The Abandoned

by Kyp Harness

  Garry Lewis was mad when he found out. “Miner Forty-niner don’t have any right to tell you to stop making it!” he said, and at recess he saw Mr. Gosland outside doing recess duty and went up to him and asked him, “Why’d you tell Tim to stop making his paper?” Mr. Gosland’s eyes narrowed and he asked, “Whose boy scout are you?”

  “Ha-ha! Tim got in trouble for his paper!” my brother Jason said at supper that night.

  “What’re you laughin’ about?” my dad said. “You’re in trouble, too. You’re in there as Chief Pencil Sharpener!”

  “Yeah, that’s right!” I said.

  “Oh, you think it’s okay if you go down, just so long as you take the other guy with ya, huh?” Dad said, turning on me.

  The problem with doing the drawing for the school newsletter, though, was that I would submit the drawings suggested by Mr. Gosland relating to the subject matter of the newsletter, which he would advise me of when he took me into his office each month, and the drawing would be taken by the school’s secretary and traced onto carbon by which the newsletter was reproduced. Her tracings, I found to my anger when the first newsletter was printed, often left out lines that I considered essential, making some parts of the drawings appear as blobs, or leaving out mouths or eyes on some of the figures. It didn’t seem to make any difference to anyone else, but to me they didn’t have any of the feel or spirit I’d drawn them with, and I asked Mr. Gosland if I could trace them onto the carbon myself, and he said that wasn’t necessary because Mrs. Brennan did that job “very handily.” I would try to say that my drawings didn’t look as good when she traced them, but he chuckled and asked me if I wanted to see his chipmunk in the terrarium.

  “Now for this month I had the idea that you could draw something relating to the maple sugar trip the grade ones went on when the class was told that to get sap they had to ‘tap’ the trees, and one of the children…” here Mr. Gosland paused to chuckle, “one of the children spoke up and asked if ‘tapping the trees’ meant putting water taps on them like they had at home. So I thought you could draw the trees with water taps on them.”

  At home my dad started going into work again. One night at my aunt’s house on my mother’s side of the family, I heard him telling Aunt Maxine and Uncle Elmer the story: “They said to me, you’ve had a heart attack and I said, ‘Bull—shit! I didn’t have no heart attack!’ I didn’t have any pain in my heart, it was my arm that hurt like a bitch! And they said that’s where it hits ya, and then by Jesus, I started feelin’ terrible again and they told me I had another heart attack! And I wake up and this one over here…” I pictured him pointing at my mom, since I was in the next room playing with my brother and my cousins, “this one over here is sittin’ there cryin’ her eyes out! Jesus Christ! So I said, ‘What’s the matter with you? I’m the one that had the heart attack!’ and she says she’s worried about me. ‘Well, Jesus, how is your sittin’ there cryin’ gonna help me?’ I says to her.”

  Meanwhile, my cousin and my brother and I had found some old boxing gloves that we brought into the room where the adults were talking and when Dad saw them he started talking about how he’d boxed in the Navy. My cousin was Uncle Elmer’s grandson, and his dad was there too. Since my cousin was the same age and size as Jason, they decided the two boys would put on the gloves and spar a bit so we moved out to Uncle Elmer’s front room, and the men who’d been drinking some beers showed the boys the right way to lace up the gloves, and Dad prodded Jason while Uncle Elmer and his son-in-law coached our cousin, and as they faced off against each other, at first the two boys were smiling but something in the men’s faces became tense and impatient as they stood behind the boys with their beers, my dad drawing fitfully on his cigarette.

  “Hey, that ain’t the way ya do it—ya gotta get in and under,” he said to Jason, bending to show him how it was done, while Uncle Elmer and his son-in-law fussed with our cousin, getting him to hold his gloves up in the right way, and they all surrounded the two boys, the fight all of a sudden becoming serious:

  “Hey—don’t let him get ya like that!”

  “Block him!”

  “Uppercut!”

