up by greasy brown suspenders that crossed against his back. The old man’s hair, of course, was gray and usually uncombed, his beard quite stubbly, as if he only shaved once or twice a week, but never on the days when we saw him. Always scowling, the Rag Man had piercing eyes, suggesting anger withheld but nevertheless simmering none too deeply within. His was a gaze we swore could spot a boy hiding almost anyplace. As he came up Whitwell Street from Granite we could hear his raspy cry, “Rags, scrap” and I swear I occasionally heard him add “little boys.” He piloted an old freight wagon from a half-century earlier, which was complete with wooden-spoked wheels that had pounded iron rims over wood. His lone horse – a tired beast – was likewise old; its progress up Whitwell through the neighborhood every week was invariably slow. Whenever we heard the Rag Man’s approach, we’d all run to one of our presumably safe hiding places, fearing that if he spotted us we were doomed. One of my friends had a large yard that rose a good ways up the side of Presidents’ Hill. It had an abundance of trees and shrubbery behind which we could hide, giving us vantage points from which we could monitor the Rag Man, yet letting us remain well-hidden until he passed. A bit more daring than my playmates, I discovered what I thought was a fantastic hiding place from which I could gain a really close look at the old man. The house where my grandparents lived had a wide front porch, underneath which was a crawl space that, while small and cramped for an adult, was fairly spacious for a young boy. It was shielded from view by a diamond pattern latticework that afforded a clear view of the street a mere twenty feet away without leaving me too easily spotted by a passerby unaware of my secretive presence. The sandy soil underneath the porch muffled any sounds of movement. The site was a boy’s delight, complete with an almost unnoticeable side doorway. I wasn’t supposed to play around the porch, but my grandfather was always off working in Boston when the Rag Man made his rounds, leaving me free to exploit my hiding place. My friends joined me in my hiding place once they were satisfied that they would be safe there. It was a time of conspiratorial secrets for us. The Rag Man was our sworn enemy and we began conducting spying missions against him. We thought ourselves a special breed of boy, as no others could, or would dare, to get as close to the

1

Rag Man as we did in our cave beneath the porch. We could even spot the frayed fabric of his clothes and the scruffy whiskers on his cheeks and chin; that knowledge gave us special status with the other boys in the neighborhood when we told stories of our clandestine operations. They envied our courage and our air of accomplishment. It was an exciting, adventurous summer that I would remember throughout my life, even if its tales were cast from myths and imagination. By the time I was ten, the Rag Man was gone. Perhaps he had retired or maybe he passed away – no one I asked ever knew what had happened to him. He stopped coming up Whitwell during the fall preceding my tenth birthday, so that by the time I arrived in Quincy on my next summer vacation, he no longer had a presence along the street. My grandmother died three years after the Rag Man stopped coming through her neighborhood, ending her decade-long struggle with declining health. My grandfather passed away eighteen months later, severing my connection with Quincy and its Rag Man. Still well-remembered years later, I mourn the loss of that childhood myth and regret the disappearance of the innocence I possessed and the sense of wonderment I experienced when viewing the world and its surprises from an unspoiled perspective. Yet the cycle that governs our lives came around again when I had children of my own. When he was two years old, my son Will was frightened by a clown who had made a too-quick dive for him at a community festival we had been attending. After that, he wanted no part of clowns. Not having a rag man where we lived, I encouraged good behavior from Will by telling him I’d call up the clown and have him come over in his pick-up truck to take him away. That threat had the desired effect for a couple of years, just as my grandmother’s strategy had its run of success with me. Will even arrived at the point where he had devised a whole pantheon of clown monsters, leading up to the greatest terror of all: the sneaky snake clown, complete with its rattling tail. One early spring afternoon when Will was almost four my wife and her best friend were wheeling their newest additions to our two families down a street in our neighborhood, enjoying some unexpected warmth for March. Will toddled alongside them. Suddenly, he spotted a clown driving down the street in, of all things, a pick-up truck. The two women were surprised, then amused, by my son’s sudden pronouncement, “I hate that clown, I hate that stinking clown” and his continued mumbling about the clown as they pushed their strollers down the street. Just as I had dreaded the Rag Man’s approach when I was too young to know better, Will had his own childhood myth that acquired an enhanced aura of reality that afternoon. But that, too, would pass as he lost his sense of innocence and became a worldly and knowing young man during his preteen years.

2