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The Castaways by Mark Schafron

A boy tries to make his way in life despite abusive parents and meagre prospects.

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When we were kids, living far out in the country, winter seemed infinite. As it dragged on, we watched for milky yellow dawns to paint the icy places with faint golden brushstrokes of hope. Finally, after months of curdled gray skies, purple crocuses shouldered up through last year’s matted leaves. When the crocuses bowed off the stage, tangles of glowing yellow forsythia took over. Springtime! No more smelling wood smoke, wet woolen coats, or cooking odors bottled up in a closed house.

Spring was also the time when my older sister would run away from home. The snow melted, the trees budded, Sis took off.


Our mother was an angular woman, ash blonde with kaleidoscope hazel eyes that sometimes looked green, and she had an aquiline nose. She was bright and had done well in school, or so she told us. My sister struggled in school. Back then, “learning disability” wasn’t a thing. You were “lazy” or “slow.” Sis would bring home her report card and Mom would look it over, then slap it on the kitchen counter. She’d let out an exasperated groan and glare at Sis. “No child of mine should get grades like these!” she’d say. Wildflower blonde, violet-eyed Sis would stand, heels together, eyes focused on the mustard-colored linoleum, vanishing to her room once dismissed.

Mom was prone to shrieking tantrums when offended – sometimes directed at me, but usually at my sister. When Mom snapped, her eyes turned green and got scary bright. It was as if she carried some high-pressure steam tank inside of her, and every so often, she needed to blow.

Then there was our father. To a child, he was a giant. Or maybe an ogre. In reality, the Old Man was a factory worker who chain-smoked and spoke little – a wiry little guy, losing his black hair in male pattern baldness. Unlike Mom’s explosive fury, his was an always-simmering rage. When he was about to go off, you’d see his brown eyes burn and he would squint. If you hadn’t noticed the change and made yourself scarce, his open hand would whip out in a backhand and catch you across the mouth.

We had no near neighbors or playmates. School got us out for six hours a day, but that wasn’t much better. The kids in my elementary school tormented me for being a fat kid. As for Sis, she was in junior high school and was tormented for being a slow kid, despite her looks. Or maybe because of them.

My sister’s given name is Louisa, but I always called her Sis. My first name is Rutherford – another source of schoolyard torment – but my friends call me Rudd. Mom used our names, but our father didn’t. To him, I was “Boy,” or “Fat Boy.” I don’t remember him calling Sis anything. He would glance at her and his eyes would dart away, then the corners of his mouth would draw down. Other than that, he ignored her.

So, most years, as soon as the snow was gone, Sis would run away. She never got far. She’d walk or hitch to the small town to our east that had a few factories, diners, and stores. The cops would catch her rummaging through a diner’s trash cans, or find her shivering in a park at night. They’d take her to the station, get her name out of her, and call us.

One spring day when I was home from school with a cold, the cops called Mom after Sis had been gone for a day. She didn’t know that I’d seen Sis leave. I was outside at the time and when I came around the corner of the house, I ran smack into her. We both jumped. Her round violet eyes got enormous. She pressed a finger to her lips.

I didn’t do what little brothers do – run inside and rat her out. I just nodded. She smiled and sprinted across the lawn to the road. She looked back at me and waved.

I waved back and went about my business. At some level I couldn’t articulate, I think I understood.

Mom made me come along to pick Sis up, and off we went in Mom’s rusty ’53 Ford, trailing a cloud of blue oil smoke. The police station was a narrow brick building with two tall wooden doors, rubbed raw in places from countless hands. The walls inside were yellowed and looked sticky. It smelled of floor wax and cigarettes.

Behind the counter stood an overweight sergeant with a comb-over. He had a look on his face like he smelled something bad. Mom gave her name and Sis’s name and he looked us over.

“This way,” he said.

He led us to an office where Sis sat in a wooden guest chair next to a battered green metal desk, her hair matted, face bright red, as if she had been crying.

“Okay,” the sergeant said, leaning over the desk and shuffling some papers. His gun belt creaked when he moved. He clicked a ballpoint pen and held it out to Mom.

“Sign next to the X and you can take her home.”

Mom sniffed and her eyes turned bright green.

“I don’t want her back.”

The sergeant cocked his head a bit and frowned, as if he wasn’t sure what he’d heard.

“I don’t… want… her… back,” Mom repeated, emphasizing each consonant.

He put one hand on his hip and thrust the pen out further.

“Lady,” he almost shouted, “she’s a minor. You have to take her back.”

On the ride home, Sis sat in the passenger seat with her head against the window glass, staring at a spot on the dashboard.

“You stupid bitch,” Mom hissed.

That night, I lay in bed with my window open a few inches. I heard the wind come up through the trees and it came in cool and hemlock-smelling through the screen. I heard a train whistle from somewhere far off, and I wondered if Sis was awake and heard it too.


