Mercy Among the Children (19 page)

“Yer just doin’ right,” someone said, “just doin’ right.”

Now people tried to comfort Mathew because of the terrible book, and he flinched in self-righteousness and drank his beer, looking at them with a self-infatuated pain, an opiate that all clung to.

He realized that as the victim of a tragedy — the tragedy of his own making — he had a new and an indefinable power. This became more evident when my aunt — an aunt I almost never saw — timidly approached Mathew and asked to shake his hand, asking forgiveness for “that side of my family.”

Aunt Edna, after ignoring us for fourteen years, was fired with an Episcopalian sense of duty, a zeal sublime in her raw cheeks and toothpick-thin body, filling her time between sessions in court with gossiping about Sydney’s father. She was driven to a kind of eroticism by the sudden grip of local fame. And now she wanted more than anything to be seen with Mathew. He nodded at her glumly and said, “It ain’t yer fault, Edna — me and mine has no cause to row with you.”

Then they hugged and others nodded their approval.

Mathew at thirty-three was like a restless young god, not so much of Olympus but of some strange underworld, where one boy’s death and another man’s agony kept him glowing under a false sun — like a light falling from the street into an underground toilet. He stood tall at the community centre, he rose above everyone else there, because of the death of a child he used to beat.

TWENTY

He was called as a witness four days later. Father and Mother sat in the courthouse and listened. Mathew Pit took the stand, staring out at the lawyers and the press who had come to hear. He was asked about his work and his life, and his hopes. He was asked about his little brother, Trenton, and he told of how he used to haul him in a wagon down to the river. He was asked about his mother’s high blood pressure and the strain this had put on her heart. Twice he shook his head as if the terrible crime was beyond him.

At a very unspectacular moment the prosecution asked how Sydney treated the boy. Mathew’s face moved quickly, like a picture gone slightly out of frame.

“Torment.”

“You mean Sydney tormented the boy.”

“Big torment — offered him what he couldn’t give him. Offered me a job — didn’t want nothin’ to do with him — knew how he operated — torment — told him — didn’t want him over botherin’ the boy. Boy was scared of him.”

“You told him — Trenton was frightened?”

“Told him — he run when I did.”

Mathew’s pale blue eyes stared with unabashed universal incivility at the world.

“And what did he bring over certain nights — when he was with the boy?”

“Bring over?”

“Yes. What did he have on him those nights in November and December?”

“That there book,” Mathew said, and the prosecutor handed the book to him. He looked at it, too dignified to touch it. “It
was this here he was reading to Trent, who wouldn’t know no better a’tal the filthy filth, and then give him the wad a money to shut him up. That’s why he stole the money from Leo McVicer good enough to give him a job in the first place I figure,” Mathew said, not to the prosecutor or the coroner but to the audience, who nodded their heads.

“That’s why he stole Leo McVicer’s money,” the prosecutor repeated in hopeless affirmation of the tragedy.

I have never found out what book it was. My father never told me, and could not bring himself to mention that time to me. It may have been
The Soft Machine
by Burroughs, or
The Naked Lunch.
It may have been one of a dozen books I came across over the years on his shelf; the books from America after Fitzgerald, but I do not exactly know which one.

Later that night my mother prepared our meal in silence. We had gotten back home that afternoon, Autumn and I — both unable to stand being away from them — thinking we could help when we couldn’t; understanding the world was against us without knowing why, Autumn quoting poems and cracking jokes, and me wanting to fight the world.

Finally Mom asked Dad what kind of book it was. My father said it was a book that explored sexual mores, using explicit sex to describe it.

“Don’t worry, Elly, it’s just a book — we are still allowed to read in this country — as long as we are allowed to read.” And he began to eat his macaroni and cheese in silence.

My mother did not know about this book. She had been a rural working girl brought up in the rather vicious circle of female bullies and pious nuns, and now she must defend a book she herself might never understand or want to read and a book that perhaps made light of her entire life. Yet it seemed the world had been turned upside down — she was defending someone who was looked upon as immoral, and Mat Pit
and Cynthia scorning us and looked upon as being chaste.

