Mercy Among the Children (26 page)

To kill him would betray my father. But not to kill him would be to betray my father. I have deliberated on this moment for years. It has been my life’s deliberation. My life would have forever changed if I had had resolve at that moment. My action might have saved us all — Autumn, and my little brother, Percy, about to be born in a shack off Highway 11.

I held the axe, and I counted. I said to myself that if I closed my eyes and saw red spots, as one sometimes does, I would stand up and thrust the axe through the pane. I closed my eyes. There were no red spots. After another long wait, with me shivering and shaking, I heard Mathew walk away. I was angry that I had missed my chance. It was the same as if I had a dangerous bear in my sights and chose not to fire, and watched him waddle away over a hill, knowing that bear might come back to maul my sister.

I stood and ran across the field toward the brook, laughing my head off. If power was so easily attained, there must
be something fundamentally the matter with it. One swipe of that axe, powerful or not, would certainly have made my mother’s life tolerable, my sister no longer pee the bed, and me happy for the first time. Even my father’s appendix might stop acting up.

I came home, and my father and mother and Autumn were at the table with a pink ham. The house was warm. There was a window near the kitchen table, and a window much higher on the far side of the opened room. Under that window was a mantel where Mom placed her knicknacks, and a picture of Autumn at her First Communion (I had taken mine down). Next to the stove was the cot Mom lay upon. Next to that was the back door. Next to the back door was the bathroom door. Dad’s books were on shelves everywhere in this room.

To the left of the kitchen table were five small steps to the “upstairs,” where our three bedrooms were, not much more than cubbyholes really, which Dad had built on as we grew.

My father was saying grace, and he stopped and looked at me. I smiled and he smiled also. But there was something in his look that said he knew where I had been. The smile, mild and kind, said he knew what I had not done.

I lived in that torment for three weeks. It was coming on to May, and I was lucky enough to earn some money by cleaning the yard about McVicer’s store. Perhaps he felt guilty about something. Each time I came home, I saw Mathew in the distance and had a strange desire to kill him. But something happened that prevented it, showing there had been an ongoing conference about us in places we did not know.

Ms. Whyne, receiving much support from altruistic groups, came to “the children’s rescue.” Jay Beard came to our house to tell us this might come about, a few weeks after Easter, and for Mother to prepare herself for the worst; and that he would act as a character witness whenever he could.

So one night Diedre Whyne came with Constable Morris, who always looked appropriately grave and somewhat put out when he faced my mother, as if her character had let him down. The paperwork was in order; another RCMP officer stood outside with a shotgun in case my father returned some kind of fire.

We were taken. A dozen or more people waited at the top of our lane to watch us leave, and as we were being driven slowly away, they clapped their hands. Autumn went in one direction and I in the other. Mom was six or seven months’ pregnant.

Mother went to court and sat listening to Ms. Whyne describe her as semi-literate and our family as poverty-stricken, her husband suspected in a series of crimes that, when drinking, he freely admitted to.

From the transcript of these hearings I learned what officialdom thought of us:

“Their mother is a woman who has lived with a violent-prone individual named Sydney Henderson, who himself has come from an abusive home. He has seen a life of violence and has often been violent himself. Elly is pregnant again, and has no means to take care of her other two children. She is childlike in her ideas, kind in her attitude, and has endured one terrible pregnancy after the other because of her husband’s religious belief, suffering miscarriage and hemorrhage.

“There is a bullet hole in the wall of their house, and they live in constant fear since the death of Trenton Pit, a boy Sydney Henderson was influencing. Lyle is fourteen, just the age when children need strong parental guidance. His sister, Autumn Lynn, is an albino child of thirteen who is tormented at school. She has started her menses and is easily led. If we do not rescue them now they will not be rescued.”

Christ, even I could believe that.

I was sent to live with Hanny Brown and his wife, and Autumn stayed in Chatham with Ms. Whyne in Covenant House, a place Ms. Whyne ran with government funds. The Voteur girls had stayed there, and relatives of theirs from down river. It was called a safe house for female children who have been abused. That Autumn Lynn had not been abused did not seem to matter, because she seemed a prime candidate for abuse.

Just the amount of stuff I was given by my foster parents induced a surreal feeling of the betrayal of my parents. Hanny Brown took me to movies, and with Autumn and Ms. Whyne we went to the Atlantic Exhibition, rode the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Octopus, ate candy apples and cotton candy — while my father in his old blue suit pants and Mother in her maternity dress suffered in silence in the scorching summer heat, with the black woods and chirping frogs all around them.

I hated myself for a candy apple, but I could not stop eating it. In Hanny Brown’s house, I found an old fishing knapsack. I stole what I could to take home — baking soda, salt, ketchup, sugar, coffee, tea. I hid the knapsack in my room. One day, checking the sack, I found a bag of flour placed there, and going down to supper that evening could not look my hosts in the face.

Ms. Whyne shared the duties of Covenant House with her friend Dawn Fleager, and they were subsidized by government money. Their relationship was incorporated as strange celebration into small-town civility toward non-conformism at that time. That is, Diedre was at the height of her power, and I had none at all. Her mistake, as well as mine, was to think her power would last. That those very conformists who now hated my father would
not someday in some way, seeing their chance, turn their turret tanks on her.

What Diedre wanted was to help Mother in some kind of self-awareness course. The idea that Diedre was self-aware and my mother was not has often struck me as hilarious. My mother, however, said she would travel once a week to the Bowie school to learn about nutrition and health care for herself and her children. I know this was not really what Diedre had intended, but it did work in my mother’s favour.

