Mercy Among the Children (29 page)

Still and all — I had lost it but I knew at that moment I was a fisherman.

Also — I didn’t mind losing that fish. In fact, there was always something strange about getting one trout. But it was more complex than that — it wasn’t just the idea of one fish on a string making you look derelict, with your knees muddy and pants soaked. It was also the idea that I must pay observance to an apprenticeship — the apprenticeship of life that none had taught me.

I spent the rest of the day looking over my bobbin and line, setting them just right and casting into that rip, letting the bobbin move in the laconic deep current toward the log. But nothing more happened. No other fish attended me. And then it was falling dark, and I was way out upon a rather opulent log — I don’t know how I had crossed the stream.

That was when I suddenly realized it —
the children.
I had been gone for hours. I had let my mother down.

In the dark I rushed back through the woods. If I move my hair I can show the remnant of a scar. It was dark and I could hardly see — I had my rod and tackle box with me. I also was secretly frightened of bears now. I had seen two before, and now it was dark.

The night held a soft warmth in the spruces. What sickened me was this — my response to the
feeling
I had had earlier in the day when, unknown to them, I
bullied
them into being alone by saying to myself that it would give them spunk. It was for this cringing feeling of power that I held the greatest anger now. It was the cringing feeling of power of people like Mathew Pit. So now I knew it. I began to understand what my father had been fighting all his life. Not that power was not in him, but that, like all mankind, it
was.
But he fought it!

I heard the slap of a beaver tail to my left. All was still, and
then suddenly a great black shadow appeared in front of me, a huge animal moving just beyond my reach.

I went into the stream, at the worst place possible, and found myself up to my waist in high water with the moose no more than three feet away. I ran from it, so that I lost my balance and went under completely. I believed (for Arron Brook filled with fickle eddies and hidden undertows is a deadly brook) I would drown and never see my parents or my siblings again.

The moose ignored my ignorance, and just trying to stay out of my way went on across the bar, a great beast and was lost on the other side. The trees were in that warm gloom of a late-spring night.

I reached the little lean-to. But they were not there. Only silence and the pulse of my heart in my ears. I saw Percy’s sneaker tracks alongside Autumn’s leading directly into the swale. Inside that bog and tall grass they would soon lose sight of, and not be able to hear, the brook. It was the one place I did not want them to go.

I let the blackflies light upon me as if penance was needed, watched them suck at my sunburned arms, and then went up the warm and shadowy hill looking for a sign of my children (for this is how I thought of them). I searched the pathway that led to our small house, and then turned right, through the ghastly burned-over stumps, from where our area got its name, all looking like spectres from some terrible civil war battle.
The Wilderness
, perhaps. I called out to them, and every tree seemed to stare back dumbfounded at me.

“How did you let this happen — where are your children?”

I was sixteen years old, and I had done a disreputable thing that my father never would.

“All is madness without love.” This is what I heard, in the gentle late-spring wind. It was exactly what my father said to
me when he grabbed hold of the knife I had showed him that night. The blood was so red that had dripped on the floor. He looked up at me in terrible tenderness.

“Lyle,” he said, his face white.

And what had I said?

“You fool — goddamn fool — cut your hand now, no-nothin’ fool — I never —”

At that moment my father looked pleadingly at my mother.

“I have failed everyone,” he said. “Constable Morris was right — you are too beautiful to be stuck with me.”

Elly, who still had her suitcase with things to take to Saint John on a trip we never made. And too, why had she stayed with my father when all others had cast him away — was it pride? Or stubbornness or folly? I’ll tell you what, it was worse than pride, folly, or duty. It was done — it had to have been done — for love.

Until I was walking through the ghostly remnants above Arron Brook I had forgotten those lines. I had simply remembered turning and seeing Autumn. But now those moments returned to me.

“All is madness without love.” And my father had not said it.
My mother had.

