Mercy Among the Children (12 page)

Moreover my father would not become work foreman at this time, as Porier was planning, which meant no forty-dollar-a-week raise.

Later that morning, a week before the robbery, Sydney went to Connie’s home. When he told Connie the conditions, Connie stared at him and said in astonishment: “You didn’t do that for me?”

“Of course,” Sydney said.

“Why?” Connie said, and he looked around at no one in particular as if wanting to relay to someone his feelings of astonishment.

“I don’t think you being fired over one incident was fair,” Sydney said.

“Fair,” Connie said, mulling over the word, and licking his lips together. “My, my.”

Tonight, a week later, as Elly slept, Sydney pressed his hands together like a child forming a church steeple and remembered the weak expression on Connie’s face when he had said “My, my.” He had taken two shifts as watchman for no pay. Connie had not once thanked him.

Elly was pregnant again, we were growing older, and here he was still living in a shack. He knew the world Elly had come from. But he had not improved it much. Diedre Whyne of course was right, and this was part of the reason his soul was inconsolable. If they took the child away things would be better. As far as finite things went, Ms. Whyne was right. But of course Elly and he would not do that.
Could
not.

What about the car he had just promised her, which she had told Autumn and me? All his life my father had witnessed
men who had had better luck and had gained much more than he, some through deceit and treachery. But there was nothing to be gained in worrying about them.

“It will happen as it is supposed to,” Father muttered that night. Although saying this was no comfort at all. Suddenly Devlin’s smile pressed a heavy weight on my father’s heart, just as Prof. David Scone’s dismissal did years before. He reached forward and stroked Elly’s hair. Then he kneeled and prayed. Why did a grown man do this on his knees in his underwear? I do not know. I have never been able to understand why.

I have always known my father believed in the necessity of a stoic life, and still and all hoped with stoicism for some proof of life being worthwhile.

Wind wailed against our house, and it was dark up on the highway. Now and again a tractor-trailer with a load of peat moss would grind along the road, stopping to turn toward the detour and the old bridge farther along the river, and the lights would catch our upstairs window, and show Father pale and almost naked. Yet no matter how thin my father looked, he was strong and impenetrably faced the cold and snow. He would work and had worked in below-zero all day in a sweater without a coat. Ice and snow was his world. The fire of ice; the sweet blue orb of snow.

TWELVE

When Rudy Bellanger went to Mathew Pit late the afternoon after his incident with Elly, shaken and white, with a story
about how my mother had tricked him by showing him her panties then refusing to comply, and would certainly tell Leo that he had assaulted her, Mathew looked unimpressed. He had always felt she was like that: a bitch from the village of Tabusintac who milked cows as a little girl, went to church, and kept a crucifix under her pillow. And now was married to a simpleton who read books and talked in riddles. These antics were nothing. Mathew said he knew all about women like her, and he banged a bottle of rum down heavily on the table as if to prove it.

Mathew said he had himself dated her and had long known the girl. Rudy’s fault, Mathew advised, lay in his good nature and his kindness, and his general decency. Mathew sniffed and folded his arms and tapped his boots on the linoleum floor. But now it was time to get tough, Mathew said. Rudy shuddered when he looked at Mathew Pit’s face.

“How are we going to get tough?” Rudy whispered.

“If that’s the kind of woman she is — we can get her back soon ’nough,” he said, in a raspy tired voice.

The air was dulled by the smell of burning wood and autumn air coming through the front window onto the dust-covered sill of Pit’s old house.

For seven years Mathew felt himself best friends with Rudy Bellanger, whom he called Banger, and had done everything he could to be entitled to something when the old man died. His biggest mistake, however, was at certain times to trust Rudy with information. Last year, he had advised Rudy about the property where the highway would go, and was exasperated when Rudy told his wife, who immediately informed her father. Leo then bought that sliver of property for himself, making another thirty thousand dollars profit. Mathew, who never had the front money to buy it, had informed Rudy because he wanted a split.

