Mercy Among the Children (14 page)

“Why would he want to knock the bridge down? Why would I do that? I don’t understand.”

“I swear there’ll be big money in it for us — it’s gotta go — the span’s gotta go.”

“Who’s paying you to do this?”

Mathew thought for a moment. “Rudy Bellanger will pay us — if it’s done right —”

“But that’s his own company.”

“That’s what makes it legal.”

Connie said he had just gotten rehired after a dispute and didn’t want to chance anything. He did not tell Mathew that Sydney had gotten him rehired under stringent conditions.

“It is a awful case,” Mathew said. “Sydney was just caught stealing a bunch of money from Leo —”

“God, where? At the bridge?”

“No — at the house — Elly did it.”

“Elly!”

“I think so — but they will try to blame it on you — just as always.”

Connie looked at him curiously. “Me —?”

“Well, I can’t be sure — but we’ll do something very big,”
Mathew said. “It’s a shot into the future for us both. You just help me with the span —” He produced a stick of dynamite he had had in his possession for a long time. “Just let part of a span fall into the river — and Rudy will pay us four thousand apiece.”

“Four thousand apiece?”

“Yes — four thousand apiece. It’ll be good for Rudy —Rudy needs our help — we love Rudy, you and I.”

“Love Rudy?”

“Well, I’ve always had affection for Rudy — I don’t know about you.”

“Sure,” Connie Devlin said, and wiggling his toes in his big red socks (he always slept with socks on like he had as a child because of cold toes) sneezed and coughed. He said sure, because he didn’t want to chance what would happen if he said no. He was Mathew’s first cousin. He had usually been in on things of this sort, in one fashion or another. Just by Mathew’s face, he knew Elly had done no such thing as rob the house. Mathew had.

And this showed the difference between Mathew and his two friends. Connie had as much on Mathew as Mathew ever had on Rudy Bellanger. But what Connie knew kept him both faithful and silent; what Mathew knew about Rudy kept him arrogant and dangerous.

Connie Devlin listened to these plans. He would turn out the lights the night Mathew drove the truck across the abutment and threw the dynamite. Mathew knew nothing about explosives, but he knew Sydney did. It would be considered Sydney’s fault. Everything would work from that.

Cynthia had disapproved of the robbery because everything Mathew had done so far had failed. Then tonight, before Rudy visited, she told him that he soon better prove that he could do things right or she would think of him as others did.

“And how is that — how do others think of me?”

“Well — a bigmouth blowhard,” she said, “but underneath — a gutless fool.”

His eyes jumped slightly when he looked at her. Still, had she not said this to him, he would never have rethought the dynamite or the bridge.

Now he left Connie and started his trek toward home.

Cynthia had been envious of the rich and powerful she saw as a child. Politicians and mavericks from all walks of life, some who owned cottages along the bay shore. Families from places like Montreal and Oshawa, Ottawa and Toronto. People so adept at dismissing these wide-eyed children in those small fishing houses. She wanted more than anything to be like them.

Mathew was her sole resource, but her mind was brilliant enough to see avenues where Mathew did not go. Right to McVicer himself, if need be.

She did not know that her remarks about Mathew had caused a change in him — and that he would take a chance on the bridge just for hellery.

It was on her part a rather significant mistake.

FOURTEEN

As news of the robbery spread, my father was looked upon with more suspicion, and men stayed away from him. A week or so after Connie Devlin was allowed back onsite I took Dad’s dinner to him, carrying it as if I was a waiter, in joy that I had something to deliver my dad. My father came to meet me,
patted my head, and went to sit with Connie to eat his lunch. Devlin turned and said loudly:

“I ain’t no robber rubberhead — go sit yerself somewhere else before ya contamp-inate me with yer robber germs —”

He got a great laugh out of this, which is what he was hoping for. I trembled with rage. My father sat with his eyes down the longest time, and then looked over at me.

“Get along to school, son,” he said.

Autumn and I did not know about the robbery until we heard about it at school. And my first reaction was how ordinary it was for
us
to be blamed for this.

