Mercy Among the Children (35 page)

“I always knew Connie was a son of a bitch,” she said. “Poor damn Sydney, a lot of people hate him for no reason — I never hated him, I told them I never. I like his boy, Lyle — a strong, kind kid — and Elly too, and I never made fun of Autumn for being a pink-eyes al-been-o like others did.” She blew out some smoke.

“I know I know I know,” Mathew said. “You and I know he was not the one. It was Connie trying to kill people — Connie and Rudy — who was always dangerous. I was scared of them both, you ask me.”

“Well, you didn’t want to live like that — that’s the problem —”

There was a dead silence, each one of them trying to think of a way to save themselves.

“It’s time to change the water on the beans,” Mathew said, gripping the steering wheel. Yet his heart was racing. He had no idea what to do.

Ontario, he was thinking. I will go to Ontario.

The house was quiet when they got home, and it was after dark.

Mathew went upstairs to his room and sat on the edge of the sagging bed, smoking and looking out the window. It was a room he had spent his entire life in, and he remembered himself here at various stages of his life. He remembered himself as a teenager looking out at the fire above Oyster River sand pile, seeing the black smoke funnel up and cover the sun and a hellish red haze meander over the road as McVicer, along with the other men, fought with axe and shovel to contain it. Mathew, ordered on by his father, Ike, had set the fire.

Now an owl flew through the trees in the slanted purple twilight and disappeared. Far away the remnants of the burned-over stumps stood out, with the new growth surrounding them.

Mathew got pains in his stomach if he was worried and smoked too much. But he couldn’t get rid of the thought that Connie would betray him. What was more aggravating was the fact that part of him
knew
this day would come.

Yet having known this day would eventually come did not stop Mathew from pressing ahead. Or stop him from laughing and talking and buying Freddy Snook drinks. The idea that his lawyer was a con man had attracted Mathew, because Mathew could not be attracted to anyone else.

Constable Morris had been accused of bad police work and was taking antidepressants. It seemed strange to Mathew that this big hulking man with the thick neck muscles would be on antidepressants, but it was so.

I wish I had some antidepressants, Mathew thought suddenly.

The tone of the newspaper had changed as well. It had been changing for months. They asked for a new police investigation to be opened to clear my father, to pay him compensation — to take his case before the Human Rights Commission, where David Scone now sat.

A man like Mathew, who couldn’t predict or, more important,
use
the shifts of fortune as well as his sister, was suddenly humiliated. He took the bottle of rum from his dresser and drank a large glass.

He felt it only a matter of time before he would be brought to trial. He thought fleetingly that it was all Rudy Bellanger’s fault. Without Rudy Bellanger’s attack on my mother, no robbery would have occurred, no money would have been stolen, and Trenton would be alive. He had forgotten the terrible part he had played.

Mathew stood, took off his suit jacket, and fumbled about for
his jean jacket. He went into his mother’s room, and kissed her, even though he was angry with her. She should have handled Sydney differently that night he came to ask about Trenton. (He didn’t remember that he’d told her to say exactly what she had.)

He stared at her in both anger and pity. She had come home from mass and had fallen asleep in her clothes. On the mantel was a picture of the Virgin Mary, but Mathew could not look at it without thinking of Trenton. Once Trenton had upset Mathew’s tools, and grabbed the picture of the Virgin so Mathew wouldn’t hit him. Still, Mathew hit him, and kicked him. Mathew had always beaten him; just like their father had beaten Mathew. Mathew had taken those beatings to protect his mother and sister. Yet what had happened? He had turned into the same kind of man as his father.

Tonight the old lady’s television was on, and
Wheel of Fortune
was playing, the wheel spinning when he closed the door.

He went to the closet and took the 12-gauge pump and walked downstairs, outside, and across the road.

The air smelled of fall, the scent of musk. On his left, close to the new bridge, with its large citified lights leaving a rarefied glow on the water, and across from our dark and muddy lane, sat the old beaten-up trailer of Jay Beard. Jay’s trailer light shone on the shale rock foundation and made those rocks glisten to the sound of guitar music. His lot was surrounded by deep spruce and gnarled shrubs.

