THE SUMMER OF KEN
Nonfiction from The Southeast Review Volume 27.2
For a summer, he lived in our basement. Didn’t pay rent. Held no job. Just smoked cigarettes and stared in the distance and farted around with his dog. He was alien to us—tall and bony and eerie-eyed—the grave, sunken look of a farmer from the Dust Bowl, like pictures we’d seen in social studies books.
The leathery, deeply creased skin of his face was mask-like, sort of folded in. Indelible marks of the highway hobo we suspected he’d always been. He had a serious tan, a kind of glaze to him, and slicked his hair straight back like a gangster, a jet black sheet, streaked at the sides with some giveaway gray he must have missed when he dyed it. I’d bet he was nearly fifty. For all we knew he was thirty-five. Truth was you couldn’t tell.
He lived in our basement. This guy Ken and his dog Samantha, our chosen transients, tests of faith.
That was the summer my parents chose to stretch their Christian mission to the outer limits. I don’t mean this in the usual sense. Neither sanctimonious bible-beaters nor bent in a bad way on saving souls, they were nonetheless suckers for the core ideal. As follows: serve the poor. Open your doors to them. Seriously, actually do this. Invite a transient and his mangy dog into your modest-sized home. Carry on as if this were natural. Then ask your sons not to roll their eyes (nor sleep with one eye open).
*
We picked him up in the K-mart parking lot just outside of Wilkes-Barre. The whole family went. A field demonstration of Christian generosity. Though we didn’t like it—not at all—and we let my old man know it. He listened intently, sensitively, like always, then let us know it was final. This guy Ken was staying with us because he needed our help. We’d try it out. An experiment. Might be actual fun.
My father was a minister, and Ken had gotten our number from another pastor, a young man named Charlie Buford, who was big-hearted and persuasive, sincere about serving the desperate and poor. Real liberation theology type. The Charlie Bufords of the world did this sort of thing on a regular basis. Ken would be my father’s—and our—virgin flight. First and last.
*
I was eleven that summer and shared a bedroom with my little brother up on the second floor. I knew if this guy Ken meant to murder me, he’d have to hike two creaky stairways and risk waking everyone up. My other, older brother had no such assurance. He lived in the basement too, in the back room next to the furnace.
That part didn’t last long. The sub-cohabitation. Could you blame my brother for the minor freak-out? He left a week early for his job that year, to the Mennonite camp in downstate PA where he spent his summers as a counselor. Ken would have the basement—the carpeted fore-room with our toys and games and weight-lifting set—set for himself and Sam.
At first, of course, it was weird. Who was this guy? What was he doing at our dinner table, head bowed in pre-meal prayer as I kept my eyes open and stared?
Tell me, please, why was he sitting on our sofa in the living room, watching That’s Incredible! with the rest of us?
A few weeks in, we hardly noticed him. He was unobtrusive for the most part. Sure, he was there sometimes when you wished he wasn’t, but after time, he became almost family. He told pretty good stories in a slow, New England drawl. Here and there we even made him laugh. I don’t think anyone but my father was ever entirely at ease around him. But we weren’t unnerved either. Ken and Sam became a fact.
He ate our food, slept under our roof, walked his dog, smoked, talked.
The fact we all recall the clearest? He loved my mother’s home-baked bread, the oatmeal bread in particular. He’d sit at our kitchen table, his bronzed, hairy legs crossed like a philosopher’s, really working the butter, slathering it on, almost as if he were tuckpointing. Perhaps in hopes the hardy slice might stick to his stomach forever. He’d scoop out the strawberry jam, one or two spoonfuls, and spread it over the buttered base like a grainy layer of paint.
“That’s a work of art,” he’d say, holding up the slice. “See that?”
He’d down half a loaf in a sitting. Easy. Eventually, my parents felt obliged to prescribe a sort of bread boundary. A two-slice limit. Something like that. Mom could only bake so fast, and besides, we liked the bread too. Just once, we wanted to find a loaf without his thumbprint in the doughy top, where he’d pressed the thing tightly to steady it for slicing.
*
He was looking for work as an interior decorator—that’s what he did, apparently, no joke, he decorated homes—though he had some trouble, a recurring pattern, finding clients who trusted his vision.
He never found any paying work that summer, though my father gave him occasional tasks. Basic stuff around the house: Water the garden here. Do the dishes there. Even assigned a bible study or two, meditation questions (my dad tells me now), which Ken habitually zipped through, then headed off to the coffee shop or tossed Frisbee with the dog on our side lawn.
I think we were too young to call it freeloading. Even now, I’m not sure that’s what it was. He was getting it together. Taking his time. Having a serious summer-long think.
