Mercy Among the Children (31 page)

I had descended to a place I did not believe in. A battle raged inside me, with grand marshals and winged regiments fighting over the contested ground of right and wrong. A
battle almost everyone partakes in, and almost no one any longer believes.

A few weeks after I entered this hell, politely trading on Cheryl Voteur’s warm legs and kisses, I was told by her (the only one I had confided in) that the Sheppards now knew I had stolen this chalice and were out to get me, and that she had put herself in danger by trying to stop them.

I felt I had to ask
their
forgiveness. That did me, carrying my seven-inch Bowie knife, a lot of good, didn’t it?

That is when I began to see the nature of my crime; no matter
who
the Sheppards were, no matter whom they had harmed, it was
who I was
that counted. I realized it was part of the hidden decree in our natures that my father spoke about. And worse, Cheryl saw this. I was no longer her hero. And she was susceptible to heroes. She needed them. Yet here she was doing all she could to protect me!

Just like Rudy’s sin against my mother, by this unthinking act of theft I had boxed myself into a corner. I had cursed my father’s lack of action — to find at the end I had no moral stamina to do what I swore must be done by him. The moral stamina came from
not
doing it. Jay Beard was an exception — and his road had no guarantee.

“Bring the chalice here and I will sneak into their house and set the fuckers up,” Cheryl said, sitting naked and facing me with her bum on my thighs. “You go tell Morris you saw them bring it to their house — when Morris comes I will have put the chalice somewhere it can be found! — and I’ll fill the fuckin’ thing with morphine and cocaine.” She kissed me.

“That would be appalling to do,” I said weakly.

“It would not at all be appalling to them,” she said angrily. “They would do it to
you
in a second.”

I saw the world as much more complex and internecine than I ever had before. I saw how comfortably the Sheppards
fit in a world I did not. They fit as easily as Mat Pit, because everything was potentially viable to them from the beginning. And Mat Pit? Well, Mat Pit fit as easily as Leopold McVicer.

TWENTY

By early March the accusations Gerald Dove had made against McVicer’s Works mounted. The incidences of allergy, cancer, and miscarriage among our community were eight times the provincial or national average.

There were weekly meetings at the one-room schoolhouse, and I went to them. The highway was dark, the stars out at seven. I walked across the new bridge and down the old Bowie Road to the school. It was well lighted, and you could see your breath even though it was crowded. People drank coffee in Tim Hortons cups. There were ice crystals inside the window, and everyone kept on their hats and gloves.

I saw Penny Porier for the first time since she had seen me in town. Did she know I still loved her? Did she know that at nights in summer when the breeze was gentle I made up stories to myself of how she would soon phone me, or come to see me? But I had lost my virginity to Cheryl Voteur. And Penny? She had watched as others ridiculed me.

She had left that past September for Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, but had been forced by illness to come home before Christmas; hence the visits to the doctors. She had always been sickly, I knew that.

She stood so close to me I could see her breath in the cool
schoolroom. She told a friend near her that she had undergone many tests in Halifax. She felt she was very ill, but she didn’t know why.

“You’re only eighteen,” I whispered hoarsely. “You’ll be all right — they’ll find out what it is! You have to be — you do.” There were tears in my tough eyes. I don’t know if she heard.

And then I got close enough to touch her — my fingers touched her coat as she passed by. I saw her turn and walk toward the front.

Mr. Porier had not wanted to blame her sickness on anything to do with McVicer. Her illness in his mind was only temporary, and a woman’s thing. Anything else would make false his entire life.

Now his own daughter had gone over to the enemy camp. He had tried to threaten her. One morning he had broken into the bathroom when she was sitting on the flush and had shaken his belt in her face. Griffin had to rush in and step between them. Porier, his eyes blazing, his short thick arms furiously moving at his sides, threw the belt at his son and kicked the yellow bathroom wall. And now McVicer phoned every half hour, wanting to find out if there was anything he could do.

