Mercy Among the Children (33 page)

“Show me your hands,” he said. I did so. He looked at them curiously and held them in his, close to his chest. His eyes flashed when he held them. He ran his thumb over my knuckles. It was on the tip of my tongue to confess. But then he said:

“Ah — I told you you would box.” His rough old hands were shaking just slightly. “I have no store anymore,” he said, releasing my hands and reaching out to pick up the remains of the fly rod he had snapped in two. “No — don’t have no store no more. I want you to know I didn’t hurt your father or mother — I liked them.”

He didn’t look at me, but continued to inspect his rod for a moment. I said nothing.

“Man can be defeated but not destroyed,” he said, a line that finishes, “Man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

I told him it was from Hemingway. He did not know that. He told me someone had said it to him once when he was in trouble.

I nodded and he let me go.

TWENTY-FIVE

It was summer of 1989. My father had been gone almost three years. Percy had no memory of him, and I was more content.

Dad sent us letters, with money, telling us how he prayed for us (not one of his prayers, which I called his praters, did
I keep or return) and that what he was doing now would insure our future (a lie) and we would all be together again (I did not care).

Elly read these letters by holding the paper straight out in front of her because her eyes were growing weak. My mother loved him and was still lovely, her hair with just the first traces of grey would fall in front of her eyes in the old sunlight that came upon the kitchen table in the after-supper hours.

She and Percy kept a garden with some beans and peas — we were trying to get Percy to try a pea, and would put one on his plate every night for supper. Which he did not trouble himself to eat. He would, however, eat around it.

Elly and he would go to their garden each morning and look at the crop of carrots and beans and turnips, which Autumn informed us were rutabagas. Then in the afternoon as summer went along Mom would sit on the porch shelling the peas and Percy would lie out in the grass with Scupper Pit. Autumn, who had a job as a summer counsellor at school, would come home about two.

My mother had taken a catering job that spring for the McTavish woman whose house she used to board at. My mother, twice a week, had to deliver twenty-five sandwiches to those workers on the road, and the names of those she had to deliver sandwiches to were written out on a piece of notepaper on the kitchen table in her crooked hopeless handwriting. Often when I woke she was gone out to get those ingredients for those sandwiches.

My mother’s little sandwich empire. She would walk up the road alone, a small woman with soft auburn hair, and a slight sad smile. Sometimes in the evening she would tell Percy and Autumn a story about how when Dad came home she wouldn’t have to make sandwiches anymore, and she might take a course at a university.

“How wonderful it will be,” Elly would say, folding her hands on her lap. Then she would sigh, and in a moment of vulnerability say again, “Yes, how wonderful it will all be.”

Father wrote saying he would be home before Christmas. I do not know why but I defended him to others and hated him myself. But when Autumn asked me to pose with the rest of the family as Jay Beard snapped a picture to send to him, I would not.

Over the last few years, I took the money that Father sent us and with it paid the hydro and the oil and bought the groceries. I told Autumn I never spent it on myself. But I never showed her how much Dad sent. At first I spent just a little of it, and then a little more. Until his money obsessed me each time I went to town; I drank much of it away. I heard Father worked until his feet bled, in places that could bust you apart. So I knew I was obligated not to touch a cent. I tried to put this money back. I had trapped the winter before for muskrat and beaver and, setting up a bait using a poor deranged horse, shot ten coyotes with the old over-and-under .22/410 my father owned, and pelted them out and sold each for thirty bucks. I suppose I thought myself tough, and I had a reputation. But the money came and went and I still had nothing to show for it. I was going nowhere, neither to university nor to hell.

Autumn knew I was taking Dad’s money for myself, so it was hard to look at her. It was hard to look at myself. Each time I took ten dollars I cut myself a small mark on my left arm with my knife, to remind me when I took off my shirt how much in blood I owed my dad. Then I started on my right arm. Then the cuts became deeper and longer. And one day somewhere up Arron Brook, far away on a windy bluff, I realized I had spent more than twelve hundred dollars of money that belonged rightly
to the family, and that the marks crisscrossing my arms did nothing more than mock me for my weakness.

