Mercy Among the Children (48 page)

I carried no pictures, had no good memories, chose no occupation. I conspired to forget everything I had ever learned or
known except for Mathew Pit. But I could not drink the pain away, or even keep it down. The hand I had broken on his head did not heal right — I went to no doctor because none had the kindness to visit my mom during her miscarriages. My hand pained in the dampness in the middle of winter.

FOURTEEN

In February, three years after I left home, I looked up and Gerald Dove was standing in front of me. He had placed a loonie into my hand as I sat near Maple Leaf Gardens.

“Lyle,” he said, at first unsure and then kindly. He told me he was in Toronto taking some high-school children to a Leafs game against the Montreal Canadiens. He made me promise I would meet him for breakfast the next day; not only did I have part of a large estate to manage — and he wanted me home, for the decisions were mine and not his — but I had a compensation package to be settled with the provincial government, and David Scone and Diedre Whyne were both interested in seeing me to make headway in that regard.

Dove and his students gathered around me. Everyone wanted to shake my hand. I became emotional and self-conscious.

“You see how much your family is now honoured — because of your father and sister,” Dove said.

“Autumn?” I said. I had not even known if she was alive. So many had left me.

“All these kids have
read
her — this is their reward for passing their mid-terms — to come to the game.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her novel — and your father’s poems — you didn’t know? I can take you to any bookstore here and you can find Autumn’s novel — can’t he, kids?”

I started to shake violently. I was ashamed of representing my family to them. I turned and ran away, clutching myself; into the dark bowels of Toronto’s midwinter.

I walked in the dark toward the lake, hoping to drown. But I couldn’t even do that.

I left that night. I went to Europe. I wandered through Oslo on sunny winter afternoons. On the trains and in the bars I spoke to people who had their lives ordered, fastidious and kind-hearted, used to being punctual and correct.

I asked one young man I drank with if there was a Catholic church where I could go and light a candle. It was my mom’s birthday. He looked at me with alarm, and whispered that there was, but he would not be sure where. That here Catholicism was looked upon as a sect, and its observers looked upon as imbeciles.

“Let us drink to my mother.”

“Skoal,” he said.

That night I went to the Oslo airport, a huge empty place filled with cement and glass and a few desks for security. The lights cast a cold glow on this ugly chamber while outside it was almost dark. In this grey northern darkness, much like our own, with people dour and alone, their lives seemingly as transient and as unfulfilled as mine, I was walking by a news kiosk when I stopped dead. I turned and went back, to a book section called, “New Voices for the Millennium.”

She was looking out at me, wearing her contacts, but her hair was white, with just a small yellow streak at one side. The jacket said she lived in Toronto and was married, with one son. Sydney.

So she had raised herself above the torment of our youth. Unlike me she had crossed into a realm where her affliction did not matter anymore. I could see that her affliction was now a part of her grandeur and looked upon as a quality of artistic bravery.

She had a translucent beauty and a wilful Henderson look. Her phoenix could not be otherwise. Where were those boys who had tormented her now, took down her panties for candy — those girls who did not let her join? I remembered her clothes were almost rags doused with holy water, and the pink glasses she wore always folded on the window sill at night.

Now her white hair was the hair of an oracle, her eyes were the eyes of mercy. I too had once been ashamed of her, and couldn’t protect her from the vileness of our youth.

I could see that the picture of her in our provincial paper, taken to expose us, had not succeeded in destroying our family. I bought her novel, though I could never bring myself to actually read it. It was dedicated to Percy.

Often I would go to airports hours before my flight and would sit and watch and wait and hope. What was I watching for? I did not know. Not for the longest time.

I knew that very few of these humans dressed impeccably and hauling their indespensable luggage would have seen moose and coyote blood, have stolen wood to survive a blast from winter, have carried a knife into a strange house in order to perpetrate a murder, or have seen a father almost beaten to death. I knew I was free of my past as long as I remained in transition from one place to the other, travelling with these newer, more organized, and more modem humans. Humankind that I could never really join. Not even if I tried. My gaze whenever I wanted told people to stay away.

I arrived in Paris this past spring. I visited Napoleon’s tomb, walked by the Place de la Concorde, and went to the Montparnasse graveyard where Colette and Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are buried. In the middle of this vast city graveyard I could not stop crying.

I had a room on the rue St. Denis and went back to it late on that cloudy afternoon. I lay on the bed, and wept.

You see, those tombs and mausoleums where all those grand people lay are larger and better built man the house Percy lived in, the place where he waited for his mother to come home — for me to take him to the circus — and I thought of his grave by the lumpy ground.

So I ended my travels. I came back home two months ago. But everything had changed in my house. It wasn’t the same as it was when Autumn and I had slid across the new wax job in our sock feet or I had taken Percy for walks in his wagon. I just got lost in my house as small as it was. I would sit in a chair for a while, and then, remembering some painful incident, I would jump up and move to some other chair. This happened until I had nowhere to sit or stand. I couldn’t even cook supper, because Mom and Percy had made tea there.

The Sheppard boys came, telling me lies about Mathew — how they had found him and had beaten him for me. They each wanted five hundred dollars. So I gave them money. They were quite fond of me now.

But when they came back the third time, giggling and laughing about how well they had managed things, I locked my door and went at them. I beat the teeth out of both of them. I smashed Danny’s nose and cut Bennie’s tongue when I punched him with my ringed finger. I’m sure they didn’t think I could. They fled into the late-afternoon drizzle with a smell
of balsam in the air. I never saw either of them again.

