Mercy Among the Children (37 page)

“‘Oh,’ I said, ’are there saint bones in
my
church?” (Here he affected astonishment.) “And Leopold, do you know what Percy said?”

“No, I don’t,” Leo said. “I don’t know what Percy said. How would I know what Percy said? Percy may have said anything.”

“Percy said, ‘If there are no saint bones, then there is no church — you cannot have one without the other.’”

Leo was exasperated. He was exasperated because he didn’t know what the child had meant, didn’t know why it was a great thing to say, yet was jealous of the little child for saying it, especially after he had written a cheque for the visit of Vicka. Could Percy do that? No, he could not It was always up to him, McVicer.

“Children say all kinds of things,” he said. “I have said similar things myself.”

“You have?” Porier said.

“Of course I did — lots of smart things. Anyway,” Leopold said, “I know Mathew Pit did it — the robbery.”

“What — How — ?”

“You know the five hundred dollars? I bet my pocket money Elly never confessed to it at your confessional. Why? Because she never did it.”

“Oh —”

“Mathew Pit — he had me fooled for a day or two — no, not even that long!”

The light had gone from the room and only a few electric candles burned. The altar boys had all gone.

“You see, no matter how long, things get figured out.”

“You are right,” Porier said. “All things unseen will be seen.”

This struck Leopold not as comforting as he left.

The autumn night was warm, and smelled of rain through the oak doors. In the autumn night Porier stood, turned out the lights, and locked the back church door, from where he could see the white marble altar glowing faintly. He could not
admit to himself the sexual misdeeds he had committed on the two poorest children in his ward thirty-five years before — his one lapse in all this time — Sydney Henderson and Connie Devlin.

Sydney had survived in some fashion. But it had ruined Devlin’s life, so that he became a cheat, a drunk, and a liar in the world. Porier saw in Devlin’s weak mouth and small, deceitful eyes a vague yet discerning moment of himself, of his own sad soul. He was hoping for God’s forgiveness, without wanting to bear any further cross.

He knew who McVicer’s other children were.

He knew. He knew who had burned the store, and who asked to have it done. He probably knew my father was innocent of every crime ever bestowed upon him.

Leo went home. He sat and thought a long time. Now the natives were saying he had stolen their land and were demanding restitution. And Dr. David Scone, who had once sat at his table, had taken their side; and so too had Diedre Whyne. Perhaps he would lose it all. But not if he was smart. He took off his uniform and sat in a chair near his bed. All his friends were now dead; others whom he had fed and clothed had turned against him in their piss-arsed pants. The premier, a man he had helped get elected, had snubbed him last Christmas. David Scone was publishing a book on the injustices against the First Nations. It was being serialized in the local paper. Seven times in the first three chapters Leo’s company was mentioned, the wood he had cut, the roads he had dug out. And Scone wrote his reports against him in an office building his lumber had built and on paper his softwood had supplied.

Whyne was dead, Ike Pit was dead; those who had once offered him a Senate seat in Ottawa were dead, their pictures
stiffly hanging on the walls of the Legislature. Unfortunately he was not dead. He was old, and his time had gone.

He loaded his shotgun as he did now every night.

Man can be defeated but not destroyed, he thought, and took some comfort in this, as a freezing man takes comfort in a small patch of sunlight on the snow.

Yet he thought of Percy, helping lift Teresa Pit so Father Porier would bless her, and was sad. He gave a prayer that he would build the church roof as long as God left him in peace. But when he closed his eyes, he saw only Percy Henderson, hauling Scupper Pit in his wagon, up to the church to pray for sweet, gentle Elly McGowan.

SEVEN

Some nights Percy would sit by Mom, playing cards or checkers as she rested on the couch. She would tell him stories about long ago, when Autumn and I were children.

Often I was out, poaching, or drinking. If the poor rabbits knew I was selling their dead bodies for wine, they would be heartbroken.

Many nights I stood outside of a dance shivering because I didn’t have the three bucks cover charge. I smelled of woodsmoke and iron, my eyes were deep brown, my skin the colour of poverty. I had colds that would not stop, I coughed night and day, or when I sat at the table in my thin shirt, sipping from a quart of smuggled-in wine, with a pack of Export “makins” sticking out of my pocket. Girls would pass my table and not
look in my direction, frightened I would ask them over. Many times I could smell the balsam fir on me because I had loaded wood. Looking at old pictures, I realized that I resembled Roy Henderson, even to the clothes I wore. I had drifted back into the nineteenth century.

