Mercy Among the Children (46 page)

“I knew he would not be found right away. Lyle, I asked him if he was in pain, and finally he told me that he wasn’t in pain any longer. And then after five minutes he said:

“‘I know, Elly — yes — I know — it was always right here — right here — you and me and the children —’

“I waited, and after a while when the snow got very deep, he stopped speaking. I went to his knapsack and found the poems. But I thought who would want his stupid poems? So I left them there.

“When the young students travelling down to Moncton found me walking on the side of the road, I had been up for thirty hours. I couldn’t face going back to find him. I know I had promised, but they would know I had taken his boots — perhaps they would think I had pushed him over. At the end I couldn’t help him. I’ve never been able to do those things like help people,” Connie Devlin said. “But your dad was a good man that way, don’t you think?”

NINE

At about this time Cynthia had the car running. But she could not convince the old man to go to it. He believed she was going to take him to Mathew, who would hit him over the head.

“I can’t see anything,” Cynthia said as she ran back to get them. (She had been running about for three quarters of an hour.) “Why in fuck does Canada have storms anyway?”

It was now almost two o’clock. They sat in the doll room, and Gladys tried to get her father to move.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Leo said.

Cynthia’s mind was still on the thousands upon thousands in the bag sitting on the kitchen table.

She felt she would have to make her escape by dressing like a man, and to that effect she was going to bring a bag with her, with a pair of Leo’s corduroy pants and work shirt, and boots, and an old hat. Like many truly beautiful women, she could look like a man if she had to.

They would be looking for a woman in a car. She would abandon the car, take the train as a man. She would go to Halifax, wait for her child to have the operation, and then spirit her away.

“Get in the car,” Cynthia said, “you stupid crippled old cock-sucker — who I love.”

She attempted to pull him to his feet. The old man sat where he was, his hair, in spite of his new hair style, slightly messed up.

“Please, Daddy, let’s go,” Gladys said.

Cynthia went upstairs. Upstairs there were almost a dozen rooms she had not entered before. Suddenly she sat down and put on Leo’s clothes, shirt, pants, and sweater. She would
run away by herself. But then, zippering his pants, she saw two figures far away, dots coming toward the house.

No one would get her money! She ran throughout the house to lock the doors. Then she went into the doll room to hide, forgetting the money on the kitchen table, in the paper bag.

Mathew walked toward the house in the gloomy snow, and Rudy trudged in front of him, turning around now and again and prodded on by Mathew’s look. Rudy was talking, trying to get out of doing this horrible thing. But it was to no avail now. Every time he looked back over his shoulder, there was Mathew’s implacable expression. Rudy’s pants got caught on barbed wire and tore, and his knees were cold and shaking. They came to the woods in back of the house. Here Mathew loaded the shotgun.

“There’s big money in there,” Mathew said. “Big top dog money — that the McVicers stole from me.” (This was Mathew’s latest claim.)

“There is?” Rudy said.

“Thirty or forty thousand,” Mathew said, sniffing. The shotgun fell into the snow and he had to pick it up and wipe the barrel. All in all, he said, he liked shotguns much better than rifles.

“A shotgun will blast a man in two,” he said.

“Oh, I see,” Rudy said.

Rudy was trying to make the moment seem natural to himself, but vomited once more.

“Why are you puking?” Mathew asked, astonished. “Something you eat?”

“Yes,” Rudy said. Rudy said he would like to sit in the snow. His face looked pleading, like a little boy’s. But Mathew prodded him with the shotgun, and Rudy went over the fence and into the field, marching before Mathew like a prisoner.

“After this I’m gettin’ myself a pizza,” Mathew said, but the gale, the trees filled with ice battered by this gale, drowned out his voice.

TEN

Though the school was closed that day, the run-through of the play Autumn had written on the Escuminac disaster took place. In the pivotal scene, a fisherman whose life was the centrepiece of her work, facing death in waves ninety feet high, managed to tie his own son to the mast before he was swept into the water and lost.

The scene she wrote was part of the true historical events of that night of June 29, 1959, which she could not have recreated unless she knew and held them in her soul.

