1
Home Left Them
ON A FREEZING FEBRUARY MORNING in 1971, in Yarmouth, Nova
Scotia, the young boys who would become my sons were rescued by
the Canadian Mounted Police from a childhood of overwhelming desperation
and neglect. Only two and three years old, my sons do not remember
that the door was unlocked and swinging on its hinges, and the only adult
at home lay unconscious in a downstairs bedroom. They do not remember
the broken jar of peanut butter that they scooped from in their crib, or the
sores on their buttocks or the feces in their hair. They do not remember the
shattered window in the attic room next to the crib, or the way the light
gave way to dark every twelve hours. They do not remember the little girl
with matted hair—their sister—crouched in the doorway, destined to find
them twenty-five years later. They did not know that their names were
Eddie and Kurt.
The social worker who took them to a place where they were bathed
and fed, as well as the doctor who documented the emptiness behind their
blank stares and the malnourished smallness of their rigid bodies, are both
beyond memory.
Kurt does not remember his trip to the hospital for the hernia that
the doctor found and his terror of the medical staff who tried to quiet him.
Eddie does not remember his panic at being alone, without the brother with
whom he lived behind the bars of a dirty crib.
It wasn’t until nearly twenty-five years later that I was able to piece
together what happened to them during those early years, between May of
1967 and February of 1971. Reports from the only social service agency that
existed in that small fishing village, a packet of letters from their foster mother,
and patches of Kurt and Eddie’s memories were all we had to go on. When
their adoption file was finally unearthed from a Division of Youth and Family
Services warehouse in New Jersey in 1997, the full extent of their deprivation
as babies was revealed. Confronting and understanding truths long hidden has
been an important step in the process of healing the deep, pervasive wounds
of the past.
Several weeks after removing Kurt and Eddie from that attic room,
the Canadian Social Service Department placed them with Ardis and Allen
Morton, a young childless couple in Yarmouth. The courts had acted on the
county’s petition for protective custody, and a young social worker, Heather,
made the children her cause. Piling them into her station wagon, she brought
them to the little red house on a secluded tract of land on the outskirts of
Yarmouth. Kurt and Eddie were the first of dozens of foster children whom
Ardis and Allen would parent during their marriage. Good and simple people,
they’d tried to conceive a child of their own, but Ardis was unable to get pregnant. As foster parents, they were prepared to take care of children, and perhaps
eventually adopt them. Allen had an eighth-grade education, and worked
with the maintenance department at the local hospital. When not at the hospital,
he did forestry work in the timberland that surrounded the town. Ardis,
who had completed ninth grade, remained at home and was looking forward
to having children in the house.
The boys’ first memory of their life as foster children was of Baron,
the watery-eyed Labrador who came running down the icy patch of driveway
in front of the little red house where Ardis and Allen lived. They each remember
Baron as an instant friend, wagging his tail and nipping at their mittens as
if to say, “Come and play.” He dashed ahead, leading them to the doorway.
Inside, the house was warm and neat. Neither of them could believe it when
Ardis showed them a cardboard box stacked with plastic trucks and a rocking
horse standing next to it. Neither of them had ever had a toy of his own. Kurt
even remembers the dried flowers, probably gathered from a nearby field the
previous summer, arranged in a glazed pot on the kitchen table. Ardis took
Eddie and Kurt and their little bags of belongings to the room where they
would sleep. It contained a set of bunk beds where they would be tucked in
each night under clean sheets and warm blankets. A window across from the
bed was covered with cotton curtains. Beneath the curtains was a piece of clear
plastic, pulled taut over the window and nailed in place to insulate the room
from the cold. When warm weather came, Allen removed the plastic, and the
boys were able to look out onto the huge trees and canopy of sky and stars
that surrounded the house. Across a narrow hall was another bedroom where
Ardis and Allen slept. The doors between the rooms were left open. At night,
the soft murmur of conversation mingled with voices from the TV floated
from the living room into the boys’ room as they huddled with each other in
the bottom bunk. These were the first images laid down like a plank in the
scaffolding of memory around which the boys would construct a past. The
architecture of a safe life was slowly being erected.
