Mercy Among the Children (25 page)

I put my hands up. I held them about two feet apart. I had never in my life put my hands up and I stared at them, in front of me, as if they were in themselves two enemies. Behind me stretched the walls of ice and the silent bay where small dark inland islands sat in a meticulous cold and glassy dusk waiting for the warm winds of the southwest to come.

Griffin walked around me, throwing left hooks and staggering me until I went down. I looked up at the crowd, seeing no kindly face except my sister’s.

Then, rolling over, I pressed my fingers on the snow and by that rose again to my feet. My tie flapped, and the air was harsh against my lungs as I tasted my blood. My forehead had swollen from a punch, my nose was broken, and blood scattered like red ribbons along my shirt and pants and over the desolate parking lot, indented by a thousand forgotten winter footprints where pages of my essay were caught on specks of swollen ice or disappeared into the last winter light, one with the words “McVicer’s company monopolizes all our life” written in a scrawl. The crowd pulsated in and out about us, driving Griffin on with its shouts and palpitations.

I turned my head away when I was hit a fourth time and saw many faces looking at me, and Autumn’s face transfixed by my suffering — even though the punches never really hurt at that moment. Then as Autumn ran to protect me, Griffin threw out a left. Before I could stop her the blow glanced off her chin, and she fell. Everyone was silent.

Griffin laughed, turned against me again, and threw a hard right hand. This time I stepped into it and grabbed his fist in my palm. Suddenly and quite strangely I realized a most terrible secret for me to know. I was twice as strong as he. His fist withered in my grip, and he let out a yell and dropped to his
knees as if begging me to stop. I hauled him to his feet with my hand, but the pain on his face was unbearable to look at.

So I knew first-hand that what my father had said was right — that every injury done to someone is done again to the perpetrator of that injury; and the only way to lessen its effect is to cultivate “a hardness of heart” against other living beings.

I picked up Autumn, put my arm around her, and turned along the snow path, the snow dotted with specks of my bright red blood.

“I’ll get you, you cowardly bastard,” Griffin Porier yelled, but the crowd looked at him differently than they had two minutes before.

I went home. Later that night I heard some commotion outside, and someone tossing a bottle. My father lay in bed listening to men as they questioned his courage and asked him to come out and face them and have a drink. It went on for an unbearable length of time.

A man would yell, “Come on out and have a drink,” be silent for a moment and then shout again, “Come on out and have a drink!”

Then they advanced on the house, but a pistol shot rang out. Reeling in drunkenness, they ran away. They didn’t even stop to pretend they were brave. Another shot was fired from old Jay Beard’s pistol. We heard them yelling and a truck driving off.

I began to cry. I wanted to go out and help him. But I did not.

My tie lay in the sink. My mother got up early and dried it, and resewed my pants. My boots, once my father’s, eight years old, were shined by Autumn in the morning. And in some dreadful way I knew, because of my strength, what it was like to be the men outside.

TEN

The next night it started to snow, and the snow came down over our small house and the yellow yard, and I thought of my rabbit snares I would check in the morning. I had to kill them because my father refused welfare and we needed to eat. It was always worse when the rabbit was alive because then I would have to find a stick of wood to club it.

My face was bruised and swollen, and Autumn and I sat in the far back room of the house, where the one chaise longue and our few summer things were kept. I looked at her for a long time, and then I said:

“Things will be different from now on — we will never be bothered from now on — I will not allow anything to happen to you from now on. Not a tear from your face will flow —”

At first she said nothing — stupefied, I suppose, at what I was whispering. It was like Adam talking to Eve — I had left my mother and father, left the valley of the Saints, and had been thrust forward into the thorns. There was a sense of myself apart from the wishes of my family.

“Do you believe in hell?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in heaven?”

“Yes — but not as much as hell,” she said, smiling.

“Do you think good people go to church?”

“Yes.”

“Does Jay Beard go to church?”

“No! He hates church — he hates the priest. You know that.”

