Mercy Among the Children (47 page)

Mathew turned the shotgun toward Leo.

He hesitated. In that second the world seemed to stop for all of them. In that second there might have still been time to put everything back in its place.

As Mathew turned the gun, Rudy held his arms up over his face and jumped as if jumping into a pool of cold water, coming down between Mathew and Leo. Mathew saw this at the very instant he pulled the trigger. He had intended to fire over Leo’s head, to make him stop. Rudy’s smile was pleading and hopeful when he jumped, just as it had been most of his life.

No one heard the shot until Rudy fell backwards. Another shelf of dolls crashed down, and Rudy could see his own hands falling, and it was as if he was holding little Teresa May who was hugging him, and she was smiling as he picked her up one summer day when he was wearing Bermuda shorts. But that was all; there was someone else in the room, talking to him now, telling him to come away quickly, to hurry, for they had to go; and he was dead before he hit the ground, the plans for his marina sticking out of his jacket pocket, his eyes wide open.

Mathew grabbed Cynthia by the hair and dragged her toward the car.

“You fuckin’ fuckin’ fuckin’ cunt, you’ll open the safe,” he said as he passed the paper bag on the kitchen table. “Think the likes of you could fuckin’ trick me!”

In the afternoon twilight, he hauled the safe into the back seat, pushed his sister into the front seat, and drove through the heavy snow, veering right and left in a trance of his own making.

Cynthia’s face was spotted with Rudy’s blood, which ran from her eyes like tears. She was dressed much like the man who had told Percy that he would someday have to go away.

TWELVE

Percy was waiting for me to come home. He had set the clock before him on the kitchen table, and had made himself a glass of Quik and a peanut butter sandwich — half for him and half for Scupper.

I did not come home, just as I had not come home many days. Just as I had not taken him to the circus. Finally he went to the phone and dialled Jay Beard’s number. He waited. There was no sound, but he did not know why. He went and sat beside Scupper again.

“Scupper Pit,” he said, biting into his peanut butter sandwich, “what do cows do on Saturday night?”

He waited.

“They go to the MOOO-vies!” He laughed. “That’s a joke Mommie told me — when I was little.”

He looked inquisitively at his sandwich and took one more bite. Then he put it down on the plate carefully, and looked
about the room. Everything he had ever known was here, waiting within forty yards of his house. The birds he fed, the daisy chain he had made for his mom one summer day.

He sighed, and clasped his hands together and waited as the clock ticked. Then he stood and went quietly to the telephone again and dialled Jay Beard’s number. And he waited. There was no sound at all. He did not understand that the phone lines were down. He went back and sat on the chair. Again he listened to the clock ticking.

“Scupper — I’m sorry,” he said finally. The dog was, at fifteen years, unable to walk, and over the last week was unable to eat. It could not go outside to urinate, and Percy cleaned its fur of pee every day. Percy believed that the vet would make it all better again.

He looked out the window. The sandwich sat on his plate, and his Quik was half-finished. He put on his boots and coat. He did this, and sat in the seat again waiting for me.

“When Lyle comes back, Scupper,” he said, and the wind blew, and far above him the clouds moved. But then, as if something finally prevented him, and went out of his spirit, he stopped saying I would be home. I had never been home for him in a long time.

He put Scupper in his old security blanket and picked him up.

He should not have had to carry the dog. Nor did he know he was putting the dog in more distress. He opened the door, stepped into the blinding snow, and tried to make it to the road five hundred yards away. He fell three times and the dog fell with him. Each time Percy struggled to catch his breath in the gale-force wind.

Each time he fell he would pick the dog up again, and cross from one side of our lane to the other, staggering and seeing places where I used to help him collect his bugs; the thing he remembered about me, I guess.

He talked to the dog and told him things he told no one else. They would all be happy and go for a picnic. And Lyle had a funny story, and Autumn showed him how to dance, when we all got in our sock feet to wax the floor; and his mommie showed him how to make muffins one afternoon. He stopped in the middle of the lane, snow falling on his orange hat, and thought of Elly, and how she smoothed her hands on her dress the day he made her the daisy chain — the only thing he remembered of her now. He looked behind him, as if he might see her sitting on the porch, smoothing the dress with her hands and saying, “Oh, Percy darling, how are you?”

