Well, I made it to the coffeeshop and pounded out roughly half of today’s recommended daily allowance. I was thrown completely off balance when I stopped at an abandoned house that I’ve been meaning to look at for the last year or so. The place hasn’t been deserted too long, less then two years I’m almost sure of. I know in some parts of the country this wouldn’t be too big of a deal, but around here, I tend to think of these places as few and far between. Old farm houses that once sat outside the reach of the city, swallowed up, then slowly neglected over the years by secret people inside who can’t or refuse for whatever reason to maintain the property. Rain, decay, mold, and just pure and simple age, all combining to take the place down. The owner dies or disappears. Windows become broken. Doors hang open. And then the curious, eventually, find their way in.
I guess I don’t think too highly of the curious these days, considering my surprise when I arrive and find that not too much has been vandalized. No spray paint on the walls. No graffiti of any sort that I could find. But the real surprise, the real treasure, are the things that somehow end up left behind. The things of no apparent value, but to me, might be the only clues left of what really went on in someone’s mind.
What went on in Kenneth’s mind all those years? That was his name, Kenneth. Enough mail lying around to prove that. Name still on the mailbox. Photo albums, ruined by rain, piled on the kitchen counter. Handwritten notes tell me that Kenneth was a crafter, and pile after pile of small, rectangular papers tell me something about Kenneth’s fixation with scraps of paper that I cannot begin to understand. And then the clippings of the women. Women’s faces and bodies. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, paperclipped together in small groups of seven to ten, scattered all throughout the house. In drawers in the kitchen, in cabinets and on the floor. Upstairs, more clippings, paperclipped together in the same curious fashion, lying in every room and every closet I look in.
Whatever Kenneth was, I know that my idea of him will become the newest character in The Hermit’s Door. He will become a friend of the hermit. One of the visitors who shows up to talk with the hermit. It is the fate of the dead or missing to become what we make of them. They are as full of surprises as we allow them to be. I turn over the scrap of paper that has written on it: deliver their soul from death, only to find another note, written in Kenneth’s crisp, distinctive printing. Bottle Cap, Going Down.
I take some pictures, but my battery goes dead before I can get very far. And then, in the coffeeshop, I have trouble actually writing about this new character of mine because of how fresh the whole experience of the house is. Part of me wishes I could collect all the clues and spread them out back at home, thinking of what made this man tick. What was he thinking? What did it all mean to him? Who were his people, or did he have any left?
I didn’t know where to start, so I just jumped.
Today’s excerpt from The Hermit’s Door.
The hermit couldn’t remember when he’d met Kenneth, or even where for that matter. It couldn’t have been that long ago, two years, maybe three. Or was it five? The years had starting blending together more and more lately, and he was finding it hard to accurately remember the time frames for just about everything. The order of the wives, for instance, he would be able to tell someone if they’d asked, but not the years. The when of the wives had become a mystery, and sometimes even the where of them. Kenneth, on the other hand, seemed to remember everything, and was, in fact, one of the very reasons he liked Kenneth. A seemingly bottomless pit of memory. Not something that he’d want for himself, he knew, but if he was going to have to sit around with someone, memory was a trait he enjoyed, even if he didn’t have much of one himself. Memory has a way of turning people into talkers, much the same way being alone turns people into listeners, so once a week for an hour or two, Kenneth and the hermit made good companions.
“Do you ever get lonely?” Kenneth asked. “For a woman, I mean. Don’t you ever start missing it?”
“I don’t know, Kenneth. I imagine I do sometimes, but it’s hard to put a finger on when. What about you? You’ve been alone awhile, haven’t you?”
The hermit had heard very few questions in his lifetime actually searching for information. People wanted to talk about themselves, to explore that thing that they felt missing. Questions were an easy way to introduce a topic, to begin a conversation about something that maybe a person felt uncomfortable about beginning. Kenneth, for instance, wanted to talk about loneliness. His own loneliness. Not an easy thing for a man to bring up. About himself or anyone for that matter. Kenneth was trying to open a door that otherwise he might leave closed.
“Sometimes I think back,” the hermit said. “Before this. Before I was alone.”
Thinking back was obviously something Kenneth was familiar with. Even now, the hermit noticed, Kenneth’s eyes shifted slightly to the left as something came to mind, and that, the hermit thought, was the real question. What vague image was it that Kenneth saw, trying hard to hang onto as his life moved further and further away from the moment? Or was it something he couldn’t see, something so fuzzy and out of focus that the very idea of it, hanging there in his mind, was enough to drive him mad? Enough to drive questions out of him? Hard questions for him to ask. Questions impossible, of course, for the hermit to answer.
“I think about my father’s berry farm sometimes,” Kenneth said. “I remember it the way it was when I was a boy. The stains on the Mexican’s hands and the front of their shirts and pants, red and purple, and the little Mexican kids, smaller even then me, there with their parents, helping to carry the berries sometimes. Sometimes we’d play but mostly they kept to themselves and I kept to myself. Now that I think about it, I think my dad wanted it that way, more then anyone else. I think it might have been him that kept me from playing with the Mexican kids. I don’t know.”
“It’s hard to say what’s on anyone’s mind.”
“It is.”
Kenneth found himself thinking of the newspaper clippings he kept. Pictures, cut from newspaper articles and advertisements, sometimes from magazines, occasionally from something that might arrive in the mail, all clipped together in small piles of six or seven and hidden throughout the house. Pictures of women’s faces, put together in groups that made some sort of sense to Kenneth, but not so much that he would have been able to explain if asked. The pictures were his secret, and sitting there talking with the hermit, there was something comforting knowing that they were there, waiting for him to come home. The idea of the pictures was a long way from the idea of life on his father’s berry farm, but wasn’t something that crossed Kenneth’s mind. He wouldn’t have made any connection between the two.
The hermit, had he known about the pictures of the women, wouldn’t have been that surprised. Comfort, he might have told Kenneth, always has had a curious way of manifesting itself in people. There’s no explaining the things that comfort us. Like trying to pinpoint where a raindrop came from. Somewhere out there, he might have said, pointing out into the sky. Comfort for people comes from somewhere out there.
“It’s easy to be lonely for childhood,” the hermit said. “I think everyone’s lonely for something simple.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I just can’t remember ever meeting someone lonely for more difficult times.”