Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  At a very unspectacular moment the prosecution asked how Sydney treated the boy. Mathew’s face moved quickly, like a picture gone slightly out of frame.

  “Torment.”

  “You mean Sydney tormented the boy.”

  “Big torment — offered him what he couldn’t give him. Offered me a job — didn’t want nothin’ to do with him — knew how he operated — torment — told him — didn’t want him over botherin’ the boy. Boy was scared of him.”

  “You told him — Trenton was frightened?”

  “Told him — he run when I did.”

  Mathew’s pale blue eyes stared with unabashed universal incivility at the world.

  “And what did he bring over certain nights — when he was with the boy?”

  “Bring over?”

  “Yes. What did he have on him those nights in November and December?”

  “That there book,” Mathew said, and the prosecutor handed the book to him. He looked at it, too dignified to touch it. “It was this here he was reading to Trent, who wouldn’t know no better a’tal the filthy filth, and then give him the wad a money to shut him up. That’s why he stole the money from Leo McVicer good enough to give him a job in the first place I figure,” Mathew said, not to the prosecutor or the coroner but to the audience, who nodded their heads.

  “That’s why he stole Leo McVicer’s money,” the prosecutor repeated in hopeless affirmation of the tragedy.

  I have never found out what book it was. My father never told me, and could not bring himself to mention that time to me. It may have been The Soft Machine by Burroughs, or The Naked Lunch. It may have been one of a dozen books I came across over the years on his shelf; the books from America after Fitzgerald, but I do not exactly know which one.

  Later that night my mother prepared our meal in silence. We had gotten back home that afternoon, Autumn and I — both unable to stand being away from them — thinking we could help when we couldn’t; understanding the world was against us without knowing why, Autumn quoting poems and cracking jokes, and me wanting to fight the world.

  Finally Mom asked Dad what kind of book it was. My father said it was a book that explored sexual mores, using explicit sex to describe it.

  “Don’t worry, Elly, it’s just a book — we are still allowed to read in this country — as long as we are allowed to read.” And he began to eat his macaroni and cheese in silence.

  My mother did not know about this book. She had been a rural working girl brought up in the rather vicious circle of female bullies and pious nuns, and now she must defend a book she herself might never understand or want to read and a book that perhaps made light of her entire life. Yet it seemed the world had been turned upside down — she was defending someone who was looked upon as immoral, and Mat Pit and Cynthia scorning us and looked upon as being chaste.

  But let me also say this — like my own father, the book was condemned not because it was pornographic but because it was great … the editorial in the paper, by our brilliant investigative reporter, quoted a passage from it, with the heading: “Did Mr. Henderson Quote This to the Child?”

  And our university here — men who should have come out in defence at least of the right of my father to read this book were silent, frightened, and as usual their decision to say and do nothing was meaningless to everyone but themselves. I later learned that out of all the books I suspected, all had been taught and romanticized by Dr. David Scone.

  Still, Elly saw that my father missed the obvious — as bright men often do. He had believed that people at the university would come through for him and tell everyone the book’s worth. He had been awaiting this in silence. There was, I hesitate to say, a childlike vanity in this hope.

  “Sydney, listen to me,” my mother said that night. “I want you to listen to me. You are allowed anything in this life — except the luxury of being different — this is why you are being tried. This is perhaps the only reason. Don’t think professors get away with being different, because they do not — they conform — is that the word? Yes, conform. Not one has come out to defend you. They have all hidden. When Miss Young knew the book was to be used against you last week — and you said it was a great book — she went to the university and not one English professor came forward to claim its greatness. They didn’t want to be associated with you even though she said she saw it on at least three professors’ shelves. You are not human to them; they don’t want you to read what they do or come to the same conclusions they come to. So I now know what their learning is worth.

  “I have lived only in Tabusintac, but I know learning is worthless to those who have no insight — and power can even turn Diedre against me, who I love. Besides, scared people will turn on you in a second. I can’t bear to read the papers because they lie,” she said, tears in her eyes. She sat at the end kitchen chair and put her hands on her lap.

  “You do not understand — no accomplishment overcomes the stigma of being different. That’s what Miss Young told me. I try not to think about it and cannot eat my supper or nothing. I didn’t understand it at first. But now I do. You are not different in the way difference is acceptable but in another, bigger way. If you did something — well, like Dr. David Scone, who chained himself to the Department of Indian Affairs desk and wore Micmac clothes — perhaps they would look at you differently. But I think Dr. David Scone did that not for Dan Augustine but for himself. You are different.”

  “How?” Father asked.

  “You don’t fight — you don’t protest — you say nothing. Miss Young says that comes because you saw so much violence when you were a child, you cannot imagine being violent yourself. That might be honourable — and certainly much more honourable than the men I grew up beside, who fought and rowed in their dooryards — like the Pits — still, it makes you different — and that is what Isabel Young is up against. She is up against them all alone — and my heart breaks for her when I think of it. She is a hero — not you, Sydney — she is.”