“You stupid no-nut bastard — you don’t do that,” he had said. “You keep these things quiet,” he said, pinching Rudy’s cheek and pretending it was a joke. But his smile, showing white even teeth, was angry. “The goddamn McVicers get everything — everything all the time — this shoulda’ been for you — the Whynes and McVicer share this whole area and we is nothin’ but peasants.”

Still, Mathew was not about to see anything else go up in smoke because a bored wife flashed her crotch hair. He knew how Leo liked this woman, and was of course aware of her good looks. For the last few months he was wanting to discredit her not only for his own vainglory but because being a realist (and knowing Rudy’s weakness with Cynthia) he could sense that something would happen that might jeopardize his friend. He had warned Rudy to stay away from Elly on four different occasions, but the last thing Rudy understood was himself.

Mathew was more angry with my father, whom he had always considered slow and dumb. (He did hear that Sydney had read Tolstoy and Conrad, but what did that matter?) How could Sydney have set this all up, he thought.

Mathew Pit believed people viewed the world as he himself viewed the world. And Mathew was totally unaware of how far his imagined plans had gone, over the last few years, and unaware of how dependent he was upon plans to secure Rudy’s trust and receive recompense for this trust. When he was drunk Rudy often said they would be partners as soon as the old man died.

But because of this incident with a woman Mathew himself was still sometimes enamoured of, Mathew’s house of cards was beginning to implode without anything being realized.

Mathew had looked at Rudy that late afternoon, a stained bolt-shaped ring on his index finger and a cigarillo in his mouth. Behind his head under the dreary window a calendar with a picture of a half-naked woman was grimed with thumbprints.

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that girl,” Mathew said, snap ping a bit of leather shoelace with his heavy hands.

Mathew talked in a whisper. His eyes glanced to his left and then his right, and he went back to repairing a snowshoe, tying it off as conscientiously as an artist.

When Rudy left Leo McVicer’s that afternoon, a half hour after my parents had, he was well aware of what had really happened. Mathew had robbed the house.

Rudy had been appalled by the look of Elly, and he could not justify destroying the young woman’s life. He drove to Mathew Pit’s after he left Leo’s, determined to get the money back, to cut all his ties with Cynthia.

Mathew shook his head and yelled something indiscernible to Trenton’s dog, then kicked at it. He did this to further his control over Rudy Bellanger. What infuriated Rudy about this was that he sensed in Mathew’s movement how much Mathew knew about him, and disliked about him.

“You can’t do anything else to her — this must be the last thing — she is just a poor woman — they have nothing,” Rudy advised Mathew Pit. “I don’t mind getting rid of them, as you say, but I don’t like cheating old Leo in order to do it.”

That is, Rudy said what weak people always say to prove they are of one and the same mind with others. Of course he minded getting rid of my mother. It was the only thing he minded more than cheating old Leo. Besides, he felt Leo had cheated him, and was at the bottom of his heart somewhat happy.

But by his own weakness all this had happened. Now he said:

“I need the money back.”

Mathew laughed. “The hell you do. I’m the one got you outta this scrape — you are the one, my boy, who loused up my deal with the land north of the river — I bet Leo thanked you for reminding him there was one sliver of land he didn’t control.”

“I know — he was wrong — but you can’t keep the five hundred,” Rudy implored.

“I’m going to keep it till after Christmas — by then everything will have blowed over.” Mathew spoke with calm assurance and had the studious look of a man who is used to holding others’ feet to the fire.

Rudy could do nothing but say he would go see the police if this continued.

“Police — police, is it! Leo would want that — he’d welcome it.” Mathew gazed at Rudy with eyes that were unfocussed and unnerving. There was a bit of blond whiskers on his upper lip and chin. He wore a jean jacket and heavy work boots covered in mud. His blond hair was slicked back in the ducktail he always wore, even though the fashion had long ago changed.

Mathew thought anyone who dressed differently was a faggot. He did not know how else to describe his anger and frustration when he saw them. The boys looked like girls and yet condescended to him because of their education. And if he was anti-intellectual (as Leo McVicer was), he had a right to be, by birth. All his life
they
in some way or the other had spit in his face, and those whom he had trusted after three years away at university looked upon him with dismissive conceit. But when their cars or motorboats were broken they came to him.

