Can you tell I was not in the best of moods? But then, I don’t think anyone was feeling particularly chipper that night, despite the soft and cheerful classical music coming through the speakers, one in each of the four corners of the main floor. (I think it was something by Aaron Copland because listening to it made me feel like I was standing in the middle of a wheat field on a sunny day, and that only made me feel depressed.) The shelter was about a third full—there were twenty-five, maybe thirty people, not counting the staff—and the evening had already seen its first “episode”: a young guy named Joe (I didn’t know his last name, people who come here rarely have them) had kind of flipped out earlier and took off into the dreary night, upsetting everyone who’d been eating at the table with him. The Reverend (the man who runs this shelter) spent a little while getting everyone settled down, then sent one of the regulars, Martha, out to find Mr. Joe Something-or-Other. Neither one of them had come back yet, and I suspected the Reverend was getting worried.

The Cedar Hill Open Shelter is located just the other side of the East Main Street Bridge, in an area known locally as “Coffin County.” It’s called that because there used to be a casket factory in the area that burned down in the late sixties and took a good portion of the surrounding businesses with it, and ever since then the whole area has gone down the tubes. Most of the serious crime you read about in The Ally happens in Coffin County. It’s not pretty, it’s not popular, and it’s definitely not safe, especially if you’re homeless.

As hard as it may be to believe, there’s not all that many homeless people in Cedar Hill. If pressed to come up with a number, the Reverend would probably tell you that our good town has about fifty homeless folks (give or take; not bad for a community of fifty-odd thousand), most of whom you’ll find here on any given night, which explains how he knows all of them by name.

The shelter is in the remains of what used to be a hotel that was hastily and badly reconstructed after the fire; the lobby and basement were left practically unscathed, but the upper floors were a complete loss, so down they came, and up went a makeshift roof (mostly plywood, corrugated tin, and sealant) that on nights like this amplified the sound of the rain until you thought every pebble in the known universe was dropping down on it; luckily, the lobby’s high ceiling and insulation had remained intact after the fire, so that—combined with the soft classical music the Reverend always has playing—turned what might have been a deafening noise into only an annoying one. When it became evident that “Olde Town East” (as Coffin County used to be called) was not going to recover from the disaster, the city decided its efforts at a face-lift were better employed elsewhere. As a result of the Reverend’s good timing in getting the city to donate this building, the Cedar Hill Open Shelter was the only one in the state (maybe even the whole country) to have Italian marble tile on its floors and a ballroom ceiling with a chandelier hanging from it. Makes for some interesting expressions on people’s faces when they come through that door for the first time.