Mercy Among the Children (42 page)

Then Percy appeared on the steps, Autumn holding his hand. Under his dark blue winter coat he wore a small suit
jacket and old bow tie, just as his mother would have wanted. He looked down, and his face lighted and he ran into my arms.

The snow was reddened by the sun, the tamaracks as hard as steel, and the sky still with cold. We held Percy’s hands as he walked between us.

“Do you know what Mother and Father meant to this world?”

I told them that Mom and Dad meant greatness. I told them that McVicer did not mean greatness, nor did Dr. David Scone, nor those men who wrote about native rights without spending one night with Cheryl Voteur. I told Autumn that did not matter. Everything in our world was backwards. I told her I had hurt my mother and father.

“Percy, when your birthday comes, we will go to Saint John,” Autumn said. She told Percy all the things he would do. “How wonderful it will be,” Autumn said.

THREE

Peace? It was that very week that Connie Devlin came home. I saw him walk past my mailbox at nine one evening. He wore a beautiful new coat and a pair of sheepskin boots. He was interviewed by police and said he knew nothing of my father’s disappearance. But he was soon under their protection and within three days people said he had told them everything. A rumour started that I was looking for him and wanted to kill him. I came to believe this rumour. It caused in me a kind of anxious desperation that I loved. It was then that Mat Pit came to me. His face was sunken. I saw the look of a hunted man,
a man who feared daylight and other people. Of all the people he had maimed, harmed, or influenced in his entire life, only Rudy Bellanger and myself still listened to him. Rudy, kicked out of his house long before Christmas, and under an investigation his own father-in-law had started, was also a broken man. Rudy still made plans, but no one listened to him now. Gladys had returned to her father’s house, lived in the old doll room off the kitchen, and her large ranch-style house was up for sale, desolate as empty brick houses tend to be.

Pit came to me alone. The far-flung plans for empire, his parasitical hopes of inventing himself in the style of Leo or anyone else, had been snuffed away, like a candle snuffed by a finger. It left only the erupted blister of malcontent. Angrily he told me this, in violent, almost virulent language. And Cynthia? Cynthia he hated. For she wanted nothing more to do with him, ensconced as she was in the huge house on the bay. Did I know that she was engaged to McVicer? I nodded. How dare she be engaged, he ranted. Did I know she had a two-thousand-dollar diamond engagement ring? Again I nodded. How dare she!

He told me he no longer existed for her. The gravel drive, the old house she grew up in, the sunken yard, the desolate windows, the men she had given herself to — bullies and punks — had been swept away by a wave of her hand. To Leo she was a woman who had suffered at the hand of a brother now demonized — a victim he had rescued from some wild horror. Leo would not believe anything about Cynthia except what he wanted to. Leo had taken to wearing clothes Cynthia had picked out for him, and had his hair cut in a new style. It was obvious he was senile, Mat said. I nodded. It was rumoured that he had slapped his own daughter when she mentioned he was being silly.

“Ah yes — that’s what Cynthia is like —” Mathew said. “I can’t bear to think of my sister like that — but there you go.”

I might have taken some pleasure in this, but I did not. It was not so peculiar to rural men suffering the new age. His jacket was torn, his boots were frayed, his hands blistered with cold. He was sick, and trying to find work. He also needed, more than anything else, to get away.

“How can you let Connie Devlin get away with this?” he said, after we drank wine and did two lines of cocaine. “You have to take him down — for your dad’s honour. Remember we spoke so often about honour?” He put his hand on my shoulder.

“Police patrol his road every hour and he orders them about — he is in his glory,” I answered. I was now sickened by everything, and Mat saw this and became desperate.

“Well that’s easy — wait for a storm,” Mat said, “when the patrol cars are off the road — when no one is around. I’m not thinking of myself,” Mat said, “I know you have no reason to trust me — but Connie — rumour is he threw poor Sydney down a cliff — I’m shamed to think he’s my cousin — he turned the floodlights off — he was the one who got Trenton — I know that now in my heart when it is too late. If I could bring yer dad back I’d soon trade places with him — yer dad suffered ’cause of what Connie did — me own cousin actin’ like that there — Connie was the one who made me think yer dad hurt Trenton. I was beside myself, and for one time I didn’t think clear. When a storm comes, that’s yer best chance — he’ll be alone — I’m not saying this for myself. I’ve got to go because I’ll be blamed for a crime I never done — no one should have to suffer that! To be blamed for a crime they never done.”