But there was no one there anymore. And she would not be there ever again. And suddenly for the very first time he was aware of it.

He was not even sure if he was on the lane, for the drifts were so high and the snow so blinding. He did not know where the road was, because of the storm. It was almost impossible for him to breathe. But he kept struggling with the dog. Everything was white and the trees were blotted out and shrouded in twilight Our mailbox too was covered now — his last indicator of where the lane stopped and Highway 11 began was under snow.

He kept walking to the trailer, where Jay Beard often gave him cookies and played the guitar.

“Scupper,” he said, turning his face away from the wind, “I hope Lyle doesn’t know that my heart is broken.”

He stumbled again slightly, the snow past his thighs. He sat down, not knowing he was in the middle of the highway.

“I am tired, Scupper Pit,” he whispered.

Looking up he saw too late the car lights and the man who once told him he would have to go away.

Jay Beard saw it all from his trailer and ran outside in his bare feet. Autumn ran from the corner of the bridge, and someone shouted for Jay to get an ambulance.

Scupper was still lying across his master, and licking Percy’s face. I have heard that Percy’s nose was bloody, his blond hair wisped in the wind. I have heard his eyes were open and filled with tears.

I once told God I did not want that child to live. So just to prove to me what life was really worth, and what I in fury had cursed, God allowed me him six years.

Mathew did not stop. Cynthia tried to pull the car over but couldn’t. Mathew looked once in the rearview mirror and kept going.

“This is my chance,” Mathew said, sniffing. And he hit her.

“Shut up,” he yelled. “Shut up or I’ll send you straight to hell — I’ll send you straight to hell!”

Even though she did not say a thing he kept yelling shut up and hitting her for a long time.

She lay against the front door, with her feet tucked under her to make herself as small as possible, as the wipers clacked against the frozen window. For fifteen minutes she said nothing as he beat her.

Finally, in the middle of town, right near an old cement wall, in front of one of our three-storey 1920 wooden houses, she opened the door and jumped, and rolled, and the Cadillac kept going.

She stood. Her back was bare and the wind lashed it. Her breasts and ribs and face were bruised. Little had she thought last night, or any night previous, that it would all somehow end here at the civic centre. She could not get the little boy’s face out of her mind, and she staggered forward in a daze.

It was already after three. The door opened and she was swept in by others. Her fingers were red raw, her hands bent like claws. She was dressed like a man.

The place was filled. Waiting most of the day were nine thousand people. She was just one more as puny and insignificant as anyone else. The money had been left behind on the kitchen table, the legitimate will had fallen from her clothes when she was changing and lay in the upstairs room of that faraway house to tell the world that I and Autumn and Percy were the beneficiaries of three-quarters of Leo’s estate.

She stood looking at the makeshift altar, with a few candles fluttering and people lining up at confessionals with beads in their hands — people in wheelchairs, on crutches, people with cameras, journalists who had come as critics, boys of nineteen scoffing and drinking at the back, babies crying, and thousands of men and women dressed in their best winter clothes all craning their necks.

Then there was a sound from an anteroom behind her, and an RCMP officer tried to move her out of the way. She looked and saw Constable Morris, given these civic duties now more and more. She nodded and tried to step aside, and stepped instead into the path of Vicka, the child visionary from Medjugorje.

Cynthia looked at this young woman and went numb. It was a rather blunt and rural face, not unpretty but far from sophisticated; she was dressed extremely plainly, and wore no makeup. Still, never had Cynthia seen such a face — it was filled with joy.

Vicka was just a foot from her and passing her by, seeming not to notice her at all. In her presence Cynthia could not control her emotions, and began to shake, and she lowered her head.

