Mercy Among the Children (17 page)

I can only tell you that I wish I had been there at that moment, no matter if I was thirteen. I would have struck him because of his rudeness.

Another officer came into the room and said that if they wished to file a complaint he would be willing to type it up. But there was no suspect, and any of dozens upon dozens of people might have mailed this. Nor were my mother and father above suspicion. And perhaps Sydney liked all the attention. Morris glared at him, as the other officer said he knew people who did things for attention, set grass fires, and pull fire alarms —perhaps this letter-writing scheme was an attention-getting device.

“You like this, don’t you, Sydney —” Morris piped up, “like this part of it — you’re not caught yet — but still the paper is writing about you. They say you are something of a philosopher — and like poetry — quote me a poem, Syd — quote me even one line of a poem — I bet you could not — spit it out — one damn line of any poem from anywhere at any moment that was ever written. Come now — you must know one — do you know one?”

“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport,” Sydney said, staring almost in shame at the constable.

My mother listened to this and her lips tightened. Constable Morris turned his swivel chair away, and leaned back, stretching with midday fatigue.

“Do you want to make a formal complaint?” the other officer asked more kindly.

My mother said, “No thank you, sir.” Her lips trembled. My father was again utterly silent. Ever since he was a boy and beaten he was silent in the face of adversity. He was silent in school when people gathered about him at recess, and he was silent now.

“You’re dumb, aren’t you, Syd!” Morris said. “You knock up a little girl like Elly here — a sweet girl from the boonies who’s never met a real man, or been to a party or had a date, or taken a trip — you are her first — first to touch her — I know you, Syd — then you keep her in a prison for fourteen years, knock her up three or four times — use her to rob Leo McVicer who likes her and refuses to press charges, refuses even to fire you until Christmas is over only because of your children. Then you take that money from her, frighten an old woman, use a stick of dynamite you had on you for years, and entice her retarded boy to the bridge, you even bragged you would do so saying you knew more than God. A heathen, eh, Syd, and this poor woman is in your clutches, because she’s never felt a real man between her legs —”

Then, swivelling around to face them, he added: “I know real men who would love to get to know you, Elly — you could go back to school — on to university — get a student loan — now is your chance — I’ve talked to Dr. David Scone about you —imagine, a man like that — a man who would have nothing to do with Sydney yet is interested in you! Stay here, Elly, turn
evidence for us and he will never bother you again. You and your children will be taken care of — I’ll see to it, and you’ll be enrolled in university.” He stood to walk away, and then turned abruptly again, and with great almost mindless fury added:

“You like picking on women, Syd, and old men — do you? — come from the Bartibog in some shack, do you? — eat moose meat, do you? — perhaps you thought the old lady would give you money, did you? — and perhaps poor Trenton tried to run away from you, and you lured him to his death. That made you feel powerful, did it? Well, do you want to step outside, I’ll take my uniform off and you can have a go at a real man — see how you measure up — oh yes, look at your face — I’d love to wipe that smirk from it. So you want to come outside and fight me?”

Again my father said nothing.

Then the second constable brought Morris another coffee. Officer Morris, his face beet red, sat down, looked through a file, sipped on his coffee, and after a minute or two looked up startled, as someone will when they wish to acknowledge to everyone concerned their willingness to dismiss you out of hand.

My mother stood, black purse in hand, with my father. My father simply said, “Thank you now.”

My mother asked for the letters back.

“The letters will remain with me,” Morris said, taking another sip of coffee.

My mother stared at the dismal day. How was she to repair her life if it could be mocked so easily? She felt a deep, immense loneliness and love for my father that went beyond loyalty —she felt their love was meant to be, in some way, when the atoms in their blood coursed through the endless stars in the endless beginning of the night.

“Thank you, sir,” she said again, “but I don’t want the letters misplaced. They are proof of my husband’s grave innocence.”
Grave
was without a doubt the word to use, but she did not know at that moment why she had used it — it had tumbled from her tongue. It tumbled from her tongue like a word from a slip of a girl in some pasture downriver on some May afternoon, like the word
circumnavigate
had come from her lips one day when she was ten and in love with Diedre Whyne and the world.