Every time he spoke my father’s name, my eyes blurred, and seeing this he shook his head sadly, and after a time, he took his leave. For the first time in his life, I think, he may have been frightened of me.

FOUR

With Cynthia’s arrival at Leo’s house, with his wife moving into that house, and with his own house up for sale, Rudy had been suddenly thrust into hell. And if one did not believe in hell one had only to look at Rudy, see his eyes and his frayed windbreaker, and realize that in his pocket he carried a ticket stub to a room at the YMCA.

He could not stand for this. He would not and live. Yet he waited for Gladys to help him, and hung about his father-in-law’s back yard, watching Cynthia eat cinnamon buns and coming and going in the Cadillac.

He had paid a terrible price for his infatuation. This is all he thought of now. Some days he would go up to the Pits’ and wait for Mathew to talk to him. He would stand on the hill in back of their house and see the window of the room where he had had sex with Cynthia that fateful night. The window was often open, and darkness lay within.

When he was a child he was so frightened of failure and people. Now, too late, he realized his fear of life had crippled him. He might have done anything in his life, even have been a great man, and he had done nothing. When a child he had prayed to be safe, to be happy, to be loved. And now too late he realized that he had been given what he had prayed for. By the time he was twenty-one he had been safe and happy and loved. But it wasn’t enough for him. And did he give anything in return? No. He had not been kind to Elly because of conceit and lust. He had not been good to Gladys because of greed. And he had not loved because of fear.

What had Leo McVicer ever done to him but say, “No, this won’t do — you will not use me just because you married my
child — I will not be fooled!” Rudy could not hate the old man for doing what he did.

Could he not even take his own life? This thought was often fleeting in his mind. No — he could not. But then, why not? What was the point of this — for eventually all his actions would be known. Still he had to stay alive. He would get money somehow and go away, to the place he had always wanted to go — Australia.

Rudy knew he would break under questioning. No escape hatch was in fact opened to him, except the truth. And the truth was that he had assaulted my mother and had had an affair lasting some seven years with Cynthia. That he had become a coward because of this — not in spite of this. That this type of weakness turned against a man and made a woman mean.

That because of cowardice he had relied upon Mathew Pit, as a friend and an adviser. And Mathew had robbed a house, and sabotaged a bridge. That the sabotaging of the bridge had cast Sydney Henderson into hell — but now, after all this time, after years, the man was about to be resurrected, and Rudy himself was cast into hell. And if one did not believe in hell, well, one had only to look at him.

The only time he had spoken to Constable Delano, at a party the summer before, he kept his eyes lowered. John Delano spoke to him kindly, even light-heartedly, but Rudy could not relax. And Delano whispered:

“The death of a boy is a terrible burden to place on an innocent man — you know that, Mr. Bellanger.”

And Rudy felt his nose starting to run, and his eyes water. He was not more than a millisecond away from saying “I did it” when Delano changed the subject completely and asked after Gladys’s heath.

Yet there was one solution. He had a child, Teresa. And
he would go to Leo and claim this child in front of Cynthia. Perhaps in doing this, he could still save himself!

Rudy crept into his father-in-law’s house by the same door he had taken the hour he had accosted my mother. He did this the Wednesday Mathew came to visit me.

He knew there would be no marina. The day after the Knights of Columbus meeting everything in his life had simply stopped. That was the day Leo had phoned Gladys, told her what he had suspected, and without Rudy being allowed to explain, to speak or say a thing, the marriage was over and he was no longer allowed on the property.

However, for Cynthia Pit it was all a natural progression in her life. She had had Danny Sheppard when she was a teenager and he was a big talker; then she had Rudy when she was a woman and he was the manager of his wife’s store and had plans for a grand marina. Now she was the caregiver for a woman whose rich father was enamoured of her and had asked for her hand in marriage. She had not done a thing toward this end, it had just happened, as if it had all been preordained. Nor did she ever consider that she had betrayed almost everyone to gain this position.

