letus Thibble lived with his mother on a little piece of ground about four miles north of New Zion. It was all that was left of their land. The rest had to be sold when the old man died. Cletus couldn't farm it because, you see, Cletus wasn't quite right in the head. The money from the land kept them going until Mrs. Thibble was old enough to draw a pension from the government, and that's how they got by.
Every day, except Sunday, rain or shine, Cletus walked the four miles in to New Zion and spent the day rummaging around in the trash bins behind the stores and sitting in the New Zion Gen'l Mdse watching the checker game and listening to the talk. Occasionally, one of the merchants would hire him to do some heavy lifting, he was stout as a mule, and so he would have enough change to buy his lunch. If not, he went without. It didn't seem to bother him.
What Cletus rummaged for was cardboard. He would pile up as much as he could find or as much as he could carry and tie it into a bundle, and somewhere around five o'clock in the afternoon he would heave it up on his back and stooped and sometimes staggering under the load he would head out for home.
"What in the world do you do with all that cardboard?" people would ask him.
"Huh, huh," Cletus would laugh. "Keep it."
Ben Poser told how Cletus stored the cardboard in the old barn behind the house. He said that barn was stacked to the rafters and over half full. And Ben was out there often enough to have known.
Ben ran the taxi in New Zion. There were just enough people in town and nearby who didn't have cars or didn't drive for him to make a living. Ben had an arrangement with Otis Goins, who ran the New Zion Gen'l Mdse to take his calls and much of the day he was either in the back with the idlers or out in front in his taxi waiting for a fare. And day after day he watched Cletus struggling out of town with his load of cardboard.
One rainy afternoon, moved by compassion, Ben started up his taxi, caught up with Cletus, shoved the wet cardboard into the back seat, and drove him home. After that, whenever it was raining or cold, Ben would watch out for Cletus and drive him home. And somehow, without Ben ever meaning for it to, it became an every day job. And, on top of that, Cletus never seemed to expect a lift and Ben always had to insist.
"I don't mind doing it," Ben said, "but I'm always losing business because that's quitting time, and that's when people need a taxi."
One day Cletus didn't show up at his usual time. Ben waited a while and then scoured the town for him. He was nowhere to be found.
But the next morning, he was there in the back of Jim's Store.
"Huh, huh, huh," he laughed to the idlers. "Yawl hear 'bout the trick I played on old Ben? Huh, huh, huh. I hid so he couldn't find me and take me home."
