Mercy Among the Children (34 page)

I sat in a kitchen chair in the dark and tried to think.

“They can’t take everything away,” I told my mother. But she simply put her hands on her lap and sighed.

The next day I took Dad’s old chainsaw, which he had used for cutting the ice during smelting season. I cut a number of birch trees in the morning. I cut them into four-foot lengths and hid them as best I could under bushes and smelt netting. Then I took my rod, with a few butt bugs, and proceeded to the water.

I got home late that evening. I saw the lawnchair sitting out in the front yard, on a patch of grass and dirt. The house was dark, and a bird or two still twittered. A piece of Percy’s birthday cake was left out for me on the table. I went upstairs. In the room I saw Percy’s envelope, with the word
Getir
written on it and the few crumpled dollars in it. I looked for a dollar in my pocket to give him, but my pockets were as empty as my heart.

The next day I went to collect the wood I had cut. It was early in the morning, with pearls of wet dew on the tall grass. I walked along Arron Brook, smelling the rot of windfalls, and saw the sunlight meander through the tops of the trees. A crow made a racket at me. I began to look for my wood and thought I must have walked up too far.

But I hadn’t. A truck had come in on the path that led from the highway and had taken away my wood. There wasn’t a stick left out of my four cords. The chatter of a squirrel made me look up, high above the trees, to curse.

I went to the tax department and waited for over an hour. I had almost talked myself out of staying when Ms. Whyne said she would see me. It was quarter after four in the afternoon. They worked until four-thirty in the summer months.

I was ushered along the hallway toward her cubicle, past pictures of streams and old spruce trees. The day had turned hot, and the air conditioner was on in the office. Behind her cubicle stretched others in the half dark. Faraway sunlight pressed through the narrow window blinds.

She was wearing large earrings and a flowered blouse, and a plain light blue skirt. Her face was damp white and her eyes wide, a look prevalent among people in offices during the summer.

“My wood was taken,” I said.

“Yes — we were able to get the truck right in,” she said.

“That is my wood for the winter,” I said. “We need it to heat our house.”

“It belongs to Revenue Canada,” she said. She cleared her throat and picked up a glass of water, shifted some papers and glanced up at me, with her eyes very wide and dry. Her lips touched the water in the glass, and she smiled slightly, as if to herself.

“I’ll pay you back,” I whispered.

“Pardon?”

“I’ll pay you back,” I whispered. “My father was ruined, over nothing at all. But I am not my father. I will not be.”

“Oh — a threat.” She said, “I’ve never had a threat.”

I had no weapons to fight back. Not the weapons that are now allowed. So I turned and put my fist through the window.

I was taken to the hospital needing eleven stitches. The police came and questioned me at supper hour, as I sat on a gurney. Constable Morris came in.

“Lyle,” he said, “think of Elly.”

He questioned me as to whether or not I had threatened Ms. Whyne. I said I had not, and had no intention of it, nor did I mean to break the window. What I realized was this — my father had told him the truth and deserved to be believed,
and he did not wish to believe my father, for my mother’s sake. I told him a lie — and he desperately wished to believe me for my mother’s sake.

He told me he did not know what I was into, or with who — but he wanted to tell me this.

“What?” I asked.

He told me the Sheppards were to be raided soon, and not to dare go near there or the Voteur house.

I told him Cheryl and her family should not be harmed, it wasn’t their doing.

“If you mention a word of this I’ll run
you
in,” he said. “I’m doing this for your mom — for your mom — don’t go near that fuckin’ house. I’m doing this for Sydney,” he said, “not for you. I don’t want to see you in a scrape.”

I was released at eight o’clock. There were conditions. I was not to go near Ms. Whyne or the tax department again or I would be charged with assault and I would have to go to jail.

The east wind reminded me of fall, and that my wood should be piled under its stable. My hand pained. I thought of how Dad had grabbed my knife — how utterly useless I thought his act. But what had mine garnered me? Nothing more or less than Dad’s. And I saw my father’s act as a proud and noble act of a man. An act selfless. My act was of a youth foolish. Besides, Father had no guilt. I could not walk past a mirror during the light of day.

