Mercy Among the Children (15 page)

“Mrs. Pit, tell Cynthia I wouldn’t do such a thing — I
couldn’t
do such a thing.”

It was bitterly cold. My father put on a worker’s jumpsuit and left the house to search for the boy. I went with him to the inlet. He never spoke to me. I felt his anxiety as we walked.

There were gentle shrouds of snow falling from small fir trees in back of our house. From the far side of the inlet we could see the waving flashlight beams of people in panic, Cynthia and others, and hear the faint hollering of the old woman — a woman Sydney had never really spoken to until the day before, and a family he had never truly known.

They were searching the shoreline but were frightened to go onto the newly formed ice. (Trenton had gone onto the ice two or three times before.) My father was frightened as well, and perhaps he was very frightened, but decided someone had to go.

I told him that I was lighter and I could go. (I had always wanted to prove I was as brave as he was.)

“No,” he said sternly.

The ice was as bottled and grey as the back of a nurse shark and my father soon disappeared in the darkness. He walked toward the strait calling Trenton’s name. But after a time he saw the open water, and felt the frozen wind, and turned back, heart sinking, and thinking of the bridge, just at the time he heard a thud, like snow falling from a great height, and he felt the ice shift under his boots.

My father ran to the bridge. He arrived twenty minutes later and shone his light along the yard, by the cranes, and down along the shore. The security lights had not been turned on; the whole structure was silent and forbidding. He went to the power house and tried to turn on the lights, and could not get in. He went back to the spans and stood where yellow cranes and tractors sat blanketed in snow.

He was about to turn his light out when he saw a form lying to the left of the last span, on the ice. And what was worse, a section of that span had let go. Rebar jutted out like spikes into the night, and eight feet of the span itself was gone. Just as father had feared. Teetering off the broken span was the company truck.

By the time my father reached the boy, Mrs. Pit had arrived. She wore boots over woollen stockings, and her woollen coat had a pink housedress button sewn on its neck. The wind wailed, and in the dark, clouds could be seen sweeping the sky above them.

Her rosary dangled in her hands as other men arrived and brought the boy’s broken body up.

“Trent,” she said, in a whisper, fearful of waking him. She kept walking about him, as if inspecting a strange sweet flower, breathing on her folded hands where the rosary dangled. Now and again she would bend over and touch him, touch the Saint Christopher medal on his neck; making sure he wasn’t an apparition. Snowflakes fell on her bare head and covered his thin bare legs.

“You told me this would happen—” Alvina said suddenly to Sydney. “You pushed him down — you told me you knew what would happen to him today — you said he would be dead and he was!”

Sydney, too stunned to speak, looked at her, and then at Mathew and Cynthia.

At the very moment my father looked up, Elly came running out of the darkness, and her face came toward him with the expression people have when late for an appointment. She wavered and stood still, like a post being put into place.

The body didn’t move except for the hair being blown by the wind. The hair that, as Alvina had said just the day before, Christ had counted and knew. Cynthia glared at my father for
so many reasons. No one knows why a woman as beautiful and as free as she was attracted to my father. But she had been for a number of years.

“You — you pushed him down,” Alvina said again. “You drove that truck — you brought him here in that truck for something terrible, and when he didn’t want to you pushed him!”

However much Alvina, Cynthia, or my mother wanted my father to speak now, my father could not. He simply stared at them. He respected the old woman in her moment of trial, and did not want to trifle with her feelings by contradicting her accusation so soon after her shock. He felt others would
know
it was said in
shock.
He stood silently in the freezing air. From the comer of the bridge Leo McVicer glared at him. His bridge, his crowning achievement — all gone in a thud of snow.

He said, absolutely calmly, “What in Christ was that truck doing out there, Sydney? There was nothing supposed to be out there.” He turned and went home.

Finally paramedics came. They gathered up the body and moved away.

