The Soup Kitchen - Tom A. Wolfe (carter reed .TXT) 📗

The Soup Kitchen

Two familiar faces arrived at the line of white wooden tables set up in the basement of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Bradford Street. The man and woman, weak with hunger and frozen to the bone from the cold February wind blowing outside, vacantly glanced around the carpeted room and noticed the white board which still had verses written in green marker from that morning’s Sunday school lecture. Frosty Sunday mornings brought with the dawn a throng of children bundled up in scarves and jackets that doubled each one’s size. Afternoons in the basement of St. Paul’s were different. At 3:00 every day when the soup kitchen opened, the throng of lively children was replaced by a procession of men and women who, after spending the day shuffling around the streets looking for jobs, came to get their oftentimes single daily meal: a lukewarm plastic bowl of chicken-noodle soup. A peculiar smell of grease, dirty laundry and the freezing winter air followed the homeless as they filed slowly past the volunteers who ladled out the yellow liquid.
The man, who was named Aubrey, turned to his girlfriend Rita and made a sour face. His eyes communicated the sorrow he felt to Rita and she quickly looked down at the table beside them. It was as if she felt that if she looked Aubrey in the eye too long, they would realize the hopelessness of their position and lose the remainder of their will to carve out a meager existence in the ugly world of a small town’s most wretched destitution. Aubrey had never been a wealthy man, or even a comfortable man, but he had always looked scornfully at those who resorted to charity to help them get by. Standing in line, he retraced the path in his mind that fate had taken him to his current condition of homelessness as he had done countless times before. Throughout the younger years of his life, Aubrey was always able to get by sufficiently doing menial jobs just as all of his friends from high school did. One by one Aubrey’s friends left the stagnant life of their small rural town and moved on to live in poverty in other parts of the country until it seemed the only person left to remind Aubrey of his happier teenage days was his high school sweetheart Rita. Their relationship had long ago become platonic. Homelessness does not leave time for romance, and the youthful lust for each other slowly left along with all of the opportunities for work in the town.
When Aubrey dwelled on the conditions of his life for too long he was filled with an overwhelming anxiety. He desperately searched the room for something to take his mind off the fact that after this meal, he would have to leave the warmth of the basement and walk the mile back to his car behind the local Wal-Mart to sleep for the night. His eyes drifted back to the white board. “You cannot serve both God and Money” met his gaze mockingly, and Aubrey let out a snort of contempt for the people who earlier that day had discussed the quote and then returned to their warm, peaceful homes. They didn’t have to greedily eye a dirty basin of canned soup every afternoon; they weren’t chilled from wandering the street.
Rita nudged Aubrey. They had reached the young woman who, dressed in an old white apron retrieved from the musty smelling closet behind the church kitchen, smiled as she performed her weekly good deed as the ladler. Rita got her serving then stood off to the side as she waited for Aubrey to get his. When it was Aubrey’s turn, the young woman filled his plastic bowl too full and Aubrey felt a splash on his wrist. Yellow broth had trickled down his wool glove and was stopped at the point where his coat sleeve, slightly too short for his lanky arms, touched his bare skin. There being no napkins on the table where the bowls and silverware were laid out, Aubrey pulled his sleeve slightly up and wiped himself dry on his dirty grey sweatpants. He motioned to Rita and they walked to the last table in the crowded basement that had open seats.
Aubrey carefully laid the bowl of soup on the table, trying to avoid acquiring any more damp stained spots on his few articles of winter clothing. Even if his daily scrounging for loose change gave him enough money, laundry was near the bottom of the list of things he had to spend on. After the expenses for extra food were paid (after all, a bowl of soup a day is hardly enough to live on), Aubrey needed money to fill his car with gas so he wouldn’t have to walk across town looking for jobs. There was also the money needed for his and Rita’s cigarette habit, for a weekly shower at the campground near the highway, and for countless other day to day expenses one runs into when living life without a home.
Without speaking to each other or any of their downtrodden companions at the table, Aubrey and Rita ate mechanically. They didn’t look around anymore; they just stared at the contents of their bowls. The bright lights in the church basement, the whiteboard with the ironic passage that Aubrey remembered from when he too as a young child went to Sunday school, the rough carpet under the soles of his dilapidated shoes, and the faces of poverty all eating the same soup around him oppressed Aubrey this day as it did every day. A man who had more experiences to draw upon to think about in times like this may have been able to briefly escape his world and be carried away by his fantasies. Aubrey, experiencing nothing but this bleak poverty for the past decade, could not distract his mind for long with fantasies before it inevitably went back to brooding over his life and desperately searching for ways to improve his conditions. Cold air gushing in to the basement as the heavy wooden basement door swung open bringing with it more shabbily-clad middle-aged men and women combined with the sick sensation of damp wool on his glove made Aubrey turn to thoughts of his poverty quicker than usual this day.
So this was the lowest a man could go in life, Aubrey thought as he gazed into his soup. Rock bottom was found in the same room where wealthy men sent their children every week to be taught how to be good Christian citizens. These wealthy men, who happened to be the ones born into a family that could afford to set them up into good lives where they would never have to wonder where their next meal came from, paid no attention to the people like Aubrey. Their only thoughts of Aubrey were the same thoughts that they’d have towards a spot of muddy snow on the side of the street: “It’s unfortunate that ugly things exist in an otherwise nice place like this, but so they always have and so they always will.” And yes, so they always would. As the patrons of St. Paul’s soup kitchen would return to the hotels, campgrounds, or cars that they were staying in they wouldn’t have much to do other than get close to each other and comfort each other in the cold winter night, so more children would be born into poverty and increase the strain on charitable organizations like St. Paul’s.
By now Aubrey’s soup was finished and he was staring into the empty plastic bowl. He roused himself from his thoughts momentarily and looked at Rita, who was also staring into space, lost deep in thought. At closer inspection of his surroundings, Aubrey realized that all of the people sitting at his table had the same hopeless look of contemplation cast across their faces. Surely, all of the other people at the table were tormented by the same lingering presence of poverty. Poverty can make a man feel hopelessly alone when he comes to a place like St Paul’s Soup kitchen, where all of the faces express the same desire to be somewhere else, to be a different person, and no one is interested in your existence. Perhaps it was because of the food that filled his belly, or because Aubrey’s bones were gradually being warmed by the steady stream of warm air that flowed out of the old basement radiator, but looking at all of these faces had a different effect on Aubrey today. He was comforted that the woman sitting next to him, who he had known since his earliest high school days, was also going through the exact same thought-processes as him; he was comforted that all of these strangers, too, knew exactly what he was going through. Unlike the parents who dropped their children off to Sunday school that morning who all lived separate lives with their own problems, the people at the soup kitchen that day all collectively formed a necessary niche in society, just like all of the other social classes. They formed a single living organism that just happened to be characterized by things like their wretched living conditions and a persistent lingering hunger and despair that was briefly abated once a day in that basement.
Filled with a sense of warm-hearted camaraderie brought on by this realization that he was a member of this essential part of human life, Aubrey stood up sanguinely and told Rita it was time to leave; they had taken up seats long enough and it was time for another couple to eat their soup in the exact same way that they had just eaten theirs. The organism that was alive in the basement would continue living regardless of Aubrey and Rita’s presence. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the rest of the days that Aubrey and Rita had the need, Aubrey would come back to the basement of St. Paul’s and rejoin the throngs of homeless, assuming his position in the natural order of society that he now gladly accepted, even cherished. For now, however, Aubrey and Rita stepped out alone onto the cold street outside the church and began the mile long journey back to their car behind Wal-Mart.

Publication Date: 03-16-2010

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