Mercy Among the Children (11 page)

“A molecule,” McVicer said now, looking at the most recent article in the paper against his company and tossing it aside.

It was a molecule, unseen in the winter cold and summer heat, unseen when children went sliding on the great dark hills, unseen when my mother poured bulldog lime, unseen on the forest floor near the great barren pools. Some people never felt the effects, but others — well, others’ immune systems were destroyed. And others were born with feeble hearts or lungs, and some with no pigment to their skin.

“How can I fight them?” Leo asked, for the first time in his life uncertain. “How can I fight Gerald Dove if I care for him — or Elly if I care for her?”

“I don’t know,” Rudy said, close to tears.

“I know nothing about molecules,” McVicer continued. “I remember when I was a young boy hearing that there was such things as molecules, and I tried to collect the smallest piece of sand I could to find one.” He shook his head. “But I never did.”

“I know,” Rudy said.

“And now Elly — stole my five hundred dollars,” Leo said.

Rudy asked if he could leave.

Leo McVicer stood, lit his pipe, and felt in his pocket Elly’s dress tag, which he had found on the floor, as he watched Rudy drive away.

ELEVEN

At eight-twenty on the morning of December 8 my mother, sending Autumn and me off to school, had come face to face with the cheapness of a sexual misdeed, and could tell no one about it.

She went for a walk. She realized she was two months’ pregnant, and so often her pregnancies had failed. (There were twins stillborn after Autumn, and a miscarriage.) The sunlight blinded her eyes, the autumn sky was blue, and the snowdrifts from the night before had turned into small glaring and crusted waves in the field beyond. On the river the ice was blue, and she remembered how she had walked on the ice last year with Sydney, when he went to set his smelt nets, and how glimmers of light had spiralled down like the fingertips of stars deep into
the world beneath their feet. Bubbles of air lay trapped under that ice, on each side of those brilliant shafts of sunlight. And Sydney told her that the day, and those bubbles of air and those wonderful fingers of starlight, were there just for her. The wind, just as today, blew recklessly over it. Over time, she remembered, clouds had formed in the sky, and the sun became dimmer. Beyond them lay Northumberland Strait as it flooded toward the North Atlantic, beyond Prince Edward Island.

She thought of this and was suddenly happy with her lot. For as Sydney told her, no one owned the ice, or the sunlight spiralling down into it, or any other sunlight, nor crisp autumn days, and no one had authority over her enjoyment of the world. That was given to her by something —
someone
else. He told her that when he was a boy he had become convinced that nothing man did or said mattered
until
this was understood.

Elly walked away from our small dilapidated house and toward the church lane a few miles away.

She stood with her back against the wind, or sometimes walked with her face into it, until finally, with her feet numb, she accepted a drive from Hanny Brown to the turn off of Saint Paul’s. Hanny had been like an older brother to her when she lived with his father and mother, and he looked at her the same way now. Often when he had a chance he would slip five dollars into her pocket, and every fall he came to our house with dresses for Autumn Lynn.

Elly walked the lane to Saint Paul’s. The trees waved, got smaller and more crooked, the closer she came to the bay, and the wind turned more bitter against her face. She went into the church, which always to me smelled of heavy oak and the forgiveness of sins. She blessed herself and kneeled, and looked at the porcelain Christ, with his sides bloodied just as they always were, and remembered how she had cut herself when she had fallen over the vacuum cord. It was awful for
Mr. McVicer to think this untruth about her. And what if he told the police — or what if Diedre found out? Diedre, whom she had once hugged and sent messages to they called “butterfly kisses”? How she had loved that little girl with the blonde hair and small mouth with its self-delighted smile.

What had changed between them was simply a lived life. She now prayed for her
siblings
wherever they may be. She thought that if she ever found them — and here she would daydream — they would cherish each other and Elly would no longer have to be frightened that her children were going to be taken away (which is what Diedre told her might happen).