From ten that morning they had gone over this pivotal scene, she changing lines and blocks for two actors, and her drama teacher — a young man of twenty-two, a writer just like she wanted to be — became more and more silent and respectful.

They rehearsed until two that afternoon. Behind the stage, where other students were still working on the props, she could see the snowfall covering the whole world outside. But she felt cosy in here, and flushed and excited by work, by the true nature of her work. She was secretly in love as well.

Her drama teacher came over to her, and took her hand in his and whispered, “What are you going to do with such large talent?”

“I am going home and make little Percy his supper,” she whispered in his ear, standing on her tiptoes.

She told me later that as soon as she said this, the drama teacher looked strangely at her, and she felt ice cold.

ELEVEN

Mathew smashed the window at the back door — the door Rudy had entered when he believed he loved my mother. He reached in and unfastened the lock, and he bullied Rudy through the door. There was no more pretense that he or anyone else was a partner with Mat Pit. Mat Pit who had begun his struggle against the world when he was sixteen.

Cynthia was sitting in the doll room with her two invalids. The heat and lights were out — the power was off. Mat and Rudy moved through the kitchen, never looking in the bag that sat on the table, and right past the doll room.

Leo realized too late why Cynthia wanted them out of the house. Far above them they heard footsteps. They heard the two men walking, now and then they heard the crash and bang of furniture as both hunted for the safe. Not even Rudy had been up to the third floor before. Cynthia was only the fourth person to have seen the safe.

“Shhh,” Cynthia said. “They’ll not find us — just be still.”

Gladys sat where she was, tears running down her face, not so much because of fear but because she could not help.

“My cell phone,” she whispered. “It’s in my purse — we can call Gerald.”

“Where?” Cynthia whispered.

“In the living room — in my purse.”

“I can’t go out there,” Cynthia said after a moment.

“Why not?” the old man said.

“I’m frightened,” she admitted.

The wind blew. They were silent again. Leo stood.

“Well, I’m not frightened,” he said.

There was no sound from upstairs. But Mathew and Rudy were two floors above; the door had been kicked in, and Mathew had come face to face with the picture of his father. Even he shuddered at this. If Rudy had been able to open the safe, and if they had found nothing in it but those letters from the government of years gone by, they would have simply left the house.

But Rudy could not open it. Mathew began to chide and hit him, causing a cut on his ear much like my mother had suffered in this house years before.

“Damn you,” Mathew said. “You promised me riches — it’s been fifteen years!”

Rudy had never had the combination to the safe, and he had never been hit since he was a child. He had simply lied. He had told everyone he handled money, hundreds of thousands, had paid cash for his Monte Carlo when it really belonged to the family business, as did his empty house. Nothing at all was in his name. Mathew, who all his life believed to be true what at the moment he wanted to be true, had fallen again and again for these lies, because the man had something Mathew had never enjoyed — wealthy connections.

Rudy hunched over, listening to the gale wind shake, felt his ear bleeding.

“Come,” Mathew said, “open it.”

Rudy tried again and again and again. “Don’t hurt me,” he pleaded, “I’m trying, you know.”

“Trying,” Mathew said, “trying — if you think
I
hurt you, wait until you see Danny Sheppard and the boys in Dorchester prison.”

Rudy looked back over his shoulder at him and nodded like a little boy.

“Move,” Mathew said. Rudy scrambled out of the way. Mathew fired point-blank at the safe. Some pellets ricocheted back and hit his leg. He roared in anger.

Mathew went to the rectangular window overlooking the side yard and smashed it open with the butt of the shotgun. He came back and began to haul the safe to the window. It was not easy and he roared to give himself strength. He believed the fall from the window would break the safe and all the money would tumble into the snow.

“If you can’t help me lift it onto the ledge I just won’t give you any,” Mathew said. Mathew’s pants were torn and both his legs were bleeding, and what was stranger still, smoke was coming from his skin.

