Mom
died suddenly on April first. Everyone who knew Lucy thought that if she was
going to pass on, she couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate date. April
Fool’s day. Her friends said maybe it was just another of her wacky trickster
jokes.
Lucy would likely reappear the next day, laughing and kidding them about
how easy it was to fool them with a faked death. My Mom liked to do that sort of thing.
But this time, Mom wasn’t joking.
She was gone for good. Massive coronary, the Coroner’s report said.
I don’t think Warren ever really
got over it or realized that going
forward, how so damned difficult his life would be without her.
Looking back at it all now, Dad was
always a socially awkward guy who never seemed comfortable with his feelings,
least of all telling others how he felt about things. I’m pretty sure all those
years of buried feelings caught up to him after Mom
died.
As a kid, I never knew Warren to be
a guy who was free and loose with his feelings toward anyone. Especially toward
me. It was Mom who always came to my hockey or baseball games. I can still hear
her crazily cheering me on even in the noisiest arena or biggest ballpark. Once, I think, Warren came to a
Christmas concert when I was in grade two or three but that was it. Even then,
I think Mom had to drag him there. Or perhaps she threatened him in some way
that even Warren couldn’t ignore.
During high school, he never helped
out with my science projects or appeared to give a sweet pinch about my grades.
Warren always seemed to be working an extra shift down at GE or tinkering out
in our garage with a mechanical project that just couldn’t be left unfinished.
They used to fight bitterly about him not wanting to come to any of my things. ‘The
least you can do Warren is to give Allan
a few encouraging words. It won’t kill you, for Christ’s sake.’ But his usual
response was ‘Allan understands. Don’t you, boy?’
To me, Warren really didn’t feel
like my Dad. He was just there, taking up space.
In 2011, I graduated summa cum
laude from McMaster Medical School. Lucy must have really done a guilt trip on Warren
in the days before the ceremony because there he was at convocation, standing
uncomfortably beside me in a dark, wrinkled suit that I’m sure he hadn’t worn
since his brother’s funeral five years previously. Mom was giving me a big hug, kissing me on the cheek and looking so
proud. But Warren just stood there, arms rigid at his side, blank face staring
at the camera as if he was waiting for it to squirt a stream of water into his
face at any moment.
Mom framed that picture of the
three of us and set it on the centre of the mantle in our living room. Now that I think about it, I haven’t seen it
in several years. I bet that Warren insisted she put it away and not be so god
damned sentimental about such things. I can just hear him yelling at her. ‘So the
kid’s a doctor for Christ’s sake. Working at GE wasn’t good enough for him, eh?
Winding motors on the line weren't enough
for him? But it put the god damned bread on our supper table every day didn’t
it?’ Knowing my Mom, I’m sure she eventually
just gave up on him and, trying to keep the peace, took the picture down.
I can
still see my Mom sitting out on the back
porch, slowly smoking her Belvedere Lights and dabbing away tears with a soggy
lump of Kleenex.
But let’s face facts here. Like
Warren, I’ve never been too touchy feely in any of my important relationships.
Maybe that’s the only god damned thing my father ever gave me.
“Damn it, Allan. You’re ice when it
comes to feelings. You’ve got a serious allergy to expressing feelings. You
just can’t help yourself. It’s part of your DNA.” A string of girlfriends
always said some version of that when they left me. And there is a lot of truth
to it.
I had come to expect that’s the way
all my intimate relationships would turn out. Until I met Helen. For what’s it
worth, I think I truly loved that woman.
After almost a year together, Helen
walked out on me a month after Mom died.
She was really close to Lucy. Mom used to say that Helen was my soul mate. I
was beginning to believe it too. But when Helen left I wasn’t sure if it was
because she was grieving hard over Lucy or just giving up on me because I no
longer had the steady influence of Lucy in my life. Whatever the reason, I’m on
my own one more time.
Thanks to Helen walking out, I
think I can really appreciate just how Warren must have been feeling after Mom died. If I had to take a picture to show
how it felt, it would be of my Dad with a week’s worth of gray stubble beard, sitting at our battered up
kitchen table, chain smoking his sloppy roll your
owns, sipping steadily from a greasy, cracked but not yet leaking, plastic
tumbler almost overflowing with Bacardi White, mixed with a couple capfuls of
Pepsi.