But let me also say this — like my own father, the book was condemned not because it was pornographic but because it was great … the editorial in the paper, by our brilliant investigative reporter, quoted a passage from it, with the heading: “Did Mr. Henderson Quote This to the Child?”

And our university here — men who should have come out in defence at least of the right of my father to read this book were silent, frightened, and as usual their decision to say and do nothing was meaningless to everyone but themselves. I later learned that out of all the books I suspected, all had been taught and romanticized by Dr. David Scone.

Still, Elly saw that my father missed the obvious — as bright men often do. He had believed that people at the university would come through for him and tell everyone the book’s worth. He had been awaiting this in silence. There was, I hesitate to say, a childlike vanity in this hope.

“Sydney, listen to me,” my mother said that night. “I want you to listen to me. You are allowed anything in this life — except the luxury of being different — this is why you are being tried. This is perhaps the only reason. Don’t think professors get away with being different, because they do not — they conform — is that the word? Yes, conform. Not one has come out to defend you. They have all hidden. When Miss Young knew the book was to be used against you last week — and you said it was a great book — she went to the university and not one English professor came forward to claim its greatness. They didn’t want to be associated with you even though she said she saw it on at least three professors’ shelves. You are not human to them; they don’t want you to read what they do or come to the same conclusions they come to. So I now know what their learning is worth.

“I have lived only in Tabusintac, but I know learning is worthless to those who have no insight — and power can even
turn Diedre against me, who I love. Besides, scared people will turn on you in a second. I can’t bear to read the papers because they lie,” she said, tears in her eyes. She sat at the end kitchen chair and put her hands on her lap.

“You do not understand — no accomplishment overcomes the stigma of being different. That’s what Miss Young told me. I try not to think about it and cannot eat my supper or nothing. I didn’t understand it at first. But now I do. You are not different in the way difference is acceptable but in another, bigger way. If you did something — well, like Dr. David Scone, who chained himself to the Department of Indian Affairs desk and wore Micmac clothes — perhaps they would look at you differently. But I think Dr. David Scone did that not for Dan Augustine but for himself. You are different.”

“How?” Father asked.

“You don’t fight — you don’t protest — you say nothing. Miss Young says that comes because you saw so much violence when you were a child, you cannot imagine being violent yourself. That might be honourable — and certainly much more honourable than the men I grew up beside, who fought and rowed in their dooryards — like the Pits — still, it makes you different — and that is what Isabel Young is up against. She is up against them all alone — and my heart breaks for her when I think of it. She is a hero — not you, Sydney —
she
is.”

Autumn looked at me in a scared way. I kept my head down, eating. It was somehow natural for Mom to want to hurt him at this time. We had all been through a lot. But he only nodded. It did not matter to him if he was called a hero or a coward. He had been called a coward all his life.

“If I ever leave you, I will leave you not over what I have suffered but over what Miss Isabel Young has suffered,” Mother said, getting up from the table.

I don’t think my father ever truly understood my mother’s
sacrifice. Perhaps he did not understand anyone’s sacrifice. He finally kissed her, felt the little child kick in her belly.

“You do not understand,” he said. “I know how my life will go — it is a mathematical certainty — as certain as any matter of calculus that I will be condemned. I do know that, so it doesn’t matter if they condemn me now or later. They must do it, for they fear me.”

“Aren’t family fights fun?” Autumn quipped, but no one heard but me.

The other woman who sacrificed herself for my father at that time was Isabel Young. She is like one of the many women who sacrifice all their lives for a point of law or truth or faith. Brilliant, kind, and unforgiving about something in her own nature.

She has disappeared, like most people from my life. She went unmarried — and alone. She walked the courthouse that day and for years after. She never spoke to the press, or tried to sound radical. She knew true revelation had little to do with the radical thought of the sixties and seventies or eighties.

She appeared and was gone, wearing hats pulled down over her ears, a tissue-carrying hypochondriac who in her life never had a date. Yet when she appeared in court — ah, in court beyond anything else she was a master. I do not know if my father ever thought of her much later. I don’t even know if he thanked her properly, because, you see, he did not believe in lawyers.