  Something terrible came into the eyes of my father, his right eye squinting up, and on the other side, Uncle Elmer and his son-in-law becoming more hungrily brutish in a way I’d never seen before—until I remembered when I’d heard about my uncle going to secret cockfights in drive sheds in the country where they made roosters fight each other to the death, and the dark eyes of the men fed on the two boys fighting, pushing them together, seeming almost angry like there was a poison they needed to ooze out of themselves and the only way they could get at it was to have the two boys fight, and my brother and my cousin starting out laughing, now serious, now doing their best to stand up before the prodding of the men whose voices were getting more guttural and careless, and the boys finally began crying, tears spilling from their eyes and down over their contorted mouths and onto their gloves, and the men going, “Aw come on now, what’s th’ matter with ya?” and the little boys bawling, their faces red and hot with shame, and the women coming in from the kitchen, my mother, Aunt Maxine, her daughter-in-law: “Now what’s going on here? What the hell are you doing to them?”

  “Jus’ a little boxin’ lesson…” Dad said and shrugged, smirking at the other men, turning back to the women with amused and diminishing contempt.

  For a while it seemed like Dad had not been drinking and then he was. Certainly I had heard him tell the stories of when his pals sneaked him beers into the hospital and he even bragged that the doctor told him one beer a day was good for him. “Just down a couple beds from me was Rob, you know, the guy who owns the funeral home in town, and he says, ‘By God, I’ll get you yet, Dirk!’”

  He still had to go to a lot of doctor’s appointments and after one of them as me and my brother sat in the back seat of the car I heard my parents talking in hushed voices about something I couldn’t hear, though I thought it had something to do with what they sometimes did on Sunday afternoons when they asked us to go out and play, and they went into their room which they usually never did in the afternoon, and so we tried the bedroom door and found it locked, so we went outside and looked in through the window and in the dim shadows of the bedroom we would only see the shape of Dad on Mom, and could specifically make out only the sight of Mom’s feet dangling over the edge of the bed with her panties draping from her toes, and later when she asked us what we saw, that’s what we said, and now as they talked in the front of the car, their voices implying more than they said, with spaces in their sentences to be filled in by what was in their minds, all the words circling around the question of When? I knew somehow they talked of what made the panties drape from Mom’s toes.

  As he returned to work and to the Point Edward Ex-Servicemen’s Club, my dad would call my mom to pick him up after an afternoon when he didn’t come home, and I’d say to Mom, “Well, at least he calls now,” and me and her and Jason would drive down to the club and get him, and he’d come sauntering out and get into the car, and once as he sat there numb and dumb, looking around with bewildered squint-eyed sadness, I asked him, “Why do you drink, Dad?” and he scowled and shrugged as my brother at my side shushed me and shook his head disapprovingly at me for asking the question but Dad just sat there looking down for a while as Mom drove, and then he said, “Well, drinking’s a drug just like any other,” and lifted his cigarette and stared at it. “This is a drug, too… a very, very, mild drug. But it’s a drug, too.” He took a drag and let the smoke curl out of his mouth as he looked out the window to the landscape passing by.

  Dad began returning to his habit of not coming home after work, or sometimes not coming home at all, so I would check his bed when I got up in the morning to see if he was there, and sometimes at night I’d hear him come in, get into a fight with Mom, and then say he was going out again, and my mom would say, “Oh, you’re going to walk out again? Do you think the kids respect you when yo
u do that?” and I heard her go into another room, maybe the kitchen, and after that I pictured my dad sitting on the couch in the living room, and then I heard his quick footsteps and then the screen door opening and swinging then slowly coming shut.

  Another night I was awakened by their fighting, a sound even more horrifying than the war-like national anthem surrendering to crackling static chaos, and my mother crying, “What the hell’s the matter with you, do you want to have another heart attack?” and then my dad in frenzied mockery calling out, “I’m havin’ one now! I’m havin’ one now!” as he put his hand over his heart then fell to the ground. I heard the clatter and thud against the floor and my mother’s voice sounding like shattered glass in hysterical fury as she picked up the phone yelling, “I’m calling the hospital! I’m calling the ambulance! Get up or I’m calling the ambulance!”

