I drove over to Charlie’s Truck Stop this past week as I usually do, but though the sun was out, the winter wind seemed colder than the actual temperature. I parked in front near the gas pumps and Jake came out to fill the tank. The normal jocular expression was missing from his face when he asked if I wanted a fill up. I told him I did and we just stood there in the cold without speaking for the longest, just listening to the sound of the gas pumps and looking out over the brown fields. The tank was full and Jake was putting the gas cap back on when he said he supposed I had heard the news. I had. My friend Bob Havershold had called me up just before noon to tell me. I sat by the phone for the longest after I hung up. The world just wasn’t the same any longer. It had seemed a bright day after so long with rain and clouds. The sun was out and I was in good spirits. Now the sun no longer made the world brighter. The day was just cold and dreary.

There were things I needed to do and I had tried to work, but the work did not go well. I would catch myself just sitting and looking at the computer monitor, completely unaware of what I had been doing. When I made the last stupid mistake and realized I was going to have to scrap everything I had done in the last hour and start over, I shut the computer down and went out to the car to drive over to Charlie’s.

Jake and I were inside and I was getting ready to pay him when I looked over toward the pot belly stove and realized, with a start, I was expecting to see Mister Johnson and that he was never going to be sitting there again.

“It’s just not going to be the same without him,” Jake said to me. I don’t know how long I had been standing looking at that chair where Mister Johnson sat and told those stories we all enjoyed listening to. It was as though Jake’s words pulled me back to the reality of the moment. I said to Jake that I understood. Jake took the money and counted out change. Mister Johnson’s brother found him early in the morning when he went over. The two of them were going out to cut wood together. It was before daylight. Mister Johnson always liked to get an early start at the day’s work. The lights in the house were from the living room but there was no answer when the Reverend knocked on the door and called out. Reverend Johnson let himself in and found Mister Johnson’s body in his favorite easy chair in the corner of the room beside the big book case. Mister Johnson had been reading the paper. It looked as though he had grown tired of reading and just laid his head back for a rest. The Reverend called the doctor, but it was evident the time had long past when the doctor could do anything. There was no official medical report yet, but everyone was sure Mister Johnson had died of a heart attack. Jake was of a mind to leave it at that. To his way of thinking, there was no reason to go doing digging and probing into Mister Johnson’s body to determine the exact cause of death. Mister Johnson had passed on and nothing on earth can bring him back.

I kept thinking of the first time I met Mister Johnson. The Cat House in Corinth is something of an institution around with a whole mythology of urban legends surrounding that grand old building. The cats of question are, of course, the kind with four legs. It seems the old lady who owned the place died and left the place to her cats. The story is the cats were allowed to run wild and breed until the place was infested with the beasts. Legend claims the neighbors came to complain of the stench of cats from the house. The truth was much less exotic. The old lady had hired Mister Johnson to help with maintenance of the place about a year before she died. After her death, he and his wive had come by daily to feed and take care of the cats. There was no breeding taking place in that old house as the cats had all been to see the animal doctor and he had taken care of their breeding capacity. Mister Johnson stayed to care for the cats and stayed on to keep up the house after the last cat had passed.

I walked past the old house many a time as it is constructed something in the manner of a small castle with stone walls and an enclosed rear yard and abandoned tennis court. I met Mister Johnson one day as I was walking past and we began to talk about the old house. It was then he told me about the cats and about how he came to be caretaker of the property. He told me about the piano in the house that began to play itself. It gave him and his wife quite a start and he determined to discover why a piano in a house where no one lived would suddenly begin to play. The piano was covered with a sheet and it was obvious it was not one of the cats walking over the keys. The solution to the mystery happened to be much smaller than a cat. It was a mouse that had found a hiding place in the piano. With a number of cats in the house, the mouse’s musical performance days soon came to an end.

There was another story about a mysterious blinking light that displayed itself at night on the wall of the kitchen. Mister Johnson began to wonder at the source of the light. He traced it to the glass front of a cabinet in the living room reflecting from a mirror on the stairs to a glass covering of a photograph in the upstairs bedroom to a flashing neon sign in front of an auto dealer ship two blocks away in downtown Corinth. I could sit and listen for hours to the stories Mister Johnson told. Many of his stories I heard several times and each time he told the story it was just a bit different from the time before. Now those stories are gone forever. Mister Johnson would have been ninety years old next week.

“I guess my wife won’t be fixing that cake she had planned for Mister Johnson’s birthday,” Jake said. There was a tear that came rolling down his cheek. We are, all of us, going to miss that old man terribly.

END