Mercy Among the Children (20 page)

I was in court for the first time that day. Connie gave a sad, whimsical twist to his head, as if he was reflecting upon this, and he glanced my way. I wanted to glare at him but could not.

“Why do you think he may have been there?” Isabel asked.

“Knock the span down — kerplunk.”

“You were brave to stay there and not to report it.”

“I was brave — but before I could report it everyone already knew.”

“My, my — and why would Sydney do something so dangerous and destructive?”

“Complained to me at the house, he weren’t going to be foreman — said people was all against him. I said, to him, I
said, ‘Listen here, Sydney — ya don’t join in nothin’, ya always caused trouble — so how can we ’spect ya to belong?’

“His wife Elly, she come to me beggin’ me to try and cover it up — like dirt in a hole, I s’pose — and said Constable Morris was on to her. I said, ‘Well Elly — it’s a good job, ’cause he might hopefully straighten you out — and get you way from that desperate man.’”

The spectators clapped. Connie then sniffed in satisfaction and looked my way again.

On Monday afternoon Connie came to the stand once more. Many of the community’s women were in the room, sitting three rows behind my parents, with Cynthia; they being her constant companions at the hearing. That day, one was the waitress from Polly’s.

Isabel smoothed her gown and went to the front of the desk.

She asked Connie if he had been fired for drinking. He denied that he was drinking. She asked who had gotten his job back for him.

“Sydney Henderson,” he said. “He wanted me to let him destroy the bridge is why,” Connie said with a loud retort.

“Oh, I thought that was Mathew who asked you that — because he was not hired on —”

This was objected to.

“Did you see him with the boy before that day — or only after?”

“I don’t know — he walked the boy home.”

“Home?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he
walk
the boy home? Can you tell the court that? That company truck was always available for him. Why did he
walk
Trenton home?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, but you do know. Sydney does not know, nor has he
ever learned, how to drive. He cannot drive an automatic let alone a stick shift.”

“Ya, he is some stupid man,” Connie sniffed.

“Then who manoeuvred the truck onto the bridge?” Isabel then turned her back on Connie Devlin and went to the table. She looked through her notes and then pointed out three things. The first was that Connie had not even been on the bridge at the time of the accident — that not only did he not punch his clock but he was still eating his supper. This could be verified by Jay Beard, who had walked by his house at that time.

“If he had been doing his job he may have feared being injured or killed himself when the dynamite blew. Someone told him to stay home because of that.” She flipped a page.

The second point was the fact that Sydney could not drive and could never have manoeuvred that truck into that position. None of Sydney’s fingerprints were on the steering wheel in the truck.

And the third was the time Connie said he saw Sydney on the night of Trenton’s death. That was the exact time, no matter how they wished to hide it, that even the prosecution had registered that Sydney was talking to Alvina Pit on the phone.

Isabel turned to the women sitting with Cynthia and smiled.

TWENTY-TWO

A week later the sheriff and the coroner recommended that my father not be sent to trial. This came down on February 26, 1983. They gave a dozen reasons. The weak span was a company
problem. The sabotage could not in any way — even the minutest way — be linked to Sydney.

Then the book. The book was considered a classic, and any man had a right to read what he wanted. The watchman was an unreliable source — his time clock, through his own fault or mechanical failure, was not useful to anyone, and his story was suspect. It was not clear if he was even on the bridge — at least reasonable doubt serviced in this regard.

Then the dynamite. Anyone who would know how to plant a charge as Sydney did when he was seventeen would know how to damage a structure better than that — and if he had time to drive onto the bridge and accost a boy in the truck, was he not frightened of the span collapsing before he himself could escape? These were serious unanswered questions.

And —
Sydney did not drive.

The most damaging testimony against Father concerned the robbery. However, there were other ways the money could have ended up in Trenton’s possession. The idea that anyone would give a retarded boy five hundred dollars for a sexual favour was highly unlikely. Find out where the money came from and you would find the person or persons responsible for the boy’s death and the destruction of the span.

