Mercy Among the Children Read online

  Men can grow up on my river, or in my province or anywhere, and see nothing of violence or anger. There is as much rich or middle class here as anywhere — I have dealt with them. But if you are born in a shack near someone who wants your land, dislikes your presence, covets your wife, is angered by your marriage, you are in a part of the world millions and millions see and have no course to redress.

  I want to tell you something that is important in understanding my father and our relationship with both Connie and Mathew. I now believe Father knew who took the smelts but on principle would not say. More important, Connie Devlin knew who took the smelts as well, but was loath to jeopardize his relations with the Pits. If on their bad side they could make life terrible for him, just as they had at times for my father. Besides, the Pits were Connie’s first cousins. Connie had to blame someone so the Pits would not suspect he suspected them. He blamed the man the Pits disliked. This is how things are done when you are afraid. Connie goes to Mathew Pit, cap in hand (figuratively speaking), and asks him what he should do.

  “Hell, get the cops after the son of a bitch,” Mathew said, sniffing as he tore the backbone from a smelt. “They are always after me no matter what I do! — can’t shit and they be after me. It’s time we showed them what’s what!”

  “You think I should?”

  “Course.”

  “And if I have problems with that son of a bitch will you back me? — he already throwed me down from a roof and left me fer dead.”

  “Course,” Mathew sniffed.

  Now I wish to tell you that the decrees against my father were not constant, or even at that time inevitable — many months could go by without one. I am telling you of the occasions that I remember. I also remember walks in the woods, and picnics and fishing trips up Arron Brook in the spring where Dad would speak about poetry and Walt Whitman and Thoreau; yet what I say here is something to measure my father by — he did not know that he, and not Thoreau, was the real article, or that his civil disobedience went to the very soul of man.

  Still by that decree, Constable Morris came to our house. It was a day in late February; the snow smelled of dirt, and the trees were coated in grey ice. It was bitter cold at the door and Morris stood in a mist of damp air. He stepped inside and looked at our small surroundings. He was the authority come to show us who we were and to keep us in our place. (I remember feeling this even then.) If he told my father we were all fined a thousand dollars my mother and father would have believed him. My father did not understand what the courts did. Not in that way. (I use his gullibility to explain his greatness.)

  Connie had telephoned the police for years over things —he was an old hand at being a snitch. Say Jay Beard played his guitar on Sunday, the cops would be phoned, or if a grader was parked near his property over the weekend, or a property stake was removed. That is meaningless trifles. Now it was a box of smelts.

  Morris was laughing about the smelts. But when he came in he stopped laughing. He glanced at my mother and was transfixed.

  At her beauty. I could tell this though I was only eight years old. She was so beautiful. He could not take his eyes off her. He instantly saw how ordinary my father looked compared to whom he was married to, and it surprised him. I see his face suddenly beet red, and then somewhat accusatory when looking upon my dad and the surroundings he had offered my mom.

  I believe Morris’s anger with my father started at that very moment. He tried to deal with the matter objectively, but his eyes kept coming back to this woman sitting in the corner with a little albino child on her knee. As for Elly, her skin was pale, her eyes soft blue, her hair auburn that fell like cinnamon ringlets about her ears, while her smile when it came lightened man’s burden.

  Who would not want to take my mother away from such a sentence? My fight against the condescension and the scorn my father suffered started at that moment. I was just not aware of it then.

  “Now Sydney,” Morris said, taking out his notebook, “where are those smelts? Come on, you have some smelts, boy?” He no more than glanced at me, and then over at my mother again.

  “I have smelts,” my father said, looking at Connie.

  “Well then —” Morris said, smiling at my mother, “what does your wife Elly say of all this roaring and ranting? Come on, give the poor woman a break — give those smelts back to this man, will you now, Sydney, like a good fellow — and I’ll give you a break here. You don’t want to go to court over a box of smelts, do you, wasting a judge’s valuable time?”

  “No,” Sydney said, blushing.

  “No,” my mother whispered, lowering her head.

  “Well there now —” Morris tapped his notebook in his hand, waited for my mother to look at him, and then decided, and it was a decision that would carry a heavy consequence against us, that he could curry a certain favour with my mother, not if he believed Dad innocent, but if he suspected him. That is, he could influence Mother to be well disposed to him, Constable Morris, if my father had taken the miserable box of smelts and he showed leniency in that regard.

  All this time Connie Devlin stared over Morris’s shoulder first at Morris’s notebook and then up at my father, his boots covered in mud and a look of startled self-righteousness on his still obsequious face.

  I glared at him, seeing him as an enemy of my blood for the very first time. Morris got Dad to promise to replace the box of smelts before the season was over, and to shake Connie’s hand. At first Connie said he wouldn’t shake the hand of a coward, but Morris made them do so.

  Morris smiled. “Now Connie, we’ll get those smelts back to you and we will forget all about this — it’s hard enough having to patrol this area without having to deal with smelts.” He looked at mother, and his face actually registered pain that he would have to leave her presence. I understood this feeling from other men who had seen her. She was that beautiful. Then, with Connie Devlin behind him, Morris walked back to his patrol car.

