Mercy Among the Children (18 page)

“You are trying to give me away — to get yourself clear!”

“No, no — I’m just —”

“You are ready to blabbermouth all over town!”

“No — I’m not —”

But Mathew’s look was one of utter self-preservation. Suddenly Rudy realized that this man would kill him if need be. Mathew by now had convinced himself — for the sake of convincing Cynthia and his mother — that he had nothing at all to do with any of this. His mother and his sister looked upon Mathew as the spokesperson for the family, and he had been quoted in the paper saying that the moment he saw
the body of Trenton was the moment his own life ceased to be important. To say this to the press and then to be found guilty would be harsh indeed.

Rudy slunk away and said nothing more. He went home but could not bear to look at his wife when she spoke of putting Sydney and Elly in jail. For she was a woman who had no understanding of the world — and putting people in jail was a fine thing for her to want. Knowing about Rudy’s infatuation with my mother, she had envied Elly.

“Will you stop that singing!” he shouted as she took hot rolls from the oven. “It’s a young mother’s life.”

“Oh,” Gladys said, turning. Unknown to Rudy, she had fallen two days before with a weak spell. “I didn’t know you felt so
strongly
about Elly,” she said.

“Don’t be silly.” He quickly chewed on some ice he took from his glass of rye. “She’s just a poor woman married to a goodfornothing goddamn idiot. They live in a shack, for Christ sake — they’ll be forced off our river soon enough!”

“Yes,” she said, eyeing him quickly and then staring straight ahead and breathing quickly through her nose. “Silly me.”

NINETEEN

The inquest began in February, with a Sheriff Bulgar and the chief coroner in charge. It gathered a great deal of interest around the province and as far away as the state of Maine.

Every day I read the paper hoping to see the words: “Mistake — Sydney Henderson a hero.” But that did not happen. Three
times over the course of those weeks a picture of Autumn walking along the shore road appeared.

And this is what I found out reading the paper:

The prosecution wanted to prove my father was negligent and overbearing and perpetrated a crime to cover up a misdeed. The case against my father rested on the assumption that he had deliberately driven the half-ton onto the weakened span. That he did this with full knowledge that the span would collapse. That he was enraged he was being fired after the holidays because he was caught in a theft. They wanted to charge my father with second-degree murder. Every family vied for every smidgen of information, and Constable Morris, Connie Devlin, and Autumn Henderson became household names.

The coroner had gone down to look at the bridge, and estimated the distance the boy fell, the time of day, and how far the warning flares were from the abutment and the abutment from the weak span, and what damage the dynamite did. And more essentially, where the truck was parked at the time of the disaster.

The sheriff had measurements taken, and wanted to know if Connie Devlin was on his rounds. Connie said he was of course on his rounds, but that he would speak only at the inquest. The sheriff confiscated the time clock.

The sheriff wanted to know why the floodlights were turned off, and if the generators themselves were faulty. All of this was fine, but in essence had nothing at all to do with my father, whom I knew had been at home that night eating his supper.

Our lawyer, Isabel Young, was thin with dark hair. My father had thought it was not necessary to bother a lawyer, and he had sat in court by himself for the first three days. It was my mother who went to her, by taxicab, and asked her to help.

Elly took out our vacation money and placed it on the lawyer’s table, crumbled ones, twos, and fives.

Isabel Young smiled, and said she would not need that. But she told my mother things would get very rough. People were talking of a vendetta, and Cynthia Pit was bent on retaliation. Besides, Diedre Whyne, whom Isabel had fought in court before, was trying to get the children placed in foster care, as Diedre said, “Once and for all.”

This would be a huge case for Diedre, and the children’s plight at the house would be used. Isabel knew this, and said she had long fought Diedre Whyne. Mother looked at her. She might have replied that she too had long fought this woman, although she had not wanted to.

Then Isabel told my mother she would do her best. “Of course he is not guilty,” Isabel Young said.

“He isn’t?” Elly said, strangely alarmed that another person would say this.

