The Abandoned

by Kyp Harness

  Later in the day he strode past her in anticipation, both of them rushing to classes, and she called out to him, “Thank you, thank you!” her smile bright and wide as she shook her head in disbelief at his efforts. Later she thanked him in more detail: “I really appreciate all the presents,” Sherrie said quietly as they talked in the library. “But I’m just a bit freaked out.”

  He watched her as she looked down to the side contemplatively. He was touched by her gentle thoughtfulness.

  “I mean… you go to all this trouble,” she said. “And sometimes I think you have an idea of me that isn’t really who I am. That you may not be seeing me.”

  “I can see you,” Tim offered, feeling the smile on his lips as he spoke, which seemed to always be there when he was in her presence. “I can see that you’re someone who’s as beautiful on the inside as you are on the outside.”

  Sherrie rolled her eyes, then looked away. Tim told himself he saw a blush along her dimpled cheeks. “This is too much,” she said. “I don’t think I can be what you want me to be.”

  In Tim’s eyes she was already everything he could ever want her to be. He was just about to tell her that when the bell rang and they had to move on to their next class. They made their way out into the hall.

  “Thanks again,” Sherrie said, smiling. She extended her arms, and he bent to embrace her.

  “Hey—break it up,” a passing teacher shouted, half in jest, and several heads turned in the crowd to see them hugging. They released each other, Tim embarrassed and thrilled.

  For Christmas Eve, Russ asked Tim to attend the service at the church he went to with his mother. Tim agreed and soon after, Russ’s mother invited Tim’s mother as well. Tim and his mother drove over to Russ’s house and they all set off from there in Russ’s mother’s car. Russ’s mother was a proud minister’s widow, a petite middle-aged woman whose eyes glittered gaily behind her spectacles. She was the type of person that Tim’s mother Mona easily interacted with, and with whom she was an upbeat fountain of kindness. She acted with Russ’s mother the same way she might towards an older person, even though both women were the same age: Mona was pleasant and attentive, her voice rising at the end of her phrases, pitched a little higher than her everyday tone.

  They all made their way into the church and were seated for the service. Russ admired the minister because he often worked quotations from writers like Albert Camus into his sermons, but Tim felt the service was like every other church service he had attended, something to be tolerated rather than experienced. At the point when the parishioners were called up the aisle to receive communion, Russ and his mother went up, but Tim and his mother stayed seated in their pew.

  “Were you disappointed in me?” Russ whispered to Tim when they were on their way out.

  “No—by what?” Tim asked, not understanding.

  “For going up there,” Russ said, jerking his head back in the direction of the altar. “You know. Non serviam.”

  “Oh—no,” Tim shrugged, but inwardly he was elated that Russ cared so much about his opinion.

  On Christmas Day, Tim and his family made their pilgrimage to his grandfather’s farmhouse. They drove through the bright day, the snowy fields at each side glistening, the white clouds stretched out thinly above them. The road ran parallel to the train tracks, the same tracks that connected to the railyard across the field from Tim’s house. As Tim and his family entered the small town fifteen miles from their home, they turned onto its main street and drove over the tracks at the crossing bisecting the community. Continuing out of the town, they turned off onto a gravel road that ran parallel to the tracks on the other side; the tracks ran through the back acreage of Tim’s grandfather’s farm, through the fields that seemed to stretch forever.

  As they pulled up before the farmhouse, Tim’s mother stubbing out her cigarette and unwrapping her gum, Tim looked out and saw all the other cars parked along the long driveway that led to the house and continued out to the barn. In years past he would have felt the familiar pangs of trepidation as he contemplated entering the house, but these were lessened by his new spiritual outlook.

