Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  Tossing some piled-up mail aside, Leo asked them what had happened to his money in the drawer. To show how important this was, he had not changed his clothes. He still wore his hunting boots, hunting vest, and humphrey pants, dotted with specks of blood.

  The old house took on various shades of light as the wind blew, and seemed to Elly to smell of guns and fly rods and rubber boots.

  “Where’s the money?” Leo asked.

  “I don’t know,” my mother said, looking at the floor — a floor she had been vacuuming when last in the house. She looked at the creases the vacuum cleaner had made. At the midpoint in the rug was the very spot the vacuum cleaner had been turned off. After Rudy left yesterday she had gone into the washroom for a second, washed the blood away, had come out, in a daze, and couldn’t finish the vacuuming. Thinking of this, she glanced Rudy’s way and saw that he was looking at that exact same spot on the rug. Their eyes met and she looked quickly at the floor again.

  Although Leo cared for her, he was more than willing to admit a disappointment in trusting her. He had known her family well. Her adoptive father, old Mr. Brown, was a hump back whose shirts were bought at his store. Each year her mother picked fiddleheads and strawberries and he allowed her to pick them on his property.

  Finally he turned away from Mom and rubbed his hands together. “You can’t tell me what you did with the five hundred dollars,” Leo said.

  “No,” my mother whispered, shaking her head. Her legs trembled. She was going to say “No, because I didn’t take it,” but she’d already said she hadn’t taken it.

  “It wouldn’t be nice for a married woman to have to talk to the police, would it.”

  “No,” my mother whispered, looking up quickly, tears flooding her eyes.

  “Nor would it be too nice if I fired Sydney — well, why shouldn’t I?” Leo said in his strong river accent, which always comes to people here in the midst of deep emotion.

  But by now my mother couldn’t speak. She only shook in spasms, her left foot leaning on her right foot, a stance she had had since a child, whenever people at the orphanage were angry at her.

  “Tell them you didn’t do it,” Sydney said.

  Still she only cried, because of the kindness Leo and Sydney were trying to show her. Sometimes in the afternoon Leo had told her to stop working and sit with him and drink a cup of tea. He would talk about his wife, of how she had to go to the hospital, of how the world was changing and men acting like women and women acting like men.

  Now she felt she had betrayed him and those nice cups of tea. A stern and practical old man, but one who nonetheless cared very much for her. Sydney was laughed at by Mathew Pit, tormented by Mathew’s sister, Cynthia, and Elly had tried to protect him by telling him that Rudy was impressed by him. It may have been the worst miscalculation of her life.

  Leo spun around to Sydney. “Perhaps you did it for her — yesterday about five o’clock?”

  “Oh no,” my mother said, trying to wipe her eyes. “No,” she said. “He didn’t — he couldn’t — he never could — I did.”

  Sydney said nothing. The wind blew fiercely.

  “You did?” Rudy said, astonished.

  “I — I don’t know if I did or didn’t,” Mother said.

  “I — could have you prosecuted. One phone call.” Leo paused. “But you have children — it’s the children I think of — not you. Sydney, I will not take Elly’s money — but you will work on the bridge until you pay the five hundred back — you will pay it back. You have been a problem on this road before, Sydney — stole money from the church —and boxes of smelts and blamed it on others — and said things about people when they tried to help you. Well — and Ms. Whyne — Elly — Diedre Whyne, do you remember her? She advised you not to go off marrying Sydney. How do I know? I know because I am a friend of her father — she is my goddaughter — she cared that much for you — she wanted you to go off to school, didn’t she, and get an education —she tried very hard with you —”

  My mother nodded hopelessly.

  “But you didn’t go off to school, you got married to Sydney — now look at the trouble you’re in — you never took advice — we knew you were slow — at church — we knew, we helped you — let you do things for the Catholic Women’s League and help at the picnics — we all liked you. Oh, I sometimes think Ms. Whyne has very hard ideas — but her father is a friend and I trust her. Has she asked to see you recently? Last week didn’t she want to talk to you?”

  Again mother nodded.

  “But you’re frightened of her. Why?”

  My mother did not speak.

  “Sydney is telling you not to see her — isn’t he, because she is a social worker and ready to take care of you?”

  Leo McVicer said this without having the least understanding of social workers. He simply felt that Whyne was the nice young woman who at times came down to Christmas dinner and played the piano, and now and again played bridge with him and Gladys. She was a woman who was being useful to society, protecting people like Elly Henderson from themselves, which he felt was what women were supposed to do.

  “I think you put her up to this, Sydney — didn’t you! You believe you deserve this money — because of Roy — or perhaps what Gerald Dove has said about your daughter — and the supposed bad molecules?”

  “That is not true,” my father said.

  There was a long silence.

  “Go — before I decide to turn you in,” Leo said, gesturing at nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” my mother said, “I am — Mr. McVicer — I —”

  “What?” Leo said.

  “I didn’t get the upstairs hallway done.”

  “Go!” Leo roared. “Both of you go!” He roared so loud Rudy himself shook.