Constable Morris was a witness for the prosecution. He stated that the boy had been dead well over an hour before the police were informed, and probably had lain there alive.

Morris spoke about how callous my father was when he came to the police station, and how Elly seemed to be mesmerized by him when he quoted a poem that, as Morris said, didn’t even
rhyme.
The courthouse crowd was amused, and giggled and turned their eyes on Sydney.

Then Leo McVicer was on the stand for two days, informing the court about his business, the tender he received for the construction of the bridge, and the fact that he was one of the river’s most well known and respected employers. There was talk about his mill, and the idea that a toxin had gotten into the groundwater, and how he had managed to have Mathew and Sydney dig new wells because of this, because he was a conscientious benefactor.

He spoke about the robbery. He looked straight at my mother as he said: “I don’t at all know about Sydney. I knew his father — he was a hard case. But Elly tried to bring up her children; they had very little — the arse was out of the boy’s pants on more than one occasion — and on occasions I went over to Abby Porier’s and got his son Griffin’s hand-me-downs — and I would bring the box over to Elly — half the time the young lad Lyle was wearing Griffin’s clothes.”

His voice and his presence carried a good deal of weight, and one could tell he was shaken by the affair. But he was never as shaken as I to find out that I wore the hand-me-down clothes of the brother of Penny Porier.

Leo was asked by my father’s lawyer what his estate might be worth.

“Three million — four million — five — I don’t know.”

“So you are very well-to-do and very well known.”

“Perhaps.”

“And you go on hunting trips and that is well known as well?”

“Perhaps —”

“There has been acrimony against you — you closed your mill with one phone call some years ago — and put two hundred men out of work. Someone then sabotaged your yard by fire.”

“That was years and years ago. And Sydney’s father — yes, he was accused of it.”

“Is there anyone else who may have robbed you — or want to sabotage the bridge because they felt you had done them injury — anyone else at all?”

Leo shrugged. “Maybe. But offhand — well, I can think of no one who had the chance as much as Sydney did — and the motive.”

During the next day’s session there was a statement by one of the labourers, given during cross-examination by the defence, about the distance of the flares from the abutment. This
labourer said that he was unhappy working near that span because it had buckled. That not only he but Sydney and Porier were also worried about this, and had blocked this span off. That driving a truck onto it was suicidal.

This did not actually help my father but put on record that he was one of the few who had said he knew what might happen if a truck was placed on the span.

Therefore the evidence of the night watchman became imperative. Where was he and what had he seen? The whole river wanted to know. Sheriff Bulgar knew the night watchman was supposed to have been making his rounds near the abutment at six-thirty — the time the truck, and the young boy, fell. Bolts along the steel span had been cut. Who cut them? The person who sabotaged the span, or people trying to relieve pressure on the buckled steel?

Other things, like dynamite, may have caused damage to the structure. This left Leo McVicer open to the possibility of a horrendous lawsuit if Sydney was not charged.

This is the case twenty-nine-year-old year old Isabel Young brought forward. Her contention was that the crime was one of a negligence far beyond my father’s scope.

By the second week of the inquest my father could not go to or from the courthouse without being heckled and threatened by our concerned townspeople. My father almost begged for death. I know that now. He walked past those who would want him killed. He was never frightened to die and never made one attempt to protect himself. My mother prayed to Saint Jude, and felt that was why he was spared. I do not believe in Saint Jude. Yet I have no other answers.

My mother could not let Father go to court alone, so she forced herself to get up and dress in the cold dawn, and made
her way by his side. Soon Jay Beard was driving them to and from the court.

The days were short, and lights in the courthouse were on all afternoon. By three o’clock it looked almost like night. Across from the courthouse the windows of the brick school were just as bleak, grey snow was piled across the open field, and schoolkids gathered to gawk.

My father’s lawyer privately asked my mother what she knew of Sydney. And though my mother thought she knew everything there was to know, his lawyer had gathered facts that were news to her. His school years were a dismal collection of torment, where he would hide in the ditches rather than face the boys waiting for him. He had been beaten by his father whenever he tried to protect his mother from assault. There was always wine at the house. He suffered from ringworm and dysentery. But the worst revelation was almost comic, as they sometimes are when you build up to them.