“Are you going to take Percy and me swimming up to Gordon’s wharf?” Autumn asked one day, trying to make amends. I said I would.

But I had no time for them. Not even to take Percy to the circus that year. Though I promised, and promised again and then once more. And he waited to go. Every morning he got up and, brushing Scupper Pit, would say: “This will be the day — Lyle will take me to the circus.”

I stayed out near the brook for days at a time.

Even there, I sometimes heard of Father. I would hear of him from strangers I met fishing on the Bartibog in the reddish brown pools at twilight. I wore a knife on my hip and carried a knife in my boot.

One time a man asked me if he was still alive. The man told me he knew him and had always felt the accusations against him were lies.

“You know he is a great man,” the fellow said.

“I don’t know him at all — nor would I want to,” I said, trying to control my voice, and the damn tears coming to my eyes. The man nodded and moved down the pool and disappeared in the grainy twilight.

Why in God’s name could I not have peace from him? I would not spend another cent of his money, I told myself. And if he was a great man, so too would I be. That is, I did not know how much I envied him. But I envied him. He had made his life in spite of poverty, scorn, and intolerance. He had made it what it had to be. He had fashioned it as Marcus Aurelius advised. He had done what men all over the world
say
men should do. And in order to prove myself to him, what had I become?

TWENTY-SIX

Sometimes after fishing when I walked up Burnt Hill, I could see our small home on the flat in amongst the trees, and far, far away, a speck so small he was almost indiscernible, Percy hauling his wagon up the cool dusty lane to wait for me, with Trenton Pit’s old dog, Scupper, hobbling along behind.

In the other direction, the Pit house would be steely quiet, with faint pink clouds far above it, and across the greenish blue bay, the indistinct houses of Bay du Vin, and behind me the ominous old house of Mr. Leo McVicer.

The Pit house was a house of sorrow because of baby Teresa’s heart. The yard was filled with potholes, the house’s siding was faded yellow and covered with ten years of dirt. The house itself seemed to sit unnaturally on the foundation Cynthia had procured. The swing set in the yard was new, an addition paid for by Rudy Bellanger, and made the house look more desolate. Often Teresa was down in Moncton or Halifax in intensive care. I remember how Cynthia looked uncomfortable in the skirts and dresses she wore to the hospital.

At least half of Rudy’s pay went to protect himself and keep Cynthia quiet. Cynthia was frightened that the child would die, a fear that came from a delicate reason she could not admit to herself. How could she hold Rudy to blackmail if the child died? Now that the store was gone, Rudy had no steady employment. At the start of that year he had eight thousand dollars put away, because one day he wanted to go to university, so impressed was he by Gerald Dove, whom he knew Gladys once loved. He had talked about university to me one night, thinking he would impress me.

“Have you ever heard of a writer named — ah — James Joyce?” He squinted his sad eyes at me.

I told him I had, told him what Joyce wrote, and he shook his head.

“The more I learn, the less it is I know,” he admitted sadly.

Yet he slowly gave that university money up to Cynthia over the next few months. He was still living in the huge house, still had certain duties to do for Leo, but every sharp wind from the bay reminded him that life was passing him by and he had done nothing. The same buoy he saw at ten was the buoy he saw now at forty.

One night, I came home drunk, a bottle of wine still in my hand. I woke everyone. I called my mother down to make me supper.

“Shh,” Autumn said.

“Don’t shh me,” I said, raising my hand to strike her. I stopped.

“It’s just you’ll wake up Percy — and he’s —”

“He’s what?”

“He’s going to go to first grade — Mom and I registered him for the fall — he is excited about it. He waited up to show you his pencil all day —”

When I went to bed Percy pretended to be asleep, with his caterpillar collection on his nightstand, his small sneakers beside the bed with his socks in them, and his bow tie hanging from one of the bedposts. His pencil was gripped in his hand. Now and then, as I staggered and sang, he would open an eye and look at me and then quickly close it again. He saw the cuts on my arms, and a tattoo on my left arm that I had gotten at the circus.

As I undressed I saw four dollars in an envelope on Percy’s dresser, and a strange word written on the envelope:
Getir.

