“She suggested that I have a procedure and then I would be free of it, and think of my own self.”
“Ah — yes,” he said. “Many people do that now — abortion.”
“Abortion,” my mother said, and she burst out laughing, for honest to God I don’t think she had heard that word before in her life.
Long after my mother was asleep that night my father remained awake. He paced and he thought, and the night was wild, and he was alone. I could see his light on in the room as I tried to work on my homework. I was hoping to sneak Dad’s old rifle out the next day and hunt, and I had torn out an advertisement for a knife, and I kept this under my pillow or in my back pocket.
Of course because of my mother (or I blamed it on her) we said the rosary every night. Tonight we had prayed that she wouldn’t get sick with this pregnancy, and that no harm would come to Autumn Lynn. We prayed for my father, that he keep his job, and that Leo’s money be found.
I lay in my bed under the slanted walls of my small room, which was built at the back corner of our shoebox, and listened to my father and imagined what he was thinking.
Like most men who have had little happiness, my father had expected this newfound happiness, the one he had taken in his job, not to last. And he was right. It was an awful situation for him and Mom. Three nights before, every one of our dreams seemed possible.
He felt he should resign right away. But he could not. Then he decided that if he proved himself at work — worked as hard as he could, worked until he puked — McVicer might finally see that he had erred.
Still he felt that the love he had for my mother, and the love she bore him and the children, was always under assault. So he was alone with his thoughts because I was not old enough to understand them or to help alleviate them.
He had never told my mother but he had heard all about Polly’s Restaurant; that men had teased him about her just as boys teased Autumn and me at school. Even Cynthia had come to him last summer, the day after he had corrected Professor Scone, and asked him to a dance at the new community centre. I was with him and I remember what she said. He told her he could not go, and she winked.
“Oh, when are you going to smarten up and get out and have fun? I bet Elly does.” She sighed. “Down at Polly’s Restaurant each and every day with Rudy Bellanger — I wonder what they get up to in his car along those lonely roads?”
My father had given me a wretched, courageous look and said nothing.
“Why, God, do you allow this to happen?” he now said. I heard him faintly speak this line from my bed. It never bothered me. For I knew my father and I knew he spoke like this. But if he ever got an answer from God or anyone else, he did not say so to me. When I talked to God I did not ask why things happened — I accused him of what was happening — that was the essential difference between father and me.
He looked at my mother sleeping as the wind howled. Her small arms were outside the blankets. Her face was pensive, and now and then she tossed. Thinking he would wake her, he stopped pacing and he sat down.
He and Elly had passed each other many times in the summer, in those fields when he was a child baling hay for her adopted father and she picking strawberries. They had even stood beside one another in church, and had not known it.
That is, he had not met her until it was ordained. This is what he knew in his soul and this is what he told me many times.
To have another child now might be unwise. It would not be difficult to stop it; there were those around who would do it, and offer a benevolent service, especially to a child like us. I mean that’s part of it although they would never say so. My mother and father’s dreams were always dispensable to certain people, who for some reason believed that they themselves and their own dreams were indispensable.
Yet a different moral problem had confounded my father for the past week. It was something no one else who worked on the bridge would have troubled themselves with, yet to my father it was the only thing a man of conscience should worry about.
Connie Devlin had been fired for incompetence. He was accused of being drunk on the job. He had come to Sydney seven days before begging him to intercede with the boss. He said that being fired meant it would be difficult to get his unemployment and it was near Christmas.
Because Sydney was trusted, some men asked him to arbitrate on their behalf. Devlin coming to him was not unusual. They relied on him, and they teased him. All mocking is a form of fear. Those who are most mocked are generally most feared. My father was mocked all of his life.
He thought about what he should do. The next day, he went to the office and pleaded Connie Devlin’s case.
Porier was a man who lived by McVicer’s rules. He had built his house on McVicer property, shopped at McVicer’s store, took a loan out for a car with McVicer’s blessing. Porier was not at all a big man — but he had a bull-like neck and thick arms — and his two children, Griffin the boy and Penny, were looked upon by him and his arrogant wife as being far superior to other children.
Connie Devlin as night watchman carried a time clock that had to be punched at intervals of one half hour. During the night previous to his being fired the clock was missing seven punches. Thus three and one half hours had gone by when Connie wasn’t cognitive enough to punch the clock.
Sydney argued that Connie should be given the benefit of the doubt and Leo not finding out would be the best course.
“Perhaps it’s like he says — the clock is broken,” Sydney said.
Porier did not want Leo to know how good a worker my father actually was. He was jealous of him. He was worried that Sydney might use this firing as leverage; and he was very worried about Sydney’s capabilities with the men themselves. “The men don’t appreciate what you do for them,” Porier said.
Sydney said that it did not matter what the men thought.
“I hate gullible people — they are a burden to everyone,” Porier said. He sniffed and hauled out a map of the river, for no other reason except to prove to Sydney how busy he was. On the desk was a picture of his children, and one of Gladys Bellanger holding Penny in her arms. She was Penny’s godmother.