I always wore a tie to school — it was as if my mother wanted to isolate me even more. A tie, a heavy white shirt, old suit pants, and black shoes. Autumn always wore a dress, white stockings, and a pair of black patent leather shoes that had once belonged to Mother herself. Her eyes were red, her eyelashes thin and weak. One day after she was teased she whispered in my ear:

“I will someday have eyes to stare the world in the face —and my eyes, Lyle dear — well, my eyes will be Autumn blue.”

Still, we were dressed the way my mother believed children should be dressed to go out, It was genteelly countrified. That I did not know how to throw a punch to protect us made it dangerous. The boys of my youth valiantly tried to get me to fight — two or three of them at a time, calling me “little Lord Fauntleroy.”

Autumn stood behind me when they teased her. Did I hit them back? No — because my father had drilled into me the vanity and falseness of violence. So I turned away ashamed, and endured with my sister the callous and chronic idiocy of others. My mother was called a thief, and then a whore. They told me she drank gin at Polly’s and had her panties taken off by Rudy Bellanger.

Across the brook the days got shorter and the wind blew the substance of hard snow over the tufts of hard broken fields. I would go home and stare at my mother in strange agony. I could not ask her if this was true.

I was usually up before breakfast because I would stoke the stove, or sometimes Autumn and I would be sent out to meet the milk truck at the top of the lane. Autumn did well in school and I did not. Nor did I do that well in sports. But I did do well in the woods. Already I had explored the woods and surrounding area, and I had seen where the salmon would run close to shore on their journey into our waters.

I saw some danger in the woods. I knew what it was like to get turned around and lost. Usually as the cold days came and the snow fell I planned for trips to snare rabbits and trap mink — things I could sell for some extra money. I did not want the money for myself. I was saving to buy Autumn contacts to make her eyes the blue she desired. I could find mink tracks, and rabbit, of course, and was beginning to notice coyote tracks as they came into our area. The coyotes here were almost the size of wolves, mating as they did with wild or running dogs.

I wore a heavy coat, a hunting vest, and lined boots, and spent my afternoons away from everyone, and could run comfortably and break a trail on snowshoes.

Trenton, Mathew’s young brother, was almost nineteen but looked like a child. He wandered about the bridge worksite, and went there — in spite of people telling him to stay away — to collect nails and loose cement, putty and wire. Not only my father but Porier had to help him across the road because of the transport trucks turning toward the detour. The snow fell often that year and he was in danger of being injured.

The old woman was too tired to bother following him, as she once did, and though she sometimes kept him inside, he had enough wits to get out by himself. But my father’s concern hit
a snag with Mathew, who said he didn’t want my father in his yard. Perhaps Mathew feared Trenton divulging something —it is only a guess. Still, Sydney started walking Trenton home. The Pits did not like this. Mathew came outside one night and told my father not to bring the boy home again. I was with them.

“But I don’t mind doing it,” Sydney said.

“Don’t matter — stay away from the boy — stay away from him — you hear — I don’t want him with you!”

“It’s just that the bridge —” my father started to explain.

“The bridge,” Mat piped up. “All as we hear day and night is goddamn heavy equipment on that bridge — it shouldn’t be built here at all — it’s all just political — we didn’t have a say and don’t have a cent from it. And yer as much a part of it — ya poisoned my chances at a job — yer not going to be playing about with this youngster —”

Trenton wandered to the site the next day. So Sydney decided to have a conversation with the old woman, Alvina Pit, without Mathew being there. He went across Arron Brook to the Pit house after supper on December 18, 1982. White smoke drifted out of their chimney, and fresh raw snow sat upon the aging stumps behind the house, while a glow from outside Christmas lights lighted the sky farther down the snowy road.

Alvina was outside decorating the tree. In her look, the small blunt nose, the eyes a little close together, her soft lips, my father could see Cynthia in thirty years.

Alvina looked at him the way she had been taught to, as if his rationale, since too obscure for most people, was trickery, as Mathew had warned her it would be. She was like many unthinking women who bowed to their sons.

“I think I should keep an eye on Trenton,” he said. “Because once he gets out of sight of Mat and you he is on his own.”

