Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  Once last summer Leo was putting some flowers in his back yard beds, and she, being bored, had wandered through the back woods, beyond those huge enclosed fields and out along his dusty back lane. She passed some of his graders and tractors, a few of his gravel trucks. The smell of mud gave her a slightly erotic sensation. She was wearing a loose halter top and tight shorts. He smiled upon her, wearing an old hat and khaki pants. She walked straight up to him, but realized his daughter, Gladys, was inside the porch on one of the old wicker chairs, painting, in her straw hat and heavy print dress. So she did not stay, even though he asked her to come into the house for a drink of lemonade.

  “No, not today,” she had said, clicking her tongue. She knew he would remember her, would remember the clicking of her tongue, because she wanted him, too.

  Still, this did not make her loyal to him if money could come through a lawsuit against him. But also it did not make her loyal to Mathew if the lawsuit were to fail and Leo showed interest again.

  Though she was sorry her poor innocent brother was dead (and she was very sorry), she was left daily indications that life would be much better for her because of it. Cynthia knew the one way to prove outrage was action, and she had to prod Mathew into taking it.

  “It is Connie we have to get — you should never have allowed him to know anything about you,” she now said. “You cannot trust a man. I am very different from you — I have already planned my life, and I will do something every bit as big as anyone on the river.” She smiled at this, like a slave might.

  The fact was, far from being free, Cynthia had always been institutional in her thoughts.

  Cynthia knew and used the same language as Diedre did, the language of a social contract that mattered so little in true human affairs. That is, Cynthia could easily talk about dispossessed, and marginal, and traumatized, and underprivileged, and emancipation, and victims, and family unit in the jargon of the social worker whenever it was to her advantage. And she could drop it in a second when it wasn’t.

  Cynthia knew how the police worked, how the social services worked, because she had been a product of them. She knew about welfare, and she knew how to make these programs work in her favour. She had always been able to get money for her mother when others failed.

  Tonight she did not like to admit that the death of her brother had become a game in which she was deciding how to dupe those authorities who had taken an interest in her, yet she could not deny its appeal. Her conversation with Mathew never suggested this, even though both of them felt the same sensation; this would allow them to prosper. No matter that she did not want to recognize this internal and provocative truth, she was stuck within the core of its veracity.

  “First we go to the lawyer,” Mathew said. He did not look at her when he said this. “There is a chance at a good deal of money. The lawyer said it wouldn’t even have to go to trial — that Leo is vulnerable now and would be willing to settle. It’s not for us, it’s for Mom,” he added. “It’s for Trenton’s memory.”

  “For how much?” Cynthia asked, rolling a toke and looking at him, hands on her knees, and her knees spread.

  “Anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand.”

  “Trenton was worth more than that,” she said. “That’s the first thing.”

  But $100,000 was an enormous amount for her.

  Cynthia sat up, threw the blanket off, and asked him to hand her her jeans. She asked him again what money would be worth the child’s life. He said, his voice genuinely breaking, that he didn’t know.

  THREE

  The next morning Mathew dressed in the frigid air of his bedroom, and covered himself with his best clothes. His best clothes were five years out of date, a button was split, and he wore a pair of cowboy boots that gave his pants a ridge at the calf.

  Cynthia knew lawyers fascinated Mathew Pit because they allowed him entrance into a world of jurisprudence where everyone was supposedly equal. More than that, that world allowed him in a legal way to be superior to those who had condescended to him, and allowed him to show a regal bearing that the law granted the “marginalized.” Although he hadn’t considered including Cynthia or his mother in his quest for money, he realized he must now. That he relied on Cynthia day in and day out was something both of them knew.

  Therefore he and Cynthia went to a lawyer, as representatives from their family. They were going to sue the construction company and Leo McVicer himself. This is what pleased Cynthia — the idea that she could sue “Leo McVicer himself.”

  Both Mathew and Cynthia realized that the law, like their entire lives, was a game where truth did not matter, but the appearance of truth mattered.

  Even their lawyer didn’t care if he was called ethical. In fact it was better if he was called unethical. The more stories about him, the greater his notoriety, the more hilarious it all was. It was much better if he was called shrewd, and he could show this shrewdness in a grand way in a small town, and bring in elements of manoeuvring that other lawyers might not try. This is why Mathew was drawn to him.

  And there was a story this lawyer often told about Roy Henderson, my grandfather, trying to pay his lawyer with one-and two-dollar bills on the court steps after he was found guilty, and how this money blew out of his hand and got wet in the rain. To him this was profoundly comical. When it was once mentioned to him that my grandfather was an illiterate man who had nothing and died in jail with nothing but an address in his wallet, he answered stiffly and morally by saying, “Law is the law.”

