He was a big man, tall and powerfully built, and he was very angry. I was 11 years old, and alone with him. I had never seen him like that before.
He was slapping himself on the arm, hard, angry slaps, and he was vocalizing. Not words but their nonverbal equivalents. He was grunting and growling. The offending wasp finally hit the ground, but the man wasn’t finished with it. He began stomping on it with his large boots, and kept this up for some time, all the while still vocalizing his anger at the painful sting. I knew it hurt, because already in my few years I had been stung by a variety of bees a number of times, once by four of them in my ankles after I stepped into a hive hidden by a pile of leaves. I had heard that wasp stings were worse. A half-hour later he came back to the sliver of the wasp’s corpse and stomped it again several times, for good measure.
I was both amazed at the sight and, I must admit, a wee bit amused. How many times can you smash-kill a wasp.
I knew the man by his name, Happy. Happy Hughes. I loved being around him.
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Normally Happy carried himself with an easy but confident demeanor, and in fact was never far from a jest and a smile.  During my last few years in elementary school, he worked many Saturdays at our house in the countryside outside of Terre Haute, Indiana. He did the Saturday chores that normally the man of the house would do–scraping, painting, fixing things, yard work of all sorts–but my architect father was working six days a week in those years at the family design firm. So for Saturday-work Dad hired Happy, who also worked as the janitor at the firm, Yeager Architects in the city.
Happy was also African-American, and seemingly he had no difficulty mixing in with white people. This despite living in a city that only 35 years earlier had been at the epicenter of the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. At one time back then, it is said that both the mayor’s office and the city council were controlled by the Klan.
In 1939 the national leadership of the Klan passed to a veterinarian from Terre Haute. But by then the national influence of the KKK’s second coming was already waning. Happy, his family, friends and neighbors lived through this period.
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I have two other standout memories of those Saturdays with Happy. Because he did not have a car and so could not drive out to our house to work, my father had to drive into the neighborhood of black working-class houses in Terre Haute and pick him up on Saturday mornings. Then, after his own day of work at the family architecture firm, Dad drove back to our house to pick Happy up and take him back to his house in the city.
One fall afternoon, as dusk was settling in around 5 p.m., his work done for the day, Happy and I were quietly sitting in the family room, waiting for my father to return to take him home. My father was commonly late in this routine. As the minutes passed and the room darkened, Happy finally broke our silence with a gruff voice: “Tell Ralph that if he is late again picking me up, I’m gonna whup him!”
I loved his “effrontery.” I knew that Happy couldn’t beat my father up. Not because he couldn’t easily handle my string-bean of a Dad physically. But because Dad was his boss.  The other piece that struck–and amused–me was that he called my father “Ralph.” I loved that, too. It rang odd in my ears, especially given the time and place, of which I was naive.
When our large brood of four children were very young–the four of us born in a period of only six years–my mother had an aide during the week to help watch over us and the house. They were black women from the city, and I especially well and fondly recall Clara and Myrtle. Even we children addressed these adults by their first names. They always called my parents Mr. and Mrs. Yeager. Much as we children always called our parents’ friends “Mr.” and “Mrs.”
Happy was happy not to partake in this imbalanced convention. It was “Ralph.” I laughed out loud, which Happy seemed to enjoy, and we returned to waiting in the dark.
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The other memorable event was not funny at all, then or now.  It involved three boys and Happy. Again, a Saturday. A good friend from my eighth-grade class, Danny, had stayed overnight at our house, and we were in my grandparents’ large yard right across the road from our house. My younger brother (by 16 months) was with us, and John and I got into a fight. This was not a particularly rare event. So close in age, and our personalities were oil and water. John was feisty and fearless, and I was the introverted, quiet type. But I was larger and stronger.
Usually our fights were just wrestling matches, and I always won those. In this one I threw John roughly to the ground as Danny watched us. He got up angrily and ran quickly toward me. He was so angry that I figured he was going to break an unwritten rule of our fighting–no hitting with fists–and try to punch me in the face. So at the precise moment I ducked.