Warren lasted almost six months
without Lucy. But I believe that the life spirit really left his body when the
undertaker closed the casket on her in the Eternal Life room up at Needham’s.
Two months ago, late on an
unseasonably chilly Tuesday night, I found him lying crumpled up on the faded
orange shag in the hallway outside their bedroom. Just down a bit from my old
room with the fading blue ‘Go Argos’ sticker on the door and the light blue and
white paint peeling off the wall under the stained window sill where the rain
always seemed to find its way in. The television and all the lights were on
when I pulled into our double lane driveway after I couldn’t get Warren on the
phone. When my calls kept going to Mom’s voice asking the caller to leave a
message because ‘we can’t come to the phone right now’, I knew things weren’t
right with him.
I called 911 but asked the operator
to tell the ambulance and fire guys not to use the sirens and flashers because
my Dad was gone. “No need to bother the neighbours at this time of night with
all the commotion of the sirens and lights.”
I sat straight-backed on the worn, cracked brown leather sofa in the
darkened living room waiting for them, thinking about what a mess the place was.
But it was all just too much to tidy up before the paramedics arrived.
The flashing red and blue lights,
faint at first down at the end of our street, lit up the living room with a
weird, somewhat disorienting strobe effect from their trucks parked out front.
I guess it's ok not to use the sirens on
a call but the roof lights have to be on for traffic safety purposes. I expect
that Warren would have been embarrassed by the showiness of it all.
Of course,
the cops arrived a bit later because until the Coroner could pass judgement, it
was considered an unexplained death. The young patrol officer was business-like
but mildly hostile. She asked lots of questions about Warren, his habits. Not
so subtly, she hinted at the possibility of suicide. I answered as calmly as I
could but she didn’t seem satisfied. After about fifteen minutes, she got on her
lapel radio and talked to someone.
Soon, an older cop with three
stripes on his neatly pressed blue shirt turned up in the living room. Sergeant
McGuire, I think he said his name was. He repeated all the other officer’s
questions and watched me closely. McGuire was very direct about the possibility
of suicide.
I had to agree that suicide was something
that had to be considered given Warren’s extreme distress since Lucy died. McGuire
seemed to be weighing something up in his mind.
“He’s your Dad, right?” McGuire
paused and then continued.
“You almost always call him by his first name. Never
call him Dad. I find that a bit odd, given the circumstances here.” He waved an
open hand roughly in the direction of where Warren lay under a fading green
sheet in the upstairs hallway. “You see what I mean?”
I silently and slowly counted to
ten before answering. I had to be careful here with my words or things could
get awkward between us very quickly.
“Yeah, he’s my Dad. But he and I
always had this thing about our relationship. He was cold towards me. I was
cool towards him. He really never felt like a Dad to me. So it was easier just
to call him Warren and be done with it.” I half smiled, hoping McGuire would
understand.
McGuire’s eyes widened a bit at my
answer. I’m sure I heard him suck in a bit of room air. His eyes fixed intently
on mine. I felt like he was reading my innermost thoughts. I didn’t care for
that one bit. I waited quietly while he worked something out.
“OK,”
he said, choosing his words with care. “I get the picture, Allan. At least I
think I do. Sometimes father-son relationships can be really hard to explain.
Give me a minute and I’ll get back to you.”
McGuire and his patrol cop spoke
quietly out in the front hall for a few minutes. McGuire came back in and said
he was sorry for my loss and explained that Warren would have to be taken to
the Coroner`s office for an autopsy. I could likely pick him up for burial in
about a week.
So I went through all the funeral
routine again with Needham’s. But this time I had to take the estate through
probate and that took a month or so.
Which brings me to why I’m standing
here in the middle of the kitchen in my parents’ house. I’m wondering how the
hell I’m going to get rid of all this stuff so the house can be cleaned up and
readied for sale.
There’s a junk drawer over beside
our old, once white now yellowing Kelvinator. I swear I can still hear Mom and Warren always arguing about it. Warren
always kept putting his stuff into that damn drawer while Lucy took stuff out just
as fast.