Worse for us all was the money. Trenton had the money that had been robbed from old Leo’s house stuffed in his pockets. Of course, Leo McVicer believed Sydney took the money; that’s why he was letting him go after Christmas. Though he entertained a thought of someone else robbing him, he now no longer could, because in his mind both events fed off each another. He telephoned the police the next day and told Constable Morris his suspicions. He wanted to help the police — but he also wanted his money back. The question floating in the air was this: Why would the money be in Trenton’s possession? This is what Leo himself addressed to Constable Morris, and Morris, fed information since the time Father was
accused of stealing the box of smelts, retaliated against my father — set up a scenario against him, judged him without any evidence. But that everything
fit
seemed incontestable —the threat to Alvina, the truck to whisk the boy away, the money to give the child for a sexual favour (the whole five hundred dollars for a sexual favour given to a retarded boy, that in itself is perverse), and the child’s death. The more information that came to him, the more Morris made it fit.

Besides, his feelings for my mother’s suffering were kindled anew, and flared in a romantic way as he remembered her in our little house. This was part of the grand labyrinth my father had to traverse — and he had no string to follow even if he managed to slay the bull.

When I heard what they thought my father had done, when I remembered how Mother sent me to him with his lunches, when I remembered his years of suffering, my scorn was for every man or woman who had ever trampled my parents down — and no scorn burned brighter.

“Man can overcome any fate by scorn,” Albert Camus said in his essay on the myth of Sisyphus. Perhaps I was thinking of my father as Sisyphus. His plight seemed the embodiment of some great callous stupidity, comic in its futility. Yet there was something else, held off until now, until this moment. It was my first unmasked
contempt
for propriety.

It was the propriety of the event that I was actually reacting against and ultimately challenging. This is what made me renegade.

At Gratton’s funeral home a few miles down our old highway on that Tuesday afternoon there was a lineup of people waiting to pay their respects. The graders were out plowing the road down to the bone. Men and women, simple good-hearted working people, bright and filled with love — people one should never have to explain away — stood in line to pay
their respects to that child who had walked among us with his dog, Scupper, and run in fields hidden from the highway.

His funeral was paid for by Leo McVicer.

Part of this outpouring came because Trenton was a retarded child who had died such an unfortunate death, and any community would have reacted the same. And part of this mourning was a spontaneous outpouring that comes when the family who has suffered such a loss has already had an unlucky life. These good-hearted people needed to be there for this troubled Pit family, to prove that they stood shoulder to shoulder in such a horrendous loss and that past deeds, mistakes, or feelings toward Cynthia and Mathew Pit meant little or nothing compared to grace and love.

A rumour that last summer my father had taken Trenton to the drive-in theatre in Bushville was rampant.

Father Porier did two services and two high masses for the repose of the soul of Trenton Pit.

A picture of Trenton holding Scupper — who since his death walked to the bridge every evening searching for his master — was carried on the front page of not only the local but the provincial paper. There was a picture of the collapsed span, the unlucky company truck my father had supposedly driven, and the dog at the bridge sitting in the snow.

People said my father went to the bridge in the truck because he would be safe from spying eyes — but God had judged him and had collapsed the span. When a rumour surfaced that dynamite had been thrown at the span it seemed also knitted into my father’s plans. He was to be let go, so he threw the dynamite in retaliation.

Trenton’s mother spoke of finding Trenton’s hockey cards neatly lined up on his dresser that night before they went to search for him, and a prayer for the protection of children on his bedstand that Father Porier himself had blessed.

The lineup grew longer.

Of course Father’s innocence afforded him nothing. This is the torment I have carried with me. From the time of thirteen I have thought only revenge. I have thought only revenge.

The funeral was attended by seven hundred people, and dignitaries — mayors from the four largest towns on the river, our member of Parliament, and others.