“Does the priest protect our family — has he been down to offer comfort? Has he ever said a kind thing about us at
mass? Has he ever spoken to us when we went to catechism? Or has he told people to leave Mommie and Daddie alone?”

“No — of course not — he wouldn’t come near us!”

“Does Jay Beard protect our family?”

“Yes — with his life, it seems.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Well, I might have self-interest — but I would say offhand yes.”

“What do you think of him?” I said.

She thought a moment. Then, “I think he is wise,” she said.

“But is he as wise and brave as Dad?” I said, almost trembling.

“I suppose.”

“Would you like
me
to become more like Jay Beard?”

“No — like Dad,” she said.

“Do you think I could become like Jay Beard?”

“I’m not sure.”

I lighted a cigarette. She stared dumbfounded at me. Then I handed it to her. She inhaled and coughed and clutched at her throat in a mocking death throe. I lighted another for myself, and blew the smoke out slowly.

I stood — exercising my grand sense of morality — and I took out of my back jean pocket the heavy Bowie-shaped bone-handled knife with its seven-inch stainless steel blade. I had bought it with the money Rudy Bellanger gave me. I smiled at her when she looked at it.

“Oh,” she said. “Will that gut a rabbit?”

“I would someday like to become like Jay Beard — I have to!”

Autumn was silent. Yet I think the thought of freedom suddenly seemed promising to her. I took out a small ring with a small stone and put it on her finger.

“I was going to give this to Penny — well, a girlfriend — but I have no girl — so I will give it to you — this will be our marriage.”

“I finally have a boyfriend,” she said.

I asked her what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a veterinarian and win the McVicer scholarship and — she blushed — write a book. The McVicer scholarship was worth fifteen thousand dollars.

“McVicer will never give you that scholarship,” I said, “but I will pay him back.”

Autumn admitted she was scared and stayed in her room whenever she was alone.

“You will never have to do that again,” I said. “You will never have to worry anymore — I will go to jail before you are teased again.”

The next morning I got up in the cold and went to check my snares as my father set out for mass.

“You go pray — and I’ll find us something to eat,” I yelled, my breath floating in front of my face.

I found the snow had covered most of the snares but there was a rabbit in one, buried up to his back. The trees were still, and in the hedges I could smell smoke from fires burning in wood stoves up the inlet.

I walked out of the woods, skinned the rabbit, and left it hanging on the back clothesline. I woke Autumn and told her I would find potatoes and carrots and we would have a rabbit stew.

Then I went off to school. I walked into the boys’ washroom and saw Griffin Porier there. I stood still, my heart beating a mile a minute — just like the heart of the poor rabbit before I had killed it that morning.

“You touch me again, I will crush your head,” I said. “I will kill you — no matter who your uncle is, no matter if I am excommunicated, no matter what happens to me — you will be dead.”

He looked at me, smiled weakly, and said, “Oh, sure.”

But as I approached him he backed away. It was the first time anyone had ever backed away from me.

Griffin ran from the washroom.

In his run I felt seared into my brain the horrible dishonesty of the universe dressed up in a moral accusation against my father. And I now realized that everything my father trusted — the church, hard work, the saints, the Poriers themselves — was bogus. And in a real way it didn’t matter that my father had caused nothing. I should not be so quick to forgive him just because he had caused nothing. Because in another way, his inaction had caused it all — all the misery forced upon us was caused because he elected to be passive. What if he had taken action sooner? If he had fought years before, he would not have left it up to me — or worse, to poor half-crippled Jay Beard. I smelled the pungent hide of the rabbit on my hands — what other child on the river this day, with microwave ovens and video games Autumn and I had never played, had to gut a rabbit for dinner that night? No, those I sat beside, shared my noon hours with, had been a part of the twentieth century for a long while; and would soon become a part of the twenty-first.

We had our stew that night, for I stole both the carrots and the potatoes from the gas bar.