It was cold outside, and cement mixed with mud covered the whole acre where the trucks were parked, and the sky was like a blue stone. The yard was grey and barren. Small trees bent over the cliffs along the water, the same stifled colour as the muddied concrete.
The bridge had inched out and out into the river, and they were sinking the support shafts. Porier was extremely pressed by his work, and had disdain for anyone interrupting him.
Now he glanced up from his map.
“Devlin would never do this for you,” Porier said, shaking his head in time to: “Devlin would not he would not he would not.”
My father again nodded, and said that this was probably true but if he took his cue from Mr. Devlin he would never have told the truth in his life. He smiled at this, because it was said good-heartedly.
Then my father said: “If you give him his job back, I will do an extra shift as watchman. That would very likely relieve your suspicions.”
Finally Porier, without moving, but throwing a pencil the length of the trailer, said he would give Connie Devlin another chance. His face was dark and riveted with anger, his neck swelling with muscles, his fingers blunt and thick. His anger was always like a passion coming over him. He waved his hand in dismissal and added if even one half hour was missed Connie would be fired and, he added, like the afterthought of a general who sends people to their death, so would Sydney Henderson. And if Leo did not like it, he himself would quit and he could get his son-in-law to finish the bridge.
Moreover my father would not become work foreman at this time, as Porier was planning, which meant no forty-dollar-a-week raise.
Later that morning, a week before the robbery, Sydney went to Connie’s home. When he told Connie the conditions, Connie stared at him and said in astonishment: “You didn’t do that for me?”
“Of course,�
�� Sydney said.
“Why?” Connie said, and he looked around at no one in particular as if wanting to relay to someone his feelings of astonishment.
“I don’t think you being fired over one incident was fair,” Sydney said.
“Fair,” Connie said, mulling over the word, and licking his lips together. “My, my.”
Tonight, a week later, as Elly slept, Sydney pressed his hands together like a child forming a church steeple and remembered the weak expression on Connie’s face when he had said “My, my.” He had taken two shifts as watchman for no pay. Connie had not once thanked him.
Elly was pregnant again, we were growing older, and here he was still living in a shack. He knew the world Elly had come from. But he had not improved it much. Diedre Whyne of course was right, and this was part of the reason his soul was inconsolable. If they took the child away things would be better. As far as finite things went, Ms. Whyne was right. But of course Elly and he would not do that. Could not.
What about the car he had just promised her, which she had told Autumn and me? All his life my father had witnessed men who had had better luck and had gained much more than he, some through deceit and treachery. But there was nothing to be gained in worrying about them.
“It will happen as it is supposed to,” Father muttered that night. Although saying this was no comfort at all. Suddenly Devlin’s smile pressed a heavy weight on my father’s heart, just as Prof. David Scone’s dismissal did years before. He reached forward and stroked Elly’s hair. Then he kneeled and prayed. Why did a grown man do this on his knees in his underwear? I do not know. I have never been able to understand why.
I have always known my father believed in the necessity of a stoic life, and still and all hoped with stoicism for some proof of life being worthwhile.
Wind wailed against our house, and it was dark up on the highway. Now and again a tractor-trailer with a load of peat moss would grind along the road, stopping to turn toward the detour and the old bridge farther along the river, and the lights would catch our upstairs window, and show Father pale and almost naked. Yet no matter how thin my father looked, he was strong and impenetrably faced the cold and snow. He would work and had worked in below-zero all day in a sweater without a coat. Ice and snow was his world. The fire of ice; the sweet blue orb of snow.
TWELVE
When Rudy Bellanger went to Mathew Pit late the afternoon after his incident with Elly, shaken and white, with a story about how my mother had tricked him by showing him her panties then refusing to comply, and would certainly tell Leo that he had assaulted her, Mathew looked unimpressed. He had always felt she was like that: a bitch from the village of Tabusintac who milked cows as a little girl, went to church, and kept a crucifix under her pillow. And now was married to a simpleton who read books and talked in riddles. These antics were nothing. Mathew said he knew all about women like her, and he banged a bottle of rum down heavily on the table as if to prove it.
Mathew said he had himself dated her and had long known the girl. Rudy’s fault, Mathew advised, lay in his good nature and his kindness, and his general decency. Mathew sniffed and folded his arms and tapped his boots on the linoleum floor. But now it was time to get tough, Mathew said. Rudy shuddered when he looked at Mathew Pit’s face.
“How are we going to get tough?” Rudy whispered.
“If that’s the kind of woman she is — we can get her back soon ’nough,” he said, in a raspy tired voice.
The air was dulled by the smell of burning wood and autumn air coming through the front window onto the dust-covered sill of Pit’s old house.
For seven years Mathew felt himself best friends with Rudy Bellanger, whom he called Banger, and had done everything he could to be entitled to something when the old man died. His biggest mistake, however, was at certain times to trust Rudy with information. Last year, he had advised Rudy about the property where the highway would go, and was exasperated when Rudy told his wife, who immediately informed her father. Leo then bought that sliver of property for himself, making another thirty thousand dollars profit. Mathew, who never had the front money to buy it, had informed Rudy because he wanted a split.