When Sis turned sixteen, Mom and the Old Man allowed her to quit school. I guess they figured there wasn’t much more reason for her to stay, what with her being kept back all the time. Sis kept a poker face during this solemn signing of school documents at the kitchen table, but I could see the twinkle in her eyes. The Old Man launched into a loud tirade about how Sis wasn’t going to lie around the house all day for him to support. “You’re going to get out and get a goddamn job!”

Sis did just that, landing a job at a diner she used to scavenge, washing dishes at first. It didn’t take her long to work her way up to lead cook. “You have a knack for this business,” the owner told her. Sis went to work every day with a smile on her face. She came home tired, smelling of grease, and still smiling. When she wasn’t working, she sat in a rocking chair in her room reading paperback books, her lips forming the words.

Mom hatched a plan where Sis would work for a year, bank her earnings, then move to Boston and stay with Mom’s aging hippy cousin, Ritchie. She’d look for work and get her start in the big city.

While she worked at the diner, the Old Man insisted on being her bank. He’d hold her paychecks, dole out spending money, then give her the balance when she moved. Mom balked at the idea.

“Why not let her open a bank account?”

“I don’t want her spending it like a goddamn drunken sailor.”

And that was that: no further discussion and Sis had no voice in it at all. The Old Man stored Sis’s paychecks in an empty Whitman Sampler box he kept in the glove box of his car.

The day came when we loaded Sis’s belongings into the car and set off for the big city. When we pulled up to Ritchie’s apartment block, Mom turned to the Old Man and said, “It’s time to give Louisa her money.”

The Old Man hunched forward over the steering wheel, jutted out his jaw, and said nothing.

“Where is Louisa’s money?”

“It’s my goddamn money for raising her all these years.”

Mom opened the glove box and took the lid off the candy box. No checks, no money. All gone.

Mom stared out the windshield with the empty box still in her lap and turned pale. Sis was next to me in the back seat, looking confused. Nobody spoke. I didn’t understand what had happened. It was only years later, when I saw a Whitman’s Sampler box in a store, that my memory of that day came back. I stood in the candy aisle with my mouth open, feeling like you might if you heard of a friend’s sudden death, or maybe your own terminal diagnosis. Your mind caves in. A thought focused: he robbed his own daughter. Christ, who does that?

After being deposited in Boston, our parents never heard from her again.

Perhaps a year later, Mom and the Old Man divorced. I was thirteen and moved with Mom to that ratty little town to our east, and she got a job as an office clerk. She had a hard time making friends and came home at night cursing the other women in the office. As far as men, she seemed to attract shifty-eyed guys whose greasy attempts at being my pal made my skin crawl. They didn’t hang around long, though, usually disappearing after a dose or two of Mom’s temper. She clung to me like a piece of driftwood, which made my teenage social life non-existent. It wasn’t worth going out with friends only to be screamed at about ingratitude when you got home. It was just easier to keep her company and clap a tight lid on your resentments. We watched a lot of TV.

And so it went until I was seventeen, when doctors diagnosed Mom with cancer, the symptoms of which she had ignored for many months until she could ignore them no longer. It was awful to see her ashen-faced fear as she died first at a walk, and then in a sprint. At the end, I sat by her hospital bed and watched the comatose, waxy mannequin that was once my mother die with a last puff of a breath. She held no conversations with phantoms only she could see, nor was there any deathbed wisdom shared. There was just gentle, rhythmic breathing. In and out. In and out. In. Then out. Then no more.

I felt nothing but relief. Relieved that the woman was no longer in pain that I couldn’t imagine. Relieved that I was free at last. It took me a long time to forgive myself for that last part.

I couldn’t find Sis to tell her. Cousin Ritchie had lost track of her when she moved on from his place, destination unknown. Mom was long estranged from the rest of her family. So, I took what money she had, arranged a simple funeral, and that was that.


Within days of the funeral, the Old Man showed up at the tiny apartment Mom and I shared. I had a part-time job pumping gas after school and couldn’t afford the place for much longer. I guess I stiffened when I answered his knock, because he gave me a small smile and said, gently, “Is it okay if I come in?” He wore clownishly colorful golfing clothes. A whiff of his Aqua Velva and cigarette stink made my stomach knot with anxiety, even though I was now head and shoulders taller than he and my baby fat was long gone. I sat down on the couch. He remained standing.

“Well, Boy, I was sorry to hear about your mother.”

I nodded.

The Old Man studied his tasseled shoes and then jutted his jaw out and made eye contact. He was squinting. The tentative fellow who knocked at my door was gone and my father was back.

“I talked to my lawyer, and he said that since you are almost eighteen, I no longer have to pay child support unless you go to college full time.” It came out in a monotone, like something memorized. I just stared at him.

