Here's what made me sad yesterday. Strange how a memory of over forty years still can sting.
When I was young, second third and fourth grade young, my family moved to what was then the outskirts of Bemidji. Out our front door to the east, across the dirt road and through perhaps two acres of woods, began Bemidji proper. Out our back door to the west was open field of several acres and then forest. Beyond that was country living.
One day early in our first summer in that house I was wandering the field out back when I was startled to meet a little boy even smaller than I was, also out wandering. He had freckles on his nose and cheeks, reddish blond hair, and blue eyes.
"I'm Shawn. Do you live around here?"
I pointed back toward our house. All we could see of it was the flat roof and chimney.
"I'm Mark. Where do you live?"
We shook hands. He pointed to the north. No house was visible, only trees beyond the field. I brought him home, introduced him to Mom, and that began a nearly three year friendship. We saw each other almost every day from then on. We were the only two boys within reasonable walking distance, as far as we knew.
The time came that Shawn brought me to his house. It had three rooms. His mother, two sisters, and grandmother shared the house. The floor was boards. Between the boards the ground was visible. It had a wood stove in the larger room, which was living room and dining room and sleeping corner for Shawn. It also had Grandma’s chair and blankets and smell in another corner. The wood stove was interesting, as I’d never seen a stove with a well for water built right on the side of it before. The wood box on the other side was Shawn’s job. At six he was already the wood cutter, splitter, and hauler. I was seven; my only job was to take out the garbage. I helped Dad with the lawn, but only when pushing the mower down the incline. I wasn’t big enough to push it back up. I noticed that when Dad was home Shawn was always around him. Dad would read to him because Shawn couldn’t read and I could. Sometimes I got jealous because Shawn seemed to like Dad even better than he liked me, but mostly that was ok because I liked Dad a lot too.
Shawn’s place was worse on the outside. The roof looked tired, as if it wanted to lie down. There was no lawn, just hard-packed dirt where people walked, a large pile of logs waiting to be chopped into firewood, and untouched ground elsewhere. A few steps away was a chicken coop, which opened into a small area outside enclosed with wire on three sides and above. When Shawn brought me inside the rooster let out a mighty bellow which scared me so badly I hit my head on the low ceiling. That’s when I realized the source of the sound I’d heard some mornings at our house. Between the house and chicken coop and on the other side of the wood pile was the outhouse.
This house and yard and chicken coop and privy were in a small swale surrounded by trees, so none of it was visible until you got close. You wouldn’t know it was there unless you heard the rooster or smelled the smoke or the other smell carried on the wind. I was surprised when I realized Shawn lived not more than a thousand yards or so away from my house. The rolls and dips in the field between, unseen until actually crossing them, reduced visibility, as did the trees around the bowl in the ground that held the three little buildings.
One day I realized there was nothing to read in Shawn’s house. There was nothing with print on it except the stove. I remember wondering how those women and Shawn got through the night before bedtime without anything to read.
In those two, or perhaps it was three, winters the trail from Shawn’s house to mine became clearly defined. Each of us knew each dip, each deviation around stones, and the rise and fall of the contours of that field, as sharply as we knew the shapes of our own hands. Somehow that trail haunts me. Even forty-some years later I can see that thin line linking Shawn to me, follow it as it shifts to accommodate the terrain between us.
One Christmas day Shawn appeared at my house with a new Winchester. He came into the living room and proudly shot a plastic bullet into the couch. I was appropriately impressed and asked who gave it to him, as I took my own turn. He told me his father was the source. He’d never spoken of his father before, and I hadn’t asked. I had wondered, but somehow felt that to be forbidden territory. I asked him where his father was, and Shawn replied “He lives in Stillwater.” I didn’t know Stillwater.
“Do you ever see him?”
“We go see him in the summer.”
That was the only time we spoke of his father.
His grandmother was a horror. Never in my life since have I been so terrified of a human being. She had some dreadful disease I’ve never identified that made her body more repulsive than small boys can stand. Everywhere visible, arms, legs, throat, were tennis ball sized lumps hanging in thin folds of skin, swaying with each movement. Her feet were wrapped in cloth bandages rather than shoes. From her skin emitted a smell that comes to me in nightmares. The smell permeated every corner of that house. I could smell it from the field as I approached. It overwhelmed the outhouse and the chickens. When the wind was wrong I could smell hints of it in my back yard.
I remember that she was a dreadful, grouchy, evil-tempered woman, but I can’t remember anything she said or did, because all the times I was near her I was so overwhelmed by her rotting malodorous wretchedness that I couldn’t be conscious of anything else about her. I have an impression that she liked me because I was polite, but there is nothing else left. I know I could hardly stomach that Shawn slept in a corner close to her frightful, reeking chair.
One terrible sping day when I was nine and he was eight Shawn announced “We’re moving.” I could hardly get my mind around this. I asked where they were going and he couldn’t say, didn’t know. I asked why and he didn’t know that either. That summer was tinged with desperation as we tried to get in all the play and all the exploration two boys can do with a death sentence hanging over their heads. There were pollywogs and then frogs, new trails, forest far beyond our earlier wanderings, and always the sentence hanging ahead.
And then he was gone.
Some time days or weeks later in a fit of lonesome misery I walked our trail to his house. Nothing was left. There was no house, no chicken coop, no outhouse, no wood pile. There wasn’t a rag or clothesline. The land was filled, leveled, and perfectly bare. The only reminder that Shawn and his family had been there was a hint of that grandmother’s smell.
The trail went no where. I have never since felt so alone as I did in that moment.
I have heard nothing of that family since. Sometimes in weak moments I find myself wondering what happened to that freckle-faced little boy who loved my father. What happens to fatherless little boys who can’t read and have to grow up? What happened to Shawn, who had to grow up without me and without my father? We would have been good to him if we’d had the chance.