  Slowly the work on the house continued somehow, with my dad’s knowledge of interior decorating from his college course informing his choices as to paint and wallpaper for the walls. Sometimes he’d use his new expertise garnered from the course to tell other people how their colours clashed and were incorrect according to the experts.

  But unfortunately the worst thing we found that year was that a developer had bought all the land around our house and was going to build a subdivision, and when they asked Dad if he wanted to sell he of course said no since we’d just moved in, but it wasn’t long before the surveyors wearing the orange bands came around again, and the orchard on one side of us and the cornfield on the other, and even the old barn behind us where when we first moved in, two old men named Morris and Arthur sat every day, the dust at their feet littered with the many matches they used to light their pipes. All was uprooted, upended, and mowed down, the bulldozers and the backhoes came in, and the barn was demolished, collapsed into an isle of shattered wood and stale straw around which a moat of liquefied manure shone in the sun, sending packs of rats scurrying toward our home, and my brother and I watched the workmen perched on their bulldozers, nosing their way through the orchards of apple and pear trees and flattening them, and we knew them to be our mortal enemies, and one day one of the men with a large bush of red hair whom my brother and I derisively called, “Orange Root Beer Head,” came sweating to our door and asked us for a glass of water, and we fixed him a cup of water with dishwashing soap in it to punish him for knocking down the orchard. We told Dad what we were doing and he leapt off the couch, “Christ, don’t do that! If I asked for a glass of water and you gave me that I’d punch you right in the mouth! Go get the guy a nice glass of water!”

  Mom and Dad had started bowling with a league once a week and one night they had a rare party after bowling, when a bunch of adults came to our house and stood around and drank alcohol. Dad was standing in the kitchen near a woman who leaned on the counter where the coffee maker was. “Hey Tim! Go get your brother!” he called to me, so I sprinted down the hall and told Jason that Dad wanted him. “Hey buddy, take a look at these!” Dad said to Jason as we approached, and Dad pointed, smiling, to the breasts of the woman beside him. She smiled indulgently at us. “You’re always lookin’ at Howard’s magazines—check out the size of these,” he said, and it was true, when we were in the barbershop and Dad’s partner wasn’t there, we would go look in the bottom drawer of Howard’s barber counter and see the Hustler and Penthouse magazines, and my brother in particular would pore over the forbidden pictures of flesh before our dad would say, “Hey, come on, that’s Howard’s stuff! Leave it alone!”

  Although the appeal of the pictures partly baffled me, it was true my brother looked long and hard over the women’s chests portrayed in the magazines, and now he stood in shock as his father indicated the woman beside him and said, “Now these are what you call boobs! No doubt about that! She’s sure got ’em, don’t ya think, Jason?” The woman smiled benignly down at the boy, who recovered from his shock, turned on his heel, and sped down the hallway. “Jason? Jason!” Dad called after him in increasingly angry puzzlement. A storm crossed his face and he trudged down the hall after his son. Jason was under his bed in his darkened room. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Dad was asking, standing at the door. “Come out of there! Get out of there right now!”

  Jason wouldn’t come out or speak. I tried to tell Dad I thought he was embarrassed. “Embarrassed about what? I was just showin’ him a woman that was really built!” Dad argued. “Get outta there!” he called under the bed. “Come on!” He finally gave up and left the room disgusted. Since Jason seemed to have turned in for the night, I put on my pajamas and got into my bed, listening to the voices of the adults talking down the hall. The voices grew fewer as the front door on the other side of the wall from my room opened and shut.

  I heard a body trudge down the hallway that I could tell from its footfall was my dad. I heard the trickle of him in the bathroom and shortly after, his shadow appeared in my door, framed by the hallway light. “What’s the matter with Jason?” he demanded. “Why won’t he talk to me?”

  “He’s embarrassed,” I said.

  “About what? You know as well as I do that he can’t get enough of the pictures in those magazines of Howard’s!”