  They left and cut across the dark fields north toward the road, in silence holding hands. When they got to the road my mother stopped, stood still against an aged rotted spruce stump, and said out of the cold gloom of a November afternoon, “I did not steal.”

  My father sighed.

  “I know you did not steal,” he said, stuttering. “I know they think you did. I know Diedre will once again begin to assess us. That doesn’t matter. The only thing that bothers me is the poor old man.” He looked at her kindly.

  My mother nodded. In the last ten years Diedre had done everything she could to pry my mother away from Sydney. That my mother would not look upon her views as the right views, as the sound and practical views, poisoned the relationship.

  Elly thought all of this in a second — how Diedre would use this to hurt her.

  “Don’t worry — truth will out,” Sydney said.

  They continued their walk, not understanding how evil and darkness attach themselves to the good or great to destroy their will to live.

  “Why would she rob me, Rudy — why?” Leo asked. He turned sideways in his seat as he spoke, but just for a second and then straightened again. Then he turned sideways to listen to Rudy’s answer, staring at him sharply and straightened once more.

  “I don’t know,” Rudy said.

  “If she wanted the money, if she needed the money, she could have come to me —”

  Rudy nodded.

  He looked at Leo and was frightened. He was frightened of his temper, his well-known reputation for never giving in to those he suspected.

  “But they think I am terrible — so they’d rather steal from me than ask me a favour. How well did you know her?”

  “Oh, not well at all.”

  “Did you think that she was like this? Capable of anything like this?” He turned sideways to listen, and waited with a prolonged stare.

  “I didn’t think she was like that.”

  “No, no,” the old man said, drumming his fingers on the armrest. “She didn’t seem so to me either.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

  “Everyone is turning against me, that’s what I think,” he said finally.

  “No, Leo — tha
t’s not true —”

  But Leo could only think of all of his friends who were now dead, and of how little friendship he had left. He himself had never robbed a soul, had in fact done the opposite. Except that now he was being accused of careless disregard for his workers’ health twenty years before. It stung him deeply, for he had as yet found no way to fight against it. Or no way to fight against Gerald Dove, whom he had hired just for the purpose of this fight. Dove, whom he had taken from the orphanage on a whim and kept as his own son.

  “Dove has gone bonkers, you think?” he asked. “Power hungry, you think? Trying to destroy the man who made him, you think?”

  “I think so,” Rudy admitted, relieved that the subject for now was changed.

  “Yes — a little education. You know, Rudy, I could have chose anyone — from a number of boys at that orphanage. Careless disregard,” he said. “Am I a man of careless disregard?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I certainly am not,” he wagered, as if trying to provoke an argument.

  Nothing made him more furious than to think that these men, these grown men, men he trusted, who used those chemicals to keep down budworm disease and clear roads — when everyone else was doing the same, back in the sixties — would stop using these chemicals the exact moment everyone else did, and charge that he, Leo McVicer, was guilty of knowing what they themselves, and even scientists, did not!

  “Yes,” he said, glaring at Rudy, when he thought of it. “Many a lad turned against me bought their homes with money they earned from me, paid their stinking mortgages from my chequebook —”

  “I know,” Rudy said.

  “They aren’t men. They all have the blood of pigeons,” Leo said.

  Six years before, Leo had donated eighty thousand dollars to the university so the citizens could keep the university here on the river. Yet this very night, at the university, in that very wing McVicer himself had paid for, Dove was conducting an environmental study of his groundwater.

  And Leo was now being accused in the paper, a man with grade five education accused of being an elitist and against the working man, by Prof. David Scone, who had met the working class, not by calluses on his hands, but by reading Engels and Man. Leo did not understand this at all.

  Leo thought that bringing Gerald Dove back would accomplish three things. First, the accusations against him by the Environmental Protection Agency would be proven false. Second, Gerald would see Gladys, and see what folly their childhood love was. And finally, that Gerald Dove sooner or later would come to work for him on a permanent basis.

  None of it had happened. The accusations were as damning as ever. Gladys only remembered the wound in her heart when Gerald Dove went away, and Gerald Dove looked upon his daughter as he had when he was a boy. Instead of Dove coming to work for him they now could not stand the sight of one another. This was the first time Leo had failed so utterly in his calculations.

  Leo remembered carrying Gerald Dove in his arms over the swinging bridge on the Norwest Miramichi and looking into the child’s windblown red hair; and it seemed that on that bright sunlit day in 1953 he should have been warned.

  “A molecule,” McVicer said now, looking at the most recent article in the paper against his company and tossing it aside.

  It was a molecule, unseen in the winter cold and summer heat, unseen when children went sliding on the great dark hills, unseen when my mother poured bulldog lime, unseen on the forest floor near the great barren pools. Some people never felt the effects, but others — well, others’ immune systems were destroyed. And others were born with feeble hearts or lungs, and some with no pigment to their skin.

  “How can I fight them?” Leo asked, for the first time in his life uncertain. “How can I fight Gerald Dove if I care for him — or Elly if I care for her?”

  “I don’t know,” Rudy said, close to tears.

