The Abandoned

by Kyp Harness

  Or maybe it was like the trillium flower I saw back in the bush behind our house, when my dad pointed at it and said, “That’s a trillium flower, but don’t ever pick it.” I asked why and he said, “Because that’s a trillium flower. It’s the official flower of our province and it’s against the law to pick it.”

  It was a white, almost impossibly white flower whose petals were like a whole bunch of triangles, or the folded-up paper things that girls make at school that they move around with their fingers and ask you what your favourite colour is, and it glowed there amongst the indiscriminate weeds and brush and decayed wood and I said, “If you pick it will they put you in jail?” and my dad chuckled, “Maybe, little buddy—more ’n likely they’ll give you a fine—but don’t pick it, I don’t wanna be payin’ any fines,” and we walked on and I looked back at the trillium glowing in the brush, and I knew I never would pick it but at the same time I wondered how anyone’d know if I did, whether they had police or inspectors going through the bush, or whether if I picked it someday men would just arrive at our door and ask for me without any of us knowing why, but mostly knowing that if I picked it my dad would know, and that was good enough for me.

  Maybe Andrew was more like that trillium for me. He was like a secret, and if he came to my birthday party, or if I argued for him to come, they wouldn’t allow me to be friends with him anymore, so I needed to let the trillium stay in the forest, and keep the secret of the cat swung around the living room, just like I needed to keep the secret of picking my nose and eating it, because it tasted good and salty, just like the sleepers in my eyes tasted good and salty, as the Plasticine at school tasted good and salty, like the white glue tasted tangy and salty, almost like mayonnaise, and the yellow glue from the tiny clear plastic bottles with the red, mouth-like applicators you could suck it out of tasted vinegar-like and sweet, though the stuff you picked out of your ears didn’t taste that pleasant at all, and had a far less enjoyable, waxy consistency.

  I suppose I knew I wasn’t like Andrew just like they knew I wasn’t, because I could talk, and I didn’t have water coming out of my mouth like he did, and I didn’t have to go to special classes like he did, and it’s not like I wanted to be like him, but I didn’t want to be like the other kids, or rather I didn’t understand them, like the boy who stood behind me on the very first day of school and kept pushing at my back, and I turned around and asked him to stop, but then when I turned back around he kept on doing it, and I turned around and asked him why he kept doing it after I asked him to stop and he didn’t answer, just smiled, and I didn’t understand and I still don’t understand, but Andrew would never do that, mostly because he of course doesn’t talk at all, but also Andrew only does one thing, and only is one way, not lots of different ways like everybody else.

  But also if not tying my shoes makes me more like Andrew and not like everyone else, that’s my way of showing Andrew is my friend and I didn’t care if I was like Andrew if that was the case, because I was uncoordinated and because I diddled, and because I didn’t play with the ball mitt that my dad got the night I was born from his friend Fred Scott, as he always said, “The night you were born I went out drinkin’, you know, celebratin’ with my friends, and my friend Fred Scott, he said, ‘Hey Dirk, you got a brand new son, hey?’ and he left the club and came back with this ball mitt and said, ‘Here, this is for your son, we’ll make a pitcher or a left fielder outta him,’” and my dad would hold up the mitt when he told the story, the mitt that was born the same day I was, and I felt bad because I didn’t play baseball, like I had broken some law of God by not playing with the mitt that had come into being at the same moment I had, but I just had no interest like I had no interest in hockey or football or any of the sports my dad had played, and even when my dad would say, “Whyn’t you go play with the ball mitt—Fred Scott was in the other day and said ‘How’s your boy doin’ with that ball mitt, is he a left fielder yet?’” I never had any interest in the ball mitt so maybe that’s why they thought I might be like Andrew, or would become like Andrew through hanging around with him.

  But anyway I had my birthday party, with all the kids coming to it bringing notes for the bus driver so he’d drop them off at my house instead of theirs at the end of the day, and Mom had a box full of little toys, each with a string tied around them that dangled out of the box and she brought it out, holding it up and letting the kids pull at the strings to get the surprise toy, and when my mom was getting it ready before the party I saw that one of the toys was a Mickey Mouse figurine that I wanted, so she put a little mark on the string attached to it with a red magic marker so I knew which string to pull, and also when she brought it around at the party she held that side of the box where the string was towards me, so I got the Mickey Mouse figurine and none of the other kids knew. Big Michelle from across the road was helping with the party and when it came time for the birthday spanking she held me across her lap where she sat on the floor, and let all the kids spank me for my birthday and when it was her turn to spank me she hit hard and it really hurt, and then she did a “pinch to grow an inch” and that really hurt, and tears came into my eyes from the pain and also from the anger that she would do this on my birthday—and for the rest of my birthday my backside smarted and I was mad.