  “Yeah, but it’s different when it’s a picture and when it’s a real person.”

  “Well, Jesus,” he grunted as he came into the room and sat on my bed. “I wasn’t tryin’ to piss him off, for Chrissake!”

  “He just got scared,” I said, realizing he never would understand. He lay down beside me on the bed.

  “You and Jason got the best beds in the house—they’re the best kind for your back,” he sighed after a moment. “Well, I don’t wanna upset you guys, or embarrass ya,” Dad continued, draping his arm over me. “You guys are my right and left wingers, right?” he said in the darkness, echoing his long-time names for me and Jason since Jason was left-handed and me right-handed, so those became the positions we played on Dad’s imaginary hockey team, which I always felt a little uneasy about because I failed to take an interest in hockey just as I’d failed to take an interest in Fred Scott’s ball mitt, or in any sport, and I felt bad about disappointing him, but still he called us his wingers when he was in a good mood, and as we lay in the darkness his arm hugged me closer to him.

  “You guys are my wingers, and you know I love ya—right? You know I’d never let anything bad happen to ya—right? I wish you guys could stay at the age you are now forever,” his voice said quietly in the darkness, with a different note in it. “You’re my little winger and I’m proud of ya,” and he lay there holding me for a while, then got up and sauntered back out to the party.

  “What were you doin’?” I heard Mom ask him out there with the other adults.

  “I was havin’ what you call a father-and-son, man-to-man talk,” Dad pronounced with significance.

  “Oh, bullshit!” Mom said, laughing.

  In the coming week Jason and I had a school holiday on a Monday, the day our dad had off work, and he was going to take us to the secret spot along the lake where he used to swim as a kid, an inlet near the mouth of the river, and he drove us to the beach that was secluded and watched as me and Jason played in the sand and waded into the water. “Nice and sandy along here, eh? No rocks or nothin’!” he said as he watched us. “This is the best part of the beach.” He sat on the sand and watched for a while as we played and swam. Then it seemed to get like he was thinking about something else and said to us he was going to go talk to a guy just for a bit at the Ex-Servicemen’s Club that was nearby, but he’d be back soon, and don’t get into trouble.

  We played in our own private bay and could see the big boats and tankers moving to the river beyond. The boats moved through the afternoon and the changes of the sky were mirrored in the lake, and we ran between the excitement of the waves and the pleasures the sand offered, the digging of tunnels and forts through the afternoon to its latter part, when the silence of the shore beyond its murmuring tide and the seagull’s cry became more o
minous, and the shadows lengthened on the sand dunes, and the air turned cool so we didn’t feel much like swimming anymore. My brother and I ended up lying beside each other on the sand as the sky darkened, wondering where Dad was and if he’d forgotten us, shivering in the cooling wind, my arm around my little brother for protection and warmth.

  “Have a good swim?” Dad asked as he finally drove back up. “Great beach, huh?” I could see his right eye was squinted up that way and he was talking again as if he held something hot in his mouth. He drove us home as Mom was just getting in from work.

  “You guys have a good time swimmin’?” she asked us. “You were out a long time.”

  Yeah, we did, we said, and Jason added that it started to get a bit too cold to swim near the end and Mom said, “Why didn’t you come home, then?” and Jason said we were waiting for Dad to come pick us up, and Mom said, “You mean he wasn’t there?” Then turning to Dad she said, “I can’t even trust you to take the kids for a day! You can’t leave kids like that all day at the beach by themselves!”

  “Shit,” he said, now laying on the couch in his usual place. “I spent the whole summer in the water when I was a kid—never took my suit off from June to August.”

  “You don’t leave kids that age at the beach by themselves!” Mom screamed. “They could have drowned!” It was clear to me he didn’t understand just as he didn’t understand why Jason had been embarrassed. It was more often that these misunderstandings happened when his right eye was squinted up, which seemed to happen more often as the subdivision was built around us and landscaping around the new houses caused the ground level to be raised at each side, so that when it rained, our yard was flooded till it was like it was a lake.