She sat in the pew. Had fourteen years gone since her marriage? She and Sydney, once filled with hope, still clung to nothing. And yet had they both loved me, and little Autumn Lynn, for that long? And had she not taken her luck for granted? That Autumn was an albino — did that matter so much? She was still a wise and beautiful child.

Then she remembered how Sydney had corrected Dr. David Scone, at Mr. McVicer’s house — a few months before the robbery.

Scone had looked at the birds in the trees flying about the property on a windy summer afternoon, and had quoted a line from a poem he attributed to Byron, and Sydney said:

“I’m sorry, but I think it is one of Keats’s sonnets.”

The professor eagerly maintained that he could tell the difference between Byron and Keats and laughed. Sydney nodded and said not a word more. But Elly knew the professor had quoted this line to impress her and had been furious to be shown up by a simpleton.

Yet for Sydney none of this mattered. Mom had asked him later that night where the line was from. He told her to go to his
Poems of Keats
, to look at page 111, and at line seven — and there, exactly there, was the line.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” she said.

“Oh, because he seemed so certain,” Sydney answered, “and I hurt his feelings — I don’t want to do that. Besides, he has done nothing in his life he is proud of — he doesn’t want to be stuck at Saint Michael’s University — he’s tried for years to escape from here — and most of all he believes he knows more than I do.”

Elly left the church and walked up the side road, and met my father. She told him that she was sad, and was worried about their trip — not for her, but for the children.

“We have never been on a trip,” she said. “We have allowed our children to miss so much.”

“I promise to do better. I will plan the trip for next summer — I promise,” he answered.

She smiled valiantly and said nothing. She stared past him, her eyes dry.

“What is it?” he asked.

She told him that she was pregnant again and was worried about a miscarriage, and about their situation.

“We will make do with that too,” he said.

Then she told him what Diedre Whyne had advised her a week ago.

“She suggested that I have a procedure and then I would be free of it, and think of my own self.”

“Ah — yes,” he said. “Many people do that now — abortion.”

“Abortion,” my mother said, and she burst out laughing, for honest to God I don’t think she had heard that word before in her life.

Long after my mother was asleep that night my father remained awake. He paced and he thought, and the night was wild, and he was alone. I could see his light on in the room as I tried
to work on my homework. I was hoping to sneak Dad’s old rifle out the next day and hunt, and I had torn out an advertisement for a knife, and I kept this under my pillow or in my back pocket.

Of course because of my mother (or I blamed it on her) we said the rosary every night. Tonight we had prayed that she wouldn’t get sick with this pregnancy, and that no harm would come to Autumn Lynn. We prayed for my father, that he keep his job, and that Leo’s money be found.

I lay in my bed under the slanted walls of my small room, which was built at the back corner of our shoebox, and listened to my father and imagined what he was thinking.

Like most men who have had little happiness, my father had expected this newfound happiness, the one he had taken in his job, not to last. And he was right. It was an awful situation for him and Mom. Three nights before, every one of our dreams seemed possible.

He felt he should resign right away. But he could not. Then he decided that if he proved himself at work — worked as hard as he could, worked until he puked — McVicer might finally see that he had erred.

Still he felt that the love he had for my mother, and the love she bore him and the children, was always under assault. So he was alone with his thoughts because I was not old enough to understand them or to help alleviate them.

He had never told my mother but he had heard all about Polly’s Restaurant; that men had teased him about her just as boys teased Autumn and me at school. Even Cynthia had come to him last summer, the day after he had corrected Professor Scone, and asked him to a dance at the new community centre. I was with him and I remember what she said. He told her he could not go, and she winked.

“Oh, when are you going to smarten up and get out and have
fun? I bet Elly does.” She sighed. “Down at Polly’s Restaurant each and every day with Rudy Bellanger — I wonder what they get up to in his car along those lonely roads?”

My father had given me a wretched, courageous look and said nothing.

“Why, God, do you allow this to happen?” he now said. I heard him faintly speak this line from my bed. It never bothered me. For I knew my father and I knew he spoke like this. But if he ever got an answer from God or anyone else, he did not say so to me. When I talked to God I did not ask why things happened — I accused him of what was happening — that was the essential difference between father and me.

