Mercy Among the Children Read online

  “God, whatever will you do?” Diedre had asked Mother that afternoon; and then she whispered: “David Scone is divorced and does like you very much, can’t you tell? He also is a professor! — a professor showing interest in you — my dear —”

  “I thought he was your boyfriend,” Mother whispered back, trying to show interest out of politeness.

  Diedre looked at her strangely and then smiled. “I do not have boyfriends, love.”

  “But I love Sydney,” Mother said. There was a pause. Mother heard a grasshopper tick in the grass beside her bowl of blueberries, and stood and moved five paces away. Diedre followed and kneeled beside her once again. It was as if— and Mother sensed this — my father’s feelings for her did not matter, that they believed Sydney had a calculating mind from which they would free her.

  “Can Sydney after all his trouble learn about love?” Diedre whispered finally. My mother had been waiting for the shoe to drop. For all her young life, shoe dropping, reprimand coming, chores given were the things she knew about.

  “If he had to learn it I would not seek it,” Mother replied, still whispering, which showed in a truly elemental way that she would always match wits.

  Within five minutes, a sharper, colder, and more longing wind came from the bay, and reminded one of autumn coming on.

  “I will name one of my children Autumn,” Mother said, “for the wind has informed me I will have a daughter.” And again she stood and walked five paces. Again Deidre followed and plopped her bowl beside Mother’s.

  “So, Missy, did the wind inform you if that would be your fifteenth or sixteenth child?”

  Late that evening, when she came back to her rooming house, a two-storey white building with a large enclosed veranda, and saw Sydney waiting for her on the steps, with battered boots on his feet, his hands bruised from work, his body aching from piling lumber at $1.65 an hour, she realized how much she did love him.

  Diedre told my mother she could have a job in Fredericton far away from Sydney Henderson and my mother should count herself lucky. My mother did try to feel lucky, but could not. The road, the little leaves on the trees — all of this, the dusty quality of the clouds, all these miracles she would miss if she went away.

  So that Sunday, three days after their blueberry-picking excursion and a day before she was supposed to go to Fredericton, Mom telephoned Diedre from her rooming house and said she could not possibly take this job.

  “He’s bullying you — he talked you out of it, hasn’t he?” Diedre said. “Has he hit you or something?”

  My mother whispered that this was not true, but she was crying so much the answer seemed a lie.

  “I love you,” Diedre said. “You will not ruin your life — I want to take care of you — but at times you are infuriatingly ungrateful. Think of his attitude toward you — and think of David Scone’s attitude and how he cares so —”

  “Does he care for all women, this Dr. David Scone from the university?”

  “I can tell you all women,” Diedre said excitedly.

  “But then why did he fight with his ex-wife?” Elly whispered, tears running down her cheeks. “That is no way to honour someone. Sydney has not fought with me — and we believe the same things —”

  “Don’t be childish. David Scone’s relations with his ex-wife is a private matter, and we are not discussing David Scone’s attitudes but Sydney Henderson’s attitudes toward you —”

  “But,” my mother whispered, “what are your attitudes toward Sydney?”

  Diedre said that if Mother continued to speak like that she would just hang up on her and let her live with Sydney in a shack and see what would happen. So my mother, used to being bullied so that her fingers were arthritic by being rapped, said nothing else. Then Diedre, placated by my mother’s silence, spoke:

  “Just go over for a year — you will meet real people. I love you more than anyone does — but — let’s just say this: Dr. David Scone knows something about this man — Sydney.” Here she became short of breath, as people do when they wish to relay information that they fear might not be readily accepted. “Sydney went over to the office one day and tried to bully David into getting him enrolled. He did — with big plans about this and that. But David was not bullied and soon got rid of him! Take this job we have offered — it is your only chance! God — you’re a child. Babies and diapers to that man — who as you know has been implicated in all kinds of things!”

  My mother, staring at the dresser as Diedre spoke, saw the white stone Father had thrown into the room, and swayed by this, whispered, “Goodbye,” hung up, and with a cardboard suitcase, and the white stone safely in her pocket, made her way to Dad’s property.

  THREE

  Mother had never seen my father’s house, for he was ashamed of it. It was the house we, the children, would grow up in. It was, even by Mom’s standards, a living proof of destitution. The first day she saw it, she told us, she stared at its yellow and red front, its tarpapered sides, its long tin stovepipe, before she entered in. Perhaps she was thinking she might turn around and walk all the way to Tabusintac and never see him again.

  Across Arron Brook and beyond the dark spruce trees, on that day, as on all days, sat the Pit residence. The Pits’ and my father’s houses were the only two on this entire stretch.

  She entered the house, for the door was left open. The table was metal, as were the two kitchen chairs. There was a cot in the comer near the wood stove, and books over the floor, books of every size, books on every subject, history, philosophy and geography, novels. Books that he had collected from the time he was fifteen when he had gotten his first paycheque, working in a batch house in the woods. And books now collecting dust, long ago pored over. Hemingway, Voltaire, Conrad, George Eliot, and a hundred other authors sat within her reach.