The winter moon bathed the houses in light and the wind was gentle. Spring was coming, a month after it came to most other places. Easter was here. My mom had not lost the child in her belly. I could smell water in the snow and the houses were dim and dark, and the lives in those houses warm and cosy. These were houses of men who had worked for McVicer for years. Their sons and daughters had ordinary ambitions, became lawyers and engineers. There was laughter from those houses, and rock music played from an open window.

What, I asked, had my father ever given my mother? I cursed him. I wanted to fight him. I remembered how Mom told me he walked the highway and back to visit his father in prison without complaint. Had I ever done anything close to that?
But, then, rebellion is such a savage against itself, in youth and all men of no consequence.

ELEVEN

On Easter Sunday we went to church. The pane-glass windows shone brightly and the pebbles were bare on the shore. A stiff breeze blew all morning, and our clothes were clean and pressed. After we got home a bit of snow fell, and as happens sometimes in spring, the day turned cold, the ditches froze. Mom brought our clothes in from the line. The wood my father had cut was dwindling.

I went for a walk before dinner. The sky was pale, with floating clouds; and the ditches held forlorn trappings of early spring — bent grasses, bottle labels, used condoms in the field above home, and other signs of the winter ending. The bay was brown and choppy now that the ice was gone, and as I went toward it, feeling somewhat lost under the opening salvo of spring, I found myself in Pit’s back field. I was suddenly filled with a fancy — I would have to call it fancy more than an urge or a craving — a fancy to confront Mathew Pit, to boldly go up to him and slap his face. Which with my size and strength at the time might be suicidal. But then, if considering the Machiavellian proposal to be daring rather than cautious, to entice fortune to your side, it could be done, I thought. I always knew that daring was not beyond me. And since we had tried it my father’s way, now perhaps we might try it mine. I believed Mat was guilty of blasting the bridge, though I could not prove it. But why in
God’s name did I have to prove it? They had proved nothing about us. How could anyone think my father a bad man and Mr. Pit a good one? Yet they did.

The day grew colder, and the sound of faraway traffic petered out. It was the day Christ was resurrected into the clouds, or appeared to Mary Magdalene in a form she did not know. It could be
my
resurrection as well if I did this right.

I walked through the short spruce stands, past the dog house, with dog hair caught on a nail, and into their back yard sunken with half-melted ice, the flurries of falling snow making the ground like black pencil streaks on a white scribbler page. I thought of my essay I had never been able to redo, and my almost certain failure this year at school.

I had never been into Pit’s yard before, and was surprised at how solitary and unattended the place was. I had expected their lives to be much fuller and happier than ours. Yet their house looked shabbier and more desolate than any I had ever seen, except perhaps for the Voteurs’.

I looked through the hallway window and saw an open door to the dining room, with a bit of light coming from it, and just the edge of a tablecloth on a wood table. This was where Trenton had spent his life, I thought. The last thing he might have done was look from this window at the setting sun.

Right beside me — I touched it with my hand — was a double-bladed axe, old and rusted but still with a strong handle, which was covered in snow. I clutched it as I stood there feeling the snow burn my bare hand. Then Mathew Pit himself came out of the dining room and walked toward the window I crouched under, with his shirt off, his chest and arms tattooed and heavily muscled. He who had destroyed our life stopped, near this window, and looked across to our house. He who had beaten my father, had forced him to drink alcohol (though I could not prove it), laughed at my beautiful sister and coveted my mother.

Easily I could have killed him. (I was strong enough to put the axe through his chest.) He had called my father a coward, but he would never call me the same, I thought. I held the axe. I gulped air and felt dizzy.

The air was turning more bitter and darkness was falling over the trees. I could hear the coyotes begin to yap and round each other up. I tried to think of Mathew with hatred; at what he had said to my mom and my sister and how he had treated my dad. But I could do nothing.

He closed the drapes, and I heard him say, “Cynthia? Is someone here? Why am I alone today?” I realized that though it was Easter Sunday he
was
alone; the resurrection never mattered to him, and his house bore the oppression of that disinterest. I realized that to kill him now would be the most appropriate time. No one was home; and if I covered my tracks, it might be thought to be someone else.