‘For Christ’s sake, Warren, why
don’t you keep all your junk out in the garage where it damn well belongs?’ she
used to shout at him. But my Dad would just smile and tell her not to worry. ‘I
promise I’ll clean it out on the weekend.’ But of course, he never did. Their
junk drawer war of words went on for years and years.
Standing here now, I realize I haven’t checked out the junk drawer
since I left home almost thirteen years ago. When I was a kid, I loved poking
around in it when they weren’t home.
Sometimes I found a nickel or dime tucked
under an unopened packet of screws or stuck together with some pink, hardened
gum. Finders keepers. So I always slipped it into my pocket and treated myself
later to some Smarties or the hard sponge toffee at Buckley’s Variety down at
the corner.
Curious to find out what was jammed
into the junk drawer after all these years, I stepped over, put my middle two
fingers into the centre of the worn brass pull latch and slowly slid it open.
The drawer was jammed full of
stuff. It was a wonder that my parents had even been able to get the damned
thing closed. But the same rush of excitement and anticipation that I always
experienced as a kid when I snuck the drawer open looking for spare change or a stale piece of Juicy Fruit, all of it
washed over me once again.
With both hands, I pulled the drawer
out and carried it over to the table. I dumped everything onto the green-black Formica top then set the empty wooden drawer
off to the side. I could smell the peculiar scent only old pine drawers that
hadn’t been opened in a very long time could put into the air. Oddly, I found
the smell familiar and therefore comforting.
Looking at the large, sprawling
pile of junk, curiosities and artifacts
spread out before me, I realized that I really
should have a large, heavily sugared mug of tea to sip on as I sorted through
the bits and pieces, odds and ends. All the accumulated flotsam from many years
of two adults and a kid dropping their stuff into the drawer for safe keeping
In the tall cupboard over the sink,
my Mom kept her treasured packets of
Darjeeling Green and a small, round tea ball to hold the leaves while steeping.
Opening both doors, I found a large collection of liquor and wine bottles that Warren
had probably stashed there after Lucy died. Pushing aside a half full bottle of
Appleton Estate, I discovered the tea service and liberated it all to the
counter. Taking my time and finding the process comforting, I prepared the tea
just the way Mom had taught me so many years ago.
Sipping from a large, Expo 67 mug,
I began to pick through the contents of our junk drawer.
Buttons of all sizes, shapes and
colours, many elastics thin and thick, a small ball of rough twine, a band-aid in
its stained package, several wooden clothes line pegs, a couple of broken
bright red Crayolas, an opened package of black shoe laces missing one of the laces, a woman’s safety razor, a small pale
yellow metal packet of Bayer aspirin, a red sucker of indeterminate age flecked
with gray pieces of pocket lint, random puzzle pieces of assorted colours and
patterns, a partially squeezed tube of Crazy Glue, several shrivelled blue
balloons, an unopened package of Eveready nine volt batteries, a small
calculator with the Off key missing, a Mickey Mouse fridge magnet with two
screws and a shiny bolt stuck to it, a black plastic film cylinder with the
word Kodak in yellow and red letters, a pizza take-out menu that judging by the
prices was from the mid-sixties.
A black framed magnifying glass
that I remember my mother using to examine old coins and her broken fingernails, one Oral B green and blue plastic toothbrush with dried paste stubbornly clinging
to its nylon bristles, a beat up looking bright orange Stanley tape measure
with the initials ‘WW’ carefully printed in black marker on the side. The inventory
of items in that drawer went on and on.
But several items captured my
attention. I moved each one carefully off to the side of the pile, closer to
the empty drawer that had been its home for god knows how long.
In the pile of stuff from the junk
drawer, I discovered a swirly blue Cat’s Eye marble. When I was a kid, I loved
to play marbles. I had a favourite shooter, an agate coloured marble slightly
bigger than the normal alley or marble. I called it The Blaster. It won me
hundreds of games and probably thousands of marbles over my childhood years. I
probably won the blue Cat’s Eye from Freddie Long in a several hour game that became legendary in our King Street neighbourhood.
That game made my reputation as the King of Keepsies.