The constable looked at her.

“His grave innocence,” my mother whispered again, blushing.

“Please,” the constable said, waving his hand at her histrionics.

My mother stared at him, unsure what else he could possibly do to them that showed his utter disdain.

Sydney looked at her and said: “We must go — there is nothing more to do.”

“Yes,” she said, and they left the shelter of the station.

They started their trek home again, this time with the raw wind behind them. Sydney took off his ragged blue scarf and gave it to Mother, and she put it around her face. She had planned that after everything had been cleared up she would take Sydney for a treat at the restaurant.

Now this hope seemed a vague and distant thought born out of another age. Now again she was worried about her pregnancy and desperately afraid of losing another child.

If only she had not taken the job at McVicer’s house — if only she had not felt sorry for the old man. If only she had not gone to Polly’s Restaurant for hamburgers, or if only Sydney had not gone over to Alvina Pit. For some reason she felt them both culpable. But worse, in the wind, the blast of cold that penetrated her coat and sweater, she felt that no one in the universe cared for her husband or her children except her.

She asked him if he wanted something to eat.

“No, I’m fine,” he said.

“Sydney — you need something to eat — you have not eaten in two days. I have five dollars.” She went into a corner store and bought him a carton of milk and a sandwich.

“What do you think — will anyone help?” Sydney asked when she came out.

“No, they will not help.”

He nodded and looked sideways a second.

“I know,” he said. “They will not help — we have been for some unknown reason, Elly, thrust strangely into hell.” He smiled and touched her face tenderly.

My mother looked very pale — my mother was always pale, as pale as a sweet autumn sky. Her lips trembled.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Sometimes at the worst time something happens to make things all well again. Sometimes when I am out smelt fishing, just when it looks as if it will never brighten up, the sky clears, the ice turns a dazzling blue, and rays from the sun drop down onto our shoulders.”

They stood a moment longer while he opened the carton and looked into it, seeing in his periphery vision small and changeable whirlwinds of snow over the street beyond them, and the day darkening over the stolid bare houses.

“I guess you have been let down by me — I am not very good at the world — in all my life I have not been. I don’t know why. It is a trait I have had. I come to people believing not that they don’t know things but that they do, and will, because they do, agree with what I know. Then when I find out I have been very mistaken about them, I become silent. I thought this would clear a path. I am not very bright.”

“Oh, Syd,” she said. She smiled and tears flooded her eyes.

They turned along the road together.

EIGHTEEN

For a week or so after, Mom stayed in bed, because she was afraid to start bleeding and lose yet another child. The doctor was angry with her for being pregnant and having walked to Newcastle; and the one time she went to see him, he admonished her when he examined her.

No one spoke to Autumn or me at school, but the activity about us caused increasing anxiety, especially on Autumn’s part.

We went with other people to the great churches to pray —to pray that Mom would have her baby — for she had asked us to go. For the first time I remembered my father did not go to church. I found out he had been refused communion when he stood in line. He could have had mine. I did not want or need it to be saved from these people. I sat in the pew and stared at the gold chalice that Father Porier held in his white liver-spotted hands, with his white linen hankerchief stuffed into his sleeve and the light lingering on the stony altar, and hated him, for my father’s sake; for my father refused to hate.

It is strange, the thing people most value about themselves they will lose sooner or later. My father during this time lost the church. It crumbled beneath him and left him alone in the air. And how he needed it now, with an inquest coming. He sat at home reading, not the things written against him or Mom, but reading the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius. I saw the Penguin edition of that small book in his back pocket for days. And I remember thinking that professors teaching it at Saint Michael’s or at the University of Toronto hadn’t the same need of it.