  “Well, hello, hello!” his grandfather called from the top of the stairs, and they made their way into the overheated kitchen. There were pots and pans simmering on all the elements on the stove, the smell of the roast in the oven hung heavy in the air, and his grandfather’s wife Penny was darting this way and that, attending to everyone’s needs. Tim and his brother stood for a moment in awkward small talk with their cousins. They could no longer relate so easily as they grew older, and their amiable banter hardly covered the widening gulf of encroaching adulthood. As his father made his way into the sunporch to lie down and go to sleep, Tim moved out into the front room, where his uncles sat on the couch and on kitchen chairs brought in to accommodate them.

  They were all farmers in their late fifties, and all sported generous stomachs; they spoke in gruff, amiable exhalations of breath, invariably offering the greeting, “G’day!” Much of their talk centred on food—whether they would help themselves to another cookie, or a piece of Penny’s special “sea foam candy” that was in dishes all around the room, or how large their respective stomachs were in comparison to last year. Later, they’d tease each other about going back for seconds after dinner.

  Over the last several years Tim had been embarrassed before these men, ever since the oldest of the uncles had offered him a job on his farm. When Tim was thirteen, Uncle Jim needed labourers to pick up the stones in the newly turned-over fields. It was considered a rite of passage for a young male in the country to put in some good, honest manual labour in the outdoors. Tim was driven to the farm and began working with some other hired hands, walking behind his uncle as he drove his tractor, pulling along a wagon. Tim and the others trudged across the field in the broiling heat, picking up stones—some of them as heavy as bowling balls—and heaving them onto the wagon. From time to time Uncle Jim would point out some of the rocks they missed from his vantage point up on the tractor seat.

  Unlike the other workers, Tim lived with his uncle while they did the job. He slept in a spare bedroom on the second floor of the old wooden farmhouse, and in the mornings, after a generous breakfast with his uncle and aunt, he went to join the other workers where they waited beneath a giant oak tree beside the house. At eight in the morning the sun would be sending down fierce blankets of heat, which would only increase through the day. At lunch, if they were close enough to return to the house, Tim would eat there with his uncle while the workers ate beneath the tree.

  Two days after the work began, the weekend came and Tim was driven back into town. On Sunday night he called the farm and told his aunt he wouldn’t be coming back. He was more than glad to get back to his usual summer routine of watching television all day. Still, there was the uncomfortable sense he’d failed yet another test of masculinity, which only increased when Uncle Jim stopped for a haircut at Dirk’s barbershop and tersely commented to his father, “You can tell Tim that I was very disappointed in him.”

  After that, he was ashamed in the presence of his uncles. He was thin and more interested in reading books than playing sports, and now he had the nerve to be lazy as well. He realized that, having failed to pass the test of honest labour, to them he was not and could never be a man. But now emboldened by the Charitas love that had been implanted in him, he walked up to each of them in turn and embraced them, to their considerable surprise. Later, the card tables were pulled out and the games began. After that the meal was served, Dirk awaking in time to partake. All the aunts made sure that everyone got enough to eat, and then helped wash up as Penny went out to tend the chickens. Several of the cousins who had their own cars ambled up to the old man in his easy chair and said, “Thanks, Gramps, but we have to be goin’, makin’ our rounds, got to go over to Cathy’s folks’ place now.”

  The old man looked up, grasping their hands,
and said, “Well, thanks for comin’, and have a happy new year.” The early hours of night greyed the snows outside, and a blast of frigid air came up the stairs with each departing guest, still felt as their cheery goodbyes faded beyond the door. The sons and daughters drank their coffee and helped themselves to another of the treats Penny was making the rounds with. Tim was passing by his grandfather’s chair when the old man called out, “And how is Jason today?”

  Tim stopped and came to his grandfather’s side. “Tim,” he said.

  The old man reached out and grasped Tim’s hand tightly. “Or Tim, rather,” he said, grimacing as he closed his eyes. “How’s Tim today?”

  “Good,” said Tim.

  “Well, that’s good,” his grandfather noted, shaking the grasped hand with each of his words. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s good.”