Leo heard the shot. The fury of the gale told him he might have one chance and one punch left, and the way he dragged his left leg in his new white sneakers told him he would probably the after he threw it But his life as a boy coming to manhood, the memory of his mother’s agony, told him it did not matter, that he had lived his life as best he could, and was resourceful and brave when he needed to be. And now as much as any time, he needed to be.

He waited for those upstairs to come down. But they did not. He reached the purse, and began to carry it to the room.

Suddenly he saw his safe fall through the air and land on his pear tree outside the bay window. It landed with a dull thud, which did nothing at all to it, and all was silent again, with snow from the roof whispering down over it. Leo smiled, and walked toward the doll room.

Unfortunately the purse was upside down. Behind him, ten one-dollar coins Gladys used when she played the poker machines at the new marina that one time fell one after the other onto the carpet my mother had once fussed over, all the way to the door.

“You’re not getting a sniff of my money,” Mathew said to Rudy, “after I did all the work.”

He turned and started down the stairs, his footsteps falling in brutal fashion toward the main floor, mindless of the blood running down his legs. Inside the doll room behind the kitchen, Leo was preparing for a final battle. He would wait, as if waiting for a fighter to move laterally, and then he would throw his right cross — a punch he well knew how to double up. Then he would see how tough Mathew Pit was.

The phone was not in the purse, though Gladys kept looking for it. Cynthia remembered that she had taken it to the Cadillac. Now she could not admit to this. Leo stared at her, not in anger but in pity, remembered her fascinating body not in lust but in sadness, and shook his head at his own folly.

Rudy could not bring himself to move, knowing that if he remained where he was, he would be safe. All his life he had asked whomever it was people pray to, to be safe. But it was his own life that manoeuvred him here at this time. He thought, If he finds them he will kill them.

Mathew was mesmerized by his own nature, by his own self-aggrandized viciousness, the immense fear he instilled with his bellowing.

He almost missed it in the gloom of the house as he went to leave. But something made him turn and go back to the living room again, past that old paper bag on the kitchen table. He saw the coins leading to the small door of the doll
room. Perhaps, he thought, those coins fell from the safe. Yes, that was it, and he picked them up, one at a time, thinking them a great treasure. He followed them to the door.

If Leo had not gone for the purse, nothing would have happened besides a botched robbery. Rudy was now on the lower stairs.

Mathew began to feel about for the door handle.

The first thing Cynthia said when she saw him was, “Go away — and nothing will happen.” The three of them tried to bar the door. They were all like children, I suppose. At the end I think almost everyone is.

Rudy walked downstairs shaking, standing at the very spot where my mother had stood declaring her innocence. The great old house was cold and silent.

“Where’s the money?” Mathew kept shouting. “Come and open the safe for me and no one will get hurt.”

“You may’s well go — for I will not open the safe,” Leo said.

Mathew kept lifting the rifle butt to hit the old man. But the old man stood his ground.

“Come and open it or I’ll smash yer face in,” Mathew said. “All of this is your fault, Leo, all of it — every stinkin’ bit!”

“Leave us be.”

At first Rudy did not know who had said this. Then he realized it was the sound of a feeble old man. Rudy went closer and stood outside the door, listening to what was going on.

At that exact moment Mathew slapped Cynthia as hard as he could, “for cheating him,” and Leo threw his right hand. Mathew sprawled backwards. When Leo threw the punch — the hardest punch he had thrown in forty-five years — he himself fell to his knees. When he fell to his knees Rudy instinctively ran to pick him up. But he stopped, because of fear, and the sight of the shotgun. He looked at it, and it paralyzed him. Leo and Mathew began to fight for the shotgun, and Leo
was kicked in the face. A spurt of blood from the old man shot straight into the air like a geyser.

“Help him, Rudy,” Cynthia pleaded after Mathew threw her back the second time against the wall, her own nose bleeding.

“God,” Rudy said, trembling.

Mathew kicked Leo again.

“Rudy, dear — you have to now,” Gladys begged.

Mathew wrestled the gun away from the old man.

Still, Leo managed to throw his right once again and send Mathew reeling, so that one shelf of dolls, immaculate in their dresses, and perhaps worth thousands of dollars, came tumbling onto Mathew’s head.