Mercy Among the Children (28 page)

She began to smile and then her face crumpled into a picture of sorrow like I have never seen in my life again. She turned away from us and went into her room. I saw how her body flinched horribly under her costume, as if her very body was desperately trying to regain its lost dignity.

We looked over and Mom was crying. She kept telling me
to stop fighting or they would take us away again. It seemed she cried because of what I had said about Autumn. Her face crumbled too. But my father knew about Autumn, and had kept it silent; not only because of Mom’s feelings but because of Autumn herself, who he felt was afflicted. Even as her father he did not judge her. Yet the world — the goddamn world was tearing us apart.

“Ask him,” I said. “Ask him what he did on the bridge — maybe it is all true — maybe they are right. Maybe me being crazy and Autumn being easy comes because he is nuts.”

I left the house. I walked in circles most of the night, and the longer I walked, the sadder I became. I could not get Autumn’s smile out of my mind, or my mother’s crying. What did it matter what Autumn had done? Who was I? My father, beset by problems and as good a man as I have met, did not judge.

With the red dawn over the tin roof of our shack, the smell of heavy smoke in the air, I went back inside. Autumn was in her small room asleep in her play costume. Mother was asleep in her bed. On the table there was a note:

“Dear Lyle:

“You are right of course. All my life I have been a burden to those who see things more clearly than I. I was a burden to my father, and now I am a burden to you and little Autumn. I think I can find work — I will stay and work until our debt is paid. Then things might get better. Take care of yourself and Autumn and Percy, and be kind to whoever comes to our door. Love, Dad.”

My father left just before dawn and walked to Ferry Road, and got a drive in a truck with Bliss Hanrahan, the trucker Mathew
Pit had punched that night long ago. It was the first time Bliss spoke to my father about things that bothered him. He told my father that only person who might have turned off the security lights the night of Trenton’s death was Connie Devlin. This had bothered Bliss Hanrahan now for two years.

My father said nothing.

The second thing Hanrahan spoke about was the letters written to Mom and Dad. A group of people at Polly’s Restaurant had done this as a joke, he told my father, for they were sure my father was guilty. “They meant nothing by it — you know what they can get up to for a joke around here,” Bliss said. But now after all this time, it seemed that my father might not have been responsible, and the joke should be exposed for what it was.

Bliss was an average man. He kept looking at my father trying to devise some idea. And he wished to be cautious, and did not want to be overly sympathetic. Still, he knew Connie and Mat, and he also knew that the letters were written by others. That he had not come forward with either piece of information made him now less reticent about my father’s innocence; and a guilt tugged at him.

My father was let off in late afternoon, north of Campbellton along a stretch of interconnecting woods roads, and walked until dark. There he found the camp and the foreman, and was hired the next day.

Later, Hanrahan spoke to an RCMP officer, just in passing, about these strange things. This officer’s name was John Delano. He had been following the events from afar, interested in them because all did not seem right. He placed a phone call that night, and finally set in motion events that would change our life.

There were times after Dad left when our lane was frozen stiff, and we were all waiting for him to come home, and Christmas was nearing. I would then remember the sunlight on his glasses when he spoke to me and I would be transported into the land of his gentle sorrow — a sorrow like brilliant old wine, a sorrow that comes with knowledge and wisdom. That is the closest I’ve ever come to knowing my father. I do not think that when in happier times he spoke of a gentle life as we picked blueberries in the field — spoke about the ideas that encapsulated both him and my mother — that he had ever thought (and why in God’s name should he?) he would be forced to literally live it with the excruciating balancing act of a man on a tightrope in the wind. But then again, in some way — don’t we all? I found Tolstoy’s
The Forged Coupon
he had taken out for me to read and placed it back on the shelves of books without opening it. I vowed not to ever read another book.

For an instant, a split second in the dawn air, I felt free to pursue my dreams. Yes, and they were so different from my father’s I almost cried.

FIFTEEN

Dad left before Percy was three. I carry a picture of Percy on his third birthday; Dad’s chair is empty, so he must have been gone.

I tried for a time to be Percy’s father. I took him for walks, in his wagon, and we would stop along our lane to collect
his bugs. Our lane was overgrown with green whip grass, and surrounded by high trees that waved above our heads in the summer breezes.

Percy had four jars filled with grasshoppers and crickets, caterpillars and snails. He’d wait for me to come home from fishing, jar in hand. He’d open the front door and run to give me a hug.

“You should not wander anywhere alone, Percy,” I told him one day. “You might tumble in the brook.”

I would bring the wagon around and Percy would tell me he needed his lucky bow tie. We would search the house for it. A red snap-on bow tie. Then, bow tie secured, jar in hand, he would sit in the wagon, his feet in red rubber boots.

My mother had almost lost her life giving birth to him. She had bled and her afterbirth was hard to issue. To the day three months later, Cynthia Pit’s child, Teresa May, was born. She also was a child of sorrow, had a bad heart, and Mathew and Cynthia were at the hospital in Moncton many times while the little girl was examined and re-examined, always dressed impeccably and with pearl stud earrings. Most everyone, I think, except Gladys, knew Teresa to be Rudy Bellanger’s daughter. Or maybe she did know by the time the child had her third birthday.

Percy and Teresa, in spite of their family histories, were like brother and sister from the start. Nor could Autumn or I help but love the little girl Percy did.

I constantly worried about the way Percy would wander by himself. One day, fearing he had drowned, I went along the old smelt path and found him sitting on a stump, his hands folded, looking at the leaves budding on the trees above him, his mouth slightly opened as if he was speaking to himself, or singing.

Another day, when I was pulling him in the wagon, he asked me if I was going away.