When we got a bit older, my friend
Roly Paterno discovered that we could give each different colour marble a
monetary value. So rather than playing for keepers, we could play for cash. Best
of all, none of our parents would ever be the wiser. I made quite a bit of
secret spending money that one summer.
But it all suddenly ended when Warren
surprised Roly, Freddie and me along with a couple of rich kids from Weller
Avenue out behind the garage, flicking and rolling for nickels, dimes and the
occasional big stakes quarter. I was grounded for a week. What was worse, I
never saw my Blaster or the bag of Cats’ Eyes ever again. I begged Warren to
let me have them back, promising to never ever gamble again. He just laughed in
my tear stained face and whispered, ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers, kiddo.’ I
hated him for that.
In the junk drawer stuff was a toy
soldier. It was a little nicked here and there but otherwise in pretty good
shape. He was a shiny green plastic mini version of an American foot soldier. He
had an almost exact replica of a machine gun in one hand and the mould caught
him in the act of throwing what I always imagined to be a live grenade. He was the
last survivor of probably a hundred green plastic variations of soldiers I had
in my army. I would spend hours in my bedroom, creating mountains and gullies
out of my bed sheets and pillow, fighting wars with my soldiers. They were
always bravely led by a green plastic figure that carried no weapon but stood
proudly with hands on his hips. I called him Major Tom. But just like with the
marbles, he mysteriously disappeared too.
My passion for playing war with toy
soldiers caused another, real war between my parents. Warren hated anything to
do with soldiers, war, violence, killing or hurting things. On the other hand,
my Mom believed that ‘playing soldiers’ as
she called it, was good for my creativity and growing my imagination. Every
chance she got, Mom would secretly slip me a new, shiny green recruit for my
army. But I always had to promise never to tell Warren. I got pretty good at
keeping my men hidden from him even though he was always on the hunt for lost
or forgotten soldiers.
On the rare occasion that he did
find a lost soldier out in the grass or stuck down the side of a cushion on the
living room couch, he would rage at me, at Mom, at the whole world, swearing
and yelling that no fucking son of his was going to grow up worshipping war and
doing violence to others.
Over the years I played with
soldiers, I probably lost a dozen or so good men to Warren. When he found one,
he would hold it in his hand, wave it front of my Mom and me, then melt it down
to a hot, green gooey glob over the kitchen sink with the propane torch he kept
under the counter for just such opportunities.
I’ve always suspected that Major
Tom died a fiery death at the business end of that propane torch but I could
never prove it.
Major Tom and the shoe box full of his toy soldiers just
disappeared one day. Regretfully, I solemnly declared them missing in action.
From the pile of stuff, I picked up
a small, bone handled jack knife wrapped in a darkly stained rag. It had one
blade which was still as sharp as a razor with not one spot of rust anywhere to
be seen. It was Warren’s. He carried it
with him everywhere.
‘Every man should have a good knife close at hand’, he’d
always say. ‘You’d be surprised how often you need a good blade.’ But I never
found I needed a good blade any day of the week, so when I was older and could
get away with it, I walked away laughing, just to piss him off.
Warren only used his blade for
carving and whittling. He was very good at it. He would spend hours working a
piece of wood or sometimes a piece of deer or goat antler he managed to find
somewhere. For my tenth birthday, Mom gave me a small whistle that Warren had
carved from a goat’s horn. Its tone was shrill but nicely tuned. On the bowl,
he had carved my initials ‘AW’. ‘It’s from your Dad and me’ she said and gave
me a hug so tight I could hear her heart beating slowly through the fabric of
her dress.
But never once did Warren mention that god damned whistle to me. It
didn’t take me too long to convince myself that my mother made it for me. Quickly,
that goat horn whistle became one of my most cherished possessions.
One day, when I was probably
eleven, the whistle disappeared from my night-table. I never saw it again. I
always suspected that for some sick reason Warren took it back but I never
straight out asked him. Besides, even if I had got up the courage, I knew all
he’d say was ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers, kiddo.’ Then he’d give me his special silent stare
with those coal black, expressionless eyes until I gave up and walked away
defeated and humiliated once again.