Her father had begged her not to go to the meetings. He went to her room and, looking distraught, he tried to cajole and coax her into staying home.

“I don’t know what Leo’s going to think,” he kept saying.

Penny initially had few allies here. Certain people wanted to use her sickness against McVicer — and for them it would be good publicity if she died. I think Penny knew this; but she rode this wave as long as she could.

What McVicer feared came to pass. At the third meeting they put her on the stage with Dove and took a picture, his arm around her, protecting her from her own family. She told us about her symptoms. For years her period had not started,
her weight was always low; she was forever tired. And in the mill — behind her back yard — dozens of barrels of herbicide and pesticide were stored when she was a baby girl. Ike Pit had worked there and he had died, and a dozen others as well.

The next day McVicer went to her and said he would pay for her education if she would not be part of these meetings. He told her that Dove was out to crush both him and her father. McVicer took her hand, patted it, and insisted he make her tea. He brought it over to her, along with tinned cookies from his store, and asked if she would like to see a specialist in Toronto. He looked at her, his eyes filled with the power her father feared. He told her about his war experiences — how he had fought at Caen. How he had been pinned down by a German machine gunner outside Antwerp. How he had put three hundred men to work in the woods. All the while he held her hand.

She had swallowed hard (for she could hardly eat) and told McVicer she mustn’t take his kindness. “Oh,” she had said. “What education will I need now? What specialist should I go to? When was the last time you came here to serve me tea? How often have you phoned my dad in the middle of the night to do some errand? How smartly he jumped to your tunes, how trite was his life, to feel important by waiting for you to make your Christmas visit! We lived our lives in a frugal house, without books or knowledge or even much love.”

McVicer chuckled, and looked at her father with grave, penetrating eyes.

She climbed the stairs that night to go to bed and saw her father sitting in his room, everything in place, staring at the floor, while the clock ticked behind his broad, muscled back. The next day, he and her mother came into her room, with its pink bedspread and dried flowers in a green vase.

It was this visit to her room that hurt her more than anything
else they did. She remembered their vacation to Prince Edward Island when she was a girl of seven, and how they had to leave three days early because McVicer needed Abby home. They never got back to that little cottage where she had collected red mud and seashells. It was this memory that made her fight back with tears in her eyes. Griffin, sitting in his own room, listened to the argument and, not being able to stand it, lay down on his bed, and bent a pillow to cover his ears. It was her eighteenth birthday.

“It’s just a woman problem — girls have them — that’s all —” Porier said finally, in a loud but faltering voice. “Think a Mr. McVicer — now ain’t the time to desert him.”

Penny didn’t answer. She sat on the side of her bed, fumbling with her bedspread and staring at the floor.

“You know, your father’s been very good to you — think of that,” Betty said to her, holding her head high.

“Listen,” her father added, “yer mom says you always wanted to get away for a shopping trip — say we do that — just me and yer mom and you — how will that be? Wouldn’t that be fun — away on a shopping trip — down to Boston on a shopping trip?”

In offering her this, he offered her
all
he ever had. But she went to the meeting.

TWENTY-ONE

Gerald Dove was now forty. He was thin as a string, with large, haunted eyes and the white skin that complements red hair.

I knew Leo’s Machiavellian mind believed Dove was just
the man to prove these allegations against his mill false, even if he had to twist a fact or two. Gerald had come home hoping to be able to help his mentor in his time of need.

For a while the study went in Leo’s favour; they had cleaned up, they had taken the barrels away. But Gerald had left his mentor’s house ages ago, and had taken a small room in a motel. He had complained to the police that his phone had been bugged, and his room broken into, and that he was sure he was being followed.

A rumour surfaced that he had broken into his own motel room and destroyed his own files because they went in McVicer’s favour, and that he only came back to ruin McVicer because McVicer had broken up his relationship with Gladys. (I am sure McVicer spread these rumours himself.)