  Autumn looked at me in a scared way. I kept my head down, eating. It was somehow natural for Mom to want to hurt him at this time. We had all been through a lot. But he only nodded. It did not matter to him if he was called a hero or a coward. He had been called a coward all his life.

  “If I ever leave you, I will leave you not over what I have suffered but over what Miss Isabel Young has suffered,” Mother said, getting up from the table.

  I don’t think my father ever truly understood my mother’s sacrifice. Perhaps he did not understand anyone’s sacrifice. He finally kissed her, felt the little child kick in her belly.

  “You do not understand,” he said. “I know how my life will go — it is a mathematical certainty — as certain as any matter of calculus that I will be condemned. I do know that, so it doesn’t matter if they condemn me now or later. They must do it, for they fear me.”

  “Aren’t family fights fun?” Autumn quipped, but no one heard but me.

  The other woman who sacrificed herself for my father at that time was Isabel Young. She is like one of the many women who sacrifice all their lives for a point of law or truth or faith. Brilliant, kind, and unforgiving about something in her own nature.

  She has disappeared, like most people from my life. She went unmarried — and alone. She walked the courthouse that day and for years after. She never spoke to the press, or tried to sound radical. She knew true revelation had little to do with the radical thought of the sixties and seventies or eighties.

  She appeared and was gone, wearing hats pulled down over her ears, a tissue-carrying hypochondriac who in her life never had a date. Yet when she appeared in court — ah, in court beyond anything else she was a master. I do not know if my father ever thought of her much later. I don’t even know if he thanked her properly, because, you see, he did not believe in lawyers.

  I know she loved him. A passionate love. At the end, she gave him a fleeting hug, and then kissed Elly on the cheek. She had been their only friend.

&
nbsp; I do not know where she has gone. I hope for her and deny her nothing in life. You see, Dad and Mom weren’t able to pay her, and I have money to give her now; as long as she doesn’t mind where it is from.

  She ate by herself at Polly’s Restaurant and bore in silence the puritanical disdain of the patrons, the menace of the gloating waitress. Everyone except she believed in the guilt of Sydney Henderson. She worked long after the others had given up for the day, going over the stress level on the buckled steel span, the way the bolts were cut, the notes collected about my father’s ability to use dynamite one summer to blow rocks compared to how it was thrown at the bridge.

  TWENTY-ONE

  When Mathew came to the stand the next day, Isabel asked him about his relationship with Trenton. He began to grit his teeth when she suggested it was he and not Sydney who tormented the child.

  She was the kind of person Mathew hated, the kind of person he feared — a woman of 109 pounds, with a peaked face, who did not at all fear him. And he realized that she did not fear him in the truest sense of the word — not just because she was hiding behind the law or her ability to practise it. She did not fear him in some elemental way.

  “You tormented the child many times, didn’t you — and tormented his dog?”

  “That’s all made-up nonsense,” he said.

  “Is this the book,” she said, taking it from the table and handing it to him, “that Mr. Henderson read to Trent? Did you hear a reading?”

  “No, I didn’t — but Cynthia did.”

  “Cynthia did. Well, how do you know what’s in the book?”

  “I got a good glance at the filth — I know.”

  “When —?”

  “I picked it up — I looked it over — this was the book he was reading to the boy — I seen — and he tried to pay him off, then threw him down over the bridge — as if he weren’t nothing at all.” He shook his head, tapped his feet, and was stolid in his refusal to look her way. She handed him the book and he took it, looked at it, and quickly handed it back.

  “That’s her,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “It’s the book,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t,” she said, and she handed it to the sheriff.

  “It looks like the book,” the sheriff said, partly as a question.

  “It’s my brother’s book,” Miss Young said, picking it up again. “His name is on the inside cover — he teaches it in Halifax — I had to send for it because no professor at Saint Michael’s would pretend to have a copy. See — these notes were made by him — and here — this passage — this filthy filth — about sex — was underlined by me — at two this morning.” She turned to the court and held up the book for all to see. “See here — at the back — by people like Edmund Wilson, Edith Sitwell, etc. — ‘a great and profound novel’ — see? Even if this book was read to Trenton — which I assure you it wasn’t — it would have done him no ill. He would not have had the least conception of what it was saying. The younger radical set at the university in Chatham teach it — they teach it as a great book, as a modern classic — to get back at the priests I suspect, oh yes, that’s the height of their radicalism — but they have not come forward to say it’s a great book. Well,” she added, “they’re from Chatham.”

  She closed it, put it down, turned away, and, suddenly turning back, said she had no more questions for Mathew Pit. Mathew had to be told three times to leave the stand. Cynthia glared at him — for mentioning her name. Above all Cynthia knew then and there that she must remain on the sidelines if she was to further any ambition she might entertain.

  The truth is — if I can say this — Mathew was a bully, but in his heart of hearts he loved the boy as much as anyone ever did, and Isabel Young had the audacity to question this. And in a way this moment, after living the short and regal splendidness of acceptance, was the beginning of his downfall.

  Later in the week Connie Devlin took the stand. He said he saw Sydney on the bridge, and swore to it. It seemed a breath of sanity had returned.