  “I know nothing about molecules,” McVicer continued. “I remember when I was a young boy hearing that there was such things as molecules, and I tried to collect the smallest piece of sand I could to find one.” He shook his head. “But I never did.”

  “I know,” Rudy said.

  “And now Elly — stole my five hundred dollars,” Leo said.

  Rudy asked if he could leave.

  Leo McVicer stood, lit his pipe, and felt in his pocket Elly’s dress tag, which he had found on the floor, as he watched Rudy drive away.

  ELEVEN

  At eight-twenty on the morning of December 8 my mother, sending Autumn and me off to school, had come face to face with the cheapness of a sexual misdeed, and could tell no one about it.

  She went for a walk. She realized she was two months’ pregnant, and so often her pregnancies had failed. (There were twins stillborn after Autumn, and a miscarriage.) The sunlight blinded her eyes, the autumn sky was blue, and the snowdrifts from the night before had turned into small glaring and crusted waves in the field beyond. On the river the ice was blue, and she remembered how she had walked on the ice last year with Sydney, when he went to set his smelt nets, and how glimmers of light had spiralled down like the fingertips of stars deep into the world beneath their feet. Bubbles of air lay trapped under that ice, on each side of those brilliant shafts of sunlight. And Sydney told her that the day, and those bubbles of air and those wonderful fingers of starlight, were there just for her. The wind, just as today, blew recklessly over it. Over time, she remembered, clouds had formed in the sky, and the sun became dimmer. Beyond them lay Northumberland Strait as it flooded toward the North Atlantic, beyond Prince Edward Island.

  She thought of this and was suddenly happy with her lot. For as Sydney told her, no one owned the ice, or the sunlight spiralling down into it, or any other sunlight, nor crisp autumn days, and no one had authority over her enjoyment of the world. That was given to her by something — someone else. He told her that when he was a boy he had become convinced that nothing man did or said mattered until this was understood.

  Elly walked away from our small dilapidated house and toward the church lane a few miles away.

  She stood with her back against the wind, or sometimes walked with her face into it, until finally, with her feet numb, she accepted a drive from Hanny Brown to the turn off of Saint Paul’s. Hanny had been like an older brother to her when she lived with his father and mother, and he looked at her the same way now. Often when he had a chance he would slip five dollars into her pocket, and every fall he came to our house with dresses for Autumn Lynn.

  Elly walked the lane to Saint Paul’s. The trees waved, got smaller and more crooked, the closer she came to the bay, and the wind turned more bitter against her face. She went into the church, which always to me smelled of heavy oak and the forgiveness of sins. She blessed herself and kneeled, and looked at the porcelain Christ, with his sides bloodied just as they always were, and remembered how she had cut herself when she had fallen over the vacuum cord. It was awful for Mr. McVicer to think this untruth about her. And what if he told the police — or what if Diedre found out? Diedre, whom she had once hugged and sent messages to they called “butterfly kisses”? How she had loved that little girl with the blonde hair and small mouth with its self-delighted smile.

  What had changed between them was simply a lived life. She now prayed for her siblings wherever they may be. She thought that if she ever found them — and here she would daydream — they would cherish each other and Elly would no longer have to be frightened that her children were going to be taken away (which is what Diedre told her might happen).

  She sat in the pew. Had fourteen years gone since her marriage? She and Sydney, once filled with hope, still clung to nothing. And yet had they both loved me, and little Autumn Lynn, for that long? And had she not taken her luck for granted? That Autumn was an albino — did that matter so much? She was still a wise and beautiful child.

  Then she remembered how Sydney had corrected Dr. David Scone, at Mr. McVicer’s house — a few months before the robbery.


  Scone had looked at the birds in the trees flying about the property on a windy summer afternoon, and had quoted a line from a poem he attributed to Byron, and Sydney said:

  “I’m sorry, but I think it is one of Keats’s sonnets.”

  The professor eagerly maintained that he could tell the difference between Byron and Keats and laughed. Sydney nodded and said not a word more. But Elly knew the professor had quoted this line to impress her and had been furious to be shown up by a simpleton.

  Yet for Sydney none of this mattered. Mom had asked him later that night where the line was from. He told her to go to his Poems of Keats, to look at page 111, and at line seven — and there, exactly there, was the line.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” she said.

  “Oh, because he seemed so certain,” Sydney answered, “and I hurt his feelings — I don’t want to do that. Besides, he has done nothing in his life he is proud of — he doesn’t want to be stuck at Saint Michael’s University — he’s tried for years to escape from here — and most of all he believes he knows more than I do.”

  Elly left the church and walked up the side road, and met my father. She told him that she was sad, and was worried about their trip — not for her, but for the children.

  “We have never been on a trip,” she said. “We have allowed our children to miss so much.”

  “I promise to do better. I will plan the trip for next summer — I promise,” he answered.

  She smiled valiantly and said nothing. She stared past him, her eyes dry.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She told him that she was pregnant again and was worried about a miscarriage, and about their situation.

  “We will make do with that too,” he said.

  Then she told him what Diedre Whyne had advised her a week ago.