Mercy Among the Children (16 page)

Everyone agrees with this completely. The shack we live in, with its small clumsily fitting tin pipe, seems foreboding, and Autumn, beautiful clever Autumn to me, once so special, is now with her snow-white hair and skin considered a sign of my father’s rural depravities. The idea of the carcinogen in the soil is forgotten. Our house is framed in the local paper just after the funeral. God, it looked sad.

Those men my father had done favours for, filled out application forms for, helped with their unemployment benefits, forgot him and remembered only a man who read strange books. They crowded together, I am sorry for saying this, like the gutless pukes men tend to be.

It is now January. There is going to be an inquest. Those police officers and prosecutors tell my father that if he gives himself up they will not charge my mother with the robbery of the McVicer house.

“You don’t want your next child to be born in jail,” they say. “Or your children to be taken away.”

Nowhere to turn, they go to Connie Devlin. My mother convinces my father to do this. She is certain that those he helped most would now have to help him. A certain willingness of people to trade upon the lines of common human decency. Besides, she is only human, and doesn’t want her child to be born in a jail or Autumn, especially Autumn, to be taken away.

That day, with all the work on the bridge halted, Connie sits at the table in his kitchen, his head down, his eyes cast upon the floor, his thin stringy hair neatly combed over his balding head. He listens to the radio, the country and western station
from Fredericton, smoking an Export cigarette and tapping his beige cowboy boots. My father asks him to help. Connie glances at Elly, exhaling smoke.

“I have no idea what I could do,” Connie says finally, “to save you.”

“You know he helped you,” Mother says.

Connie says nothing for a long time. Then he shrugs, as if this is not a subject to discuss amongst gentlemen.

“So,” he says, “I didn’t know he were like that?”

“Like what?” Elly smiles.

“I just didn’t know he were like that with little boys,” Connie says, sniffing proudly. “I mean, I heard things ’bout it — but I was too good a person myself to believe it —” he adds, astonished at his own goodness.

My father accepts this insult in silence and, his voice still even, asks: “Connie — did you see anyone at the bridge any time of night besides — well, besides the boy — who would have been silly enough to drive that truck onto that weak span? Who left those floodlights off?”

Connie, tapping his cowboy boots on the linoleum floor, shakes his head, as if the question itself is a monstrous insult and his integrity is at stake. The last of the winter sun has left gold streaks across the snow and along the kitchen window, and gold dust from the sun filters into my mother’s auburn hair as she stands in her orange winter jacket and boots. Here is where you see my mother as a child even though she is thirty-two. They could hear a grader on the highway. The bright windows of Connie’s house rattled.

“I can tell ’em only what I know — that I haven’t seen nothing at all,” Connie says. “Except you.” He smiles solemnly at this, and the curl of hair at the front of his head, with his enormous red face, makes him look like a baby in a crib.

The air in the house is warm, and Connie’s work mittens
hang over the radiator in the living-room corner, and his work socks padded at the heels and toes hang over a chair in the kitchen. Again he glances up and then glances away.

The next day Father got the first of the letters:

“Eye for eye — your oldest child will die.”

Perhaps they should have been more careful about who they targeted.

The note was written as everyone says and no one believes actually is. It was written from letters taken from those articles in the paper and pasted to a typewriter sheet. There was a warning for my mother pasted at the bottom of the page: “I will get the cunt too.”

It was the first time I had ever heard that word, yet I understood exactly what it meant. My father had no intention of showing the notes to Mother. But she discovered them. I remember my parents at this time — when I was thirteen. For the last few months, because of their jobs, they had been trying to enter the world — they would tell each other about music, and fashion, not because they wanted so much to keep up, but because neither had ever been involved in the great world beyond their doors before.

They set out in mid-afternoon to the police station with the letters. The road had a glare upon it; the day was silent. A few school buses sat in parking lots waiting for students to get out of class. The wires above them hummed in the wind. And my mother kept up the pretense that everything was all right. She asked my father questions about books, because this is what she knew he wanted her to be interested in. She wondered what it would have been like to have graduated. She took my father’s hand as she spoke.