So what did it matter that I could quote Plato, or that my father had read to me as a child? I knew nothing about music. When once asked if I knew who the Beatles were, I said: a small armoured bug with mandible. I had fought back, I had learned. I had, like Autumn, taken certain courses in the frivolity of the world, only to sound ridiculous when I sang the lyrics coming from the age of yuppies, of
Bright Lights, Big City.

On Thanksgiving Saturday there was a dance, and I came home drunk. Elly said that Dad had phoned. He had wanted to talk to me, and they had left the phone line open for a half hour. She told me he would be home for Christmas. She never told him she was sick — never that I was drunk. Mom asked me if I would go to church the next morning for her. She had never been drunk. I on the other hand had taken to being what my neighbours
thought
I was. For, once I became what they had delighted in saying I was, they feared me.

Still our old house belied my monstership. I wasn’t even a thief in my heart. I sought not darkness but light. So such a rebellion as mine was a heartbroken one. And little Autumn knew this.

Whenever I saw the faded palm leaves from an old Palm Sunday behind a picture of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, I would tremble. In the never-forgotten stories from my childlike mother I would remember that when our Virgin was speaking to Saint Bernadette, the voices from hell arose, and one look from the Virgin’s quiet face sent them into howling submission and final silence. I would remember that Saint Bernadette’s body in its glass resting spot had never corrupted. And I would
realize that I had miserably failed these childhood stories, but I had never in my heart outgrown them. Never had I really disbelieved them.

More fool I to believe something I could not commit to and damn myself for my human weakness each and every day, when millions who mocked my belief never suffered a pang.

Mom believed. She believed in miracles just as she gave money she could ill afford to Save the Whales, Save the Seals, Save the Children. In this was her response to miracles in her life. So leave her to them. She believed in Saint Thérèse of the child Jesus, of little Saint Flora beheaded for her faith. There was in this, in the rains of autumn, or in the scent of the lilac of late spring, a feeling of quiet wonder and of peace.

Still, my mother had a peace beyond any I had experienced. She had a picture of a sperm whale that someone told her her money had helped keep alive. Christ, did they not know my mother had not a nickel?

I had just come from the dance. Our community centre was an old one-room school moved out on skids to the highway, and a bar and a dance floor put in. I went there, now looked upon as the failure I was.

And what had I done that very night to prove myself? I had attacked the fisherman Hanny Brown. And what was the reason? Well, he was six foot three and strong as a bear, but hadn’t I proven to myself I could hit like a mule?

He had no idea why I attacked him, and I needed a reason. I yelled, so everyone would hear, that he had called my mother a whore.

“That is not true, son — I would say that to no woman.”

I started to turn away but saw Cynthia Pit by the bar looking across at me. I threw a short right and I felt his legs buckle within the very vibration of my punch. He put his hand up to cover his mouth, and I came back with a left hook. And
Hanny dropped. His wife started crying — his face was covered in blood, his shirt and tie spotted bright red, and he rolled over and pushed himself up.

“Son,” he said, “I did nothing.”

“Well there you go — I just did,” I said, laughing. I walked out through the crowd, everyone looking at me until I looked at them.

Mathew followed me out. I will tell you this, I was under his spell. There was no question about it.

Mathew brought out a paper towel for me to wipe Hanny’s blood from my hand. He smiled when he saw it, and handed me a smoke. He said I had done a good job, and told me he had more wood to steal.

“I want you to go somewhere with me.”

“Where —?”

“Just somewhere — will you or not?”

I shrugged as if to say it made no difference. Then I went home. Once I was alone, my elation subsided, and I was left only with a picture of Hanny’s kind dark face looking at me in confusion and in shame because I had hit him in front of his wife.

I needed my mother to hate me as I went into the house that night. So I began shouting at them, and Mom began to shake. Autumn glared at me and got up and left the house, so I yelled at her and called her a whore.

“Please,” Mother said, reaching a hand toward me. “I am glad you can take care of yourself, but tomorrow go to church and recite the prayer of Saint Francis.”