Sheriff Bulgar said this did not make him feel easy about letting Sydney go. It simply meant that the prosecution had failed to convince anyone beyond a reasonable doubt that what happened was more than an unfortunate accident or that other people were not involved. Everything was unconvincing. The trial would be as well.

My father had his own scenario worked out. He had hidden his thoughts from Isabel Young but took out a diagram later that week and showed it to my mother. For two hours he went over every point as we sat listening. He did not understand it completely, but he was certain he could reveal the hidden
codes in such a way as to show who had taken the money. He said he would go to Leo McVicer and exonerate Elly, which was the only thing my father wanted.

“There must have been a small crime to allow the larger crime. The theft was done to
entrap
us — so as far as my thinking is, the robbery at the house must have been done as a coverup — again and again I come to the same conclusion — the same one. The robbing of money was secondary. Something terrible happened at the house
before
the robbery to make the robbery necessary, if it was to be blamed on you. The bridge is another matter altogether and came as a complete convenience to those who wish to discredit me.” He paused.

“Still,
you
were the one they wanted to initially discredit — I wasn’t a worry to them.” He took Elly’s hand. “It was you — it was not to protect Mathew. It had to be someone closer to McVicer — perhaps Rudy Bellanger. Is there something you are not telling me? Did you see Mr. Bellanger do something at the house or store which was unfortunate.”

“Of course not, Sydney.”

“Hm,” he said. “Well, it must have something to do with him — they wanted you gone so Leo would not find out —” He looked at my mother gently and said, “Oh, I know you think I’m silly, but mathematically it works out — Mathew Pit took the money, and Trenton was not really attempting to give it back to me but to Leo — and Cynthia doesn’t know, or want to know, that Mathew is guilty — she used to love me — now she hates me.”

“Hates you,” Autumn said. (I think she believed this to be all very romantic at the moment.)

“At any rate, Mathew Pit knows he has to make me culpable forever — that is why he hates me too — now they are both in turmoil. Strange how it will someday all come together.”

“Sydney — I want you to do something,” Mom said.

“What?”

“I want you to forget what you just said — we have another child coming — I want more than anything no more trouble —”

“Oh, I don’t care about me — it is you I am thinking of.”

“Then don’t do or say another thing —
please!
”

Sydney shrugged. He continued eating his cooling soup. Finally he said:

“So I know — that’s all I know.”

“Please stop!” Mother shouted, wringing her hands. “Or I will leave you forever — I swear I will go away!”

We all went to bed that night in silence. The wind blew over our house. I could see the light from the stove. I could see my mother’s knicknacks on the mantel. I bet I prayed for her, though I didn’t believe in God. The next morning we went off to school, and Father, taking his smelt nets, went to work.

The new opinion (or the same opinion in a new form) was that my father was not a poor fool from some Bartibog swamp, but a rural Machiavellian, his books and his poor treatment of my mother used against him.

FURY

ONE

A few weeks later there was a full moon, and stars dotted the sky. The snow was hard, and even though the mercury was low, the first scent of spring could be felt in those dry tiny orbs of air. Constable Morris went to Polly’s Restaurant to calm down Mathew Pit, who had just gotten into a fight with a trucker, a fight he attributed to his family’s suffering.

Mathew sat with his hands on a bottle of beer, his jean jacket rolled up showing the sleeves of a frayed white sweater, and complained to Constable Morris about the inequality of the law. Why have a law if the law allowed this? What right did the law have to make his family suffer these indignities? Just because he once had legal troubles was it right for the law to persecute him?

Constable Morris agreed and apologized for the entire case. It was not handled properly at any level, and never since the murder of young Karrie Smith some years before had there been such a debacle.

“Good men suffer all the time because cases are not handled properly,” Morris said. He blamed the prosecution for botching what was essentially an easy conviction.

“What if he confesses?” Mathew said.

“If he confesses, he confesses,” Morris said. “An inquest isn’t a trial — a confession would change it all.”