He had been shot by a .22-calibre 410-gauge over-and-under rifle when he was a child of twelve. The bullet that entered him had caused appendix attacks ever since. The lawyer had a picture of Sydney lying inside an oxygen tent.

This is what kept him in the hospital where he had taught himself to read. It was after his mother’s death, which he thought he was partially responsible for, that he became withdrawn and reclusive.

Elly did not know any of this, but she knew now what the laceration on his stomach was from.

“Well then,” Isabel Young said, “don’t tell him you do know.”

On February 7 Mother and Father left the courtroom about four in the afternoon and were driven to our lane by Jay Beard. When they got home our own lane was dark and a snow fell over the frozen mud heaves. Deer had yarded here and you could see them grazing on what was left of the buds of frozen
maples. Autumn and I were staying at Mother’s aunt’s down near Barryville.

Mom and Dad walked along the lane in silence until they came to the house with the tarpaper flapping in the night. A squall of snow was moving across the bay.

Just as they got to the door, it opened. Out walked Mathew Pit and stood before them in the eerie snow-soaked yellow light from the porch. He stood before them only that indiscernible jiffy, yet his eyes had a look of triumph; and this look, the impetuous self-delighted look that opponents who are most ignorant of you often carry, came as he brushed by them and disappeared into the frozen tragic dark.

Mathew felt a pressure to act, not to save his family honour, but to save himself from his own guilt. Every day about this time — after dark fell on the snow — there was a moment when the death of the boy was truly unbearable for Mathew. Because he knew exactly — and he and Rudy Bellanger and Connie Devlin were the only three — how it had really happened. How the boy had lain there; how he lifted his arm as if to plead for help. And what had happened, and the memory of the boy falling through the air, was seared into Mathew’s mind like a brand on a heifer. But each day falseness grabbed him, hugged him, and kept him in its swell.

Now going to our house he had found a book. And the book was the thing — for those most susceptible to scorn are learned men fallen.

That night, crazed with anger that Sydney would not admit to what he had done, Mathew had come into my father’s yard to confront him, to beat sense into him. It seemed that my father, though he was innocent, should be morally bound to confess, because all the river believed him guilty. Mathew came to press upon Dad his own disgust; but Dad was gone, the house was opened, and inside, he had found a book.

He found a book from the new world Scott Fitzgerald in glory once saw from his room in Paris, but now from some further age, a book that enlivened us with the possibility of everything
except
redemption. A book that swept its wings through the corridors of hell and enjoyed what it found. Mathew had found a book on the shelf that proved about my father all he wished to.

Mathew left Mother and Father standing in the petrified silence. He walked across the frozen ice threaded with snow and made it out to the community centre.

Here people were listening to Waylon Jennings’ music and playing cards. Mathew entered with windswept eyes and a golden chain on his neck. He walked in and put the book, my father’s book, on the centre table.

“Read this filth,” he said. “This is what I found — just read the filthy bastard’s book.”

“Where did you find it?” Connie Devlin asked.

“At his house.”

Cynthia looked at him, picked up the book, and when Polly herself went to take a look, Mathew brought the entire group to silence by saying:

“I wouldn’t be lookin’ at no such filthy filth, Polly — not like that there —”

“I have a thing or two to say when I come forward,” Connie Devlin said, sniffing hard and shaking his head. Finally he had decided which side he would be on. He gave in to his old enduring weakness, to be like others and to take his chances later. Now he could tell the story Mathew had invented. The self-inflicted ruse was that he had made up his own mind to tell the truth
in spite
of his longstanding friendship with Sydney Henderson; and this is what others believed.

“Nothin’ hurts me more than this here,” Connie said. “He got me back on the bridge — but
now
I know why — it was to turn my back the other way when he done his dirty work — to keep silent when the generator was broke and the bolts all snapped off. Well, I can keep silent about a lot — not that.”