Poor Folk

   Ira Sams was born with nearly useless legs on which he got about with the help of crutches fashioned from branches of a bodark tree. The knobby limbs were wrapped at the bottom with pieces of tire inner tube so they would not poke holes in the linoleum floor. "Poor folk have poor ways," he was fond of saying in a faux apologetic manner. When he became sick with diabetes they had to remove one of his legs just above the knee. As if that were not enough misfortune for one man, in the same week that they had to remove his other leg his wife Margaret died from the epizeutic, leaving Ira to fend for himself. With the small amount of insurance from her death, Ira had the doctors make him two legs of plastic that were disproportionately lengthened, at his request, to make him nearly a foot taller! He seemed not to care that his torso appeared grotesquely stunted. "I have been a cripple all my life," he said. "Now I am a big man."

   With the remainder of Margaret's money he bought fancy suits and shoes to "keep up appearances," and wenched and boozed and gambled the rest away. While the money lasted, few objected that he was often offensively smug about his changed lot in life. When he marched about town on those long stiff legs of his, half a head taller than most, the children would look up and shout in mock terror "Look alive! Here comes Ira Sams!" to which he always responded with a big smile and a sweeping wave of his felt fedora hat. He was a "big man" for almost a year when, nearly penniless, he died from a blood clot on the brain. The cemetery association donated the plot next to Margaret's. The townspeople threw together a coffin of scrap plyboard barely four feet long and buried him with his plastic legs laid neatly by his side. Today there is a brief, complimentary, graveside service:

   "Poor folk have poor ways," saith the preacher. . . . "Amen." 

glwarren, 2014