He told me about his promotion to foreman, made some more sympathetic noises, said he had to go, and made for the door. He left a scrap of paper with his phone number. I still hadn’t said a word. I was thinking about the hotdogs in the fridge that I needed to stretch for a week.

“Call me and let me know what you decide about school, boy.” He was looking at his feet again. I locked the door behind him.

I watched from the window as he drove off in a white, 1970-something Cadillac convertible. There was a middle-aged woman with black bouffant hair in the passenger seat. I could see two golf bags sticking up in the back.

I put the scrap of paper in the ashtray on the coffee table. Then I struck a match.

True to his word, the court-ordered checks stopped. The Old Man dropped dead of a heart attack on the golf course about a year later, I heard. I don’t know who took charge of his arrangements, and I didn’t care. I sometimes wondered if the Old Man ever slept the deep sleep of an honest man. Probably. If you have no conscience, then what could rob you of sleep?

A few days after his visit, I graduated high school. I felt freakish being there alone among all those proud graduates in caps and gowns, while their grinning loved ones in the bleachers nudged each other and pointed out their kids. I turned in my cap and gown and went home to my hot dogs. It seemed like the only thing to do.

The next day, I walked a circuit through the downtown. I marched on dirty sidewalks, flanked by vandalized parking meters. I walked past overflowing trash cans, and by closed stores with their windows papered over. The cars that passed were all older and ulcerated with salt rot. My last stop was the Army recruiting station. I stopped the recruiter in the middle of his sales pitch: That’s great, that’s fine. Where do I sign? I stayed in the Army for twenty-five years.

When I wasn’t deployed or on duty, I would observe civilian families from a distance – in stores, parks, playgrounds, on the street. I did that in every country where I was stationed, with an almost scientific curiosity about who or what might be normal. Perhaps I was thinking I’d find an ideal I could emulate, and then close the distance between myself and the rest of the world. I never found it. I came to embrace being an invisible man. I was masterful at ducking questions about my family or my life before the Army. I never married.


My last posting before I retired from the Army was in Alabama. Sis hunted me down somehow and shocked the hell out of me when the phone in my quarters rang one evening. It turned out she’d settled in Alabama. The phone call was brief. We agreed to meet for lunch the next day at a restaurant just outside the post.

I walked into the restaurant and saw her in a window booth in the sun, which made her hair the buttery color of the forsythia back home. She stood when I walked up, but neither of us made a move to embrace. Instead, we shook hands awkwardly, like little children just learning how.

We settled in, facing each other, our backs straight, as if wary of each other.

“Look at you, Rudd,” she said. “I could tell you were a soldier as soon as you walked in, even in civilian clothes.” She was slender, dressed casually but well, and had picked up a syrupy southern accent. She wore no rings.

I smiled and shrugged. “It’s the haircut. And I’m told it’s the way we walk.”

“That’s it. Right there.”

“How did you end up down here?”

“Oh, after Boston, I tried San Francisco, and cooked there for a few years. I discovered the Grateful Dead, free love, and heroin. Anyway, I got myself clean and got the hell out of there. I bounced around, landed down here, and fell in love with the hot weather and just the… cadence of the place. I have a lot of restaurants and cooking styles under my belt, so getting work is never a problem.”

“I’m heading back north after I’m done here in a couple of months,” I said.

“Are you one of those Yankee snobs who hates the south?”

“No, I’m one of those Yankee snobs who hates the heat and humidity.” She smiled and I could see tiny crow’s feet by her eyes.

The server brought menus. Sis picked hers up and started reading, moving her lips like always. She glanced up and saw me watching her.

“Dyslexia,” she said, laying down the menu. “That’s why I was such a mess in school. Not slow, not lazy. But I forgive all the assholes who tortured me for it.”

“That’s big of you,” I said. “I mean that.”

She slapped the table with her menu. “Ha! Just kidding!”

“About the dyslexia?”

“No, about the forgiveness.”

“I’m sorry, Sis.”

“Louisa. I prefer my given name.”

“Fair enough. But Sis is better than Fat Boy.”

“Heh. I’d like to see him call you that now.”

After the waitress brought our food, Sis said, “It kills me to ask, but how are our charming parents?”

“Oh.” I took a quick sip of water. “I figured you might have heard somehow. They’re both gone.”

She lifted her chin and frowned. “Both?”

So I told her all of it, over the clatter and chatter of the dining room. Mom and the Old Man’s violent, dish-smashing, punches-thrown divorce. Mom’s cancer, lying about how she hadn’t suffered. I told her about the Old Man, dropping dead on some fairway in his court jester golf clothes. I spent most of my time on Mom, volatile and miserable almost to her last breath.

Her eyes shone a little, and I reached across the table for her hand. Without breaking eye contact, she let her hands drop into her lap.

“This sausage gravy is crap,” she said. “Too much flour, not enough black pepper. A splash of sherry wouldn’t hurt, either.” She scraped it to the side of her plate with her knife.