  All was silent in our house for over five minutes. I looked at Autumn and she looked at me with a sad face. People were now entering our childhood world and seeing Autumn as an oddity. And she was now, for almost the first time, realizing she was different. And no one in the whole wide world could help her with this; and when she looked my way, for help, as she did that very moment and many moments later on, I could give her none.

  On occasion people had walked up the shore in the summer when they were having parties and taking the well-worn path into the timber, would sometimes drunkenly tumble upon my sister sitting in the trees beyond our house, combing the hair of one of her dolls. Once when they did, I heard them shriek and begin laughing as they ran back down the path in skirts and high heels.

  “There’s an albino back there! Jesus Christ, where are we — the Ozarks?”

  My mother looked at me now and sighed.

  “That’s a police officer?” she said finally, as if a question.

  “Yes —” My father nodded. They were again silent for another five minutes. The wind began to pick up in the trees. My mother had baked a cake, and had made molasses cookies for us, but now our feast was ruined and none of us knew what to do.

  “He is still a nice man for all of that,” Elly said.

  “Yes, he is,” Father agreed.

  “Do you think I should have offered him tea?” Elly said, smoothing her dress with her hands.

  “I don’t know,” Father said. His lips moved and he spoke under his breath calculating how much money a box of smelts would cost us.

  “Well,” he said finally, “A box of smelts is nothing — and you can help me too, can’t you, Lyle — we’ll make a challenge of it and have it back to Connie by tomorrow.” He looked over at me, picked up Autumn and put her on his knee.

  I told him I didn’t want to help him, nor did I think it fair to have to go out in the morning and collect a box of smelts when everyone knew Mathew Pit had stolen them.

  “Son, people have treated me unfair most of my life. To beg a tru
th in front of them is unconscionable, because truth gives them a respect they might not deserve. Besides, to think that they will have a better opinion of me for doing so is unwise. I didn’t take those smelts. I know this, and Connie knows this. He knows who did, but he is afraid. Mathew Pit is crazy, and people know this. My greater plan now is to get the smelts and give them away and then someday it’ll turn around. I know you are only young but what I tell you is true.”

  And he smiled at me, and smoothed Autumn’s white hair. Her eyes were pink and she wore pink glasses, rendered blind without them. She needed new glasses too, but we could not afford them. Once she was stumbling along a ditch without her glasses and being teased by some children as I walked home from fishing trout. I had to take her by the hand so she could find her way. Her dress was white, as were her stockings; but her stockings and her panties were often worn with age.

  Thinking of this, I challenged my father for the first time.

  “What about the time — people said that to Autumn —and you know what I mean — and they laughed at Mommie that day. I don’t want people laughing at Mommie when she went to the store.”

  I was breathing heavily and I was staring at the wall. My arms were folded in a childish tantrum.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Father said.

  “But maybe it matters to Mommie,” I shouted.

  “Oh no,” Elly said, smiling slightly and looking at my father.

  The next day we got Devlin a box of smelts. I remember Father froze his right hand doing so. We brought them to him in the afternoon. Devlin went about his house working and not acknowledging that we were there. His house was much nicer than my father’s, with an attached garage and a flower garden — covered in winter of course. He had gotten most of this because of money his father had left him.

  “Mr. Devlin, sir,” my father said, though he had known him since he was seven.

  No answer.

  “Mr. Devlin — here are your smelts.”

  Devlin looked over without comment.

  “Do you want us to leave them here or to take them inside the garage?”

  Connie pointed to a spot and said nothing more — as if he had been deeply affected by my father’s dishonesty, a person whom he had once considered his friend.

  On the way back down our lane in the setting sun, I told my father I would pay him back.

  “No,” my father said. “It is never a matter of paying people back. It always causes you more sorrow in the end.”

  I went home — went back to school. Smelt season soon ended, and not another smelt did I eat.

  SIX

  At Christmas I became aware, long before Autumn did, of our essential poverty. I knew of it by the time I was eight. Perhaps even before that. I caught it as one catches a warning wind on the south side of a fish shanty on the open ice. You know, in your most secret heart, the full force of that wind is just around the corner, but you stick to the side where there is sun, hoping the wind doesn’t find you out.

  We were one of the fifteen families in our parish given a charity box by the church. But Father insisted on earning ours. So he and I would go each December 22 in the frozen afternoon and help in the church basement to fill those cardboard boxes and wrap children’s presents.

  We worked alongside members of the parish who were much better off than we, as we wrapped presents and boxed turkeys and cranberry sauce for those in the community much like ourselves.

  The Poriers — a family of lower-middle-class duty and some acquired vanity — were always there. Penny Porier was a little older than I was. Dressed in a white rabbit coat, with a white fur hat and muff and white leotards, she entered my life smelling of peppermint and tied up with a Christmas bow one December afternoon when I was eight or nine; to me the embodiment of perfection. Just as was her house, and her father’s car, and the small bicycle with the horn that her brother, Griffin, had. I coveted that bicycle — I dreamed of it day and night, I took walks past their house to see it, even though Griffin would never let me on it. But once — once I touched it as he rode by.