*
Our benevolence toward Ken changed course—severely—the day my father asked him to mow the lawn. He obliged, but when he finished—sweaty and sun-baked and lighting a smoke—he lit into my brother and me as we lazily watched cartoons.
“You boys just gonna lay around all afternoon?”
My brother and I bolted upright.
Well … yeah (we meant to say). Sure we are. It’s summertime, right? That’s what it’s for.
We said nothing. And our silence only seemed to embitter him.
“You boys need chores.”
“We’ve got chores,” I said. Which was true. Dishes. Garbage. The usual. Nothing too strenuous or time-consuming. Wasn’t like we lived on a farm.
“It’s our house anyway,” I furthered. “You can’t tell us what to—”
“Don’t get lippy.” He stood at the back door that opened to the living room, his shirt off, brow furrowed, looking taut-muscled and ominous. He loomed there, exuding authority, deciding what to say next.
And then—from nowhere, it seemed—came an edgy-voiced, full-bore scolding. He really tore us a new one. As if he’d wanted to do so all along.
You ought to help out more around here, he told us. What kind of free ride do you think life owes you? What sort of shiftless little wiseass punks had our otherwise thoughtful father raised? Sons of a Mennonite minister? Come on! Get it together, boys! Pitch in!
We were stunned. Scared too. Suffice it to say, we both ran off to Mommy (after mumbling something wiseass in reply). The admonishment was too much to bear. And we both—my little brother and I—were more than a little pissed.
*
The next few days at the dinner table were tense. My father and Ken had had a sit-down, and though Ken was adamant that “the boys ought to have more duties around here,” he agreed that our discipline was not his business.
Ken never officially apologized. Maybe he really thought we had it too easy. He’d spoken out of turn, he seemed to admit, but still, he’d meant what he said. Every word.
Thereon, my little brother and I found more excuses to be absent from home. Wiffle ball games. Bike rides to the park. Volunteer runs to the store, etc. A mutual avoidance settled in—a whole new flavor of weirdness. A while there, as I recall, we really wanted him gone.
*
In the last strange twist to the summer of Ken, we ended up leaving—all of us—and Ken was the one who stayed.
I’d assumed when family vacation time arrived, Ken would take a trip to the local Y. Or hit the road for good. Whatever. But as our Toyota pulled from the driveway, packed to the ceiling with camping gear, Ken stood by our house, holding Sam in his arms, and grinned widely, waving goodbye. The house keys were in the pocket of his cut-offs. The Shearer home was his.
Was he thinking, “Good God, I’ve hit the jackpot!”? Was he tempted in the slightest to rob us blind? And we wondered if our father had lost it. I mean, come on, Dad. Do you even know this guy? Really, truly know him?
We were gone a solid week and a half.
This, the ultimate test of faith, the final exam of our loving trust.
When we reached the Adirondacks and set up camp, we forgot about it soon enough. By the time we hit the ocean for the second half of our vacation, Ken was a distant memory.
But the last day or two, riding home on the interstate, gazing out the window at the billboards and trucks, I really had to wonder. Would Ken pass the test? Did he have that much faith in our faith in him? Or rather, had he skipped town already? Was he riding shotgun in one of these trucks, zooming the other way? Maniacally cackling? Our TV, stereo, washer, furniture—packed flush to the ceiling in back?
*
I’ve asked my dad about it since. Why did he take such a risk with our belongings? With the security of our home? In retrospect at least, he must see that choice as heedless. Right?
My father, who’s just turned seventy, only chuckles in reply. He says he just knew. Ken had a deep sense of conscience. Of fairness. Religious belief had little to do with it. Ken’s character would never have allowed it. Something in him, says my father, was rock solid true to his word. Sure, he must have been tempted. Ken’s friends, the transients and drifters and day laborers who hung at the coffee shop downtown, called him crazy for not taking advantage. He should rent a U-Haul and clear the place out. Are you insane, man? They’d asked him. That’s cherry-picking, bro!
*
But when we pulled up the driveway, carried in our luggage, and stepped toward the living room in back, we found him there, on the sofa, the mutt Samantha curled at his feet. His teeth were sinking into a slice of oatmeal bread, gooped all to hell with butter and jam. He raised the bread in salutation.
“Hey there!” said Ken. “Good trip?”
He’d passed. He looked proud about it. And we carried on as if it were natural.
Jay Shearer is a PhD candidate in English Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches writing and literature. His writing has appeared most recently in Other Voices, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Main Street Rag, and the Pinchpenny Press chapbook series. In 2007, he won UIC’s Goodnow fellowship award for prose. He lives in Chicago with his wife and son.
