After we buried my mother, my brother and I were attended to by the neighbors while our dad was at work. The couple next door was especially kind to us. She was barren, and over the years, I suspect we had become her surrogate children. They were regarded as the older folks of the neighborhood. Mrs. Webster, Ida, who was sixty, spent most of her days quilting, knitting, working on her needlepoint, cooking for the relatives of the recently departed, and “doing God’s work”‘. She evoked images of Mrs. Santa Claus, with her silver hair, immaculately done up in a bun, and her plump figure modestly covered with an abundance of long, full material gathered at the waist, with only the toes of her shoes peeking out the bottom. Depending on the day, she smelled of rose, lavender or apple pie.
Mr. Webster, Web, was sixty-five, and not all that well-liked. He had been a railroad worker, and many years previously the switch on a railroad car had accidentally been thrown into reverse while he was standing on the tracks. It resulted in the loss of his right big toe and part of the adjoining one. After a few complications and set-backs, it was determined that he should be discharged with a reasonable pension, rather than creating a new position for him.
His clothes closet sported an entire rack of nothing but long-sleeved, flannel shirts, in seven different shades of plaid, which he tucked into his well-worn overalls. Lined up on the floor underneath the flannel shirts were many pairs of identical slippers, each in varying degrees of disrepair. Ida saw to it that every Christmas he received a new pair of leather slippers. He immediately cut a hole in the right slipper where his big toe would have gone–if he’d had one–“to give my ‘toe-less’ foot breathing room;” but also, I suspect to elicit sympathy from anyone who hadn’t heard his tale of toe woe.
He wandered about the neighborhood, often showing up on a doorstop to pass the time of day with the women, who had already heard his stories again and again. He loved to listen to, and spread gossip whenever it was convenient. If the women would see him coming, they’d get on their phone and pass the word that ‘Slipper-y Web’ was making his way down the street. His gait was uneven because of his injury, but each day, he’d walk haltingly to the local grocery for Ida, clutching her daily grocery list, and hoping he’d run into a sympathetic ear.
I had been cautioned more than once not to go into their house if Mrs. Webster wasn’t there, but I didn’t need any encouragement from my folks after the time he curled his finger in my direction and motioned for me to come over, patting the bench where he was sitting. He smiled with the sun glinting little shards of brightness off his gold front tooth as he called: “Sunny, if you’ll leave that barking dog of yours at home, you can come over and I’ll show you where my big toe used to be!”
That pretty much tells it as far as the Websters are concerned, except that Ida pinned all the laundry on her clothesline every day but Sunday, promptly at nine o’clock in the morning. Web tended to his vegetable garden and spent a good deal of time beneath the shade of their thriving green apple tree, sittin’ and whittlin’ in his slatted, paint-peeled wooden chair, watchin’ the world go by. Which meant singularly–the neighborhood!
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The day after my mother’s murder, when the police knocked on the Webster’s door, no one answered. Ida was in the basement running her noisy wringer washer, humming a tune, oblivious to any sound, and Web was at the grocery. The policemen never bothered to return–after all, as they said to each other, “The Websters are above reproach.”
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