  I know Penny’s father — Leo’s foreman and the priest’s brother, Abby Porier — liked others to see how busy he was; and he liked my father (whom he had competed with at horse-haulings as a boy) to know that no one had more responsibility than he himself. He was a stocky man with a bull neck and the proud look given to certain kinds of limited men who believe they earned whatever they received. It makes them prosaic, fearful of exhilaration or exuberance and stingy with their children even if they do not mean to be. To him, his paycheque and his Christmas bonus were a bestowal from no one and nothing but his own hard work and worth. He believed that it could never with one swipe of dismissal be taken away.

  He liked the idea that I would watch everything he did, from cleaning his truck windows to tying his boots. I could not help doing so. Griffin told me his father got calls from McVicer, sometimes at three in the morning.

  Griffin had driven in a backhoe. His father cherished Leo’s trust — it was like currency, really. And Penny and Griffin knew this, and both were self-assured because of it. Penny wore a Christmas ribbon in her hair. But what I did not know was that I wore Griffin’s old pants. He had sworn not to tell, but Penny knew.

  That year I remember someone asked what I was going to get for Christmas. Penny looked at me and my face froze. I looked at Griffin and he smiled when I said: “I’m going to get a bike like Griffin — just like that one there.”

  “Syd, your boy is going to get a bike?” Abby asked nonchalantly across the half-dozen tables. The air had the particular scent of cement basements, of dust and old wax, and a certain futility contained within it. Abby waited for Father to speak and peeked at his daughter. Griffin, his head down, kept nudging Penny. This ashamed and infuriated me. But I could say nothing.

  My father wore an ancient tie clip glimmering in the basement. He looked up at me, his face wan and tired from a life of work, as if to say (although I did not know it then), “This is your cross to bear, son.”

  Abby was called immediately after this moment to take a call from Leo McVicer. So Father kept working with his head down packing turkeys and toys. Griffin glanced at me once more, his neck pinched in his white shirt by his small green tie with a reindeer on the front. After ten minutes Abby came back, rubbed his coarse unshaved face, and said he had to leave.

  “Griffin,” he said, “don’t you say nothin’ — ’bout what I spoke about.”

  Griffin gave me a look of accepting pity and tired superiority. I did not understand that my clothes were what he was looking at.

  December 24 we went out late in the afternoon to deliver these boxes with Father Porier. If it was not Christmas Eve it would have been only another grey and lonely winter day. But Christmas Eve makes everything special for children. We delivered the boxes up and down the shore road, and I remember the sound of snow falling on each cardboard box of groceries.

  The boxes were piled in the back seat and in the trunk. Each box had a present for each child of each house, had a twelve-pound turkey donated by McVicer himself, had preserves and nuts and dark fruitcake from McVicer’s own store, and barley toy candy and candy canes for the children.

  Most of the houses were off the unpaved shore road, and every house was easy to deliver to except the Voteurs’. That day their father was waiting for us, with a shovel, the crotch of his pants tom out, and wind blowing chimney smoke far up over his head. He did not want a box for himself. He was drunk and was sitting on the porch step awaiting us. At five foot five and 125 pounds, he had the unfortunate name of Samson. The Sheppards were his cousins and the year before had ordered his family to move. Samson and his wife and children had just gotten back in. It was the last house before the reserve.

  The bay had made ice, and the waves had frozen in midair. Glassy twilight came with the smell of smoke.

  Samson sat here at four o’clock in this waning light of a bitter December afternoon. Seeing the crotch out of
his suit pants, his face covered in small pricks of greying beard, I had my first glimpse — my first real glimpse — of a poverty of spirit, and I associated it in my young mind with Abby Porier, with his suit pants too tight.

  I knew something about the Voteurs. I knew Cheryl, who was in my class. I knew they had a son, Darren, who was Autumn’s age. I knew Diedre Whyne had come to them with the police one October night and the social services had filed a motion against the parents and wanted to bring Cheryl and her sister, Monica, to Covenant House, which Diedre ran for abused girls.

  I looked at their wet shingled house smelling of pulp and darkness and the sad scent of smoke, like eggs on raw air. In the house the children looked raggedly from the single-pane windows. You could spy one, if you looked, at every window looking out at us. Cheryl, Monica, and Darren.

  Worse than the dark unattended house having no decorations for Christmas, the children had placed one light behind the curtain, and a plastic Santa Claus was stuck to the window of the front door. Their door faced the bay, but like so many rural houses of the poor they were surrounded by land and owned no property, had the bay in front of them and never had a boat.

  “Maybe you should take this box in, Sydney,” Father Porier said. There was a moment of silence. I wanted to yell to my Dad not to do it. Then Father sighed, looked over his shoulder, and told me to hand him the box from the back seat with the large boxed doll. Taking the box he got out of the car.

  “I’ll kill you,” the man said.

  Never minding this threat, my father walked across the smoke-scented yard as snow began to fall in dreary flakes over the old peaked roof.

  Samson stood, raising his shovel as my father walked up the slippery steps, and started to move the handle back and forth four or five inches, as if taking aim with a baseball bat. I thought of the stations of the cross on the church windows as I stared at my father’s dark hair and thin neck. If Samson swung he would split my father’s head wide open.