Mathew walked up his lane, walked toward the field behind, and ended up on the old Russell Road. After a few minutes he came to Connie Devlin’s house, its white siding still warm and its small lawn decorations spinning and whirling in the wind. Mathew loaded the pump and walked to the door and opened it with his left hand, the shotgun in his right.

The closet had been cleaned out, and there were clothes all over the floor. A note on the table asked Devlin’s sister to
please turn off the water so the pipes wouldn’t freeze that winter and put antifreeze in the toilet bowl.

Mathew went back outside and across the lawn. He turned and fired a brace of birdshot at the house, and kept on walking.

Back in the dark old house of his mother, he meticulously, with his black comb, combed his blond hair in a ducktail in front of the small kitchen mirror just like in a movie, even though he never had anywhere to go.

THREE

Cynthia knew that everything had changed for them, that the lawsuit showed their hidden contours of greed and self-interested pity.

She could see that something grander must propel her future now. Any idea that she cared for others was decimated once you studied her face and heard her laughter. Yet those who knew she did not care for them cared deeply for her. Her wild beauty had seduced many, some boys as young as eighteen.

Cynthia had been Mathew’s most loyal adviser and friend, but it was time to loosen her tethers. Mathew was neither trusted nor liked. She saw this as a liability to herself. If he was to go to jail she must distance herself
now.
She must give Mathew up. It would be for the best. To escape prosecution herself, she would hand them Rudy Bellanger too. She was preparing to phone the police to test the ground.

But the next morning the telephone rang. It was Rudy Bellanger. He said he had to see her.

“I can’t possibly,” she said.

“It is urgent,” he said and hung up.

Rudy came to her at ten on a quiet, bright day. She was sitting on a green chair in her bedroom. Her bedroom suite looked foreign to the house, as if it kept as its guest some countrified prima donna. Many houses in the country have a room like this, done over by a sister or a daughter who could never leave home.

Before he could speak she told him she didn’t want anything; that it was not in her nature to want, but that he was behind in payments for the child; and that she had never planned to become dependent on him.

“I have no more money,” Rudy said. “Honest to God I don’t have any — I’ve paid you, I’ve paid Mathew — both of you have come to me over the last five years —”

She looked closely at him. From the time of Teresa’s birth until now she had received some nineteen thousand dollars from him. Could it be that even this pittance would run out?

“What do you mean, you have no more money?”

“My wife has a trust fund and a residual from the pulp mill from the years when Leo sublet his land to them — but it’s not all that much, perhaps no more than forty thousand left. She needs care; she is in a wheelchair now more and more. And someone is telling lies about — us — to her — about — the child. She has not spoken to me in months — and neither has Leo.”

“Well what about Teresa — should she suffer because of that!”

Rudy nodded glumly and waited patiently to tell her why he had come.

“I’ve suffered because of you,” she said. “My God, it’s my own fault for falling in love with a married man.” Then she shed a tear, as easily as she did everything else.

He stared at her face, her dark hair and tight slacks, and wondered if this was true. He was vain enough to hope that it was. He smiled slightly, like a child.

Cynthia’s eyes brightened. “You know I never meant to harm you, Rudy — I was the one that kept them away from you as best I could — it was Mathew — wasn’t it. Connie and Mathew and you — all in this together. I have to go to the police. I mean, if
you
go to Dorchester — I don’t want to go — really, I’ve been harbouring fugitives — Mathew, and you. Even though I love you this is very serious stuff. My love has made my head all wobbly.”

“Your head wobbly —”

“Yes — and I’ve prayed to the Virgin — look.” She pointed in regal fashion to an old picture of the Virgin Mary. “I prayed to her to get her act together and help me. The Virgin told me, in kind of a little voice, that I was blinded by love for you — and I think the Virgin Mary is telling me to turn you in — it would be for the best, wouldn’t it?”

“God — no,” Rudy said. “I kept quiet, now
you
have to.”

“Why?” Cynthia asked innocently. “Hmm?”

“I — I could be
harmed.
If I go to jail, I mean — if you love me as you say — and I know — I mean, I’ve prayed to the Virgin as well — but, well — you can’t take everything she says so seriously!”

Cynthia stared at him blankly.