On September 7 I came back to Hanny Brown’s house after fishing. I walked into the porch at four o’clock. Two men and a woman were standing in the front room. I didn’t know who the men were; they both wore suits and had beaming faces with startled eyes, and rather fine rings on their fingers. They were from the provincial office of the Department of Social Services. They were Ms. Whyne’s bosses and oversaw all her affairs at Covenant House.

Ms. Whyne was with them. She had a striking face, a pronounced jaw. She had the type of face that as she got older its traits of social cruelty became more pronounced; traits always hidden in our culture just under the surface like the effects of sin on a picture of Dorian Gray. She smiled at me, with a kind of unfelt affection, and asked me to go pack my things. I came down without the knapsack filled with stolen staples, but Hanny Brown went up and got it for me. And as I was leaving, bright tears burned in his wife’s eyes.

Ms. Whyne took my hand as I walked to the car. I said nothing against Ms. Whyne, and I held her hand. Part of me was by now a social slave. I would squeeze the slave out of myself, as Chekhov said, but not for a while. They had made me love cookies and cakes and wanting to belong, and to lie to myself, to believe they were brighter than me or Autumn or my father, to accept reprimand without question. No — I had always wanted
to belong; and my father had prevented it. By belonging I betrayed him; and so too did Autumn.

Still, my mother had come through. Thirty-three and exhausted, she had cleaned and scrubbed. Dad had redone two rooms and had taken a job the unemployment department had found for him — a job picking up garbage. They bought a new crib. They swallowed all the little pride they had left. But we were going home.

Four or five months later Diedre Whyne found work in another department. She had given her all to our case, had worked on us for fourteen years. She pulled back her divisions and retreated into the hills. We felt we would never see her again.

Percy, our brother, whom I had told the Virgin Mary I did not care lived, was born. I came home to find an infant in the crib, covered in a blue coverlet, with a sudden burst of sunlight falling on his bald head. His eyes were closed, his little fists were clenched.

I ran to find Autumn. She was sitting out back on our one lawnchair, near the fir trees smoking a cigarette — her face, I realized, suddenly beautiful, and her life, as far as most people were concerned, already damned.

TWELVE

Well over two years passed with Dad collecting garbage for Elliot Pearson. When I came from school I would see him hanging
on to the back of the five-ton truck, or throwing garbage up into the box. He did this methodically and like an artist, his tie flying back over his shoulder. He wore his suit I tell you this not because I think it unnatural for a man who lived like my father to wear a suit collecting garbage; it was as frayed and worn as the garbage he collected, so at some level it was appropriate.

Dad would hold on to the side of the truck with one arm, allowing his other arm and his leg to lean out over the pavement as the truck moved along in the drizzle of snow. And the snow fell. Our river was dredged and opened by ice breakers all winter, and huge paper ships came into port, from Europe and the States.

However, with us, it was as always. And it didn’t seem to matter to Dad or to anyone at the unemployment office that Isabel Young had told Mom that Sydney’s I.Q. might be near 170. God, if it took that I.Q. to get a job as a garbage collector for Elliot Pearson, I was in trouble.

I fought every day and I stole. When I fought, my father was never again mentioned to me. And people knew I carried a knife. When I stole from McVicer’s store, I was respected and feared by those my age. I would steal diapers for little Percy and nylons for my mom. McVicer knew this, for later that year he offered me a job sorting work pants and shirts two days a week.

“You’ll be able to buy something for yer family — who knows — diapers, maybe — or who knows — nylons for yer mom —”.

What I did buy — what I ran to buy, what I rejoiced in buying — was contacts and a wig for Autumn Lynn.

One day I saw in a small field hidden from our house two older boys with my sister. She was laughing, and smoking a joint, and one kissed her — and one put his hand between her legs.

I did nothing, because those boys had given me my first bottle of wine. So in this time of our acceptance, the other way to be a slave reared its head. I, and Autumn, were
considered “one of them.” Others made “allowances” for my father. And as long as I made these same allowances (which didn’t seem like much) I would be included.

I accepted the allowances, which said my father was guilty. One day I overheard a remark intended for me to overhear: “He’s not responsible for what his old man did — his old man’s a pervert — he’s a good lad —”

It was a profound moment, one that told me that I — and Autumn — no longer had to own up to who they thought my father was, and that I could disown him like a fleck of lint on the new shirt he had bought me with his last paycheque. I tried to fight this moment, to go to my father and beg forgiveness, to go to my mother and ask for her blessing, but I saw how easy it would be for me now if I went along with them. This is why Autumn lay in the field with her panties off.

I knew this now. I told Autumn what I was thinking.

“I love Dad. But look what Dad did to us,” I said, “and why we are in these scrapes. But we don’t have to be — you and I will bolt above all of that — now people think you’re pretty — well you are, Autumn — but you use it to
your
advantage, not theirs — if you know what I say.” I could not look at her when I said this.

I had bought Autumn things to make her look pretty, because I was secretly ashamed of her, and she knew this as well, and this is why her body meant nothing to her. So that very week I gave them to her. I bought her a black wig, and I had her go to the optometrist the next Tuesday and be fitted for contacts. I paid for both of these things by working for McVicer on the weekend and by trapping martin and mink. There was a good spot for mink farther up Arron Brook, and I tell you I had discovered it by myself.

By Wednesday she looked prettier than I could have imagined. This was what the world continually asked us to do. To
betray my father, my mother, to leave their side, to let them die alone.

THIRTEEN

It was February of 1986 when the letter came. I brought it to the house, thinking to myself that it might be a letter of glad tidings, something to do with Dad’s complete exoneration.