I know she loved him. A passionate love. At the end, she gave him a fleeting hug, and then kissed Elly on the cheek. She had been their only friend.

I do not know where she has gone. I hope for her and deny her nothing in life. You see, Dad and Mom weren’t able to pay her, and I have money to give her now; as long as she doesn’t mind where it is from.

She ate by herself at Polly’s Restaurant and bore in silence the puritanical disdain of the patrons, the menace of the gloating waitress. Everyone except she believed in the guilt of Sydney Henderson. She worked long after the others had given up for the day, going over the stress level on the buckled steel span, the way the bolts were cut, the notes collected about my father’s ability to use dynamite one summer to blow rocks compared to how it was thrown at the bridge.

TWENTY-ONE

When Mathew came to the stand the next day, Isabel asked him about his relationship with Trenton. He began to grit his teeth when she suggested it was he and not Sydney who tormented the child.

She was the kind of person Mathew hated, the kind of person he feared — a woman of 109 pounds, with a peaked face, who did not at all fear him. And he realized that she did not fear him in the truest sense of the word — not just because she was hiding behind the law or her ability to practise it. She did not fear him in some elemental way.

“You tormented the child many times, didn’t you — and tormented his dog?”

“That’s all made-up nonsense,” he said.

“Is this the book,” she said, taking it from the table and handing it to him, “that Mr. Henderson read to Trent? Did you hear a reading?”

“No, I didn’t — but Cynthia did.”

“Cynthia did. Well, how do you know what’s in the book?”

“I got a good glance at the filth — I know.”

“When —?”

“I picked it up — I looked it over — this was the book he was reading to the boy — I seen — and he tried to pay him off, then threw him down over the bridge — as if he weren’t nothing at all.” He shook his head, tapped his feet, and was stolid in his refusal to look her way. She handed him the book and he took it, looked at it, and quickly handed it back.

“That’s her,” he said.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“It’s the book,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” she said, and she handed it to the sheriff.

“It looks like the book,” the sheriff said, partly as a question.

“It’s my brother’s book,” Miss Young said, picking it up again. “His name is on the inside cover — he teaches it in Halifax — I had to send for it because no professor at Saint Michael’s would pretend to have a copy. See — these notes were made by him — and here — this passage — this filthy filth — about sex — was underlined by me — at two this morning.” She turned to the court and held up the book for all to see. “See here — at the back — by people like Edmund Wilson, Edith Sitwell, etc. —
‘a great and profound novel’
— see? Even if this book
was
read to Trenton — which I assure you it wasn’t — it would have done him no ill. He would not have had the least conception of what it was saying. The younger radical set at the university in Chatham teach it — they teach it as a great book, as a modern classic — to get back at the priests I suspect, oh yes, that’s the height of their radicalism — but they have not come forward to say it’s a great book. Well,” she added, “they’re from Chatham.”

She closed it, put it down, turned away, and, suddenly turning back, said she had no more questions for Mathew Pit.
Mathew had to be told three times to leave the stand. Cynthia glared at him — for mentioning her name. Above all Cynthia knew then and there that she must remain on the sidelines if she was to further any ambition she might entertain.

The truth is — if I can say this — Mathew was a bully, but in his heart of hearts he loved the boy as much as anyone ever did, and Isabel Young had the audacity to question this. And in a way this moment, after living the short and regal splendidness of acceptance, was the beginning of his downfall.

Later in the week Connie Devlin took the stand. He said he saw Sydney on the bridge, and swore to it. It seemed a breath of sanity had returned.

“And who was near the abutment when you made your rounds?”

“It was Syd,” Connie said, pointing his finger, “driving the truck up there, and I said, ‘Syd — don’t do it, Syd — don’t do it.’ But did he listen? No, he didn’t listen. I said, ‘Sydney, you went and cut them bolts — that whole section is gonna go’ — and he just says ta me, ‘Well, so what!’”