Three days later, Danny Sheppard was picked up at his house. Knowing he was in for a prison sentence, he fired a rifle at a cop. The shot missed. This police officer was Constable Morris.

Danny came up for trial sometime later. And by chance Rudy Bellanger was on the jury. They had all kinds of evidence against him, and found Danny guilty of trafficking to children
on the reserve. It was his fourth offence and everyone knew he was going away, even though with his hair cut short and a clean suit, one of the police officers could not pick him out in the courtroom.

Rudy was the jury foreman and pronounced the verdict with great relish. Rudy did not understand why Mathew was so quiet and alarmed. But I did.

As soon as the sentence of eleven years was imposed and the courtroom cleared, Danny told Constable John Delano that both he and Bennie knew things about the bridge and the long-ago robbery at McVicer’s house.

With Rudy boasting his part in their downfall, I became aware that when he helped sentence Danny Sheppard, he had sentenced Mathew and himself. He just did not know it yet. Mathew took two trips to visit his friend in Dorchester and came home glummer each time. Even Connie Devlin did not speak to him now.

Their world would crumble without my help, just as my father had said. They who lift a hand against you do so against themselves. If only I had believed him just a little I might still be free.

LOVE

ONE

Mathew and Cynthia had convinced themselves they would be able to retire after they won their lawsuit. Yet almost six years had gone by and they waited, as people of little knowledge wait, always thinking their lawyer had their best interests in mind, and that he was more than a lawyer, he was a friend. That is, they believed what Snook himself had cultivated, and understood legal procrastination only in the way he wanted them to. Until the entire community was tired of hearing about their legal battles. As for Snook, he had taken three thousand dollars from them and rarely, if ever, thought of their case.

A week after Danny Sheppard’s sentencing, Frederick Snook came down from town. I watched as his car pulled into their yard. He got out in the twilight, wearing the same loud suit I had once seen him wear in court. He brushed some dust off his loafers and, looking unfavourably upon the large old house, went inside. He took little Teresa May’s fingers in his and made faces and took a quarter from her ear and handed it to her. Though five years of age, she looked like she was three.

He asked about her condition and discovered how serious it was; that someday she may need a heart transplant. Then, feeling he had done a civic duty, he faced his clients and said what it was he had come to say.

“I’ve gotten an offer — an offer to put all of this behind us now.”

Cynthia looked at Mathew and winked. Mathew sniffed.

The offer was a one-time lump sum payment of two thousand dollars.

There was silence at the bare metal table. They could not speak. The offer was a thousand dollars less than what they had already spent on the litigation.

Frederick listened with a pious blankness as they cursed everyone, as if his failure was
their
fault. They shouted at him about all the plans they had had and what they were led to believe. He left with a sense of heaviness and the injured merit that men of Snook’s legal and business acumen often have at just these times.

They drove to his office two days later. He had not thought he would be seeing them again and looked startled when they came in. Cynthia held little Teresa May, who had a flowered hairband about her head and a long scar visible on her chest. But the lawyer did not feel it was the proper time to shake the child’s fingers. She had become just a sickly kid whose mother this lawyer had always considered “white trash.”

Snook took out two file folders and went to the desk. He extended his hand to two chairs.

He told them that the lawyers for McVicer had come up with what they thought was a reasonable offer.

“I wouldn’t want to be rich in this parish,” Snook said, as if Cynthia and Mat should empathize with their opponent’s position.

That they did not take this offer was understandable but completely up to them. It was the words
reasonable offer
that cut to their souls.

Mathew wore the same sports jacket and the same cowboy boots he had worn all those years before; Cynthia the same dress, the one she also wore to hospital with baby Teresa. Snook shook his head sadly as he kept looking up from a dossier to one or the other as he spoke.

“What all the experts say is that the span that gave way wouldn’t have if it had not been for sabotage. This would likely be in the company’s favour at trial, and not I think in yours or Connie Devlin’s. I have your interest at stake. It would be a very large expense to go on from here — he’s a bastard, McVicer — but he has smart men working for him.”