I went to the schoolhouse and saw the letters PCDD and TCDD with arrows and circles attending them, and molecules drawn on the old blackboard, framed like stop signs and yield signs. Gerald talked to us about the reaction of toxins on menstruating women, and herbicides and pesticides on the respiratory faculties of northern children.

I felt unusually sorry for us all. Men with heavy beards and the huge hands of pulpcutters, their hands cut and gouged by years of work, with grade seven education, now saw for the first time a world far beyond tractor grease in minus-thirty weather, a world far removed from taking the hide from deer in November.

Now Dove drew his molecules on the blackboard, his thin hands covered in chalk dust, the eraser emitting the clouds of chalk dust.

It made those tired, kindly, heavy-handed men aware that the world had gone beyond them into another century. And really, here, on this black night, we were straddling three centuries. Woodcutters sat with university students who listened
patiently to an explanation of toxic waste and the computer printout done at M.I.T.

So I smelled McVicer’s nineteenth-century blood on Gerald Dove’s thin twenty-first-century hands. I was sure McVicer would crumble. We all were sure.

The government quickly allied itself with the people, with the scientists, with Gerald Dove; and McVicer — whom it had championed for years — was alone. Many nights that winter, McVicer’s house was locked.

I wanted him condemned. I laughed in the cold air under the sparkling stars with all my heart. Yet I still admired him. I don’t know who else did. Maybe no one else, maybe everyone.

I was attracted to McVicer, to his solitude; an old man at the end of his life facing what his life had been without help, without explanation, and better yet, without apology. He slept with a shotgun beside his bed.

I waited and I watched, and I went to the meetings nodding my head at what others said. McVicer claimed he was now a scapegoat for a frightened uncaring government. He had not used these chemical scythes any more than anyone else, and he declared that he had protested his innocence in front of a governmental watchdog committee years before — about the time of the robbery. He was prepared to make some restitution if the government would issue a statement clarifying certain relevant points. The government was silent.

His daughter, Gladys, watched the snow fall over the ground, over the bitter tar black wharf and under the distant highway lights, believing in her father’s goodness and her own worthlessness. Every day Leo blamed her. Every day he told her Gerald Dove had come home just to cause them pain because of her. She took an overdose of muscle relaxants and tried to sleep. Rudy found her and got her to the hospital; Leo tried to keep it quiet. It was here Rudy realized his
wife had always loved someone else. And some part of him was heartbroken.

In the next few weeks those on Dove’s side made Penny Porier believe that all of this was being done exclusively for her. They took her away from her father, moved her into her own apartment in town, with a nurse. Her life in the northern part of the province, once so insignificant, now shone with tragedy, and she was interviewed and photographed and spoken about on national T.V.

I smelled McVicer’s blood and waited, I suppose with the unconscionable human glee felt at others’ disaster. No one spoke to McVicer coming and going from church after Penny Porier’s interview, even though he released a statement about the money he was giving for the new stained-glass project there.

For years the provincial government had funded Gerald Dove, and paid for the lawyers who represented the five families who had launched the lawsuit. Doing this amounted to coercion. The government was determined to get to the bottom of this case, and to be on the right side of the litigation. Yet the government also didn’t wish to be investigated.

On March 19, Leo McVicer called a press conference. He said that not only had he used these herbicides but the government had reimbursed him throughout the sixties to the tune of thousands of dollars and had encouraged McVicer’s Works and other mills, in letters and phone calls, to use these dangerous sprays. And why? Well, McVicer said, they had obligations to chemical companies in the States who supplied the herbicides and pesticides. And why? Well, said McVicer, so they could find buyers for the province’s wood products, in competition with British Columbia and the northern states. And did the
premier, who spoke increasingly about his awareness of the sacredness of our environment and the legacy left to us by the First Nations, know this? Why, of course, said McVicer. Can this be proven? Most definitely, said McVicer. He had the government’s letters about subsidization to prove it. Where were they?

“Ah,” said Mr. Leopold McVicer, shaking his head sadly. “They are locked away in my safe.”