  That was in the house before the bush in which the trillium glowed, down a gravel side road from Highway 7, beside the creek the side road bridged across, though a lot of the time it seemed the bridge was out, and the creek ran up the side of where we lived, and then there was a pond back a ways. On one Easter the Easter Bunny brought me and my brother plastic colourful bug catchers, and after we unwrapped them and Mom and Dad went back to bed, me and my brother went to use the bug catchers where we knew there were lots of bugs, at the pond, where the bulrushes grew up high, and the tall grass, and the pussy willows and cattails, the strange milkweed plants that had pouches you open up that are filled with milk like you might get from an animal, like the white glue you get at school, or the pussy willows just like the paw of a cat, or the furry rabbit foot you got for a keychain (and Dad shot rabbits with the twenty-two gun he told you to never go near, and he cut up the rabbit in the kitchen sink) and the weird weeds that gave off little yellow pellets, or white ones, and the green thistles whose greenness seemed to add to their evil, as they waited for you to step on them to cause you pain.

  Down in the pond was the seemingly powdery green stuff that gathered on its surface, making it seem almost solid, and all around the pond the earth was nearly liquid and the tall grass and the reeds hid it so there was no clear line where the pond ended and where the land began, it was all muddy and deceptive and most of all there were bugs flitting all around, the butterflies and also their more nondescript cousins, the moths and other bugs that whipped around but with wings only of white or grey or black, and the simple common flies that joined along, but with maybe a strip of electric blue or purple or green, the shining grasshoppers that leapt up suddenly from who knows where to throw themselves suddenly across your eyes, the mosquitoes that plagued every summer, the tiny almost-nothings inflicting their petty damage who were almost benign compared to the bees and the hornets—the bees which I hated because everyone told me they wouldn’t sting you if you left them alone and didn’t bother them, and once when I saw a bee I stood stock-still so as not to bother him, and he landed on my temple beside my eye, and he sat there and I felt and heard him buzzing, and I felt him moving around, his horrible buzzing like the turning over of an evil motor. I held my breath and willed myself into paralysis, as my insides crawled with the awful feeling moving at my temples like a cat pawing at its bed, until I knew that him moving around was just to get a decent grip from which to sting me as I felt the sharp stinger pierce into my temple with the fierce terrible buzzing seemingly gaining in volume and I cried with the pain but also with the feeling of betrayal from all those who said that if I left the bee alone he wouldn’t bother me.

  At least with the bees you
got the satisfaction of knowing they gave their lives to sting you, because their stingers had rough edges so they couldn’t pull them out without pulling their guts out and dying. It wasn’t that way with hornets who, as my dad said, had long slick stingers that could go in and out like a needle on a sewing machine over and over again, as my brother found out when he went into my dad’s old abandoned Jeep by the laneway and a whole swarm of hornets come out at him, like a long piece of black fabric unwrapping and flapping in the wind the swarm came, chasing his small boy body across the yard and stinging him over and over, so he got taken to the doctor who said now he was allergic to hornet stings and if he ever got stung by a bee or a hornet again he could die and my dad said, “I told you to stay out of that Jeep!”

  All this was on our minds as we crept through the weeds to the pond on Easter morning with our bug catchers, and we heard the trilling all around that we always heard in the summer which I always used to associate with my mother’s cigarette smoke and the way it smelled outside, but when I heard the buzzing trilling when she wasn’t around I thought it must be the engine of summer keeping the summer going, or the sound made by the golden spidery rays of the sun that you saw when you half-closed your eyes and looked at it, for the sound sounded like the gold spidery rays looked, as though they shone so bright they became sound. Our excitement made our hearts beat faster as we came to the pond, and there above the pale green powdery growth on the surface of the pond, we saw the flittering, jiggling bugs of every description, some adding their sound to the buzzing trilling of spring, the insects coming at us from every direction and we rushed forth with our bug catchers thinking there wasn’t a better place for their use in all the world, there beneath the blue Sunday morning sky, there in this perfect pond hidden from the world by its natural protective fence of weed and reed, and tall grass and pussy willows.

  Running forward through the muck at the periphery of the pond, the tall grass bending down before us, we reached out with our bug catchers and I told my brother Jason to wait a bit behind, and we heard the low murmur of frogs and heard but did not see them plopping into the water at our arrival, and my feet in boots now splashing, now sinking with a sucking noise down into the muck which reached up to grab at my boots as we saw the most rare dragonfly seeming as big and stationary as a hummingbird hovering before us, its long tail we knew not to be a stinger but somehow very scary nonetheless, its grey bombardier body seeming weirdly big and its wings vibrating in a blur like an optical illusion looking weirdly unnatural and untrustworthy as I felt my feet go deeper into the muck, like a hand at the bottom of the green speckled pond was grasping them, and I tried to lift my feet, but found the sucking, squishing, sticking muck unseen would not relinquish and in fact seemed to pull my legs deeper like the quicksand we’d seen in cartoons and Gilligan’s Island.