Suddenly angry at the memories of
the missing whistle, Warren’s harsh words and heart-stopping stare, I roughly
threw the knife back onto the table. It skidded and spun across the chipped Formica surface, slamming hard into the side of
the empty junk drawer. It made a very loud, hollow sounding ‘thunk’. That’s
when I noticed there was something odd about the drawer.
I examined it more carefully.
Considering how roughly the drawer had been used by our family over the years,
it was still in pretty good shape. The bottom of the drawer was covered in
mysterious dark stains and deep, angry looking scrapes. It smelled faintly of machine
oil.
In spite of all my issues with
feelings, I do have a really good and practiced
eye for small details and how things work. My Mom
always said that if I hadn’t become a doctor, she was sure I’d be a mechanical
engineer. So it was natural that I quickly realized
something was not quite right about how the bottom of the drawer matched up to its
sides. There was a thin line of space at the joints where none should be.
I quickly rummaged through the pile of stuff from the drawer,
found the Stanley tape and took two measurements. The first was from the inside
top of a side to the bottom panel. Three inches. Next, I measured the outside of a side panel, from its top edge to
the bottom of the sideboard. Four and a
quarter inches.
There was just over an inch of depth
difference. I felt a thrill of excitement
flicker through my body. Unbelievably, it would seem that our old junk drawer might
just have a false bottom.
Recovering the magnifying glass
from the pile of stuff, I began to carefully examine the interior of the
drawer. It didn’t take too long to discover a slight, narrow widening of the
space between the front face of the drawer and the bottom board. Using Warren’s
knife, I slid the tip of the blade into the
space, wiggled it side to side and gently levered it up and away from
the face. That was all it needed. The drawer’s fake bottom lifted up along the
sides and came out easily into my hand.
A shallow compartment revealed
itself. The fake bottom had rested on four small pine pegs glued to the true
bottom of the drawer. The interior space had been carefully lined with soft,
green velvet. Everything had been meticulously crafted. In my mind, there was only one person who could have
done this.
As unexpected as this discovery
was, it was the contents of the secret compartment that seized my attention and
quite honestly, turned my nicely ordered and usually predictable life totally
upside down.
In the middle of the space, there
was a deep scarlet, soft fabric covered presentation box, somewhat thin and about
the size of two decks of playing cards side by side. Inside, I found a small medal in the shape of a silver five pointed star, a maple leaf at each angle.
At the star’s centre was a gold roundel which held a delicately sculpted maple
leaf surrounded by a laurel wreath.
Turning over the medal, I found the imprint
of what looked like a royal crown. Underneath it was one word: COURAGE. Below the word was engraved ‘Warren
Kaye Wyatt’.
I never knew that my father had
received such a thing.
Yet here was a medal that seemed to suggest some
significant honour had come to him. Curious, I took out my phone and googled
Canadian medals. It only took a few moments to identify it as the Star of
Courage. It’s the second highest award for bravery given to a Canadian citizen.
The Wiki notation said: ‘Canada’s Star of Courage is presented to both living
and deceased individuals deemed to have performed acts of conspicuous courage
in circumstances of great peril.’
I was left dumbfounded by the
discovery of Warren’s bravery medal. Was it a clue to the distant and at times
the abusive personality of my father? Would
the existence of this medal force me to re-examine our relationship? All this was
just too much for me to take in at the moment, so I moved on to the other objects
in the box.
Next was Major Tom, hands cockily
planted on the hips, his shiny green plastic, square-jawed
face still staring off to some distant place. The Major lay on his back over in
the right side corner alongside my beloved agate shooter marble. The Blaster had
been safely secured on its own small, delicately tied knot of green velvet.
A small object, which at first I
did not recognize, peeked out of an open
end of a beautifully beaded pouch of soft, lightly tanned deerskin. I was
stunned when I recognized the delicately
rounded stem of my missing goat horn whistle.
Beneath the case holding the medal
was what looked like a large photograph folded in quarters. The folds were
cracked and in some places, the fibre had separated with tiny holes quite noticeable.
I unfolded the print gently so as to not further damage it. I spread it out on
the kitchen table. It was my graduation photo from McMaster. I’m sure it’s the
one my mother had framed and proudly displayed on our living room mantle. But
like so many other cherished items in my life, it had mysteriously gone missing
a few years ago.
