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The Carpet Man

William Ade

    Most working people aspire to simple things. They often toggle between occupations, doubling up as needed, to sustain their family. They prefer television over high culture, beer instead of wine, and bowling in lieu of golf. They work with their hands, often cramming their bodies in tight spaces to make broken things work. Those kinds of people don’t search out adventure. Their pursuits never lead them far from the familiar. They’re the anonymous sustainers of the human species.
    My brother-in-law was such a man. He arrived on earth in mid-January 1942, birthed in the family homestead located in Plumtree, Indiana. With a surname of Smith, early on he was tagged with the unimaginative nickname of “Smitty.” The young man graduated from a tiny, rural high school, served a two-year Army stint in Korea, returning home in 1967. He married my eldest sister in 1969.
    At the time, his skill set was that of a carpet installer, an occupation, like most labor-intensive work, that paid enough to sustain his body while wrecking it for future use. Installing carpet required much time on his knees, bent over at the waist. The first task was nailing the tack strips along the perimeter of the rooms. Once the tack strips were installed, the padding and carpet were rolled out and cut to fit the measurements of the room.
    The specialized tool used for installing carpeting was a knee kicker. The head of the tool grabbed the carpet, and a swift kick with the knee to the padded butt of the device lifted the carpet over the tack strip. Smitty would be on his knees, moving crablike across a room, driving the knee kicker a yard at a time. There might be only one room to do, or, multiple rooms, hallways, stairs, and maybe a basement.
    My brother-in-law installed carpeting as a freelancer and as a full-time employee. He did the work when he operated his own carpet store. He later had a factory job for nineteen years, laying carpet on his off hours. The man performed the backbreaking work for nearly forty years. It was the labor that helped keep his wife and four kids fed and sheltered. While he’d jokingly refer to himself as the carpet-man, he couldn’t mask the pride he took in his skill and longevity.

***

    The 1995 Chevrolet Lumina wasn’t sporty and would probably have embarrassed the girl if she weren’t seventeen years old and happy to drive any type of car. It was the second day of December 2005, and she’d dropped her brother off at his high school. The time was seven fifteen, and the morning sun had yet to reach high enough in the sky to break the twilight. The air was clear but cold, the temperature dancing back and forth across the freezing mark.
    The girl motored along the street fronting the high school. She was alert to the school buses and cars entering the parking lot, discharging students, and then rolling away. As a responsible driver, she observed the speed limit, moving cautiously at twenty-five miles an hour.
    The windshield of the Lumina gathered some moisture from the air, blurring the girl’s vision. Her left hand grasped the lever off of the steering column. She twice flicked her wrist, pulling the lever, squirting a solution through tiny nozzles embedded in the hood. The wipers engaged, their blades smearing the liquid, back and forth.
    A sense of discomfort must have risen in the girl’s stomach, something short of panic. The fluid did little to clear the thin veneer of ice on the windshield. The glass in front of her went from opaque to nearly impenetrable. She could barely make out a yellow school bus turning in front of her, so she slowed her car down. Suddenly she heard a voice yelling for her to stop.

***

    Smitty was sixty-two years old when his youngest child was married off, and by then his body was a wreck. Pain from bad knees, recurring back spasms, and arthritic hands plagued him every day. He’d grabbed his social security entitlement that year but still needed to earn money. He didn’t require much, just a little extra to allow a meal out with his wife or a birthday gift for one of his grandchildren.
    One of Smitty’s seasonal part-time jobs was working as a school crossing guard at the local high school. On the morning of December 2, 2005, he was standing in the middle of the street in front of the school. He was bundled up against the cold, wearing a reflective vest, carrying a flashlight and an illuminating stop sign. It was quarter after seven, about halfway through his shift. He saw the headlights of a car approaching. In the time it took to inhale, his mind wondered why that car wasn’t slowing down. He shouted out a command, but the driver didn’t hear him in time to stop.
    The 1995 version of the Chevrolet Lumina weighed 3,330 pounds. Even if the vehicle had significantly slowed from the 25 mph speed limit, the force of the impact was tremendous. One witness, standing behind Smitty, heard a loud noise and reported seeing him “flying through the air.” A driver in a car directly behind the Lumina observed my brother-in-law going airborne as the driver of the Lumina slammed on the brakes.
    The front end of the car first impacted Smitty’s left leg, shattering the fibula about two inches below the knee. An instant later, the car’s grill tore into his right leg, breaking the fibula and lacerating the surrounding muscles. The force of the impact lifted the 200-pound man off the ground, sending the handheld stop sign airborne. It landed ten feet behind the car.
    In the second that it took for Smitty to elevate four feet off the ground, the car came to a stop underneath him. Gravity pulled him onto the hood, where his right hand clipped the wiper blade, tearing off the tip of his little finger. His body bounced off the hood and landed on the street, creating a small gash on his head. As he lay on the cold black pavement, he was thinking, Man, this is going to be bad.

***

    What else went through Smitty’s mind as he lay in the street, his body horribly traumatized? The epinephrine immediately squirted from his adrenal glands, increasing his heart rate, blood pressure, and metabolism to help the body and mind address the sudden stress. Maybe he had a temporary suspension of physical feelings. There must have been a sense of surrender to all the wonderful, God-given hormonal and electrical activity that momentarily protects the tender self in moments like that.
    Did my brother-in-law peek at his legs, hoping that everything looked the way it had that morning when he showered? I imagine him hesitating; the vision of muscles bruised, ripped, and lacerated by splintered bones and swimming in blood might be overwhelming. More likely, Smitty surrendered to prayer, petitioning God to send qualified medical personnel quickly, begging for divine intervention if human help wasn’t possible.

***

    My brother-in-law reported vague recollections of the rush to the hospital, followed by the injections and the patching and dabbing and stitching, all done quickly with assumed expertise. Of course, the pain eventually rose to the fore, the nerves sending panicked electrical impulses to the brain. The next hours and days were an excursion in and out of consciousness until the pain was managed enough that Smitty could concentrate on his life. A life now outside any plan he might have constructed before December 2.
    I wonder what thoughts were bantered in his mind as he sorted out his options. He’d only recently escaped the daily physical grind of factory work and carpet installing. Now he had to confront even more grievous pain, one that could always be there. Instead of carefree afternoon’s playing cards at the VFW, he’d be doing months of physical therapy to ensure a minimal amount of mobility. His family would not be celebrating his next birthday at a local restaurant. They’d be standing around his hospital bed with waning smiles on their faces.
    His wife, my sister, was rightfully bitter. It wasn’t only her husband’s life marred by the accident, but hers as well. His children never envisioned their dad being a cripple, unable to visit without assistance and accommodations. The harm of a young person’s driving failure rippled out beyond the one man she struck. How did that not affect my brother-in-law’s feelings toward the girl?
    A few days later, the girl and her parents came to visit Smitty. The young woman was in tears, her face flushed with emotion, as she entered the hospital room. Between sobs, she muttered her apologies, asking for forgiveness.
    And that was what my brother-in-law did. He forgave her. He forgave her without hesitation.
    In the fifteen years since Smitty’s accident, he and the girl have occasionally met for coffee, checking up on each other’s lives. Once, he and my sister stood in a church, as invited guests to her wedding. Of course, the insurance settlement relieved the family’s financial burden, but my brother-in-law still requires a riding scooter on his bad days, a cane on his better ones.
    We don’t award medals for generosity of spirit. Forgiveness is valued yet never celebrated, since it’s often a private affair between two people. But sometimes it’s important to recognize that people quietly living simple lives do heroic things. Not because they sought it out, but instead it was thrust upon them by life’s arbitrary inclinations.

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