Morris then whispered something to hearten Mathew. Morris said he was a tough boy himself and came from tough people but there was one thing he knew.

“And what is that?” Mathew asked.

“Murder is always open,” Morris continued. “You think I have given up — I never give up. I won’t give up until that bastard is behind bars — and his wife is free of the torment she has suffered. She shouldn’t be made pregnant by that son of a bitch.”

Mathew flinched at the line:

“Murder is always open.”

He went home later that night and his mother called to him. She had heard about the fight at the bar from a neighbour who phoned. He went to her, kissed her forehead. She was sitting up, propped by two pillows. Her room had the oddly familiar style of faded flowers, and a lingering second scent of the aged within the fragrance of those flowers, caught in the warm pink walls, and the deep Maritime scent of midwinter thaw, which had turned to ice again in the night.

Alvina’s teeth were on the nightstand beside her, along with a box of Kleenex. The television had been brought upstairs, and she kept pointing the remote at it like a gun, her arm straight and her lips pressed tight. She watched
Mass for Shut-ins
, and
The Billy Graham Crusades
, and reruns of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
But now her TV with its two-foot-long rabbit ears was off. She looked at her son, and he joked with her. But she was distressed and had prayed at church.

The day before she had asked him to swear to her on a Bible that he knew nothing of Trenton’s death or of the truck driven onto the span or the bolts being cut. She had grown old in the last four months and looked at him tonight with eyes filled with disappointment.

“What is wrong?” he asked.

“Why won’t you swear on the Bible for me? If you have not committed a sin, then why not do this? For Trenton’s sake.”

“It’s not my kind of book,” he said. “Beside, I have bigger
fish to fry —” He sniffed. “Talking to a constable tonight an’ everything else.”

She looked at him and plucked the quilt with her fingers. “I could not stand it if you did it. Kiss Saint Jude.” She nervously reached about her neck and held the medallion up with her trembling fingers toward his mouth, in bright hope and expectation. He turned away.

“No, I don’t kiss Saint Jude — I used to — but lately I don’t like him — I used to pray to him when I hunted, and I never had no luck. I used to pray to him when I trapped, and coyotes took the catch. Saint Jude cares more for coyotes than he does for me, I figure.”

She knew Mathew had said in December that he would do exactly what had been done: sabotage the bridge and stop work on it. Now Alvina had to convince herself, as Mathew’s old mother who loved him, that he had not done what was in his mind to do, but that for some insane reason
Sydney
, who had never bothered her before,
had.

Alvina also knew, the moment she had accused Sydney on the bridge, with the boy’s body lying in front of her, the implications of what she was saying: that the mother of a dead child could cause the rancour she did. It was in her heart to wound him. But now she could not take any of it back. She had become, like Rudy and Connie Devlin, an unwilling conspirator in her son’s commission of a horrible crime.

Mathew kissed her cheek as she put the medal of Saint Jude back under her nightdress.

“I love you, Mom,” he said, “and I loved Trenton too.”

Mathew went downstairs and into the back room where Trenton had spent much of his time. Cynthia was sitting alone with a blanket over her considering many things this night.

She looked at Mathew and returned to her binoculars to watch our house. She was aware that there was an immense
grace allowed the Pits because of the death of this child, and she and Mathew wanted more.

Still, as Mathew looked at her he worried. Because he could see a future where this grace would not be so easily attained. As each day passed, the suffering of Elly and Sydney would be considered monstrous if the truth came to light.

Worse, every day for the last three weeks Connie was at the house asking for his money. The four thousand dollars that Mathew had promised him. He had to do something about that.

Still, Connie was discreet enough never to mention the truth. It was in a way
unconscionable
that someone would be mean enough to mention the truth to Mathew, after all he’d been through.

Mathew’s thinking was simply the logical progression from illogical circumstance. The truth was an aberration to everyone in our community who believed in my father’s guilt. To tell this truth would be a genuine inconvenience.