He looked at my mother sleeping as the wind howled. Her small arms were outside the blankets. Her face was pensive, and now and then she tossed. Thinking he would wake her, he stopped pacing and he sat down.

He and Elly had passed each other many times in the summer, in those fields when he was a child baling hay for her adopted father and she picking strawberries. They had even stood beside one another in church, and had not known it.

That is, he had not met her until it was ordained. This is what he knew in his soul and this is what he told me many times.

To have another child now might be unwise. It would not be difficult to stop it; there were those around who would do it, and offer a benevolent service, especially to a child
like us.
I mean that’s part of it although they would never say so. My mother and father’s dreams were always dispensable to certain people, who for some reason believed that they themselves and their own dreams were indispensable.

Yet a different moral problem had confounded my father for the past week. It was something no one else who worked on the bridge would have troubled themselves with, yet to my father it was the only thing a man of conscience
should
worry about.

Connie Devlin had been fired for incompetence. He was accused of being drunk on the job. He had come to Sydney seven days before begging him to intercede with the boss. He said that being fired meant it would be difficult to get his unemployment and it was near Christmas.

Because Sydney was trusted, some men asked him to arbitrate on their behalf. Devlin coming to him was not unusual. They relied on him, and they teased him. All mocking is a form of fear. Those who are most mocked are generally most feared. My father was mocked all of his life.

He thought about what he should do. The next day, he went to the office and pleaded Connie Devlin’s case.

Porier was a man who lived by McVicer’s rules. He had built his house on McVicer property, shopped at McVicer’s store, took a loan out for a car with McVicer’s blessing. Porier was not at all a big man — but he had a bull-like neck and thick arms — and his two children, Griffin the boy and Penny, were looked upon by him and his arrogant wife as being far superior to other children.

Connie Devlin as night watchman carried a time clock that had to be punched at intervals of one half hour. During the night previous to his being fired the clock was missing seven punches. Thus three and one half hours had gone by when Connie wasn’t cognitive enough to punch the clock.

Sydney argued that Connie should be given the benefit of the doubt and Leo not finding out would be the best course.

“Perhaps it’s like he says — the clock is broken,” Sydney said.

Porier did not want Leo to know how good a worker my father actually was. He was jealous of him. He was worried that Sydney might use this firing as leverage; and he was very worried about Sydney’s capabilities with the men themselves. “The men don’t appreciate what you do for them,” Porier said.

Sydney said that it did not matter what the men thought.

“I hate gullible people — they are a burden to everyone,” Porier said. He sniffed and hauled out a map of the river, for no other reason except to prove to Sydney how busy he was. On the desk was a picture of his children, and one of Gladys Bellanger holding Penny in her arms. She was Penny’s godmother.

It was cold outside, and cement mixed with mud covered the whole acre where the trucks were parked, and the sky was like a blue stone. The yard was grey and barren. Small trees bent over the cliffs along the water, the same stifled colour as the muddied concrete.

The bridge had inched out and out into the river, and they were sinking the support shafts. Porier was extremely pressed by his work, and had disdain for anyone interrupting him.

Now he glanced up from his map.

“Devlin would never do this for you,” Porier said, shaking his head in time to: “Devlin would not he would not he would not.”

My father again nodded, and said that this was probably true but if he took his cue from Mr. Devlin he would never have told the truth in his life. He smiled at this, because it was said good-heartedly.

Then my father said: “If you give him his job back, I will do an extra shift as watchman. That would very likely relieve your suspicions.”

Finally Porier, without moving, but throwing a pencil the length of the trailer, said he would give Connie Devlin another chance. His face was dark and riveted with anger, his neck swelling with muscles, his fingers blunt and thick. His anger was always like a passion coming over him. He waved his hand in dismissal and added if even one half hour was missed Connie would be fired and, he added, like the afterthought of a general who sends people to their death, so would Sydney Henderson.
And if Leo did not like it, he himself would quit and he could get his son-in-law to finish the bridge.