Rudy waited for her in the very room my own mother had been interrogated in so long ago, hat in hand, staring at the carpet. When Cynthia finally came to see him, her beauty as wanton as ever, he said he wanted to speak to Leo. She told him it was impossible. He stammered and tried to think. Then he told her he still had plans to do something. That he would someday have a bar, with VLT machines, and it would cater mainly to younger kids.

“What does that sound like?” he asked her, his lips trembling and his hand shaking as he touched her face.

“It sounds just like you,” Cynthia said coolly. “Everyone already has that — besides, I don’t like those gambling machines, they hook young mothers with little children.”

“I took care of Leo’s business for years — I want something out of it,” Rudy said. “I want to see him — to tell him — about —
us
!”

“Oh — well, I’ve been talking to your father-in-law about you, Rudy — and — well, let’s say I have a different opinion of you,” she said with a great air of disappointment.

“But he stoled my idea —” Rudy said loudly. “Leo stoled my idea for a marina.” He slapped his hat on his leg.

He said he wanted to take Gladys out of her father’s house, but Cynthia would not allow this. He asked again to see Leo, and again she said no, and told him that if he did not leave she would call Constable Morris, who was a good friend of hers.

“Don’t you think I don’t know what’s going on here?” he said.

Cynthia smiled. “Rudy, what are you saying?”

“I know you’re in league with them and have turned your back on me and are trying to push me out of what is rightfully mine.”

She looked at him piously. Then she picked up the phone.

“I will have to phone the police!”

“Please —” he said.

She paused and looked at him.

“You have come into this house uninvited — I hardly know you —” she said.

“What do you mean, into this house uninvited — who are you — and what do you mean, you hardly know me — how did we have a child together if you hardly know me! And if that comes out, what will Leo say to you then! And I am willing for it to all come out!” he shouted. “I will — it will all come out!”

But she remained perfectly calm — because she had told Leo and Gladys that Rudy would say all these things to discredit her.

“I just wanted things for us,” he said after a moment.

“Is that why you stole Leo’s idea?”

“What?”

“Leo’s idea for a marina — the one he helped build in Newcastle. A decent, kind, wonderful man like Mr. Leo McVicer?” She looked at him, again with the resilience of one accustomed to the fabric of lies. He had to turn away from her deceitful look. It made her look, at the moment, truly ugly.

When turning, he saw his wife’s legs as she sat in her room, holding the cane and listening to this horrible argument.

“Go — before you upset Gladys,” Cynthia said, pointing. “She is in my care now.”

“I — will not — I — I — Gladys — you know — you must know!”

Then seeing Leo in the room, he began to back away.

“Gladys?” he said once more, noticing her feet beyond the door, noticing the cane, remembering how helpless she was without him. “Gladys — you must know — you must!”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Cynthia whispered to Leo with a forlorn smile. “This is what he’s been like for years.”

Hearing her say this Rudy yelled a half-hearted threat, pulled his boots on, and walked away from the house. He stared back over his shoulder at the frozen lane, the dark squall of embedded trees. He was terrified. How could people be so cruel to him? How could Cynthia just invent things about him? What would happen to him now? He would go to jail — and what would happen there? Nor did it matter that in any real way he had done almost nothing —

He had not walked one hundred yards when he saw Mathew Pit, waiting for him by the very tree Rudy had leaned against after he had assaulted my mother.

“How much do you think the bastard has in that house?” Mathew said. “A hundred thousand — a million or more?”

“I don’t know — I don’t.”

“Well, you know one thing — the comb-ee-na-tion to his
safe. That’s one thing more than that bitch of my sister knows. Stick with me and we’ll still get out of this scrape together.”

Mathew turned his broad back on Rudy and hobbled ahead of him along the frozen road, his stomach in pain; and Rudy, crying, followed. Both soon covered in snow and shadows.

FIVE

That night as the wind howled against our house, Autumn told me that the police would arrest Connie and Mathew and Rudy. They would all be taken into custody and charged with manslaughter, perhaps on Friday, certainly no later than Monday. The whole roadway was whispering this in a gleeful clatter, as if a wicked spell against my family had been broken. There would be a string of other charges against Mathew.