The day after the funeral there was another article in the paper showing the procession. I have carried it in my wallet for fourteen years. I have wanted to understand it. I have sat near streams when I was alone fishing as a child, and I have looked at it. I have seen it grow yellow with age, and still it incorporates the strange giddy pain of our family. And I have yet to understand it. But I see in it the pedestrian moral high-mindedness of accusation unaccompanied by the search for truth.

This is an article of expediency, and it comes from our river, and doesn’t even mask its gloating outrage.

SIXTEEN

I now know Trenton found this money and took it back to Sydney, for he had overheard Sydney’s name mentioned by Rudy and Mathew. The money had been hidden in the same hole behind the couch where Trenton would hide his plastic soldiers and his candy. When he reached in to hide the candy cane Sydney had given him that night, he realized what money it must be. So he would give it back to Sydney. The Christmas candy cane my father carried in his hand on that dark night
he spoke to Alvina was his and Trenton’s vial of poison, the paper discharging the sentence of death and ostracism. I had handed the candy cane to my father in a thoughtless moment, as a goodwill gesture from my family to the Pits, and told him to take it to the boy.

Trenton picked the money up and did not know where else to take it. The money was stuffed in his pocket, with his glasses. All that day Mrs. Pit, fearful of something happening to her child after the strange conversation she had had with my father, would not let Trenton out of the house. She telephoned Father Porier and he instructed her to say the rosary and bless the child with holy water. She did this, and as always prayed for the intercession of the Virgin. And then finally at five in the evening fell asleep in her rocking chair in the small room off the kitchen. She often fell asleep there because of heat from the stove. Trenton was sitting in the dark, looking at the soft blue and green lights on the Christmas tree.

It was dark when Trenton managed to get the door opened. The snow had frozen at the end of the wood and up against the boughs being used to bank the house — a tradition throughout our rural Maritimes. The snow piked over the paddock fence, and was seen in patches between the trees. The moon was out over the great water. Our twisting road was silent, the flares were set up as warnings at the end of the bridge, burning away in a smudge drifting to the sky. Trenton expects to see my father, because all he knows is that my father works on the bridge. He steps onto the gravel road being engineered, and walks toward the troubled span. The watchman is not there to stop him, the lights are off. Worse, Mathew had just parked a thousand-pound truck on a weak span. The sabotage collapses it at the moment Trenton is walking toward the truck. At first there is just a slight groan and then a loud swish, and a section of concrete span collapses with a small blast of
dynamite. Mathew sees the body fall while the truck remains caught up on the steel beams above. He thinks to himself it must be Connie Devlin who is falling.

When they find the boy, Mathew knows exactly where the money came from, yet cannot say. He did not know his plan would work so well. This is what secretly terrifies him — the damage he alone managed to do.

The day of the funeral, at home, sitting with his mother, he is awakened by his own culpability. Now for the sake of appearances he will seek revenge on someone else for his own crime. He will kill Sydney Henderson. He
has
to!

He cries over the dead boy, not only in love but because he fears he will be caught. But he is not caught. He isn’t even suspected.

Another scenario is envisioned. My father sabotaged the span because he was not given the job of foreman like he had been promised, and was to be fired after Christmas. The night before, he had threatened to take the child away because he was
infatuated
with him. He had even bragged that he knew what would happen to the boy that very day. And didn’t it happen! How brave he was to kill an innocent retarded child. And was this the first Pit child he had killed? No — for hadn’t he tried his handwork with the Pits before, when he helped deliver Cynthia’s child?

One person is sought out as a reliable witness — Connie Devlin. And what does Connie say? Nothing — yet. He is waiting to see what will happen and what is planned. He is ingeniously quiet for the moment. If it looks like Mathew will be caught he will side with Sydney. But if it is Sydney who is suspected, he will be compelled to come forward.

Ms. Whyne is furious at my father. She
knew
this would happen. Hadn’t she predicted it?

“People like poor Elly Henderson should be aggressively
informed about their options when it comes to having children — here she is pregnant once more to that hideous man —” she says. “When there are other options — is our world so backward as to not see what must be done for her?”