“I would be culpable in everything — I’d get ten years in jail. I couldn’t face that,” Rudy whispered.

“What am I to do? I’m a nobody, just a little country girl who likes to listen to Dwight Yoakum and Steve Earle, but I refuse to go to jail as a nobody. It’s high time I was a somebody, came forward and had a little article written about me. How’s Gladys?” she said, lighting a cigarette.

Rudy didn’t answer.

“Rudy, what do you do during the day? I never see you, so you must do something.”

“I’m at the unemployment office looking for work. I was washing windows in town.”

Cynthia burst out laughing, a coarse, self-indulgent, and provocative laugh. Rudy had started out washing windows at McVicer’s store twenty-five years before.

“It doesn’t do any good to laugh,” Rudy whispered. He felt as if needles had been shoved through his body, and he remembered his own laughter at Elly when he showed her the gold money clip. “With Leo’s store burned I can’t do much — washing windows is a job — I don’t know what else I’m going to do with myself.”

“Where will all of Leo’s money go?” Cynthia asked.

Rudy said nothing. He looked out the back window at the string of cottages below.

“If Connie changes his story — poor Mathew is in a mess —” Cynthia continued, “and you too. And you know they’d just as soon charge an innocent man as a guilty one. My worries are for my mother —” She took a drag of her cigarette and scrutinized him. “And your wife — if you have to go to jail as well.”

Rudy felt the air on his skin, and realized that this was the moment he had been dreading for years. The moment when people he trusted would consider him expendable.

“But you were the one,” Cynthia said. “In some ways you hired Mathew to do
everything.
How will Leo take that!”

There was a long pause. Then Rudy looked at her.

“Please — I’ve just come to do you another favour.”

“What?” Cynthia said suspiciously.

“You asked me to introduce you to Leo McVicer.”

“I never asked you that,” Cynthia said, flushing. “I hope you didn’t tell him I asked you that.”

“I was told to tell you that he wants to see you — he told me to tell you to go to his house — I’m just bringing you a
message. But please don’t tell him anything — it’s the only thing I ask. Please.”

“He wants to see me — why, in God’s name?” Cynthia said at the same moment he was begging.

Then they were both abruptly silent, and she looked at him with a certain gravity, and just as one might with an errand boy, she had nothing more to say to him at all.

FOUR

My mother was ill that day, and I was with her as I saw Cynthia leave, smelled smoke and early fall, heard far off the short huff of a young moose that I knew I would call and butcher. I did not know where Cynthia was going in her swaying way that seemed to squander so much, like the scent of late-summer flowers, the overripe apple bins of fall.

I saw her leave in a plain summer dress, the length of which was somewhere above her knee. After she left I saw Mathew Pit, looking sick, come into the yard and walk toward the brook. There he sat on an old chaise longe staring at the water, as he sometimes did when fighting off a binge. Cynthia left in the other direction.

I know what happened that day, just as I know what has happened all the days before. I wish I could have changed just one action; the reflection of that change might vastly have altered me.

Their back path led through the gravel pit and to the dark, worn path through the spruce grove that smelled so green
to a hidden trampled field behind Leo McVicer’s. I know how she must have moved, for I envisioned her. Hers was a remarkable journey — for it was a journey that would radically shift the balance of power and loyalty for myself and others.

She came to a tree, and paused in a moment of splendid isolation, a woman as proud as the world, living in solitude. She came to McVicer’s back fence and tried to climb it, catching her leg on the wire and tearing the skin.

McVicer was sitting in the porch staring out at the bay and winging a red alder switch when she came to the front of the house. The water had taken on the look of desolation that water takes on in September, after the vacationers have again sought the comfort of the town or the cities of Toronto, Montreal, and Boston.

So our shore was now abandoned, and the water suspended for one second or two before the maelstrom. Leo, too, looked as if he had postponed his slide into old age. And flush with his recent victories — for he knew Mathew and Connie and Rudy would go under now — he was offering a laurel wreath to the one he wished to save. It was the same bestowal he had once given Gerald Dove, or a dozen others over the years. His power allowed him to pick and choose. He saw her walk through his back gate, knock on the door, and enter with a smile.