  “And who was near the abutment when you made your rounds?”

  “It was Syd,” Connie said, pointing his finger, “driving the truck up there, and I said, ‘Syd — don’t do it, Syd — don’t do it.’ But did he listen? No, he didn’t listen. I said, ‘Sydney, you went and cut them bolts — that whole section is gonna go’ — and he just says ta me, ‘Well, so what!’”

  I was in court for the first time that day. Connie gave a sad, whimsical twist to his head, as if he was reflecting upon this, and he glanced my way. I wanted to glare at him but could not.

  “Why do you think he may have been there?” Isabel asked.

  “Knock the span down — kerplunk.”

  “You were brave to stay there and not to report it.”

  “I was brave — but before I could report it everyone already knew.”

  “My, my — and why would Sydney do something so dangerous and destructive?”

  “Complained to me at the house, he weren’t going to be foreman — said people was all against him. I said, to him, I said, ‘Listen here, Sydney — ya don’t join in nothin’, ya always caused trouble — so how can we ’spect ya to belong?’

  “His wife Elly, she come to me beggin’ me to try and cover it up — like dirt in a hole, I s’pose — and said Constable Morris was on to her. I said, ‘Well Elly — it’s a good job, ’cause he might hopefully straighten you out — and get you way from that desperate man.’”

  The spectators clapped. Connie then sniffed in satisfaction and looked my way again.

  On Monday afternoon Connie came to the stand once more. Many of the community’s women were in the room, sitting three rows behind my parents, with Cynthia; they being her constant companions at the hearing. That day, one was the waitress from Polly’s.

  Isabel smoothed her gown and went to the front of the desk.

  She asked Connie if he had been fired for drinking. He denied that he was drinking. She asked who had gotten his job back for him.

  “Sydney Henderson,” he said. “He wanted me to let him destroy the bridge is why,” Connie said with a loud retort.

  “Oh, I thought that was Mathew who asked you that — because he was not hired on —”

  This was objected to.

  “Did you see him with the boy before that day — or only after?”

  “I don’t know — he walked the boy home.”

  “Home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did he walk the boy home? Can you tell the court that? That company truck was always available for him. Why did he walk Trenton home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, but you do know. Sydney does not know, nor has he ever learned, how to drive. He cannot drive an automatic let alone a stick shift.”

  “Ya, he is some stupid man,” Connie sniffed.

  “Then who manoeuvred the truck onto the bridge?” Isabel then turned her back on Connie Devlin and went to the table. She looked through her notes and then pointed out three things. The first was that Connie had not even been on the bridge at the time of the accident — that not only did he not punch his clock but he was still eating his supper. This could be verified by Jay Beard, who had walked by his house at that time.

  “If he had been doing his job he may have feared being injured or killed himself when the dynamite blew. Someone told him to stay home because of that.” She flipped a page.

  The second point was the fact that Sydney could not drive and could never have manoeuvred that truck into that position. None of Sydney’s fingerprints were on the steering wheel in the truck.

  And the third was the time Connie said he saw Sydney on the night of Trenton’s death. That was the exact time, no matter how they wished to hide it, that even the prosecution had registered that Sydney was talking to Alvina Pit on the phone.

  Isabel turned to the women sitting with Cynthia and smiled.

  TWENTY-TWO

  A w
eek later the sheriff and the coroner recommended that my father not be sent to trial. This came down on February 26, 1983. They gave a dozen reasons. The weak span was a company problem. The sabotage could not in any way — even the minutest way — be linked to Sydney.

  Then the book. The book was considered a classic, and any man had a right to read what he wanted. The watchman was an unreliable source — his time clock, through his own fault or mechanical failure, was not useful to anyone, and his story was suspect. It was not clear if he was even on the bridge — at least reasonable doubt serviced in this regard.

  Then the dynamite. Anyone who would know how to plant a charge as Sydney did when he was seventeen would know how to damage a structure better than that — and if he had time to drive onto the bridge and accost a boy in the truck, was he not frightened of the span collapsing before he himself could escape? These were serious unanswered questions.

  And — Sydney did not drive.

  The most damaging testimony against Father concerned the robbery. However, there were other ways the money could have ended up in Trenton’s possession. The idea that anyone would give a retarded boy five hundred dollars for a sexual favour was highly unlikely. Find out where the money came from and you would find the person or persons responsible for the boy’s death and the destruction of the span.

  Sheriff Bulgar said this did not make him feel easy about letting Sydney go. It simply meant that the prosecution had failed to convince anyone beyond a reasonable doubt that what happened was more than an unfortunate accident or that other people were not involved. Everything was unconvincing. The trial would be as well.

  My father had his own scenario worked out. He had hidden his thoughts from Isabel Young but took out a diagram later that week and showed it to my mother. For two hours he went over every point as we sat listening. He did not understand it completely, but he was certain he could reveal the hidden codes in such a way as to show who had taken the money. He said he would go to Leo McVicer and exonerate Elly, which was the only thing my father wanted.