The next morning I couldn’t look at them. They sat stone-faced at the table. I ran outside in the rain.

I spent the rest of the summer dividing my time between fishing and cutting wood for the winter — the more wood I could cut, the less oil we would burn, the less money I would need. I found buyers for most of the things I had.

TWENTY-SEVEN

About twice a month my mother received a letter marked “URGENT” from the tax department indicating how much she and my father owed, the accumulated interest on the back taxes, and the urgency with which they must pay. One day, looking through the kitchen drawers for a file to sharpen the chainsaw blade, I found these letters stuffed in a plastic bag, hidden behind the cleaning rags. I took them out and read them. It was the disaster my father had brought upon her, by his one venture into business, which she could not fight or endure and so hid from her children, even though I considered myself the man of the house.

I took out my rage on my mother, who shook as I shouted at her. She had relied upon me so long that I was no longer her son. I remember hearing how Mathew Pit tormented Trenton. Well, I had become the same. Finally, after cursing her and Dad for an hour, spit coming to my mouth, I stopped, and sat down beside her in a stupor. She was shaking, her head down, her nose running, her left foot crooked over her right. She was staring at her shoes.

Autumn had grabbed me and I had thrown her and blackened her eye. Percy sat on the couch, watching us throughout, without a word. Now, wanting to make it up to them, I asked, “How can they take what little we have?”

But Mom did not respond. She knew that I myself had taken money. I myself had spent it on wine. She sat as she always did, hands on her apron, looking beyond me.

“Well, we will go up and see them!” I said. “I’ll straighten this here out for you, Mom — I will.”

Autumn would no longer speak to me. But my mother did what I said. Though she was ill and spent much of her time sitting on the porch now, she and I went to the tax department above the post office in Chatham and sat in the waiting room waiting for Ms. Hardwicke to see us.

That afternoon we discovered that Ms. Hardwicke had been taken from our case and another woman had been given our file. This woman was working as a supervisor. Her name was Whyne.

Diedre Whyne sat down at her desk, now and then glancing my mother’s way but keeping her eyes off me. She cleared her throat.

She told us that the tax department had a plan of action. We could relieve ourselves of part of this burden if we sold the wood on the land we owned. She estimated that we could get ten thousand dollars. She had a topographical map of the area and it showed our property as lots 987–988 and 990. It was 988 where she focussed her attention.

I told her she had overestimated the wood’s worth by about six thousand dollars. She asked me if I had cut any yet. I didn’t answer her. I told her the tax burden was my father’s. But this was not true. It was as much my mother’s burden, and it was the property that could be used to alleviate it, for that belonged to both Mother and Father.

“I need that wood to cut,” I said.

“You can cut it and sell it —” Ms. Whyne said.

“I need to burn it for winter wood.”

“But not if you move out of the house,” Ms. Whyne said. “If you moved into a low-rental in town — sold the property — the debt would be paid — I am not at all trying to harm you — you understand 1 am trying to help you. I have been racking my brain to find a way to get Elly out from under all of this. I have not slept because of it. I feel responsible for her —”

“But we are not going to move out of our house,” my mother said. “We are waiting for my husband — he won’t know where we are.”

Ms. Whyne sighed. “How many times have I predicted this? Men running away after leaving the woman with a houseful of children.”

Mother fidgeted and looked at me quickly, as if to warn me not to say anything.

“Fine —” Whyne said, “but if you cut the wood on your property, we would want you to sell it — for we do have a right to it, you see. I have looked at every angle here — and there is nothing I can do, besides offer you a two-bedroom low-rental on Margaret Street — I have it set aside for you.”

“How did you know I was cutting wood on my property?” I asked.

“Are you cutting wood on your property?”

“For firewood for the winter.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, turning to Mother, “but you are obligated to sell it — you cannot just
use
it.”

We went back home. Whyne’s position was one of pointless and limited provincial power. I learned years later that at any time someone either here or in Saint John could have, in what would be called “an act of mercy,” taken this burden
away from us completely. This is what Ms. Hardwicke knew, and why she was transferred from our case.