Suddenly Vicka stopped dead, turned to her, smiled, touched her shoulder softly, and whispered something in Yugoslavian, making the sign of the cross on Cynthia’s forehead. When Cynthia looked up, the young woman had passed on, forever.
Yet the message Cynthia Pit always maintained she felt through to her soul was this:

Holy Mother has asked you, her daughter, here today, and now wishes you to change your life.

Yet how could the Holy Mother (if there even was) know that a tough independent woman such as she was would come here today, Cynthia thought? And how could she know, being dressed as a man, Cynthia was her
daughter
?

THIRTEEN

I did not go to Percy’s funeral. No one could find me. He was waked in our living room for a few days and was buried near the house. It was where Autumn wanted him to be, since he had spent all his time there, near what was called his lumpy ground, where we played marbles. I felt I was unworthy to attend. I did not go to my father’s funeral either — that spring he was found by Jon Driver, who brought the body out, and he was interred beside Mom. I was away, looking for Mathew Pit.

After a while I came home. It was a long and dry spring, the brook was low, and the bay was calm and serene. There were dried-out grasses and condoms in the field above. Autumn’s play won first runner-up at the provincial drama festival. People were in swimming by June.

I walked down to the beach often. Poor sad Rudy Bellanger was dead and Mathew had disappeared. The Bellanger place was empty and was up for sale — and I would walk about it now and then, watching brown leaves drift over the patio. I
could have easily bought it if I wanted. In fact, Gladys told Autumn and me we could have it without paying a cent. But we didn’t want it.

Cynthia spent time in jail, but not much, a few months, and came back home to be with her mother and take care of her.

Leo lived another four years. He never got better, but he did not get any worse. He learned to play backgammon and would have men come in for a game all hours. He was present at Gladys and Gerald Dove’s wedding, and lived with them later.

After a time Dove began to teach at the high school, and Gladys’s health improved enough so she could walk with a cane. MS is a disease that can go into remission, and hers did.

Dove re-established McVicer’s Works on our river and in our province to the tune of some millions. Some of those millions now belong to me.

I sometimes long for Penny Porier. At night I speak to her and make plans. Once I visited her grave and sat down and cried. But as Camus has informed us, I was only crying over something that no longer exists — is putrid and dead.

One day when I woke, Autumn was gone. It was not that she could not forgive me. I could not forgive myself. So she had to go. I didn’t even know where.

I was sitting upstairs in the bedroom, the room I had shared with Percy. It was Easter Sunday. Percy’s bow tie and shoes were still near his bed, as was the church bulletin we had received about his First Communion that he had kept on his mantel.

“Autumn,” I said.

But she had left for somewhere I was not wanted.

I had all the money I ever wanted, I suppose hundreds of thousands of dollars, and could go anywhere I chose. So I chose to look for Mathew. That was as good a life as any. To prepare
myself for this, I called him every name under the sun that I had learned growing up where I had, whatever name I had come across in the lexicon of pain and fury. But there were never enough names.

I packed Percy’s clothes into a box, and found the five dollars Mom had left him. I left it with his clothes. I also found some dog biscuits in the pockets of a pair of his pants. Deep in the pocket of his suit jacket I found a picture of Mom sitting on the veranda. I left it where it was. I had not known greatness at all, had I?

I closed up the house, left the tiny little home and the obscure New Brunswick river. I found myself in Halifax. Walking along one night, to my great comfort I saw him. He stared at me, and ran, and I ran, chased him into an alley, and he jumped me. I broke my hand punching the top of his head, and he flattened my nose — but he was gone. I followed him to Toronto.

Here no one knew what destruction I had caused. If I thought people were getting close to me, I would leave instantly. In that way I’m sure I was like Mathew Pit. We had both been created out of the same soil of the damned, the same wide empire of the poor. I slept on the streets just like he must have, haunted by voices as much as he was. Not because I could not afford a room — there was a trust account opened for me — but because I deserved no better.

“You’re nothing but a gutless fuckin’ punk,” one of the officers said to me one night after I was picked up drunk. “I’d love to get you out on the street — how about I take off my uniform and we go outside.”

“How about we do that right now?” I said. I took my sweater off, and he stared at the scars on my body and my arms, and said nothing more about our contest.