I went to visit Cheryl Voteur. I had bought a diamond for her. I started to propose. She smiled, and took my hand, and told me she was getting married to Griffin Porier. He was working now for Gerald Dove.

I stayed at home after that. I pawed through Dad’s bookshelves, flipping books open and closing them. I would stand for hours at a time doing this.

I picked up Tolstoy’s
The Forged Coupon.
I flipped it opened and saw words underlined and notations made not only by Dad but by Autumn. The pink carnation Autumn had won for Dad at the Christmas fish tank had been placed in it for safekeeping before Father went away. Age had faded it to a peach colour. I carefully put the book away and went outside.

Outside at every instant I would see Percy turning toward me, and smiling, with his hand to his mouth to stifle a cough, or his shirt out and his bow tie askew. I would talk to these ghosts, to all of them lingering here now. I would wake and sleep with them. Why not join them?

Three weeks ago, I placed my sister’s novel and my dad’s poems together on the kitchen table, along with Percy’s First Communion bulletin, took the rifle from under the bed, loaded it, and sat in my chair with the barrel at my head.

I was wondering how long it would take for them to find my body, since no one, not even old Jay Beard, would come here now. He could not stand to walk the lane that Percy had, or play his guitar anymore.

I stared at the T.V., too lazy to go and shut it off. And the program was interrupted by a breaking news story.

A large fire was burning on the south end in Saint John. The residents of several buildings were forced outside in the cold. There were firemen and water tankers fighting the blaze — and far in the background at the doorway of this very place
— this Empire Hotel — someone was sitting on a chair. It was Mathew Pit, a blanket around him, shivering and shaking.

He had come full circle — back to you — to this very building where you live, Mr. Terrieux. I saw his head and put the rifle down.

I came to Saint John the next day. I took a room in the tavern for the night and waited without sleep. The next morning I walked along the street in the cold and fog.

Mathew seemed to know I was coming. He was destitute, living in this rooming house three floors beneath you. He was lying on a mattress, staring at the water marks on the ceiling. He turned his head toward me and pointed his finger. I did not look at what he was pointing to. But the daylight came in through the window and made red spots on his bed. There was also a smell of flowers; the place was heavy with it. I reached over, right across his bed, and turned on the lamp. Perhaps this is what he had wanted me to do. I moved the lamp so I could study his face. He looked almost sixty now, and his hair was much thinner. His freckles had turned to blotches. His mouth was sunken. He lay above the covers, in long underwear, and was thin and gaunt. Here was Mathew Pit who had once bench pressed three hundred pounds and caused terror on our road.

Next to his bed he had some Chiclets, a few straws, a lime drink — I remembered how he liked lime drinks.

He was the last casualty of McVicer’s Works. He had struggled in that fight in Halifax because he was in pain. But he had never admitted this, had never given up.

I couldn’t kill him — I knew that, Mr. Terrieux. Just as you could not let a child drown. I couldn’t kill anyone. That was my tragedy. I had failed everyone.

“He is trying to tell you something,” I heard. “But he can no longer talk very good — he is trying to ask you something.”

It was a soft voice.

I turned around. Sitting in the far corner, keeping a vigil with the dying, was a child of twelve or thirteen looking at me, with black curly hair and a stud in her nose, wearing jeans and sneakers and a blue leather jacket.

“Do you know him?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“He is my uncle —”

I could not see her well, and she did not come out of the shadows.

“Are you Teresa?” I asked.

“Yes. We’re here to take him to the hospital, but he keeps fighting it. He thinks the policeman will come and get him. But they won’t. It is over now.” She had a sweet grown-up voice, clever and penetrating.

“Your mother is here?”

“Oh yes — she’s just gone out for coffee. Do you know my mom?”

“Yes —” I said. “But it has been so long now.”

I looked down at him again, and in a moment Cynthia opened the door. A light bathed the young girl until Cynthia closed the door. When Cynthia realized who I was she gave a gasp.

Cynthia had aged too. She had short grey hair, her body had rounded, and she had the beginnings of a double chin. In fact she looked like Alvina. She wore a silver cross about her neck, and no makeup.

“Hello, Lyle,” she said. Her voice was huskier than before.

“You’re Lyle
Henderson
?” Teresa said.

I nodded.

“I read your sister’s book — it’s about you and her and Percy — isn’t it, Mom — I mean, it’s a grown-up book, but I could read it. She made me laugh about waxing the floor, and collecting Percy’s bugs.”

Everything was in slow motion. I wanted so badly to die.

I saw Teresa May stand, put her hand on the table near the bed. I became aware of a very strange sensation looking at this young girl’s hand.

“He wants to tell you he is sorry — for it all,” Teresa said. There was a pause.

She came farther out of the shadows and smiled at me — the autumn light touched her olive cheek softly.

“You are little Teresa May,” I said, almost in joy. “So everything turned out — for you — I know Percy lighted a candle for you — oh, on a dozen occasions. I remember that.”

Her eyes were soft and kind.

I realized at this moment, with Teresa watching me, that he had
never
been out of my thoughts. It was not Mathew Pit I had been even searching for, Mr. Terrieux; not since that fight in Halifax.

I had been trying to find
him.

I had gone to airports early and then earlier and then earlier still, thinking that I could
find
him. But he was not at the restaurants or in the airports or feeding the pigeons in the parks, though I sometimes followed children home until their parents became concerned. It was him I was seeking. And last year I had gone to the circus insane enough to think I could find him and take him on all the rides.

Cynthia sat down near me. She told me Mathew had bone cancer, and that she had informed John Delano where he was two weeks ago; and Delano advised her to leave him be, for it was too late for retribution. So he would go to the hospital and be treated for the pain.