I had lost her Percy and I sat crying and cursing God. I told God that I would kill myself if Percy died. If He didn’t want a suicide on His hands He had better shape up and give Percy back! I knew I had told myself — no, told the Virgin Mary! — I didn’t care if the child was born — and now He had taken me up on it.

I turned back and walked toward home to tell Mother. When I got home the porch light was on. Mother was out.
She must have heard and gone to look for them.

I panicked. I could not think clearly enough to grab a flashlight and go into the woods again. I went into my father’s
room. What had I ever accomplished in my life except to harm others? I held the knife to my throat, closed my eyes. (It would be, you see, my sense of honour. I pictured people crying over me, seeing finally my great tragic scope.) I heard a cough upstairs. I turned almost hysterically and climbed the stairs.

Autumn was asleep in her bed, her few dolls set up about the room as if to protect her, her white dress hanging in the closet, her small shoes covered in mud on the mat, a book by Turgenev lying face up on the bed. Her nightgown was opened and her small left breast was visible in the light. To me she would probably become the most beautiful woman on the river. It usually took her an extra forty minutes to get home from school, because of Darren Voteur waiting to follow her. Her excesses with other boys did not diminish his love for her, and there was no way to shake him unless she walked across the highway and travelled along the ditch so she would not be seen. This was a predicament issued by the decree of poverty. Her poverty. Poverty I could not cure, nor God want to. Darren himself was caught in it — he could have no one else — but he thought perhaps he could have her. Worse was the fact that there was a moment when he might have
had
her. The moment had passed, and he couldn’t forget it. So he followed her, at a hundred yards, in the forlorn embrace of unrequited love, and waited near the mailbox until darkness and squalls of cold drove him home.

Sometimes he would come to the house, sit with Mom at the kitchen table, sometimes for hours.

Thinking of this I gently covered her breast, turned, and went into our room.

Percy was lying face down in his bed in our room, his fists clenched about some wild flowers he had picked. He coughed in his sleep again and, turning to me suddenly, smiled.

SIXTEEN

In the next eighteen months I got into three fights with those I accused of having partaken in the vigilantism against my dad.

I was brought to juvenile hall just before the Christmas break. Mom and Autumn and Percy came along, Autumn’s face painted like rouge on a porcelain doll.

The day I was brought up I chanced to see Penny Porier. She was in town for a doctor’s appointment with her father and mother. Her father gave me a glance, and in that glance the whole weight of the roadway’s scorn was distributed on my shoulders. Her mother held me longer in her gaze, wearing her mink stole with the mink eyes embedded in it.

These looks infused me with the condemnation neighbours had for me. Autumn whispered in my ear that Penny’s mother looked mortified to be seen with us, as if common decency should prevent us acknowledging them in front of decent town people.

“So let’s not acknowledge them,” Autumn whispered. Autumn saying that if Leo McVicer had told them to treat my mother with respect they would have fawned the ground, and, as Autumn said, “licked my real white bum.”

I was at that moment ashamed of Autumn with her apple-painted cheeks and her hanging dress. I was more ashamed of my sports jacket with the pockets torn, and a bit of leather saver showing in the winter sun. Penny walked away, covering her face with her white rabbit muff.

Percy was bewildered when the prosecution called me a ruffian, and I realized for the first time how much both my brother and sister looked up to me; how both had come to support me.

Still, my family’s lack of influence and power seemed a testimony of their
love
for me as we sat in that dreary place. I could not tell the court that my fights were in search of those men who had beaten my dad, those shadows that had formed about our house at night, with Jay Beard seated on a stump. Or that by my fights I had solved nothing.

The judge told me that he had no reason to dislike me but wondered if perhaps I did not dislike myself, and that I had become what was considered a nuisance to all decent people down river.

Isabel Young told the judge that these fights occurred because of my duty to protect my family; and as misguided as that might seem to him, she understood the events that had influenced them. I lived in a very different world from many — even many of my neighbours had not seen a night like I. Besides, my mother relied upon me and was not well.

