A day Jimmy Matthew Cartwright believed he saw an angel, only to discover it was something far more ordinary and far more meaningful.
Folks in Piedmont always said Jimmy Matthew Cartwright was born with two gifts. First, the ability to spot trouble from three counties away. Second, the unfortunate knack for walkin’ straight into it anyway. He had a heart as big as a watermelon and a mind that occasionally drifted like a rooster with no sense of direction.
One warm spring afternoon, Jimmy Matthew came tearin’ down Woolf Avenue like the town marshal in a hurry, his arms held over his head and his face lit up like he was beholding the Heavenly Host itself.
“I seen an angel!” he hollered before he even reached the porch where Raymond Rue, Deacon Clyde Barnes, and old Mrs Thompson sat rockin’ and mindin’ their own quiet business.
The three of them froze mid-rock. Raymond’s mouth hung open, Clyde’s eyebrow twitched, and Mrs Thompson, who had survived both the Great Depression and the Baptist Ladies Auxiliary, simply blinked and waited for the foolishness to reveal itself.
Jimmy stumbled up the steps, gaspin’ for breath.
“I seen an angel,” he repeated. “Right out yonder by the school playground. Wings. Light. The whole thing.”
Clyde Barnes, who prided himself on heavenly discernment but could not even predict the weather, squinted real hard.
“You sure it weren’t just the sun hittin’ somethin’ shiny?”
Jimmy shook his head so fast his cap near flew off.
“No sir. This thing was hoverin’. I felt the holiness comin’ off it like warm gravy off of a biscuit.”
Mrs Thompson coughed politely.
“Did it speak to you?”
Jimmy nodded, eyes huge.
“It made a sound, but I didn’t understand the words. Sort of a soft whoooosh. Like Heavenly wind.”
Raymond Rue stood up slow. He had learned not to dismiss Jimmy outright because Jimmy was one of those rare souls who occasionally tripped over the truth by accident.
“Let’s go look,” Raymond said.
So the porch posse rose from their chairs and followed Jimmy down toward the school playground.
Now, the closer they walked, the quieter Jimmy got. The angelic glow he had described seemed to have dimmed considerably. Raymond noticed this with some suspicion.
Once they reached the playground, Jimmy stopped, pointed toward the chain-link fence, and whispered:
“There. It was there. Right there over by that oak tree.”
Everyone stared.
At first, seein’ nothin’ unusual, they figured the angel had flown off to holier business.
But then they saw it.
Swingin’ gently from a low branch of the oak tree, turnin’ in the breeze, was a tangle of bright white fabric. Every now and then the wind would catch it just right and the light would shine through it like a halo.
Mrs Thompson shaded her eyes.
“Child,” she said kindly, “that is a bedsheet.”
Indeed, it was.
A plain white queen-size bedsheet, torn loose from somebody’s backyard clothesline and caught up on the branch like a ghost too lazy to haunt anything.
Jimmy stared at it, his face fallin’ a little but not enough to count as disappointment.
Raymond clapped a hand on his shoulder.
“Looks like your angel was a little more down to earth than you thought.”
But then something happened that none of them expected.
A little girl from the elementary school came runnin’ across the yard, her face wet with tears.
“That’s mine,” she sniffled. “Mama says we can’t afford a new one yet. The wind took it yesterday and I thought it was gone forever.”
Jimmy looked at her, at the sheet, then at the sky.
“Well,” he said softly, “maybe it was an angel after all, just not the kind I thought.”
Mrs Thompson nodded.
“I reckon the Lord sends help in all sorts of everyday ways. Sometimes even by the clothesline.”
Jimmy helped the girl untangle the sheet, folded it careful as a church bulletin, and handed it back to her with a smile so full of kindness you could have bottled it like syrup.
As she walked away, clutchin’ that salvaged bedsheet to her chest, Raymond leaned close to Jimmy.
“You know,” he said, “in a manner of speakin’, maybe you did see an angel. A small one. With pigtails.”
Jimmy considered this, then grinned.
“I’ll take that,” he said. “Ain’t every day a man gets to help an angel get her wings back.”
And from that day on, whenever Jimmy Matthew passed that old oak tree, he tipped his hat to it out of simple gratitude.
Because some angels glow, and some angels speak, and some angels hover in clouds.
But the best kind of angels, Jimmy often said, are the ones who need their neighbors just as much as their neighbors need them.
New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.
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