Mercy Among the Children (38 page)

“Lyle is brave,” Percy said.

I waited, holding my breath, my hand still over my face looking at the stars. I wanted my mother to say, “Yes, he is very brave.” I wanted her to acknowledge my bravery, because I had put my hand through a window, hit a big fisherman, and carried a knife. No one fucked with me. Even as far down as Tracadie they had heard of me by now, and when I looked into the mirror I saw the cold self-mesmerizing eyes of youthful disillusioned
pain; the kind of eyes I had sought since seeing those eyes in Mathew Pit when I was ten years of age.

But my mother said something, and I did not catch what it was, which disappointed me. Perhaps she did say I was brave. That was all I wanted.

My mother told Percy his tea was delicious, and that she had at one picnic served eight hundred cups of tea. Again there was silence. The light went out in the house. The wind in the trees blew. Percy said softly:

“Mom — I am making a wish that you won’t go away.”

The evening was still sweet, even with the harsh aftertaste of wine.

EIGHT

The next morning Jay Beard asked to see me, so I went to his house. He came outside and sat on an old drum, looking at me with his craggy face covered in grey beard. He asked me what had happened at the dance.

“I’ll backhand any son of a bitch who comes near me.”

“Our river has enough bastards like that — but only a few brave men,” Jay said quietly. “And you hanging around with Mathew will do you no good — or do you remember?”

This comment scalded me, and my regard for Mr. Beard allowed its truth to wound, while my respect for him disallowed any reprisal. I remember how he stood outside with a service revolver in midwinter protecting us. I owed him much, and he never asked for anything in return. Strangely
I had thought I had become more like him, but he was here to tell me I had not.

The next Friday I was busy cutting some support staffs for our old back shed while Percy sat on a stump watching me. The day had a stiff wind across the bay, and from far away I could smell salt off the water. When I looked again Percy was gone.

After searching the house I went into the woods and crossed Arron Brook and went up the long crooked road toward the hill — the one where I could see both mine and Pit’s property. I saw Percy far away, near the highway. Then he crossed the road, in cautious steps, and ran to Jay Beard’s trailer. I walked back through the broken windfalls and made it to Arron Brook. Then I crossed onto Russell Road and walked into Beard’s yard. It was now late Friday afternoon and there was a smell of fish somewhere along the old highway; the pointless fast that lingered in the spots of blue autumn heaven.

Inside Jay Beard’s trailer was my small brother, listening as Jay played his guitar. Percy had his hands folded on his lap, his feet in red rubber boots still almost six inches from the kitchen floor, and his bow tie as always crooked. Suddenly he looked up at me through the window, and smiled a delightful smile in the late-afternoon sun. Then he went back to watching Mr. Beard’s fingers, with Scupper waiting patiently at his feet.

On those days when I had thought he was going up the lane to wait for me he was actually going to hear the old country and western music of Mr. Beard. And I realized what the word
Getir
on the envelope was. Percy was saving for a guitar.

I turned and went home. I was sad, and a little envious, and I did not know why. Mathew met me at our front door. He had been waiting for me.

“Can you come?” he asked.

“Where?”

“I have somewhere to go.”

“How long?”

“Just an hour or so.”

I went inside and told Mom I had to go. She was lying with her eyes half-opened staring at the ceiling while Autumn was making her soup.

“Where are you going, love?” she said.

“Oh — I have things to do — people to see.”

“I’ve been thinking of my life in the orphanage,” my mother said, “all day — all those sad little children that I knew. It is very strange.”

I never knew that her words, her movements, and her smile would haunt my every moment the rest of my life.

We travelled that day for fifteen miles, and then along a broken, winding road toward the bay. The trees’ leaves were tinged and frostbitten, the sun lingered on the dash, and there was a scent of fall on the car seat.

We were going to an old lot, down an overgrown road against the bald autumn shoreline, that once belonged to Leo McVicer. I saw a moose trail thrashed toward the dark spruce on the far side. In the air was a hawk circling like a bitter omen of winter. I saw ten or twelve tombstones, overgrown, twisted and mossy.