Her life had taken a dramatic turn without benefit of
education, and she now must protect my father and her children, who were all as confused about the great world as she.

That is how I remember them, on a day six months before Percy was born, walking hand in hand the eight miles to the police station, assuring each other that their lives would be like the lives of other people, while the substance of snow blew about them, from their feet to their chests, in small, twisting eddies, and left their boot prints on the road, obliterated before dark. And they were making this trek for our benefit — because you see it was the children who had been threatened.

Why did they walk? Oh, irony for a man who was supposed to have driven a truck onto a span to sabotage his life’s work — my father had never learned to drive. But by the time they found that out, what would it matter?

SEVENTEEN

My father walked beside Mother telling her that these letters were “just the ticket” to relieve them of their burden of culpability. My mother said nothing. Perhaps she knew there was nothing to say or perhaps she understood what my father had neglected to tell us about his life — that there was and always would be a blunder concerning him, which he himself never seemed to care about, but which he may have entertained a small idea that his family might care about. They huddled together as they walked, and the closer they came to town the colder the day became. It turned bitter with squalls of rinsed rainbow light that comes with wind between faroff brick
buildings and can be remembered by anyone who has lived in the north as a child.

They kept their faces away from the snow, so as to be able to breathe, yet were blinded by the glare from the sun. They walked the entire distance.

My mother still talked as if our trip was an event not only natural but soon to take place, and as if the event now taking place was not only unnatural but something that could happen to anyone.

She felt things would turn out if only they said and did the
polite
things. In all my wondering about this moment in my parents’ lives, I can think of no better word to use. My father’s one unshakable belief was that people could do him no harm if he did no harm himself. He had not hired a lawyer, made not one statement to refute a soul, not even that he could not drive, and in the end handed my mother the letters with stoic majesty. I think over his life, by turns elated and dejected, and realize that so many of his finest moments were lost to the great swarm of mankind — he never made an entrance on the large stage. Yet in so many ways no moment was wasted, and no man was essentially greater.

Mother put the letters in her purse. Her small rustic propriety would now face the propriety of an organized body of law and principle that weighed and meted out justice as if justice was truth. My mother believed — in her heart and soul — that mercy was truth.

They arrived and sat in the office, and waited for Constable Morris. He had interviewed both my father and me, and at one point I remembered a kind of muted dull fury when he looked at Sydney that left me cold. What, I thought, did this man think of us?

Then, with a sense of dignity and duty that comes from some people who have never had much to do with learning,
my mother, Elly McGowan Henderson (for this is what she was called in the paper), took the letters out of her purse and handed them to the young officer.

“And what’s this?”

“These came to us,” she said. “In the mail.”

The officer took a letter and held it over his head to view it in the light through the window blind. He then flipped the notepaper back and forth rapidly as if it were wet. Then, holding it up again, he looked over the top of the page at my father.

“Pasted?” Morris asked with a look of stunned inquiry.

“Yes,” my mother answered. There was a brief pause. Again he looked at my father, but this time he smiled knowingly.

“Sydney, you did a fine job pasting this — is this to throw us off the scent?” Morris laughed out loud, perhaps because he believed he’d made a witticism; that is, the scent of my father.

“I got it in the mail.”

“Got it in the mail?”

Sydney nodded at the duplicity, not of his but of the officer’s tone. Unfortunately the nod, and the polite smile behind it, made him look dishonest. Morris had, we were to find out, a copious amount of information on Sydney that came from neighbours of ours, all willing to help the police. How he had looked at their young child funny, how he had once eagerly volunteered to help with a children’s camp, and a teenage retreat.

There was silence. The wind rattled the blank windows, and one could imagine the snow blowing across the wide field and buffeting clotheslines. The officer was short, thick set, with somewhat larger teeth than normal. He looked over at my mother not for an explanation so much as for a complicity of sentiment with
him.