This was the first public acknowledgement of my mother’s illness. Also, now in the public forum was conversation pertaining to my I.Q., which I had no reason to hope was high. However, it being relayed that it was made me seem like my dad, another monster of his own making.

“God almighty,” Autumn whispered, “another fucking genius in the family — how many is one family allowed?”

The judge told me I would have to clean our downriver community centre and help with the upkeep of the community rink, and that if I was brought up again I would be dealt with severely.

Because of my mother — because of how as she got to her feet she rested her hand on the shoulder of Autumn (who was now trying to look more and more like a woman) and how Autumn’s dress, for all of Autumn’s brilliance (and perhaps poignant because of such brilliance), hung lower on one side than the other — I hated myself when we went out into that
January glare, into the snow that never had any more regard for us than anyone else.

There was always snow that winter. I read magazine articles on space shuttles. I read magazine articles on Chevy trucks, Motorola homes, dreamed of getting myself a job. I found it hard to keep the family warm, though I did the best I could. And in the middle of January, still doing community service, I realized we no longer had money for oil. I trekked through the woods every afternoon, when the sky was grey or purple, and began to rob wood from the piles up the back road that had been yarded but not moved. This was still the four-foot wood. Not the eight-foot lengths — which it is today.

I would lug this contraband through the woods along the iced-over Arron Brook on our old bobsled and put it with my pile, hoping my mom would not catch on. Once that winter she said to me, “It seems like a miracle.”

“What does?”

“I have prayed often that we would not run out of wood, and every morning I look out the cord seems the same size. We burn wood — yet it doesn’t diminish.”

I was glad of my ability to keep her warm and guilty about the theft.

There was one thing I did not know. While I did my duty at the centre, Constable Morris, who always knew where I would be, came to visit my mother, pretending my delinquency was what he was there to address. He spoke in familiar terms with Autumn and brought Percy candy. On two occasions he brought my mother presents. It was another opportunity to make her feel that Dad was inadequate and had abandoned her. He spoke of cases where fathers left their children. Each time Morris heard of one of these cases he would bring it home to Mother.

Autumn would try her best to fend him off, but her brilliance was no match for his devotion. Her plan was to protect Mother from Morris and to spare me from knowing what was going on, sure I would get into more trouble if I did.

I stayed out after I flooded the community centre rink and drank. I drank because of the dirt in my hair and the cut of my clothes. I met Cheryl Voteur at the rink during this time. She too was doing community work because she had robbed Vachon cakes from the back of a truck to bring home to her brother and sister.

SEVENTEEN

I do not know who lived in a poorer house, Cheryl or I. But I suppose I would give the nod to her. For beyond anything else there was a scatological violence the likes of which were different from ours. About the house was a cluster of red and frozen alders, the windows were covered in heavy plastic, the house itself sank down toward the road, the road it hugged was unpaved and broken down. Inside the walls one could hear the rats nonchalantly gnawing after nine o’clock at night. A desperate tree clung by torn roots to the back field and above them ran a yellow white sky. Her younger brother, Darren, seemed sorrowful and strange, and I knew that he was himself being bullied. Besides, his loss of Autumn’s love, which he thought he once had, bothered him. I spoke to him about this, and he shrugged as if it was nothing. He kept to himself in a small attic room upstairs, listened to heavy rock music, grew his fingernails and hair long. He
passed us by with a brooding look; his room was filled with posters of the band Megadeth. I realized that out of those airwaves of information that always tell the poor who they should be, he had chosen strange examples.

Cheryl had had a baby when she was fourteen she called Moo Moo. She had the same dreams of any girl her age from California, New York, or Toronto — she dreamed of being a model, of being like Madonna or Cyndi Lauper. She had her ears and nose pierced and read novels like
Love’s Light Anew, The Weekend Romance, The Tall Dark Stranger, Love Island.
They filled the small crooked bookshelf in the living room of the dank drab house. She gave me some to take to Autumn, not knowing that Autumn was reading Malamud and Flannery O’Connor; nor I think knowing that books
could
be different than hers. Cynthia Pit was her mentor.