“I look out for him all he needs,” she said swiftly, because she wanted him to know he was one of the people Mat and
she would protect her son from. She knew all about how he humiliated Mathew. Mathew told her.

My father stared at her old coat and frayed scarf and watched her work. There was a wisping sound of snow at the back of their house, the sky had darkened, and wind had blackened the old iced-over sawhorses in the corner of the yard. Sydney looked at the upstairs window when a light went on, and saw Cynthia in the hallway.

“You don’t have to run after him —” Sydney said. “I don’t mind bringing him back.”

“He is our responsibility, thank you very much — you don’t seem to have done much for your own!” She did not look at him as she worked, but looked at the spruce tree she was trying to pin Christmas lights to.

Alvina felt justified in mistrusting him — a grown man who was mocked by the community for being odd, and was considered strange. Strange in Alvina’s mind meant only one thing, though she would never say this aloud.

Grabbing my father by the coat, as if this was the way to make herself heard, she said Trenton’s life was in God’s hands. Trenton, she maintained, was a child of her old age, and therefore God had been wise enough to make him how he was. He brought joy to everyone.

Trenton huddled in an old man’s overalls and bib beside her as Sydney took out the candy cane he had brought and handed it to him.

Alvina continued, “God has every hair on Trenton’s head numbered in his great mind.” (She repeated just what Father Porier had told her.)

Sydney nodded. “I know he does, Alvina. But what does that matter if tomorrow night he is killed on the bridge!”

This statement frightened her. “If you go near him again I will get the police!” She walked away across the frost-bulked
yard, her heavy black-seamed nylons dragging at her ankles.

Trenton turned and ran, his back bent and his legs flaying like a daddy longlegs, a candy cane in his mitten.

Dad came back home, and told us what was said, almost word for word. So, like other conversations I have heard secondhand, I have committed them to memory and now relate them to you. Sydney told my mother he was wrong in what he had just said; and it was said in a rash way to convince her.

“I shouldn’t have tried to frighten her,” he said. “It all came about because of Mathew’s damn stubbornness.”

“If there is a safety concern Porier should go to her, not you,” I said.

But Porier was infuriatingly conceited, Father said. Someone being injured would mean little to him; not because Porier was bad, but because he had warnings posted about the weak span, and had an abutment in front of it.

Sydney asked my mother if he should phone Alvina and apologize.

My mother sighed. “Just leave it be,” she said. “It is up to them. And Lyle is right, Porier should go over. Hopefully everything will turn out for the best.”

My father then spoke, softly, as if to himself. I was sitting near him, and saw his hands tremble as he talked. He said he had no knowledge of why he was abused as a boy, why he was born in such poverty, why he had faced what he had, when others who wrote for the paper and became members of the Legislature had never seen a day like he.

“But remember,” he said aloud, “we still have our faith in God that everything will turn out.”

“Why?” I said angrily. “The old priest didn’t even give us a Christmas box.”

“Son, a priest is not the Church, and the Church is not the faith,” Father answered.

He then told us that in order to run away from his life, he had read. And in his readings he realized that he was to suffer for some reason.

“Remember Cynthia’s stillborn child,” Mother said, “and how Mathew spoke about you then — he will say it again if he can.”

“Leopards don’t change their spots,” I said. “The father of that baby was Danny Sheppard, everyone knows — and they blamed you for a long time!”

My father nodded and said nothing more.

FIFTEEN

The next day was his last day of work at the site. We knew he would be let go after the holiday. The only thing he had managed to do was to keep Devlin in work while he himself was to be fired. This irony must have pleased Mathew.

Dad got up particularly early, and did not eat breakfast. They would have to rope off the third span, which had buckled along the side. This day has replayed itself in my mind for years.

My father left for work at seven and worked the whole day and came back home about five-thirty. At six-thirty the telephone rang, and Mrs. Pit asked if Trenton was there.

“No, he is not,” Sydney said.

“You don’t have him — and are keeping him from me?”

“Of course not.”

“Please, is this a joke? Cynthia thinks you are keeping him on us for some reason. That you think we are bad people or are hiding the boy — for — for some purpose.”