The air smelled of medicine and night, her nightgown was white with small blue flowers; her throat was bare and showed the strains of her coughing. Dr. Savard had come down once — only once — to tell her it was her nerves, and that she was going through early menopause. He left her pills that sat upon a table. It is almost indescribable, how his affluence and
modern knowledge was so out of place in our shanty. Its faded walls and small rooms, which I had once delighted in. Now her hand trembled as she held it out.

It was the very first time I never took her hand. In my spitefulness — in my feelings of shame and anger and poverty — in the accumulated terror I had suffered and made others suffer I lashed out:

“The church has done a great shitload of good for you,” I said. “A self-centred quiff for a priest.”

I stumbled against Percy and the cup of tea he was carrying to Mom fell from his hand. He crouched down and began to pick up the pieces.

“I will get Mom another cup,” he said.

“Never mind her goddamn tea!” I roared at him. He didn’t look at me, and continued to pick up the pieces.

“Oh Percy, I’ll get it,” Mom said, and she tried to sit up. Ashamed, yet filled with newfound boldness and hate, and disgusted by their kindness, I fled. I sat on the old couch behind the house.

I had nowhere to go, and my head was reeling with the pointless drunkenness of youth. Mathew had told me things almost in code, and I was trying to understand them.

The code was this: A man — a true man — did what he wanted to. Society was fine for people who could profit by it, but the community had left the two of us, Mathew and me, out. So why be cowed by a community that spit in my face? Look it straight in the face and dare it to spit. The code also said, take care of the weak and never hurt the innocent This was Mathew’s secret code to me. And I firmly believed he practised it.

It was a grand code, I thought. And if I had this code I needed nothing. Besides, weren’t the community and the towns along the river prepared to accept people who relied upon this code, and weren’t they frightened of men who used
it? And didn’t those who used it have greater and more admirable souls than those who did not, and didn’t I acknowledge this myself by secretly envying those men? If I envied their spunk and irreverence, so too did others.

“My father believed them,” I said to Mathew. “Now he owes taxes and they spit in his face.”

“What would you do if they did to you what they did to your father?” Mathew said to me one day.

I thought, and said: “They wouldn’t dare.”

Mathew smiled.

I felt power surge through my body. I had given the right answer. And this was why I had needed to prove myself by hitting Hanny Brown.

In back of the house on this cool October night I watched the stars and wondered how long it would take to travel to one if I went the speed of light. I held my hand over my eyes and watched the heavens, while inside I heard my mother and Percy speak.

She asked Percy if he thought I was angry at them, for they were left alone so often.

“Oh no,” Percy said. “Lyle finds me bugs and caterpillars and took me fishing.”

“But he hasn’t taken you to do any of those things in a long time — it’s well over a year. He hardly speaks to me. He always looks angry — I’ve never seen anyone so angry with the world. I know he has had a bad time in the world. But your father has had a worse time, and your father never looked angry. And Autumn too — she has been afflicted since childhood — she has no money, and boys have made fun of her — and used her — I know they have. She has come home from dances quietly and secretly crying. But she faces it, works to give us what she can — and she had a poem published, did you know —”

“Lyle cut the wood, and I watched him —”

“Autumn,” Mother said, “poor little Autumn. I think we have failed our children — your father and I — they wanted so much more than us. Percy, do you understand — I saw boys and girls with money, at the church picnics, and looked in my purse and there was nothing to give them. It broke my heart.”

“Scupper Pit has a sore paw — and he has to ride in my wagon.”

“I’m sorry,” my mother said, “but when your daddy comes home he can fix that — he is the bravest man you will ever meet — and see those books — you and I could not read them all, but your daddy could. I get so confused with books, and money — I get all mixed up — I think I have the money to pay something to keep the whales alive and then I don’t — but not your dad — he is the only brave man I have met — well except for Mr. Beard. One night your dad was sitting here and I was standing in the doorway to the study. I was pregnant with you — which means you were in my tummy — and I turned and your father — Sydney, my husband — said, ‘You have to come here and lie down now.’ I don’t know why he said this, but he did. He stood and made room for me to lie down, and walked by the study door. He stood there as if facing a test from God. He said nothing. He waited. There was a loud sharp noise and he held his arm. A man had shot through our house — you and I would have died. How did he know this? He is brave — good and kind, you will see.”