Mercy Among the Children (24 page)

“It was fired at our house — it could have killed Mommie,” I said. “My mom — you must remember Mom?”

“God,” he said. He shut his eyes, and his knees buckled just slightly.

“I’m taking it to the police,” I said. “And the police will help us — if you drive me — they might have a reward.” (I felt so small.) “I’ll pay,” I said, smiling timidly. Just then the church doors closed behind us.

He took out money and handed it to me.

“Keep this between you and me — until I can help you,” he said. “Let me keep this for a while — please, take the money, take it home to your mom — please —”

He put the shell in his pocket. It was dark, so I went under the streetlight to count his money and could still smell the gunpowder. There was forty dollars. I walked along the shore for three miles in the splendid night and came out above Gordon’s wharf to go to a store where they didn’t know me, to buy us bread and milk and bologna and cheese. More strange than anything else, I longed to be drunk.

SEVEN

Autumn and I weren’t allowed out very much, so we stayed near each other. On Saturday afternoons we made taffy and fudge, or we went in back of the house to small frozen puddles and played hockey, with Autumn in the net, wearing magazines as goalie pads. We made up names and had jokes for the people allied against us; and there were many of them — every kid on the road, except for Cheryl Voteur.

“We won’t let them bother us,” Autumn would say when boys called her names. Still, Valentine’s Day, I saw her standing under a tree at the top of our lane crying.

That did not dampen her spirits. Boyfriends were a dime a dozen, she said. She liked a boy the next day, and then another, until she had worked her way down to the very last boy on a list. Oh, I knew she had a list — I saw it on the window sill of her small room. Tom and Ted and Ralph and Bill all crossed off. I also saw her try to engage goofy boys in conversation. It would start like this:

“Don’t you think that’s exactly like
The Mayor of Casterbridge
— hmm —?” Then she would quote a passage to them from the rather obscure Matthew Arnold poem
Stanzas in Memory of the Author of “Obermann.”

“The white mists rolling like a sea!
I hear the torrents roar. — Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee;
I feel thee near once more!
A fever in these pages burns
Beneath the calm they feign;
A wounded human spirit turns,
Here, on its bed of pain.”

With these lines spoken to him by a tiny albino girl breathing on her pink glasses, the poor youngster would flee into the school parking lot.

Once that spring I went into her room. There she sat, deathly still on her chair, with rouge on her cheeks and a wig on her head. She never spoke, never moved, never batted an eye. Finally, not able to get her to speak, I turned to leave.

“I am a porcelain doll,” she whispered, “worth much money — I am kind of a Pinocchio — I do not lie.”

“Ah, they can do nothing to us,” she would tell me with a great love, “and soon they will tire of it all.” But often she snuck along the ditches in the dark, and hid from the boys who teased her, trying to put snow down her pants.

At this time I asked Autumn’s advice on how to approach Penny Porier.

“Wear a dress —”

“What?”

“Wait for Sadie Hawkins Day — the end of March — the girls ask the boys out, and I’m sure she will ask you.”

“I can’t wear a dress —”

“Ah, but you must — most of the clothes you have on are Griffin’s — you cannot be sure she is seeing you or her brother — wait until Sadie Hawkins Day.”

Autumn told me she liked a boy as well, Darren Voteur. She smiled clumsily. I said nothing. I realized that she had picked the most miserable boy in school to like, because she had worked her way down the entire list.

Out of class the days were always dark and black, and Penny’s father picked her up in his half-ton truck so she wouldn’t have to walk home, because she often caught colds. Griffin kept me away from her at school.

I turned more bitter than Autumn. I cursed my clothes and my name — my name especially.

At night I thought of Penny lying in bed in white pyjamas on a white pillow, and sadness like electric shock passed through me. I had never felt, or had never been allowed to feel, like this before.

“I will love her to the end of time,” I told myself one day as I walked the river after school. The ice had a brilliant blue charm to it, and on the ice I could see who was coming behind me. I had stopped going down our lane, just as Autumn had hidden in the ditches.