So how was it that now I had the
photo flattened out on our kitchen table? I had no one to ask. But it was clear
by the condition of the print that it had been folded and refolded many times over the years. There was an
oily finger smear down in the right corner of the photo. Right over where
Warren’s unpolished black shoes poked out from under the slightly too short
pant legs of his funeral suit. Whoever looked at the photo had usually held it
on this corner.
Maybe it was my imagination, but I’m sure I noticed a faint
smell of machine oil when the print was fully open. It reminded me of the smell
of the cloth that had wrapped Warren’s knife that I found earlier in the
drawer.
There were several fading Polaroid
photos bundled together with a large metal paper clip. On top was a picture
that my Mom had taken on Halloween when I
was nine. I was in a pirate costume, complete with a black eye patch and a
wooden sword that she had hammered together from two pieces of lathe and
hastily painted silver out in the garage before Warren got home.
Around my head, I wore a red bandana, the skull and crossbones hand printed in front. I loved that
costume as did my Mom. Warren had
ridiculed it, saying mockingly that Halloween was for goofs and most likely the work of the devil.
The other photos were of me sitting
on our back porch with my first puppy, Jackson, a black cocker spaniel with
soft brown patches over his eyes and darker brown booties on his paws. Another
of Warren holding me in his arms while I was still a baby, wrapped tightly in a
blanket with knitted wool cap pulled completely down over my ears. Warren was
smiling. If I didn’t know better, I would say that he even looked proud of that
bundle in his arms. Another of me in my Queen Scout uniform being introduced to
Queen Elizabeth during the World Jamboree in Montreal. The last photo was me
again, posing in front of my first car, a 78 VW Beetle that I had bought with
money I had saved from working part-time at Sobey’s during high school and a thousand
bucks that I had quietly re-allocated from my university scholarship fund.
The final item in the secret drawer
was a white postal envelope with ‘Allan’ scrawled crudely on the front. It was
in Warren’s handwriting. The envelope was a bit brittle so perhaps it had been
placed in the drawer quite a while ago. I had never got a letter from Warren,
even when I was away at medical school or working in Africa on assignment with Doctors Without Borders.
I removed the envelope and set it
on the table.
I sipped my now cold tea and tried not to successfully to get my emotions and thoughts under some control.
What could Warren possibly say to me after all these years of freezing me out
of his life? More importantly, why would I even care about what he had written?
Some time passed. The tea was gone
and my hands were shaking. I picked up the envelope, slit it open with his knife
and removed the single sheet of yellow scratch pad paper. It was folded in
half. One end was torn and ragged, likely from when Warren had ripped it from
the pad.
I hesitated to open the sheet. I
didn’t owe him anything. In spite of him, I had become something. Become
someone that many people respected.
I flipped open the page. Written in
Warren’s choppy, awkward flow, scratched out with a dark, thick leaded pencil
were the words…
I love you, Allan.
I am so proud of you.
Forgive me for all that I have done to you.
You are my son… forever.
Dad
In a sudden, angry rush, I swept
the empty drawer from the table. It crashed into the fridge, splintering one of
its side boards, and fell loudly onto the linoleum tile.
I pulled the whistle from the
beaded pouch and in spite of my deep sobs, blew it as loudly as I possibly
could for as long as I could.
When I no longer had enough breath
for the whistle, I picked up Major Tom, held him in my shaking hands, and
waited for him to tell me what to do now.
First Publication: ‘Junk Drawer’ appears in the October 21, 2015 edition of
www.commuterlit.com. Check in the Author Index for all Don Herald’s stories
that appear in this publication. The above version has been slightly edited
from the original published version.
The Backstory: I’m fascinated with the stuff that seems to be stuffed
into the junk drawer that every family seems to have in their kitchen. What
family story would the contents of a junk drawer tell to a son who returns to
the parent’s home after many years away? And thus, a story was borne.
Legal Rights. ‘Junk Drawer’ is the intellectual property of
the author, Don Herald. No part of this story may be reproduced in any format
without the written permission of the author.