  It had turned cold with an east wind. The stove was out, and she could see her breath. On the back wall the paper was peeling, the side of one wall had a huge water stain, the kitchen window lay jammed, and beyond this was the moan of the wind in the trees. Far away was the roof of Rudy Bellanger’s house, Leo McVicer’s son-in-law. He had married Gladys McVicer, the spoiled eccentric daughter of Leo, the year before, in a wedding with five hundred guests, including the premier and a senator from Maine.

  My mother set her things down and began to scrub.

  The place was almost clean by the time Father got home that night.

  “Elly,” he said, “you didn’t have to do this. Why aren’t you at the boarding house?”

  “They were about to kick me out,” she said. “I wouldn’t take a job in Fredericton —” She looked at him, and realized how foreign he looked to her at that moment, coming from the woods, with his chainsaw, his back covered in drizzle and wood chips and sweat, his eyes ablaze from expended energy and glowing from the wildness of where he worked and the danger of it besides.

  “Oh,” he said. “I guess you are stuck with me.”

  “You have a lot of books,” she said, looking about the dismal place, dismal in the way the cold enters a small place in the middle of a bog.

  “It’s what I have spent my money on,” he said almost apologetically, because he didn’t want her of all people to think of it as an affectation. “I never read a book until I was fourteen — I taught myself how to read — no one taught me — but as you can see I’ve made up for it.” He paused, looking at her worried and tired face. “And you know what I have found out in books?” He smiled.

  “No,” Elly said.

  He sat beside her. Outside, the air was bleak and thick with the monotony of rain, and they smelled northern fall above the tin roof, the quiet scent of autumn hunger. A moose bird flitted in the drizzle from a spruce’s dark bottom branch and hopped to his old tin barrel in the evening.

  “I will say this once, and not to demean all the good they have tried to do for you. But I have found out, even before the death of my father, that no one can do an injury to you without doing an injury to t
hemselves.” The wind and rain battered the eaves of the shoebox-shaped house, as if to mock him.

  “Those who scorn you taunt only themselves — I knew this without reading one word; because in reading one is reminded of the truth man is given at birth — by man I mean man and woman. My father never had to read a book to feel ashamed after he hit my mother or me.

  “When I was younger I drank a lot — very much — and when I was drunk I did and said silly things. One was pushing a boy from a roof — oh yes, I was drinking even then. I don’t intend to drink anymore — but I wanted to tell you that — so you would know — I have to be vigilant in that regard. But it has caused my other regards.”

  She looked at him, bewildered. He smiled, and filled a pot with water for tea, walking about in large untied miner’s boots.

  “They put you out of a boarding house —” he continued. “Well, they have demeaned themselves. The nuns bullied you as a little girl and you washed floors for them, peeled potatoes, and went to mass every morning. I know the nuns. But now your friend Diedre has harmed you and yet speaks about a future society in which no harm will happen. I have heard her speak. Last year I went to a lecture she gave. Well, they are fine people. But they have never lived one night like either you or I. Yet do they have one bit more?”

  “Perhaps they have more certainty in themselves,” Mother answered.

  “A certainty when wrong is still wrong,” Father said. “Connie Devlin is certain I caused all his problems all my life. He plans to destroy me because I pushed him from a roof in anger. I know this.”

  He paused again, and scratched his head, and tried to think of what to say to convince her.

  “The problem today is between two groups of people,” he said as he stirred the pot for tea. “One group believes the world must change — and David Scone and Diedre might wish to use you to prove it. There is a second group, the group that you and I belong to. The group that says that in man’s heart is the only truth that matters. You cannot change a constant by changing how rules might be applied to this constant. Someday Diedre will see you are closer to the truth than she is, but it will be a long struggle.”

  Mother nodded quickly, as if she hoped he would end his reflection because she did not understand it; and she had never seen this side of him. She lowered her eyes and breathed heavily and sighed.

  “I will stay here,” she said, “and we will be married — and what happens will happen, for or against us doesn’t matter now.”

  FOUR

  My parents moved into that house across the lower flat scrub beyond Arron Brook from Mathew and Cynthia Pit.

  A year after Dad and Mom were married, Diedre Whyne came to visit. Just as she had predicted, my mother was pregnant. And she looked about the terrible little place with a certain recrimination. God, what poverty — she had never seen it before. And again I add, who can blame her for her reaction, here in such a place at such a moment?

  She came to the point. Cynthia Pit had met with Diedre, who now worked for the Department of Social Services. Cynthia was very upset, told Diedre she was pregnant — just as my mother was — and that Sydney was the father. Cynthia said she had gone to Sydney to ask for some financial support, and Syd had rebuked and struck her. It was, Diedre suggested, an awful situation, worse because of its sordid rural implications. My father said nothing.

  Diedre had come to suggest a solution. My father would have a blood test as soon as the child was born and clear the matter. If he was the father, Diedre would see that the marriage done in haste was annulled, and Elly could still go to Fredericton and take that job.

  Sydney looked at Diedre and said kindly he would not take any blood test.

  “And why not?” Diedre asked, tapping a notebook on her knee. “What have you to fear?”