  It was a characteristic of his speech in recent years to repeat the last phrase of a sentence several times, as if the machinery of his mind, once brought laboriously into motion, couldn’t be stopped cleanly and had to idle slowly back into inaction. “It’s pretty calm today,” he would say. “Pretty calm,” he would repeat, and then a minute later he would whisper, “Pretty calm,” as if furnishing his own echo. Penny approached him and whispered something into his ear, and Tim’s grandfather looked up at his wife and nodded. The old man turned back to Tim. “How’s school goin’?”

  “Good,” Tim answered, looking down into his grandfather’s pale blue eyes. Penny was now going about the house, delivering a wrapped package to each of her husband’s children. The middle-aged men and women looked at the presents puzzledly—their father had never taken the trouble to give them each personal Christmas presents at these gatherings before.

  They opened the wrappings and found themselves looking at newly printed black and white photographs of their mother who had died forty years before. An uncomfortable silence settled on the gathering, in the kitchen, in the front room, on the sunporch. They were confused and taken aback by the gift—it would be several moments before the general banter would begin again. In the midst of it all was the man who was the cause of the silence and discomfort, the cause of the gathering itself, who sat grasping Tim’s hand tighter in the final moments before relinquishing it, shaking it for emphasis with each word he spoke.

  “Take care,” he said. “Take care.” And a moment later: “Take care.”

  As the city had expanded from its nucleus around the river over the past twenty-five years, and an area of postwar bungalows had been added onto the outskirts of the original downtown core of wooden houses, so another zone of split-level homes was added to this, stretching out across the farmer’s fields and the wastelands to the east of the city. The new communities were planned and landscaped with curling streets and cul-de-sacs and parks and parkettes for young families; they supported, like a host body a parasite, shopping malls and supermarkets that were worked so ingeniously into the neighbourhoods that they seemed to be connected to the homes and condominiums—to the degree that it was hard to be sure whether the massive stores were there to serve the homeowners or vice versa.

  The houses shared a commonality of appearance that was comforting, if not sedative, to their owners as they drove home down the gently curling streets after a long hard day of work, but that was comical to the farmers of the outlying area as they had watched the homes being built. “Geez, livin’ there, you could come home drunk one night and end up goin’ to bed in the wrong house!” was a recurring observation. The external similarities were not the only ones shared by the homes, for inside there were certain aesthetic codes which were adopted and shared, too. Chief among these was the furnishing of the basements, the walls of which were always covered in dark brown wood panelling. Any sports trophies won by members of the home would be displayed here, and in some houses a pool table or ping pong table, a dart board or an extra television set was present, for this was known as “the rec room.”

  Tim became familiar with the rec rooms across the city through the aspect of the Charitas program where participants held parties at their homes for their fellow brothers and sisters. The teenagers would gather on the shag carpet of the basements as guitars were brought out and Cat Stevens songs were played. The purpose of these gatherings was to engage in fellowship, but also to plan for the next Charitas weekend.

  For Tim these parties were happy occasions, for he had never had a large, ready-made group of friends before. He would enter these homes through a side door, padding down the carpeted stairs to where the teens had gathered, and immediately the hugging would begin. Other teenagers who he might have before regarded as his enemies, or as so inferior to him as to be beneath acknowledgement, were now his brothers and sisters. He would hug them, male and female, his arms wrapping around the differently shaped bodies, their different smells intermingling in his nostrils.

  Even more important to this camaraderie was the opportunity to spend time with Sherrie. She was always present at these parties, and Tim would gravitate to her, despite his best intentions to remain in the flow of the more general Charitas love. Still, she didn’t seem to mind his close proximity, and in Tim’s mind he felt as though their fellow attendees already looked at them as a couple. They had gone out on several more outings with Russ, Sherrie picking up the two boys in her dad’s oversized car. Tim continued to tell himself that these excursions were dates, chaperoned by his friend. Sherrie must have thought of them like that as well; she had turned down Tim’s original offer to go out because she had a boyfriend, but Russ’s presence on their outings made them more acceptable, safer.