My heart stopped.

“These are others McVicer never spoke of — these are men who died working for him. Most of them was bachelors, lived alone — and had no one but each other. Here now,” Mat said, walking along the old moose trail, “is ninety to a hundred barrels I buried — he was still using it up until ten year ago. This is what he didn’t want Dove to know.” He looked about at the gravestones. “These men worked with him in the forties and fifties after the war — this was their graveyard — but the community about here faded away. A few of them were married with kids and stuff — though the majority weren’t. They all died of
poison. This is my grandfather — and my father, Kyle Ike Pit — and here, Lyle, is your grandfather — Roy Henderson. Your mother is dying because of what these guys sprayed —”

We were very close to the bay. Chokecherry bushes lined the old fallen graveyard. The sound of a bird twittering and trailing the last of its stay here came to me through a cloud of cold.

“I helped me old man bury a ton of barrels. I know the government is happy to blame McVicer if they can or side with him if they have to. It is time to get him back!” Mathew said, and then with a soft hand on my shoulder he said, “Think of what he did to your father.”

I took a drink and looked out past the trampled field to an old horse standing in thigh-high grass, to a cloth of some kind wrapped about a clothesline in a faroff yard of a bleak yellow house.

Mathew’s eyes were steely blue now, his voice soothing.

“That’s all been said and done,” I answered, “said and done.”

“But what if we find the letters as well? That would prove it — isn’t that what we should do? There’s probably money in it too — lots of it. But think of the government letters — it’ll prove what I know — and if I do, everyone — the premier, his lawyers from Chatham, all of them — will pay.”

“How do you know he has a safe?”

“Of course he has a safe — of course he has a safe. We have to get the money before the natives,” Mathew said. “That’s the next ones to go after it —”

“We will sue,” I said, shivering. “Sue him again.”

Mathew’s face was calm, and filled with the light from the weak sun. Afternoon was drawing on its shadows, and some boat trailers rested along the roadside to the bay, ready for hauled-up speedboats. He spoke softly, almost without interest.

“Suing will keep us in court,” he continued. “I don’t know how much time your mother has — I know Teresa May has a
year or less — if we got bogged down in court — I know that’s more legal — but I tried it that way.”

I realized at this moment that all my life and what I had done and my poverty and my reaction to it, and my solitude in school, and my love of Christmas until it came, and my yearning madness for Penny Porier, and the dreary spotted tablecloth in our kitchen or the perpetual sadness of our lane with Percy and his wagon, or my mother’s smile when she was being bullied, or the circuses we could not go to or the foster parents where we sat, nay the very cough of my mother and the suffering of my father for unanswering Christ had caused this moment. I could say yes or no. I said nothing.

I realized that the money had mesmerized Mathew. He knew he would be in jail soon for Trenton’s death, and he had to either face up to his crime or boldly assert himself and rob a safe and escape. And I liked him well enough then to help him. Well, he had helped me with the chalice. I owed him something.

I wondered just fleetingly if Mathew was even thinking of sharing the money with me. Then I smiled. I wanted revenge as much as he wanted money. I needed it to fulfill my basic thesis against the false doctrine of my father. Except I might say, where had my thesis taken me? Exactly where my dad said it would.

I stared at Roy Henderson’s little stone with the date already invisible and stained.

I had become exactly as those who had hated us. And it had happened without my even trying. Mathew drove me back home. We didn’t speak. I thought of nothing as I walked down the lane.

I had wanted nothing to do with this robbery, until I found Percy sitting by himself in the small kitchen in the dark. He told me Mommie was in the hospital. Percy had been waiting on his small kitchen chair for three hours in silence.

I had to dress the child. I found a white shirt faded almost to yellow, and a pair of dark dress pants, and an old pair of
shoes that I shined. I washed and changed and we started up the road.

All along our lane Percy was looking and waiting for Autumn, but she was not here. Then he picked some leaves, to make into some kind of a bouquet for Mom. Then, as if distracted, he said:

“I went to the church and prayed so Mom would be better for her birthday.”