People said if it wasn’t for Jay Beard, already an old man, with his hands pained with arthritis, who constantly looked out for us, Father would be dead, our house and possessions burned to the ground. It was Jay Beard, using his old .38 revolver, that kept people away from us. I waited for my father, for once in his life, to stand by a friend and help
him.

But when my father heard that there was an oath some men had sworn to kill Jay Beard for helping us, he simply went back to mending his smelt nets for the next year and building a new shelf for Mom. I told Autumn that Father seemed too gullible to protect anyone. And all my worries were focussed on my mother and sister and Jay Beard. My hope was also — if for self-preservation or honour I do not know — that my father would die, and Jay Beard would become my father.

Autumn told me that the men had broken a window in his trailer and smashed his television set when he was down protecting Dad and Mom.

“He has no money to replace that,” Autumn said, “so we should raise the money — you and I.”

But I had no idea how to raise the money, and neither did Autumn. Worst of all, my father didn’t seem to understand all that he owed this man.

“When I get older I’m going to be like you,” I said.

“Boy,” Jay said, “be like your dad. They will not bother
you or Elly — as long as you don’t wander too far from home by yerselves — you have to take time to have this peter out — after a while people will come to their senses.”

“My father will get them,” I said, looking first at Dad and then at Autumn. “He is planning it now — no one knows what he is planning. He will take care of those lads,” I said. The urgency in my voice almost caused me tears.

EIGHT

It was Sadie Hawkins Day. I walked into the corridor in a long dress, with an old purse, while my sister dressed as an outrageously well-mannered albino Huckleberry Finn, with a straw hat. We were such outcasts, we had to try during these contrived events to make ourselves belong. And in the weak-lighted corridor both of us sensed this too late.

We were standing alone in the hallway when Penny’s brother, Griffin, approached.

Ah — she has enlisted her brother, I thought. I actually thought like that then.

Griffin was large for his age, with insolent, unhappy eyes. He had the eyes of most boys of fourteen and fifteen, at times haughty and haunted with impure thoughts boys can neither control nor advance and go to confession to relate. He wore loose jeans, a shirt with the tail hanging down, and new sneakers. He was famous for stealing pens and trying to talk like his father.

As he passed by that day he turned and suddenly thrust a compass point deep into my arm. I hollered in pain as he fled
down the corridor shouting, “Scum as you has no right to bother me sister!”

Penny, wearing a sweater tied by its arms over her shoulder, walked quickly into her room, as if she were trying to escape me. Blood bubbled up and out of the dress sleeve, leaving a wider and wider spot. Autumn tried to get me to sit down so she could get the principal.

“No,” I shouted. “No principal — a lot of good principals do for us!”

I went to get a paper towel from the boys’ washroom. I had never fought or thrown a punch at anyone. It was an aberration to my father, and he had instilled in me this idea of physical violence as an aberration. I put the paper towel under the dress sleeve and pressed against my arm, which had turned numb. I felt nauseous.

When I left the washroom it seemed the entire school had gathered to watch what I would do.

I went into class and kept my head down. I believed what had happened to be my father’s fault. I did not go to the principal, for I assumed he would not help (just as my father did not go to the police). I tore off my dress — I wore my own clothes under it. I remembered the sadness after my mother and father had taken the letters to Constable Morris. I now recognized that I and Autumn were looked upon like they. Griffin Porier stared at me, gave my clothes that he once owned a knowing frown, and sat two rows over.

My family was doubly reproached. This begged my silence.

I was in a no man’s land made palpable by the smell of the old school itself, wherein lay a thousand forgotten moments, wherein sheltered a thousand callow children and urged them onward into pointless and mediocre lives. In that school years before I was there, there was our Rhodes scholar, Gerald Dove, groomed by Leo McVicer, and the year after I left, another
Rhodes scholar. The schoolboard and principal were ecstatic. But is that not as miserable and as pointless a future as any other I have spoken about?