Often I saw Rudy Bellanger at church at the masses given for the soul of Trenton Pit, wearing his Knights of Columbus
uniform and blessing himself and receiving communion. The Knights went on parade, and he stood with his father-in-law, Leo McVicer. Leo McVicer was secretly blamed by some for having hired Sydney in the first place, and Leo knew this. So he acted.

He threw a benefit at the community centre for the children — it was called “The Healing of the Children.” It came in January on a Saturday when the sky was purple with cold and ice lay ten feet thick in our bay.

Everyone got a toy. There was a hot dog eating contest and Rudy wore a chef’s hat and boiled hot dogs in a giant pot. There were cookies and cakes from the store, and a stereo system set up for music that the children skated to at the outdoor rink. Constable Morris was there, letting the children sit in his patrol car.

Mother begged us to go.

“You are children too,” she said. “Why would they not know this?”

So with trepidation we headed out in the raw afternoon. But I was too smart to show myself. Instead Autumn and I, hand in hand, watched the festivities from the field beyond the community centre. We stood hand in hand because I knew that when we were noticed we’d be chased by the other kids. And that is what happened. Griffin Porier saw us, and with his friends tried to cut us off from our house. I was so scared and I ran so fast I ended up dragging poor little Autumn like a rag doll behind me. But we made it across Arron Brook, to our yard, with a whistle of rocks coming behind.

The Pits were usually in attendance at mass, for Alvina insisted that Mathew take her so she could be seen receiving the Blessed Sacrament. It gave Mathew a certain grace, as a worldly,
hard-bitten man who had had his share of difficulty now humble enough to be seen attending to his mother and to Christ Jesus. And for Cynthia as well, long considered a seducer of young men, to be seated in the pew with black skirt and gloves. There was talk of her first child, who would if she had lived, have been my age.

Alvina stumbled forward — never standing at the altar but kneeling silently, with hands folded, and closed eyes damp with tears. Watching her — with Cynthia helping her back and forth to her seat — there came the rather pleasant thought associated with early death.

I was sent as a representative of the family, an emissary not made welcome. People stared at me as I genuflected and stared harder at me if I took communion. So in spite of my mother’s request, I did not take communion after a while. Anyone can be made to feel a hypocrite, but I, wrestling at the time with the very
idea
of a God, considered my own self ludicrous. One day a man put his hand on my shoulder as I walked up the lane. He smiled at me and said it would have been better if I had been stillborn and Cynthia’s child had lived. He walked on, still smiling. I never forgot the feel of his wrinkled leather work glove on my shoulder. He was Danny Sheppard, purported to have been that child’s father, and one of the most desperate men on the river.

At one particular mass said by Father Porier both Rudy and Mathew Pit were in attendance, although they did not acknowledge one another. Porier walked to the podium and said:

“I have asked God for those who are responsible for this poor child’s death to be here today — for they have insulted their own human dignity. I do not see them in attendance, but Christ has not given up on them.”

After mass that day, Rudy went to see his father-in-law and had tea. He had joined the Knights of Columbus because he
needed to prove to Leo McVicer that he was a moral man — he had joined it on Leo McVicer’s insistence. But now everything had fallen apart. His life was in tatters, and he didn’t hear a word old Leo said.

He went to see Mathew that night, when the others were in bed.

“I am upset too,” Mathew told him.

“Well, it’s just that
we
know where the money came from, don’t we,” Rudy whispered. “I mean,
we
know you were setting out to do what happened. It is a betrayal of everything I — and you too, Mathew — stand for —” Rudy smiled timidly. “I know I told you on one occasion that I would like something to happen to the bridge just so Porier wouldn’t always have the upper hand. Still, I wanted nothing like
this
to happen. It is very bad for Elly and Sydney to have to deal with this. And their children — they are being tormented at school — it was hard enough for them before — you know, with she an albino, and the family so poor. Isn’t there anything we can do to get them off? Say you take some of my money and we find it — and say it was a mistake — then I say I mistakenly misplaced the money — Elly is off the hook and the case against Sydney will be rethought. I mean, is that a good idea or not?”