  “I don’t know if your friend Russ likes me,” Sherrie observed to Tim one day at school.

  “Sure he likes you,” Tim smiled. He knew that Russ could appear judgemental and remote.

  “How do you know?” she asked. “Did he say so?”

  “Well, yeah,” Tim offered. “He said he thought you were special.”

  “Oh, special,” Sherrie said, rolling her eyes, imbuing the word with its most negative meanings.

  In fact, Russ had told Tim that Sherrie was special the day after their long talk at Country Style Donuts, and he had meant it sincerely. But he said he also had reservations about her. “She seems a bit sappy sometimes,” Russ noted as he walked beside Russ on their way home from school.

  “What do you mean?” Tim asked.

  “Well, like when we were going to see that play the other day,” Russ said. “She said, ‘Maybe we’ll be able to learn something from this play and apply it to our lives.’ That’s kind of sappy.”

  “Isn’t that the point, though?” Tim asked defensively. “When you go see a play or a movie or anything—to learn something about yourself and apply it to your life?”

  “No, actually,” Russ stated. “I don’t think that’s the point at all. I don’t think that Shakespeare sat down to teach anyone anything. Inevitably people can learn something if they wish,” he allowed, “because it’s great art and it has those depths. But to see art as something to learn from, like in some self-improvement exercise…

  “It’s just typical of this bland, mediocre mindset,” Russ said, spitting out his words as if to expel their taste from his mouth as quickly as possible. “Everything has to have some purpose, serve some practical end. Nothing can be art for art’s sake. And if you look at the purpose closely,” he observed sardonically, “you’ll find it always has more than a little to do with money.”

  “I don’t think she’s talking about money,” Tim said as they walked past a gas station. “She’s just saying that, well, with anything in life, you can take from it and apply it to your own situation.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Russ. “What she said is trite—and you know it’s trite. You’re just defending her because you’re interested in her, and I can understand that. But don’t pretend that what she said has value on any level at all.” Russ chuckled, shaking his he
ad. “Anyhow, what’s going on with her?” he asked, turning to Tim suddenly and meeting his eyes. “Has she talked to you about her intention toward you and her boyfriend or what?”

  Tim looked away, pretending to take interest in a cloud formation over the weed-filled vacant lot at their side. His throat tightened as it always did at the mention or thought of Bruce Ferguson. In his mind, Sherrie and himself were already joined, destined to live into old age together.

  In reality, Sherrie had a boyfriend, a person Tim would hear about when friends of Sherrie’s walked up and asked her about him, but whose name and existence were otherwise never mentioned—which allowed Tim, in the minutes he shared with her, to pretend Bruce never existed. But if Sherrie never brought up Bruce during their time together, she also never broke up with him. This reality gnawed at Tim behind his smile, even in his most spiritual Charitas moments. As the days went by, he found himself increasingly challenged to maintain the same upbeat outlook.

  “Well,” he said, “no. She hasn’t talked about it… and hasn’t broken up with him.” It was painful for him to utter the words. “I don’t get it, really. It seems we share so much—but then that Bruce Ferguson guy, maybe because he’s older, makes her feel more secure given her home life… Maybe it’s hard to make the change.”

  “Yeah, I’ve talked to Bruce,” Russ remarked offhandedly. “He’s not that thrilling of a guy.”

  Tim felt as though his soul had frozen. “You’ve talked to him?” he asked disbelievingly.

  “Yeah, he works at Radio Shack in the mall, right?” Russ said. “I went in there and talked to him… asked him some questions about stereo speakers.”

  Tim was mortified. It had been a steady matter of principle on his part never to speak of Bruce Ferguson. To consider exchanging words with him was beyond comprehension. Tim felt somehow that it would have violated the possibility of his ever having a relationship with Sherrie if he were to speak to Bruce Ferguson. When he went to the mall he went to great lengths to avoid passing by the Radio Shack where Ferguson worked, and if he had to, he would avert his eyes so his gaze wouldn’t fall on him by mistake.