Yes, it is even more pointless — for these Rhodes scholars go off to their destiny in middle management of petroleum companies and computer chains — brilliant in their civic-mind-edness and their slavish willingness to belong, and leave us, the
unsatisfied ones
, as Yeats might call us — the Devlins, Voteurs Pits, Poriers, and Hendersons — in the sweet aftermath of embittered winter storms, to our bloodied selves. Our lives were not the lives of Rhodes scholars, even if Autumn was brighter than one. We were instead people with a
true
destiny, recognizable only in our universal lunacy under the winter skies.

I stood after school in the schoolyard, awaiting my sister, watching the yellow buses turn toward the frozen bay, carrying my mother’s dress under my arm. Autumn still in her Huck Finn costume walked up to me. The schoolyard had the smell of pulp and sulphur, the building was silent, and snow whispered from the pointed corners while the circular ventilators clattered from the centre of its roof and threw wisps of snow into the stark sky.

That weekend we did not go outside. Jay Beard came down to our house with a box of groceries. The night was stony and cold, and yet on the television I listened to the closing stock reports from Toronto and New York as if our world was that world. For the first time I became cognizant of the idea of people living in different centuries — none more content than the other.

In my little house, the nineteenth-century supper had taken place while on the television the twentieth-century stocks had just closed. The vigilantes, I suppose, could have been in any time, any place.

Autumn said she would not allow her life to be held hostage by them outside. I told her she had no choice.

“I have a choice — of course I do — everyone does.” She smiled gaily and tossed a copy of
David Copperfield
my way. “Now that’s your choice — once you enter it you will be free of Mat Pit.”

NINE

I went to school the next morning without a coat. I did this because my father was often impermeable to cold and I wished to prove myself to him. His rumoured excommunication had done nothing to him or Mom to keep them out of the grip of churches.

I went to my desk and became distracted by work. I was behind in everything, yet still believed at this time that it would make a difference, that I would be a great doctor or lawyer or engineer; or, better yet, that I would build buildings to house people whom I had heard were homeless in the cities; I would do all of this and they would see that my father and my family were good. That is the only thing I dreamed of then.

I was working on an essay about the reshaping of power in industrialized England in the 1840s and the burgeoning middle classes, and comparing this phenomenon to the reshaping of power in the information age, the age of the computer, where we had newly arrived. In reality the essay was a way to level a charge against the authorities who tormented people who could be easily bullied and humiliated. So this was the
information age! The information of Constable Morris was no more true just because it had now been placed in a computer.

It was an essay I had written in a flood of anger on small scraps of notepaper because I no longer had a scribbler. The notepaper was arranged in meticulous order later that morning, and I had reserved a time to copy it into the new library computer that afternoon. The last line on the last page of the notepaper said: “For my father has been treated unfairly, and has never hurt or bullied my sister or me, for he is a man of God.” It was a line I crossed out, not because it wasn’t true, but because Father said one should never beg the truth.

Our high school catered to busloads of kids from all of rural downriver, the sons and daughters of miners and fishermen; a school made up of children whose fathers knew what it was like to work hard, and knew injury or death on the job, thrust forward slowly but surely into our tattered new age; a millennium waiting to burst forth upon us in all its pith.

When I came back after lunch, the pages of my essay, all of them, had been thrown as paper airplanes out the window. The sky still hung black over the schoolyard, and four buses waited in the dreary lot.

I could not now type my essay into the new computer and I was forced after school to go out and try to find as much of it as I could in the parking lot. Boys and girls gathered about and watched me as I struggled to collect the drab ink-marked papers. When I came back to the front doors I saw Autumn amid the disenchanted youthful stares.

Griffin Porier leaned his heavy arm across my sister’s head, as if she were a post. I saw her knees buckle under the weight as she once again tried to make a joke of it.

As cowardly as I was, I suddenly felt obligated to defend the idea of her life being as sacred as Griffin Porier’s.

I remembered what Leo McVicer had told me. “Someday
you will box — like me you will have no choice.” Why had that made Leo happy? I was now terrified.