Early before dawn one Friday morning, I noticed a young man handsome and strong walking down the alleys of our city. He was pulling a cart filled with clothes bright and new, calling in a clear voice, “Rags! Rags! New rags for old! I’ll take your tired rags!” This was a wonder. The man stood six feet four, arms like tree trunks, hard and muscular, and his eyes flashed intelligence. Could he find no better job than this, a Ragman in the inner city? I followed him. My curiosity drove me. I wasn’t disappointed. Soon the Ragman saw a young woman sitting on her back doorstep. She was sobbing into a handkerchief, sighing and shedding a thousand tears. Her shoulder shook. Her heart was breaking. The Ragman stopped his cart.
Quietly, he walked to the women, stepping around the tin cans, dead toys and rubbish. “Give me your rag,” he said so gently, “and I’ll give you another” He slipped the handkerchief from her eyes. She looked up and he laid across her palm a linen cloth so clean and new that it shone. She blinked from the gift to the giver.
Then as he began to pull the cart again, the Ragman did a strange thing. He put her stained handkerchief to his own face and then he began to weep, to sob as grievously as she had done, his shoulders shaking. Yet she was left without a tear.
This is a wonder, I breathed to myself, and I followed the sobbing Ragman like a child who cannot turn away from the mystery. “Rags! Rags! New rags for old!”
In a little while, as the evening drew in, the Ragman came upon a girl whose head was wrapped in a bandage, whose eyes were empty. Blood soaked her bandage. A single line of blood ran down her cheek. Now the Ragman looked upon the child with pity and drew a lovely yellow bonnet from his cart.
“Give me your rags,” he said, tracing his own line on her cheek, “and I’ll give you mine.” The child could only gaze at him while he loosened the bandage, removed it, and tied it on his own head. The bonnet he set on hers. And I gasped at what I saw.
For with the bandage, went the wound! Against his brow ran a darker, more substantial blood, his own!
“Rags! Rags! I take old rags!” cried the sobbing, bleeding, strong, intelligent Ragman.
The Ragman seemed more and more now to hurry. “Are you going to work?” he asked a man who leaned against a telephone pole. The man shook his head. The Ragman pressed him. “Do you have a job?” “Are you crazy?” sneered the other.
He pulled away from the pole, revealing the right sleeve of his jacket-flat, the cuff stuffed into his pocket. He had no arm.
“So,” said the Ragman, “give me your jacket, and I’ll give you mine.” Such quiet authority in his voice. The one-armed man took off his jacket. So did the Ragman— and I trembled at what I saw. The Ragman’s arm stayed in the sleeve, and when the other put it on, he had two good arms, strong as tree trunks, but the Ragman had only one.
“Go to work,” he said. After that he found a drunk, lying unconscious, beneath an army blanket, an old man, hunched and wizened and sick. He took the blanket and wrapped it around himself, but for the drunk he left new clothes.
And now I had to run to keep up with the Ragman, though he was weeping uncontrollably and bleeding freely at the forehead, pulling his cart with one arm and stumbling for drunkenness, falling again and again, exhausted, old and sick— yet he went with terrible speed.
On spider’s legs he skittered through the alleys of the city, this mile and the next, until he came to its limits and then he rushed beyond. I wept to see the change in this man. I hurt to see his sorrow. And yet I needed to see where he was going in such haste, perhaps even to discover what drove him so.
The little old Ragman—he finally came to a landfill. He went to the garbage pits. And then I wanted to help him in what he did, but I hung back, hiding. He climbed a hill. With tormented labor, he cleared a little space on that hill. Then he sighed. He lay down. He pillowed his head on a handkerchief and a jacket. He covered his bones with an army jacket. And then he died.
Oh, how I cried to witness that death! I slumped in a junked car and wailed and mourned as one who has no hope because I had come to love the Ragman. I sobbed myself to sleep. I did not know—how could I know?—that I slept through Friday night and Saturday and its night too. But then on Sunday I was awakened by a violent light.
Light—pure, hard, demanding light—slammed against my sleeping face and I blinked and looked, and I saw the last and first wonder of all.
The Ragman was folding the blanket most carefully, a scar on his forehead but alive! And besides that, so healthy! There was no sign of sorrow, or of age and all the rags he had shined for cleanliness.
Well I lowered my head and trembling for all that I had seen. I got out of the junk car and walked to the Ragman. I told him my name with shame, for I was a sorry figure next to him. Then I stripped myself of everything and I said to him with yearning in my voice,
“Dress me. Make me new again!” He dressed me—my Lord! He put new rags on me and I am a wonder beside Him.
The Ragman! The Ragman! The Christ!