  The lawyer’s name was Frederick Snook. And he liked to be called Frederick. He had watched Newcastle grow — the paper mills got larger, the bars spread with the town, video games, cable, and satellite dishes brought the world to our door — the great empire to our south. We drove American cars, played American music, dressed in American clothes, danced American dances under the glitter globes, and yet there was a glass partition that kept us on the far side of the American experience. The Pits he considered outsiders because they had in some ways failed to keep up with that experience, and Snook, who had been to both Hawaii and Atlantic City, considered them unknowledgeable because of this. More significant, his experience was the only experience important to them. They coveted it, like some teenage girls covet makeup — that is, it is what they believed would prove them real. The Experience of my father who read Plato and Kant was not viable for Cynthia. And one true way to show it was to be included into the world that radiated somewhere else, wherever that somewhere was, the world that for this one moment had stopped pissing in their face.

  Mathew came to Snook’s office wearing a pale yellow shirt open at the neck, a grey sports jacket, which was too tight, and black slacks, with a pair of high-heel cowboy boots. Cynthia dressed in a tight black dress, with a stain on the left shoulder, and black high heels with fishnet stockings. Her pregnancy showed in this dress as a small mound. She had a diamond stud in her nose. The impression they made on the lawyer, who had defended Mathew two times, for poaching, and Cynthia once, for assaulting a bride at a wedding, was that of two wild creatures come to town.

  Mathew’s hair was receding. But he still wore it in the duck-tail he had a few years ago when he was last charged. His eyes were still mirror blue. Cynthia’s eyes bore through the lawyer and made him uncomfortable. He offered coffee, but they were downriver people and asked for tea. The tea he gave them, a scented Indian flavour he kept for widows whose trust funds he managed, and at times syphoned, Cynthia pushed away with one hand and sat back in a motion of complete revulsion.

  “It’s not the kind of tea you are used to,” he said sadly.

  “No,” she said. “Faggot fuckin’ tea.” Then she laughed aloud, not at what she said, but because of the startled expression on his face after she said it.

  The lawyer often told other lawyers she was crazy. And other lawyers would say, “Yes — but I’d let her wrap her crazy legs around my head,” to which Frederick would caution, “The crazy quiff would eat you aliv
e.”

  However, he now showed he had an immense regard for her. He nodded and assured them he had heard all about the case, that he felt sickened by it, that it was a terrible injustice to hard-working, decent people. Mathew’s former crimes seemed to elicit more sympathy from him and qualify the Pits for a bigger payout.

  “That’s how they treated you,” he said. “They never let you off though your crimes were minor. Then very likely because of your former jail time, they withhold a job for you on the bridge where you could have provided for Trenton. But they hire a man whose past actions are questionable, and a man who openly obsesses about your brother.”

  “Openly what?” Cynthia asked quickly, inhaling cigarette smoke and holding it in.

  “Obsesses — dreams about — I’m sorry, but it’s true. Worse, they have no command over their worker’s dereliction of duty. Wait and you’ll see the company squirm,” he said.

  “We don’t want to blame Connie Devlin,” Mathew said suddenly.

  “You don’t?”

  “Well — he’s a cousin —”

  Mathew stopped speaking and looked with fear at Cynthia.

  “But if he’s in on it, he’s in on it,” Cynthia said.

  “That’s right” Mathew said, though his face turned white in the dry midwinter air.

  “I know it’s hard — I know you are both grieving — I am not a priest, but I do perform a similar service — not for the other world but for this one.” Freddy Snook wore his loud checked three-piece suit with a bright orange silk tie. He looked at them and sighed, tapping a pencil on his desk, in a manner that seemed to authenticate what he had just said about these two exceptional human beings.

  “And what about Sydney — how will he pay?” Cynthia said, crossing her legs slowly. She still had never forgotten that her beauty, her immense sexuality, had been no match for my poor mother’s genteel grace. She also realized that her sexual freedom had offered her not my father but the world of failed men who had squandered their lives in sin.

  “We will take Sydney for everything,” Frederick said, and he gave a gleeful squeal and shook his head. Then he added piously, “Although it will never be enough.”

  Cynthia nodded, and Mathew felt overwhelmed by a sense of righteous anger. What he and Cynthia did not know, as Snook put his arms about their shoulders and walked them to the door, was that Snook had been Leo McVicer’s lawyer for years — was on a retainer, and had defended him successfully in five lawsuits.

  He would not easily give McVicer up to them, but he would keep McVicer informed in a casual way, so as not to damage his ethical sensibility.