  “Nothing. But it will cast hilarity on Cynthia if it is done and shame on the child. I will not participate in the shame of one and the ridicule of another for my own welfare in a community that has had no use for me from the time I myself was born, has called me simple-minded and my father mad, at the request of a woman who suspects me of beating my wife and hopes for the failure of my marriage.”

  Diedre thought this false heroics, and a grand wily scheme to escape responsibility. She turned at the door, and with it opened said “Now Elly, your last chance — I will wait fifteen minutes.”

  She waited, but Mom never left the house.

  The night of Cynthia’s child’s birth there was a heavy snowfall, pleasant but with a numbing cold. There were no cars moving on our highway; the grader had not plowed. Christmas was soon to arrive and people were stuck in town.

  Cynthia was in labour so Mother, eight months’ pregnant with me, and Father crossed the inlet on snowshoes to help her.

  Mathew, drunk for days, lay belly down on the couch. Now and then he would get up and drink from a bottle of wine. There was no one else in the house except Trenton Pit, the young retarded brother. My father once commented that the place was in a shambles. The old woman had gone at noon for the doctor and hadn’t returned. Cynthia was herself drunk. Christmas lights shone in the dark by the bed where the twenty-year-old woman lay. The string of lights had been plugged into a small wall socket and left to twinkle in obscurity as the radio played country tunes.

  “It’ll be drunk when she calves,” Mathew said, leaning over and leering at my mother.

  All his life my father felt ashamed when he heard men blaspheme pregnancy. He had seen much of the drunken terror of men, ridiculing women when they were pregnant.

  “It’s no use to be boisterous now — you should be calm,” he said.

  Now that the blizzard had swept in from the bay the last traces of streetlights were blotted out. No doctor would make it in this storm. My mother boiled water and my father prepared as best he could to deliver the child.

  At nine o’clock on the night of Christmas Eve the child was born. It was a girl. It remained still, a strange grey colour, the umbilical cord about its neck. Mathew inspected it as one might inspect a carburetor — that is, with a good deal of curiosity.

  He then covered the infant in the Christmas lights that lay on the floor. They twinkled over the child’s grey naked body. Cynthia lay still. The moon came out and shone on her naked pelvis and legs.

  Mathew picked it up, still covered in lights, and tossed the child up and down in the air, trying to revive her.

  Father took the child, and breathing into her mouth tried to revive her. He held its nose, counted and breathed softly, and then massaged its chest.

  The moon was now full on the sparkling white snow, and all the land was bathed in peace. The infant child was grey the colour of the far-off moonlit snow.

  I was born January of 1970.

  Autumn, my albino sister, was born a year later.

  FIVE

  In the seventies Dad could get no work, and so went smelt fishing in the winter. I would walk beside him and watch him haul his nets up through the great blue ice. We would leave the smelts to freeze in the sparkling air, which always made them taste much better. Far away on the ice were other fishermen’s sheds, and the glare made my eyes water, and sometimes the wind would smell of beans at five o’clock on a Saturday night.

  On Saturday Mom would wax the floor, and the smell would loiter in the air and in the shadows from the lingering sun. And Autumn and I would put on our woollen socks after supper; Dad would put on an old Elvis Presley record and Autumn and I would dance across the floor until it was shiny and smooth. Sometimes Mom had me as her puck and Dad had Autumn as his, and they would heave us across the slippery floor toward the opposition’s goal. We would slide like mannequins and crash into each other like shuffleboard stones, while outside and overhead beyond our music the cold night blossomed in winter’s crystal silence.

  Everything went fairly well until the winter my father was accused of stealing a box of smelts.

  Connie Devlin had his nets down below my father on a flat stretch. My father had t
he better stretch. At dark, just when the twilight flushed across the ice and wind began to moan through the trees, my father would come off the ice, hauling his wooden box of smelts by a rope through his frozen and cracked leather mittens. Connie had a habit of not checking his nets, and my father, who I think always felt responsible for Connie, worried about the smelts.

  It sounds ridiculous, two men with nothing at all fighting over a miserable nothing at all on a flat of ice in the middle of our great bay. Oh, our bay in the winter — how many memories it brings; ice breakers and seagulls and purple-tinted sky.

  Yet the smelt fight reminds me strangely of Down and Out in Paris and London, in the hostel where two desperate men are fighting over the one pair of clothes because one wears them to panhandle in the day and the other at night. I know those men in my blood. But you see — my father did not want to fight over a box of smelts.

  “I will make it up to you,” he said to Connie.

  I know now, as I should have then, that my father never stole as much as a matchbox in his life, but they were stolen. By who — well, Mathew Pit and the Sheppard brothers, Danny and Bennie, very likely. Bennie who wore a leather jacket with studs up the arms.

  What I had not seen until this time is how we were marked. Oh, I had seen some derision against my father at a horse-haul or church picnic. Yet by the time she was five Autumn knew of it more than I. She was aware of how people looked at her at church — a place I soon hated, with people (all of them) I soon despised. She was the mark that showed who we were as a family, because she was an albino — precisely because of this. And she was to feel this too deeply all her life.