“Well,” she said, “I give Mom a little slack. It’s clear she belonged on a shrink’s couch. But there was no way that was going to happen, not back then. But him?” She made a raspberry sound. “Never. I don’t suppose he left any money behind?”

“Money? His permanent obsession? What are you? Your father’s daughter?”

She pointed her fork at me. “Listen. He robbed me. I could have starved for all he cared.”

“That makes two of us. I’m sorry. It’s a sore spot. The funeral guy who buried his ass tracked me down not long after I joined the Army. He was looking to get paid. I hung up on him.”

She laughed. “Even dead, the Old Man stiffed people!”

“Then some bank called, wondering if I’d be interested in having his Cadillac and taking on the payments.”

She snorted. “A Cadillac. Of course, he was in hock for a Cadillac.”

“I hung up on him, too. As for Mom, I wiped her bank account to bury her and walked away from the rest. Apartment, furniture, clothes, everything. I just left it.”

She stabbed at her mashed potatoes and rearranged her collard greens. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and then played with her food some more.

She glanced around, then said, “He used to come at me at night sometimes. You know what I mean, Rudd. You were too little and your room was too far away. You didn’t hear a thing.”

I had that feeling that my mind was caving in again, like that day in the candy aisle.

“Where the fuck was Mom?” I finally said, a little too loudly. An elderly woman at a nearby table gave me a sidelong glance.

“In bed asleep, or maybe awake, pretending he was just in the bathroom for a long time. When he slithered out of my room, he’d go flush the toilet before he went back to their room. Sneaky bastard. I never called out. It was like he had his hands around my throat and I couldn’t. I never told. Mom would have just blown up like she did about everything, and probably blame me.” Sis rubbed at a spot on the table with her napkin. “I’m pretty sure she knew, or suspected. I think that’s why she shipped me off to Ritchie. She could be ten kinds of crazy and mean, but I guess I owe her for that. Or she just wanted to be rid of me. Who the hell knows?”

I felt my lips part, but no words came.

“I don’t know who buried him either,” she said, “but if it were me, I would have dumped him in the woods for the scavengers.”

“Dear God. I’m sorry.”

She gave me a half-smile. “It’s not your fault, Rudd. You got a full dose of them too, just different from me.” She took a sip of her iced tea. “You know, I sometimes wonder if they were born that way, or if something happened to them to make them the way they were.”

“I don’t know. Something. Many things. Maybe nothing. I don’t think they had it in them to take hard looks in the mirror.”

Then I saw a rage in those Elizabeth Taylor eyes of hers that made me lean back. “I used to dream of facing them down,” she said in a guttural whisper. “Of having him kneecapped. Of cracking her across the face for calling me a stupid bitch one too many times.” She shrugged, and the blaze in her eyes flared out. “I had to give up thinking like that or I would have ended up in rehab again.”

“They’re both in the ground, Louisa, and we’re not. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to think so?”

Out on the sidewalk in the heat of an Alabama July, she hugged me before we went our separate ways.

“You’re a tough cookie, Louisa,” I said.

She reached up and tousled my salt-and-pepper crew cut. “I fly above it all, little brother. I keep myself sober and I cook good food that makes people happy. That’s me. I’m free as a bird, and I plan on staying that way. Try not to freeze to death up north, soldier.”

And that was that. We promised to stay in touch, but haven’t seen each other since. We trade Christmas cards. Nothing more. She’s still cooking and staying sober, soaring aloft over the rest of us. There isn’t much for us to talk about, anyway, because we’re strangers, tied only by blood. That would just leave childhood to flog to death. There would be no point.


After I retired from the Army, I moved back home and bought a cottage out in the country. I can hear the gurgling call of red-winged blackbirds in the spring and watch the geese as they honk their way in formation across the sky in the fall. I tend my vegetable garden, feed the songbirds. I have an orange cat that wandered in one day and stayed. I split wood for a Franklin stove that keeps the place cozy in the winter. Wood smoke and wet wool, once again.

The isolation doesn’t bother me. Being in the country, with its quiet and predictable rhythms, makes me feel like I’m living near some sort of divinity.

Mom and the Old Man rest in separate plots in a cemetery nearby. I trim the little bushes flanking their stones a couple of times a year and plant a few flowers. Perhaps I do it because there’s some unbreakable umbilical attachment there. Beats me. I don’t think about it much. I just snip, rake, water.

But sometimes, after I’ve finished and gathered up my tools, I’ll look at their stones and say, “Jesus. What happened to you? What made you who you were?” And I feel sorry for them.

It’s good to be magnanimous. Not for their sake, but for mine.

As for me and Sis, we should be complete misfits considering how we were raised, but we aren’t. We’re chipped and cracked around the edges like a pair of over-fired porcelain figurines, but we’re functional.

More or less.

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