“It’s not your fault, Percy,” I said, my voice breaking just a little.

“Lyle — it is not your fault either,” he whispered.

NINE

We reached the hospital after nine o’clock. My mother was on the second floor, in a room with two other women. Her hair, I saw now, was almost grey at thirty-nine years of age. Her face was sunken. Percy gave her the bouquet of birch and maple leaves. She kissed him gently and then asked for Autumn.

“She wasn’t home,” I said, “but I will find her — and she can visit you tomorrow.”

She said nothing.

“I will phone Dad,” I said.

“Oh no,” she said, waving her hand weakly, “don’t bother him — wait until he comes back — then Percy and I and Dad are going to Reversing Falls.”

She began to fuss with the yellow collar of Percy’s white shirt, and patted his chest. Then she straightened his bow tie.

Percy grinned at me as if this proposed trip was unquestionably true. I walked out into the corridor. The nurses were going from room to room on a night check of patients. I asked one what had happened to my mother. She told me to wait a moment and disappeared.

I sat in the corridor for twenty minutes or more. Then just as I was about to look for the nurse I saw Constable Morris coming toward me with another police officer. Dr. Savard was with them also. The doctor told me that my mother was suffering an internal injury, and asked point-blank if she had been struck.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Well, she has been bleeding very badly — we are trying now to stop it,” Savard said.

Constable Morris introduced me to Constable John Delano.

Delano had insisted he come to see me about the investigation.

“What investigation?” I asked.

He asked me into the waiting room, and we sat down.

Morris stood at the door. I knew Morris had needed my father to be guilty to save his career. His superiors had finally sensed this, and because of McVicer’s importance, had quietly asked for someone else to look into what had happened. And now everything pointed to other people. And Delano knew who they were but as yet could not find Connie Devlin to corroborate it.

“You believe my father did none of it?” I asked Delano.

“I believe there was a crime committed on the bridge,” Delano said, “but I’m positive your father didn’t do it. I believe it was done to set up your father — I believe the money was robbed from McVicer but not by your mother —”

Delano said he had met with my father twice.

“When?” I asked.

“At the camp,” he said. “Do you want me to contact him about your mom?”

“No — not now, please.” My voice sounded too eager suddenly.

“The trouble with suing,” Delano said, quite off the cuff, “is that it takes so long — it may make people wary — and then they lose the lawsuit and get nothing — like the five families a few years ago — they end up with a few hundred dollars. Your father wanted nothing to do with that. He stood alone — always. His life was not a convenience for himself, was it. You have Percy to think of.”

Delano got up, shook my hand, wished me luck. Clearly he was warning me not to do what I was planning to do. But how had he known?

I found Percy sitting by his sleeping mother and we went out. The streets were quiet, and the world still. Moths gathered under the streetlights in town and fell to the raining pools, bathing their powder in water. Percy picked one up, dried it with a touch, and released it into the night.

“There are millions of moths, Percy,” I said scornfully as I watched it flutter in its zigzagged bafflement a few feet away.

“It doesn’t know that, Lyle,” Percy said, taking my hand to cross the highway.

I carried my little brother down the long road to home as he hugged my neck. With his head resting on my shoulder, I whispered: “I love you, Percy — I love you and Mommie and Autumn, and I love Daddy too.”

He had fallen asleep and did not hear.

I went that night and sat by our river. The water of our great river makes us disappear — we become at twilight in the babble of water a symphony of ghosts. As spots on the river darken, and the shadows are gorged by night, we remember the ghosts of children, of ourselves as boys and girls at six and seven far up on the Bartibog or Arron Brook, turning to smile when a trout is hooked. Of our mother in a light-hearted moment fifteen years before. The moment passes, the water continues
on, the boys and girls leave the trout stream for the uncertain stream of life, and become as I was now, sitting beside it.

But somewhere in a magical twinkling as you walk in the faraway future, you remember those children around a small blowdown in the middle of a faraway time and are filled with sweet sadness. I wanted to go back there, to that time; the time when I believed my father was a hero and took his offered hand.