On Time Mr. Roscoe, we called him. (So fun to say: Roscoe.) He worked for the Southern Pacific. When he came to our Sunday School, he sat down carefully on the stage, then rescued a gold railroad watch from his back pocket and said with a wink that he was always on time. That might have been his exact job, to keep the trains on time, except he told us how much more important it was to keep time with eternity.
Mr. Roscoe was a little man, dark hair slicked back, beginning to bald. The kind that came every Sunday from the neighboring mill town with his round-faced wife and his round-faced daughters—who, in terms of fashion, were not exactly up-to-date. This was the 1960s, but the Roscoe girls wore floral-print dresses and wavy hair, same as the pictures of country people in my parents’ wedding book.
But one day, Mr. Roscoe was not on time for church. He was not even there, and did not ever come again. His wife and daughters kept arriving now and then, but sat beneath their rosy skirts in a way that said they did not wish to speak with us. We were finally told that the late Mr. Roscoe had not died, he had just run away with a Southern Pacific secretary. Boarded a train, presumably, sitting gingerly on that hard seat.
—Paul J. Willis is professor of English at Westmont College. He is the author most recently of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild (WordFarm).
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