“Of course it was mailed to him,” my mother said with a somehow heroic tone. She looked at Sydney quickly and took his hand. Sydney only nodded.

The constable put his glasses on, made a face as if his nose was itchy, and said: “How can you be sure he has not made all of this up? — he has made up things before — haven’t you, Syd — made up things before — little things — big things —money and robbery — robbing the poor box at Father Porier’s church — you got a good kick in the bum for that, didn’t you — lighting a fire at McVicer’s mill — you got away with that, didn’t you, Syd? The box of smelts? Hmm? It’s all catching up to you now — lies and deception, deception and forgery?”

“I have never in my life heard him exaggerate or tell a lie,” my mother whispered.

The officer’s face went blank. An uneducated woman, the woman Diedre Whyne had phoned him about, saying that he, Constable Morris, must be willing to take the initiative in her case, sitting in a heavy old coat, with her face reddened from frost in the mid-afternoon room (her cold face added in some way to her being suspect), had told him that he was not only mistaken but presumptuous.

I know there are all levels of rich and poor in our society, and Mother and Father were very near our bottom rung. Morris was determined to be looked
up to
by Elly. This was a secret not even admitted to himself.

Besides, the idea itself was infectious. The idea that my father, living in a shack, was an oddball, and peculiar enough to do something heinous to a child. A
fell
man — a barbarous man. That was part of it. It was in fact essential to it. Not essential to the crime but to the outrage over the crime. My father understood this, I am sure — but he did not fight it. People would believe what they would believe, and nothing more.

Constable Morris took a different tack. He stared at my mother with newfound assumption. Perhaps
she
had mailed the letters. She denied this by complete and utter silence, a silence I have noticed in my life that the poor and mistreated
have often had. When the silence became intolerable the officer smiled and shook his head, as if my mother’s moral superiority was nothing but a ruse he easily saw through.

He was not a bad man, Officer Morris. He was, simply speaking, a stupid man — although stupidity and cruelness of heart enter the door hand in hand. In fact Officer Morris believed he was
winning
this confrontation. And he was pleased by his own sense of ruefulness. And he felt
progressive
for his ability to take them on.

But suddenly he stopped for lunch. He sat at the desk drinking coffee and eating a tossed salad and a chicken sandwich on homemade bread. My father and mother, unaccustomed to the ways of the police (or anyone else), stayed where they were, not looking at one another. Now and then Morris unfolded a napkin, wiped his mouth, folded the napkin again, and set it back beside his fork. Then, finishing his coffee, and looking into the cup, he continued.

“I’ve been thinking — what can be made of the letters?”

He held the letters in his hand and looked at Mom, stifling a belch. At first he complimented Mother on her loyalty. Not one woman in a hundred as good looking as she would be so loyal to a man like Syd. Then he put the letters down with a firm hand, and asked, while patting his hand over them, did she have any love for humanity in her? He again looked at my father and said, loudly, as thoughtless people do when speaking to those they think beneath them: “That’s humanity, Sydney — it means humankind, the human race. Sydney, I’m asking your girlfriend if she has any feelings for it — being attached to you — that’s why the question is asked.”

Sydney nodded, holding his hat with the faded fur earflaps in his hand and looking about the room as if expecting someone else to be there. Then he looked back at the officer and adjusted his glasses.

“Yes,” he said. “Humanity.”

“I suppose you want our protection?”

Again there was silence. My mother waited for an assault upon them by lowering her head just slightly — not in fear but in shame for other people.

Constable Morris stood over them, looking down at my mother, with her pale face, blue eyes, and chestnut curls. Her day had begun at seven in the morning, heating water on a stove to bathe, because we had no hot water tank, and using the kitchen chairs to iron her maternity frock so she would be presentable to
him
Now, in silence, obdurate and proud, the wind blowing across the desolate fields between the landscaped houses of town, creating those soft fleeting rainbows, she fumbled with her fingers, and said nothing.