Both sighed and said they had decided to take the money. He closed the folders, stood, and walked to the filing cabinet.

“I wish you had decided that before,” he said.

“Why?”

“Well, the offer has been withdrawn — it was a one-time offer —”

“Withdrawn?” Cynthia said.

He looked at them with numb blankness that for once showed him to be a tired middle-aged man.

“They can’t withdraw it,” Mathew said, his face completely white. “They offered it to us — they did — they offered it to us.”

Cynthia exclaimed that it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to her mother.

“I know it isn’t fair,” their lawyer said. “Nothing about McVicer is fair — you saw how he handled Penny Porier. He grew up in a gutter and he can fight like a dog over a piece of meat.”

Then the lawyer asked Mathew if he would mind leaving the office for a second. Mathew didn’t want to until Cynthia told him to. He went out, slamming the door. Snook then told the woman that they were in no position to proceed.

“Why not?” Cynthia said brazenly, as a person does whose confidence rests on never caring to know the facts.

“Because John Delano is now the officer heading the investigation — and he’s not like Morris. He has a recent statement from the Sheppard brother — Danny — that trash in
Dorchester — ready to give anyone up. From what I know — and I can’t verify it yet — the statement implies that Connie Devlin was supposed to be paid four thousand dollars — that Mathew drove the truck the night Trenton died, and that Mathew robbed McVicer’s house of five hundred dollars. You see, Devlin is terrified of going to jail — gutless weasel — because of the very lawsuit
you
filed. If you had not filed it, this new investigation might not have started. Connie will want immunity for what he will tell on your brother and Rudy Bellanger. If he gets it your brother faces a murder charge. This is why the offer was so minuscule and why it was withdrawn yesterday. Besides, the community — the river, the province — everyone who had an opinion on Sydney Henderson will want your brother’s blood.”

Cynthia stared at him.

“Personally I don’t think they have a leg to stand on — not with hearsay evidence from someone like Danny Sheppard. Still, this is going to be hard on your mom, if Connie Devlin turns.”

“I see,” Cynthia said.

She did not understand everything, but she was not surprised by any of it.

Cynthia stood, feeling absurd in her dress, took her purse, opened it, and found a cigarette. She held her child in her left arm as she lighted the cigarette, blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth, almost as a warning, and prepared to leave the office.

“I share your outrage,” Snook said, picking up the phone and asking, “Do you think Devlin is at home?”

“Not fuckin’ likely,” she said, closing the door.

TWO

They drove home along the empty road that evening. The stars were coming out over the bay, a buoy winked out, as if God still had everyone’s best interest at heart. Mathew’s gaze was vacant, his face thin and tired. He stared over fields he didn’t own and houses he had never been invited into. For a moment he had loudly proclaimed himself a victim and by this had danced above those houses. Now the cloud upon which he walked had turned to ash.

Cynthia had told him exactly what the lawyer said about Connie. Told him the new officer, John Delano, knew, told him that both Connie and Mathew were culpable. Told him they wanted another fish — Rudy Bellanger.

Told him that this is what McVicer himself had been silently doing for months, ever since he had stopped the lawsuit over the groundwater and herbicides — he was closing a noose around the necks of those other few who had gone against him. Told him how long McVicer had felt Rudy and Mathew were involved. Since the day Mathew took the stand at the inquest. She didn’t tell him to strike a deal and give Rudy up. She wanted that card to play for herself.

Cynthia sighed. “How did everything get so wrong?” The child was asleep, the car engine droned, Black Sabbath played.

“Connie Devlin,” Mathew said. “First he blames it all on Sydney Henderson and now he blames it all on me.” His eyes moved to the right and left, as if he was trying to find a way out. He knew he needed money, and fast.

“Connie —’member when Connie stole my smelts and had the ’dacity to blame it all on Sydney?”

Cynthia looked at him, startled by the complete switch, the
complete falseness; and how easily he had attained it, and how easily she accepted it. But this made her aware of the terrible dilemma she was now cornered in.