Right into his knee, which hit me full speed in my midsection. I was on the ground for some minutes, not only in pain but also without the ability to breathe. John backed away about 40 feet to watch me, with Danny. At length, as my pain lessened and my breath returned, I became aware of another injury: I was abjectly humiliated, especially in front of my visiting friend.
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So much so that I arose with a blind fury I had never before experienced.  I gave chase to John and, even with his long head start back to our house, by the time he reached the door I was right on his heals. And when I caught him I was going to pummel him as never before, with my fists.
John flew through the door and I, but a second behind him now, flew into . . . a large hand on my chest, stopping me cold despite the momentum of my speed. The hand did not budge. It was Happy’s. He said, calmly and simply, “You aren’t coming in.” And he closed the door.
I immediately ran around through the back yard to the other side of the house and crumbled against its siding, sobbing. Not because I was humiliated, but because Happy’s intervention had prevented me from getting to my brother. I was horrified by the shot of hate in my heart, and what it might have caused me to do if I had caught him. Whatever it was, I would have regretted it for a lifetime.
Happy had saved me from my worst self. A self I had been unaware of having. Happy’s hand in my chest also immediately eliminated that self for the remainder of my lifetime.
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It turns out that Happy had another whole life and identity.  This revelation came to me the same school year as the awful fight with John. I don’t recall how or why I was told, but my father must have been my source.
Happy was also a clergyman in his community, the pastor of one of its churches. Happy was also the Reverend Eugene Hughes.
I was astonished. It was difficult for me to reconcile the Happy I knew with a Reverend Hughes I could only imagine. In the midst of 10.5 years of Catholic schooling, I believed that our parish pastor–and school principal–was our throughway to God, a holy man holding the keys to heaven, a man whose days and nights were given wholly to prayer, soul-saving, and other religious practices.
It was difficult for me to see a pastor whose occupations included sweeping floors, trimming bushes, pulling weeds, and killing wasps with relish. All of this was an effort for me, but slowly I began to understand. Happy’s congregation was too poor to pay him a living wage, and so he went to work cleaning, painting and fixing other people’s properties. White folks’ properties. He did so with dedication to his family and his community, knowing that his relationships with his two jobs was deeply written into the country’s–and his city’s–racial history. And he did so without complaint, smiling at all whom he encountered.
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What I knew for certain was that something had always drawn me to Happy from my early boyhood. He had a quiet charisma, although back then I did not know that term or its meaning. I simply felt his pull. As the years came and left, and long after my family moved to another state when I was 16, I began to wonder more seriously about Happy’s magnetism that I had felt back then. More recently, musing about my own faith journey to agnosticism,1 another answer came to me.
It was not only his spiritedness. It was also his quiet, calming spirit. His spirituality that I somehow felt. I believe I felt it most strongly, without being able to name it, when he saved me from battering my brother that day. I knew even then that he had done something special, something akin to a miracle, showing up just when I needed him most. He had ministered to me and saved an important part of my life.
About 20 years ago I returned to Terre Haute with my wife and son to visit friends. On the top of my list was to see whether I could find Happy and speak with him for the first time in decades. On the internet I had been able to track down his address and phone number, and so I planned to call him and ask him if he would see me. I wished to tell him how special he was to me, and how he had marked my life.
We pulled up outside his house in the city’s working-class neighborhood that I imagine he lived in throughout his life. I dialed the number on my cell phone, hoping that he would remember me and invite us in when I told him we were parked in front of the house. A woman answered, a younger relative of Happy’s. Of course I knew he would be an old man by now, so I was unsurprised that someone else picked up the phone.
I asked for him, saying that I knew him back in the early ’60s, and that I was hoping to see him while I was visiting the city from Massachusetts. She told me that he had died just several weeks earlier.
I will never know whether Happy would have remembered me, or of his instant work of rescue on that violent day. While that had been a major life event for me, one I think about often even now, for him I suspect it fit simply into a very long list of his acts that helped turn people’s lives toward the good.
Because that’s what being Happy always amounted to.