  I clutched the bug catcher as I looked at the dragonfly and its whirring wings now abandoning its space in air as it turned and flitted, zooming like an untraceable shadow through the bright clear air, and then my attention turned to my feet ever sinking, and the water coming in over my boots, and my panic rising as I realized I was powerless over the earth which had now taken a notion to suck me into its innards. I reached out to my brother at the shore where the tall grasses grew and I called to him, “I’m stuck!” and he with his bug catcher just stared at me for a moment until I cried with my panic making me almost rigid for I’d realized that the more I moved the more the muck pulled me in, any movement increasing the gravity sinking me, and I called to my brother, “Get Mom and Dad. Tell them I’m stuck!”

  He raced back through the tall grasses, and down along the creek back to our house where Mom and Dad were lying in bed and he called, “Tim’s in the pond and he can’t get out!” and they sparked into action: Mom in her nighty and Dad in his pajama bottoms, right out of bed and down the hall and out the door, through the bush that was our backyard, the bare feet going over the sticks and twigs and thistles, whipping back the branches, my dad’s bare chest scratched by the thorns, for in both their minds was the pond, and me lying in the pond, face down beneath the green powdery sediment, stuck in the pond and unable to get out because I had drowned and was dead and nothing could be done but to pull my pulpy, rubbery body from the water, spiritlessly try resuscitation, then break at the point where past and future ended.

  But no, they saw me from a distance as the weeds and reeds parted before them, my lower legs submerged, bug catcher in my hand, and the bugs still zipping and flitting around me, the jiggling flies and moths, butterflies and dragonflies unaffected by my cries of panic as the dark mud below and out of sight stubbornly and determinedly pulled, and Dad splashed into the pond, the look on his face a fear I’d never seen before but which I felt turning to anger in his arm clamping around me and lifting me from the sucking scum, up against his chest and to the bank of the pond my mother crying, and my brother too, almost too young to know what was going on, and Dad telling us we should have never gone down there alone, struggling to get his breath back as I saw the drops of water glimmering on the hairs of his heaving chest as we all sat there for a minute in the weeds by the pond on the almost indecently bright Easter Sunday morning.

  That was in the house before the bush where the trillium was, when we could play on a fallen tree that was half propped up against another tree so we could pretend it was a bridge by the creek where you could fish, and when your fishing pole came apart and fell in the creek your visiting grandfather could wade in and get it back, and you could catch catfish and put them in a pail where they swam around. That’s the house my dad built himself after work while we lived in a trailer, and he called in all his favours, and the workers all came and worked with him building the house that he’d designed, and he always told the story of one of the workers up on top of the roof nailing in the shingles, when he said to the guy, “You putting in four nails a shingle?” and the guy said, “Yep!” and Dad went in the house and looked up at the ceiling and only saw three nails coming through for each shingle, and he said, “Bullshit! I want four nails a shingle!” and he went back in and saw four nails come through for each shingle and never less than four nails ever again.

  Local kids would come at night and vandalize the half-finished house, so he started sleeping there on the bare floor in his sleeping bag with his twenty-two but the police said he could be charged if he shot the vandals in the back as they were running away, so make sure to shoot them in the front. When the big front picture window was installed they came and scratched it up, so that he had it tinted blue so that the scratches wouldn’t show so much, because he couldn’t afford a new window. He worked on building the house at nights after his job and got so tired that he fell asleep while driving over the Bluewater Bridge one night and smashed into the toll booth on the other side.

  That was the house with the fireplace in the basement and two sinks in the bathroom, with a front yard that was a sea of weeds—the house that was down a long laneway from the gravel road and one time when they had a party the lane was so mucky no cars could drive in so people parked at the road and Dad drove back and forth in the Jeep ferrying them from the road to the house, and after eating chicken we’d throw the bones into the ditch because he said the bones splinter and can choke dogs if they chew on them, but it’s okay to throw them in the ditch because then the foxes would chew on them and choke and die.

  When Mom and Dad went to work my little brother Jason and I were looked after by the Simpson family at their pig farm on the highway and I always felt bad because they liked Jason better than me, and they laughed and imitated him when he invented a pig sound to make, and said it was cute and asked him to do it again, but when I invented a frog sound they didn’t pay any attention. Even at home I’d lie in bed and hear Mom and Dad playing with Jason and I’d feel bad and wish he had never been born. When we drove in Dad’s car he’d always make us yell “Contact!” when he started his engine and driving down the sideroad the steady grinding of the engi
ne always made me think I heard music in it, and when I thought of a song it seemed like the engine was singing the song too.

  That was before we saw the men with orange bands over their chests taking pictures around our yard, or it seemed like they were taking pictures with tripods they would set up in the fields of weeds and even in the shadows of the bush you would see them, stretching long strings from one tripod to another, and at first there were just a few of them, but then there were more and they were all around until Mom said they were from the government and that Highway 401 was being built, and the way they planned it, it was going right through where our living room was, where the blue-tinted front window was, and we would have to move. They’d give us money for the property and a big sign got put up that they were auctioning off our house, and we’d have to pack up everything and leave.