Their treasure was education, which he did not understand, and so he (and his sister, Cynthia) teamed with Rudy as a business partner not because Mathew knew business but because it didn’t threaten or hurt him. In this maze of confusion he had of late suspected Sydney Henderson of being one of them, the intellectuals, one of those who with half a chance would dismiss his entire life. So it was not important if Sydney or his wife got blamed for anything. He would blame them for anything he chose. He had dated her and
she
had scorned
him.
Worse, Sydney had a job on the bridge. The bridge was
a large project, part of the project that would create the new highway through land Mathew had instructed Rudy to buy. It would have meant over a year of high wages.

Mathew had spoken about sabotaging it. He was now set on this course.

“I don’t know about their concrete — and part of that last span is buckled,” Mathew had said the week before. “What if I took a piece of dynamite — then look out, eh?”

“Connie Devlin is the watchman,” Cynthia had told him. “He will come back to haunt you if you do it.”

Cynthia was beautiful — and more ruthless than her brother. Nevertheless, Mathew was prepared to go ahead with his sabotage on the bridge. He felt that it might help Rudy with his problems if he could cast doubt on the worth of the foreman, Abby Porier.

Now he stared at Rudy Bellanger wearing his suit and gold cufflinks and said: “How much that cost ya?”

Rudy didn’t answer. His face turned red, and he fidgeted and asked for water. Mathew poured him a glass.

Rudy finished his water in a gulp and asked for more.

Then Mathew smiled kindly at Rudy again.

Rudy wanted to build a marina to cater to the dozens of new pleasure boats and sailboats on the river. Rudy had planned this manna for ten years, secretly for the first seven. One night, drinking with Mathew, he had told him his plan. Pit’s eyes widened as Rudy took a paper napkin and drew his plans on it, showing the sports bar, the upstairs lounge, the deck lounge. It was very much a replica of a marina he had seen in Halifax. He said he could easily get a grant from the Atlantic Provinces Business Bureau because he knew three people on the committee.

Rudy believed his planned takeover was moral, very moral, until the robbery. For thirteen years, since the day of his
marriage, it was
his
store, and
his
property. Now, because of Elly, everything had hit a snag. His whole life seemed nothing more than a house of cards imploding. He was the last one who would be able to complain about any moral snag now.

Though Rudy had not been involved in the robbery, how could he not say he knew who had? And more to the point, how could he not pretend it was Elly and Sydney to save himself?

There is no worse flaw in man’s character than that of wanting to belong.

Rudy believed he needed men like Mathew Pit. Men like Mathew Pit had no structure, nor needed any. They had no class affiliation and needed none. Mathew was by trade a mechanic but he could be anything. He did not need a business structure, as businessmen like Rudy needed. He only needed a scheme, and that scheme was more important than any office or committee boardroom. People like Mathew would know what it was like to sell shoelaces fifteen for two dollars, or how to make two million in a week. It depended only upon the scheme. Mathew had his scheme, and that involved sooner or later moving to Ontario with a lot of money (that he would get from Rudy) and buying a fishing and hunting lodge in the north. He had told no one this.

Far from being a throwback to another time, as anyone looking at Mathew Pit might think, he and his sister were the new ruthless entrepreneurs. They would listen with almost stupefied inattention to the words “ethics” or “moral responsibility” — but they both knew fierce loyalty and hatreds. Sometimes they could be burned at the stake before giving up a friend. But they also both knew, especially Cynthia, how to use friends, and how to give them up in a heartbeat.

Here in a hallway of Pit’s old house, the walls crowded with pictures of old men and horses, Rudy could see into the far back room when Cynthia came downstairs after her shower.

He had succumbed to her advances, right under his wife’s nose, and he had promised himself he would never do that again. She was beautiful, with dark hair and eyes, but was far less genteel than Elly.

Of course at this moment he was through with all his philandering and had decided wild horses wouldn’t be able to haul him back; that he would never get into trouble again, or cause anyone any more grief.