“You stupid no-nut bastard — you don’t do that,” he had said. “You keep these things quiet,” he said, pinching Rudy’s cheek and pretending it was a joke. But his smile, showing white even teeth, was angry. “The goddamn McVicers get everything — everything all the time — this shoulda’ been for you — the Whynes and McVicer share this whole area and we is nothin’ but peasants.”
Still, Mathew was not about to see anything else go up in smoke because a bored wife flashed her crotch hair. He knew how Leo liked this woman, and was of course aware of her good looks. For the last few months he was wanting to discredit her not only for his own vainglory but because being a realist (and knowing Rudy’s weakness with Cynthia) he could sense that something would happen that might jeopardize his friend. He had warned Rudy to stay away from Elly on four different occasions, but the last thing Rudy understood was himself.
Mathew was more angry with my father, whom he had always considered slow and dumb. (He did hear that Sydney had read Tolstoy and Conrad, but what did that matter?) How could Sydney have set this all up, he thought.
Mathew Pit believed people viewed the world as he himself viewed the world. And Mathew was totally unaware of how far his imagined plans had gone, over the last few years, and unaware of how dependent he was upon plans to secure Rudy’s trust and receive recompense for this trust. When he was drunk Rudy often said they would be partners as soon as the old man died.
But because of this incident with a woman Mathew himself was still sometimes enamoured of, Mathew’s house of cards was beginning to implode without anything being realized.
Mathew had looked at Rudy that late afternoon, a stained bolt-shaped ring on his index finger and a cigarillo in his mouth. Behind his head under the dreary window a calendar with a picture of a half-naked woman was grimed with thumbprints.
“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of that girl,” Mathew said, snap ping a bit of leather shoelace with his heavy hands.
Mathew talked in a whisper. His eyes glanced to his left and then his right, and he went back to repairing a snowshoe, tying it off as conscientiously as an artist.
When Rudy left Leo McVicer’s that afternoon, a half hour after my parents had, he was well aware of what had really happened. Mathew had robbed the house.
Rudy had been appalled by the look of Elly, and he could not justify destroying the young woman’s life. He drove to Mathew Pit’s after he left Leo’s, determined to get the money back, to cut all his ties with Cynthia.
Mathew shook his head and yelled something indiscernible to Trenton’s dog, then kicked at it. He did this to further his control over Rudy Bellanger. What infuriated Rudy about this was that he sensed in Mathew’s movement how much Mathew knew about him, and disliked about him.
“You can’t do anything else to her — this must be the last thing — she is just a poor woman — they have nothing,” Rudy advised Mathew Pit. “I don’t mind getting rid of them, as you say, but I don’t like cheating old Leo in order to do it.”
That is, Rudy said what weak people always say to prove they are of one and the same mind with others. Of course he minded getting rid of my mother. It was the only thing he minded more than cheating old Leo. Besides, he felt Leo had cheated him, and was at the bottom of his heart somewhat happy.
But by his own weakness all this had happened. Now he said:
“I need the money back.”
Mathew laughed. “The hell you do. I’m the one got you outta this scrape — you are the one, my boy, who loused up my deal with the land north of the river — I bet Leo thanked you for reminding him there was one sliver of land he didn’t control.”
“I know — he was wrong — but you can’t keep the five hundred,” Rudy implored.
“I’m going to keep it till after Christmas — by then everything wi
ll have blowed over.” Mathew spoke with calm assurance and had the studious look of a man who is used to holding others’ feet to the fire.
Rudy could do nothing but say he would go see the police if this continued.
“Police — police, is it! Leo would want that — he’d welcome it.” Mathew gazed at Rudy with eyes that were unfocussed and unnerving. There was a bit of blond whiskers on his upper lip and chin. He wore a jean jacket and heavy work boots covered in mud. His blond hair was slicked back in the ducktail he always wore, even though the fashion had long ago changed.
Mathew thought anyone who dressed differently was a faggot. He did not know how else to describe his anger and frustration when he saw them. The boys looked like girls and yet condescended to him because of their education. And if he was anti-intellectual (as Leo McVicer was), he had a right to be, by birth. All his life they in some way or the other had spit in his face, and those whom he had trusted after three years away at university looked upon him with dismissive conceit. But when their cars or motorboats were broken they came to him.
Their treasure was education, which he did not understand, and so he (and his sister, Cynthia) teamed with Rudy as a business partner not because Mathew knew business but because it didn’t threaten or hurt him. In this maze of confusion he had of late suspected Sydney Henderson of being one of them, the intellectuals, one of those who with half a chance would dismiss his entire life. So it was not important if Sydney or his wife got blamed for anything. He would blame them for anything he chose. He had dated her and she had scorned him. Worse, Sydney had a job on the bridge. The bridge was a large project, part of the project that would create the new highway through land Mathew had instructed Rudy to buy. It would have meant over a year of high wages.
Mathew had spoken about sabotaging it. He was now set on this course.
“I don’t know about their concrete — and part of that last span is buckled,” Mathew had said the week before. “What if I took a piece of dynamite — then look out, eh?”
Mercy Among the Children Page 9