PUTNEY — The feral children regard me with dull, vacuous eyes as I drive by them on the road. They do not move from their spot near the river, which is littered with a jagged line of broken-down toys and rusted bicycles.
The eldest is a boy with clear blue eyes the color of periwinkles and long, dirty hair that hangs listlessly down his back. His sibling is a girl with a thick shock of hair and arms and a torso burnished from the sun. She wears a dirty, grayish diaper, which may or may not have been changed in the last few days. In one hand she clutches a ragamuffin stuffed animal of indeterminate breed and species. The toy is as gray as the diaper.
They live in a house in one of these small towns, although they spend little time there. Their province is the entire expanse of their road, which they freely wander, sometimes as a duet with the boy in charge.
At other times the girl wanders along the road alone, like a lost waif.
One of the kids' fathers was rumored to be a pedophile who locked the kids in one room while he feasted his eyes on computer porn in another. The other father was one of the mother's many itinerant boyfriends, indistinguishable from the rest.
The boy grows tired of being his sister's warden and occasionally rebels. Like the time he jumped on his bicycle and rode off into the night.
Crass stories of his possible abduction circulate the neighborhood.
An image of his elfin face comes to mind and I instinctively feel sick at the mental images of the various nefarious characters - including the bad-actor stepfather - who could have abducted him.
The next day I hear that he has been found. Turns out he was sick of his mother and boyfriend's endless quarreling and decided to run away. He ended up several miles down the road, at the house of some good Samaritans who alerted the police.
The mother had given the boy instructions to stick close to the house. When she'd checked on him again a mere three hours later, she was astonished to learn that he'd vanished.
* * *
The feral children's kindly retired neighbor has an open-door policy with them and delights in entertaining them. He builds train tracks for them and thinks the busy-body concern of people who worry overly about their safety (or lack thereof) is much ado about nothing.
“I have to say that it just warms the cockles of my heart to see children behaving like children. I mean, remember The Waltons? These kids are just healthy, running around the neighborhood barefoot and happy. This is what childhood is supposed to be like,” he tells me.
Several weeks later the little girl has been wandering around his property again, unsupervised.
“She's so sneaky. And she just will not hear no,” he says, shaking his head. “I told her to leave, to go straight home, and she nodded her head yes. What if she crawls into my swimming pool and drowns?”
The cockles of this neighbor's heart are beginning to freeze over.
The irresponsible parents of feral children may have little affinity for raising their kids, but are litigious pit bulls who would gleefully sue if their offspring got hurt on an unsuspecting neighbor's property. Their own negligence being beside the point, of course.
* * *
Back in the 1970s in the small university town where I grew up, my mother would purse her lips and frown when the doorbell rang at 6 o'clock. She would be in the beginning throes of making dinner. Our family habitually ate at 8 o'clock, an anomaly in provincial Nova Scotia, where folks sat down to “supper” at 5 o'clock sharp.
A mere half hour later, parents would release their children to play during the summer twilight hours, wither they would go in the neighborhood. When the doorbell rang after 5:30 p.m., it was invariably one of my (or my brother or sister's) playmates coming over to ride bikes or play on the swing set.
“Tell them that this family eats dinner at a civilized hour,” my mother would admonish us. She put special emphasis on the word dinner.
In the local Nova Scotia vernacular, the three daily meals are breakfast, dinner and supper. “Dinner” is the big meal eaten in the middle of the day, followed by a lighter repast in the evening called “supper.” In my mother's mid Atlantic American high society world, one's daily bread consisted of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Supper, if it existed at all, was a crude midnight snack.
Not only were my brother, sister, and I not free to run barefoot and wild after dinner, we were instructed to scorn our inferior freewheeling peers and by association, their permissive parents. My mother believed in orchestrated activities, Sunday school, nursery school, summer camp and proper decorum - the very qualities our free-range, peripatetic neighborhood brethren lacked.
My mother also believed in babysitters - and not only the kind who arrived at 7 o'clock and left at midnight after she and my father had returned from the theater, or evening cocktails, or wherever they were. She also believed in a special breed of sitters of the long-term contracting variety.
My siblings and I came to refer to this stable of women as “The Missuses.” The Missuses were a collection of ladies of (what was once discreetly referred to as) “a certain age.” They were stout, sturdy, serviceable widows and divorcées who lived on limited incomes, had raised at least four children of their own respectively, and were not averse to earning some additional discretionary income.
Mrs. F baked lemon meringue pies, ironed my father's shirts and apparently toilet-trained all three of us during one of my mother's prolonged absences. Mrs. R was a long-winded divorcée who gossiped shamelessly, smoked like a chimney, and never walked where she could drive. Mrs. R was my mother's preferred contract sitter.
Mrs. P, whose main drawing point seemed to be that she lived directly across the street instead of up the hill or across town (in the respective cases of Mrs. R and Mrs. F), was nevertheless employed less frequently than either of the other Missuses.
My mother despised the narrow confines of the provincial world she found herself inhabiting upon marrying my father, a college professor. She pined for the opulent life she had led with her parents in New Jersey and escaped to them whenever loneliness or boredom overtook her.
The collective Missuses became stand-in, de facto parents for weeks at a time - weeks during which we were shipped off to board out, like cast-off orphans awaiting the promise of a new home.
I don't remember seeing my father during these times, despite the fact that we resided only a few houses away. Nor do I remember speaking to my mother on the telephone. I merely remember feeling displaced, lonely and sad, as well as maternal and protective of my five-years-younger sister, who would often ask when Mummy was coming back.
“I don't know,” I would answer honestly. I didn't dare tell her that each time our mother went away I secretly feared that she would never return.
We were alone, left to raise ourselves under the benevolent but disinterested bosoms of the Missuses.
* * *
The boy wanders down the road, alone this time. He is wearing tattered, cut-off denim shorts, no shirt, and is barefooted. He kicks a pebble along the dusty road and seems oblivious to my presence several paces behind. But then abruptly he pivots, and as he turns to face me the corners of his mouth turn up in a saucy grin.
And as he does, I feel the dormant layers of ice protecting my own feral child's heart begin to slowly thaw and melt away.