“Of course not, Percy.” I stopped the wagon. He looked up at me and shielded his eyes from the sunlight. His face was calm. Yet my answer did not convince him.

“I have a deep feeling in my heart that soon you are going away,” he whispered.

I started pulling the wagon again. “Oh, Percy, that’s not true — Daddy has gone away to work — but that’s not so bad, he will come home again. You shouldn’t worry about these things.”

The wagon stopped with a sudden jerk and one of the back wheels began to wobble, so I bent down and hammered it back into place with a rock.

“I think I will go away some day, too,” Percy sighed. “But don’t tell Mom. It’ll make her sad.”

He rubbed his eyes, because sunlight was in them. The afternoon shadows lengthened, and at a dusty warm place on the lane between two large pines, sunlight filtered down, and there in that patch of sun stood Autumn with her plastic book bag, waiting for us.

“Hello,” Percy called.

“Big Percy,” Autumn shouted, and waved, and she walked out of the filtering light and became a visible part of us. That day was the first time I realized that she was or would be beautiful. I had never known that she could be. She walked with us to the house.

We had a comfortable house by then, with a small greenhouse off the kitchen that made it feel like summer, even when there was six feet of snow over our back-yard trees. Jay Beard had built this for Mom the spring Dad left. And beyond the upstairs window, there was a view of the bay and lower Arron Brook. There was wood panelling on the walls and checkered drapes my mother made in the den. The wood stove was new, and our little oil furnace heated the house well.

But more important, we were not bothered now by anyone, because my father was away.

Like Dad, I went fishing in Arron Brook. And as I explored this vast area of bog and forest I would take Percy and Autumn with me; but Autumn was frightened in the woods, having no sense of direction — so I was honourbound to stay with them when we went anywhere off the road.

One day Mom said in a strange tone I had never heard before — it seemed to no more come from her than it had from the wind: “Lyle, you have to take care of your brother — and sister — do you understand?”

“Of course, Mom.”

“Your father is away, and we are alone — do you understand?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Good.” She smiled and smoothed her dress, and went inside and closed the door. Her voice sounded like the trees waving over my head, or the clouds moving, and there was a moment when it seemed she was no longer there.

It was now June. The hollows were filled with old leaves, the sun was out, the lanes were filled with dry mud. At night the sky was like building blocks of eternity — the stars were everywhere. Up on the road McVicer’s men were at work repaving a stretch, and every day I took Percy up the lane in the wagon to watch them on the rollers and await my father’s return. (I knew Dad wasn’t coming, but Percy was never convinced.) Then after a while Percy would sigh and say:

“I guess he isn’t coming home today.”

“No, not today.”

One day in late June, Percy and I had a game of marbles in a dirt hole at the back of the house. It was Percy’s marble pot, near a patch of grass called the lumpy ground. He would
sit there whenever we were away and watch for us. Or he and Scupper Pit, Trenton’s old dog, would lie side by side and stare at the sky, surrounded by dandelions and bees. Once he made his mom a daisy chain that she wore about her neck.

After that game I got my rod, and we walked to the field and down the road to the brook.

Percy carried his marbles and his picnic with him. We met Autumn coming down the lane, and she dropped her book bag and joined us. I kept walking farther up the brook, over windfalls and wild stingers, and they followed me. When I came to the place I was going to fish, I waited for them, and threw a small lean-to together for them.

“Where is the way back?” Autumn said.

“Up through the swale there,” I said.

“Up there?” Autumn asked. I looked to where she was pointing.

“No — if you go up there you will get lost. I said there —” And I pointed again to my right. Autumn, whether she understood or not, said nothing more.

Percy was holding Autumn’s hand, and she was covered in burdocks and kept swatting away flies. Percy sat down and unwrapped his sandwich. As long as Autumn and Percy were together and could see me, they would not be frightened.

Anyway, I don’t know if it was some idea that I was through with them taking advantage of me, or that I was angry with my mom, but that day I moved away from both Percy and Autumn and crossed the roaring stream.

I crossed the stream. I left them alone.

There was a pool farther down, along a stretch of the stream that had a gravel bank, a doff of warm sun upon it. I knew there were big trout lying there. I had seen them at this time last year, at dusk one evening when I was coming home.

The earth was still damp. Birds were sitting on the branches
flitting away — and I forgot about the time. I knew I was committing an act of dishonour by leaving my brother and sister. But it was like all acts in youth, both thoughtless and somewhat intentional.

For my thought might have been something like this: “What if I do go and leave them? It’ll give them some spunk — that’s what they need. I have spunk, surely they need some too. It is a hard world when you are born without protection.”

And that made me feel not like their older brother but more like their master. They did not know that I felt that way. I was their older brother who loved them, and yet this was the game I was now playing. They did not know I was playing a game, exercising a moral thought or judgment upon them.

The day was hot, but the water cool, and the sun played on the refreshing rip of water just south of the gravel bar. Beyond that rip was an old log where I knew there were big trout. The trout of my youth. The trout of my youth are forever gone.

I had no waders. Waders at that time seemed to me to be for rich Americans — and even rich Canadian sports I called Americans at that time.

I stepped into the water, and with my line wearing the hook and bobbin, I waited. I was in a bad position to land a fish — I would have to cross again and try to haul it up on the beach. And as I was thinking this, I felt the pull — later on, when I was older, I could tell the difference instantly between a trout and a fish — by fish I mean salmon — by the way they pulled. The pull with a trout — even the ravenous ones are somewhat less intense. But it was on and it was a big trout. It wasn’t a sea run but a beautiful big brown trout that rolled and rolled and sank my bobbin — I was too excited and I pulled — and pulled. And then perhaps the worst feeling that anyone is ever to have — the line went limp. It was as if I had been cheated out of pay.