The trail into the woods that surrounded the house and a shack
standing in a nearby cow pasture were two more images built into the fragile
structure of their early memories. Here, the boys played with their little red
plastic hammers amidst mufflers retrieved from worn-out trucks and tires
waiting to be discarded at the dump. Rusted lawn mowers and an old washing
machine were strewn in the high grasses, and the boys used their tools to fix
them. Outdoors was their playhouse. Here, alone together, with cows mooing
all around, they found a thin lath of happiness and nailed it down in memory.
Allen took the boys fishing. He taught them how to tie a string to a
pole and bait the safety-pin hook with the fat bloodworms that emerged from
the ground each evening. Every now and then, one of the boys would manage
to haul in a catfish, and Allen would clean it and cook it for supper.
Sometimes Ardis took them beyond the pasture, deeper into the
woods, to watch Allen at work. They followed the sound of the chainsaw and
the trail of stamped down foliage that Allen and his friends had worn into the
forest. Coming upon their foster father in the woods was both exhilarating and
frightening. Trees were falling! Kurt and Eddie waited in the clearing, clutching
Ardis’s hand. After the long groan of the pine as it fell to the ground, the
boys ran to Allen and quickly handed him his lunch-pail, before running back
to the safety of Ardis. Sometimes they sat with Allen for a few minutes in a
bed of pine needles as he ate his lunch, before he picked up his ax or buzz saw
and headed for the next tree.
* * *
KURT AND EDDIE RARELY LEFT HOME. Occasionally they’d be allowed to ride
to the dump in the back of the old pickup truck. They sat amidst the refuse,
bumping down the gravel driveway onto dirt roads twisting into the hills, the
wind blowing through their hair. Ardis watched them from the cab as they
clung to the sides of the truck. “Hold on tight,” she shouted as they giggled
and shrieked with excitement. At the dump they each loaded up with a portion
of the week’s disposables and made a little procession from the truck to
the huge swath of valley that swallowed and digested the town’s garbage. Allen
grasped the collars of their shirts or jackets so the force of the throw would
not tumble them into the pit.
Trips to the hospital—the only other times the boys left the little red
house on a regular basis—were less fun. They did not like the hospital, with
its maze of corridors and people. They did not like the long hours with the
psychiatrist, or the small testing room where each of them went separately.
They did not like the tiny table or chair where the doctor sometimes squeezed
himself so he could sit opposite one of them to play a game that was really
not a game at all. Even the ride was less fun. Ardis and Allen told them to
squat down in the back of the pickup so that no one in town would see them.
They made a game of it: each time Allen slowed down, Ardis told the boys to
pull the old wool blanket they kept in the bed of the truck over their heads.
The explanation for this secretiveness was another piece of the puzzle that lay
hidden in a sealed file for the next twenty-five years.
Sometimes peeking from under the blanket, the boys watched Ardis
buy fish from one of the many markets that lined the harbor street. Nova
Scotia is a 350-mile-long peninsula protruding into the Atlantic Ocean like a
giant lobster claw dangling off the Eastern Coast of Canada. Yarmouth is
located at its southernmost tip. Here Kurt and Eddie could see the Atlantic
coast and the seawall rugged with rocks. They were fascinated by the bracelet
of lighthouses that wrapped around the coast, casting beams across the water
for the many fishing boats that entered and exited the tiny port. One afternoon,
standing on an empty beach, the waves lapping at their toes, the boys
looked out at the great expanse of ocean that covered the whole horizon. Allen
was pointing out the ferry docking in the harbor. He explained how it sailed
for ten hours each night to transport tourists and their cars from Bar Harbor,
Maine, in the United States, across the water into Canada. Of course, the boys
did not understand this geography, only that the other side of the ocean was
very far away.
It was the spring of 1971. Small as pebbles against the blue stretch of
ocean, the boys breathed the sea air they would never forget. Small for their
age, each boy looked about a year younger than he was. I imagine them standing
together, shoulders touching through their washed cotton shirts, their hair,
fine as corn silk, covering each head like a copper bowl.
* * *
DURING THAT SPRING, WHILE THE SONS I had not yet met were beginning to
take their first tentative steps towards recovery from their traumatic early
childhood, I was living in New Jersey. I can picture myself as I was then, deep
in thought, folding laundry in the basement or standing at the kitchen counter
spreading peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread. Robert, Kathleen, and
Dennis, my three children, would come banging in the side door each day,
hungry for lunch after a morning at school.
I was completely unaware that during those very days, providence was
entwining my life with the lives of two little boys in another country who
stood gazing at the sea.
|