  FOUR

  Two nights later, in a heavy March rain that was once again turning to snow, my father came home drunk. I glanced out the window and my father was crawling on his hands and knees. He got up and staggered badly and fell against one of the slick spruce trees on the dark side of our yard, and started yelling at it. I had never seen him take a drink before, let alone be drunk. He looked hideous, his jacket soaking and his hair beaten flat upon his head. Right in front of our little shoebox of a house, he looked as if he had lost his way; he looked like a cowering drenched dog.

  Mother and I rushed out to get him. He was singing and crying. He did not seem to know who my mother was.

  He had drank rum coming back from his last day on the smelt field. Someone had taken his sled, but he had managed to put a few smelts in his coat, some sticking tail up, some with their frozen heads looking out his pockets. He had then staggered to the road, ashamed of his drunkenness, and walked to the gas bar and asked for help.

  “You are beyond help,” the man at the gas bar reportedly said. “You’re drunk now because you have guilt right through your stinking pores.”

  “That is so,” my father said. “I am guilty about Trenton — I am deeply sorry — I wish I had not acted the way I did. I want some more to drink.” (The gas bar was known far and wide as a bootleggers’.)

  “Confess and I’ll give you some. What you just said to me say to Constable Morris!”

  “Confess,” said a woman who had come for gas.

  “Confess,” another man said, and then another. And soon they were taunting him. “Confess confess — and you can have a bottle of wine.”

  Father looked about at everyone, and tried to walk into the back room to get the wine. The manager followed him and opened the back door to the harsh blue evening air. My father had not smelled such air — which was mixed by every breath he took with alcohol — since he was a boy of seventeen. He picked up a bottle of wine. No other man dared go near him.

  He stumbled across the road in the grainy winter twilight filled with spotted snow and rain, and was almost hit by a transport. He heard the air brakes shriek, and the blow horn sound. Then after two hours in the cold night he found his way home.

  Before the night was over people went to Mathew and told him that my father was drunk — and had said he was sorry he hadn’t treated Trenton differently — which proved his guilt. They stood in the kitchen, eager to disclose this information, for whatever suspicion they had had of Mathew was suddenly and irrevocably proven wrong.

  “How can you ever stay so calm?” he was asked by Danny Sheppard, the man who had touched my shoulder the month before — the reputed father of the stillborn child.

  “I stay calm because I have a clean conscience,” Mathew said.

  The Pit house was filled with visitors all the next day; they came and went paying their respects all over again. Even Jay Beard went to Pit’s house. He asked to see Alvina. She was sitting in a rocking chair staring at the road as if longing to see someone walk along it just once more. He asked her please as a favour to a man she had grown up with — a man who once had thoughts of interest in her — not to listen to gossip, but to wait and see. But Alvina felt exactly the opposite now. She must believe what comforted her. It comforted her to know that Sydney had confessed, and that various people told her they were not going to let him get away with it. Not this time! They would take matters into their own hands! The police had done nothing. Six or seven people had told her as much. And even though in her heart she felt something was wrong, even though in her heart she did not trust her own children, how could she turn away from this confession of Sydney’s, a confession that exonerated her boy? She stared at Jay with a sadness he had never seen before in anyone, and he was shaken.

  When he went back downstairs, Mathew was sitting with some friends. Bennie Sheppard was standing by the sink. You were dealing with the most corrupt people on the river when dealing with the Sheppards. Everyone knew this. But now, in the smell of hash and wine, that did not matter at all.

  Mathew did not look at Jay Beard. All his life he had been given raw deals, and this is what showed on his face. And the proof of the terrible things Jay Beard had once believed about him was excised.

  “Whatd’ya say now?” Bennie Sheppard said. “Proved wrong, ain’cha — proved wrong.”

  Jay stood at the door hat in hand and simply said he did not feel in his heart that Sydney Henderson had done anything.

  “I know it looks bad,” he said.

  “Looks bad — looks bad! Yer so good at levelling charges at Mat Pit,” Danny Sheppard said, “’bout a lobster, about a moose, about a pound of pot — but this is ’bout a child.”

  In their faces at this moment was seen the hilarious certainty of Mat’s proclamation, and even Jay Beard felt that they might be right. He too had begun to lose hope.

  “I’m very sorry about Trenton,” he said to Mat. Mat looked at him with a terrible sadness.

  “Ya know — we are just ordinary people, Jay,” Cynthia chimed in. “We don’t have much — or ever had much — my father worked his guts out and died — Mat has had his trouble — but they wouldn’t even hire him on that bridge — for a few stinkin’ dollars —”

  “I know,” Jay said, “I know.”

  They both looked hurt and said nothing. He went back to his trailer. He had known
my father since he was a child. But how could he continue to support him after this? He was not very fond of the Pits, but they did have a point. He just did not know. Why had his own life been so hard? He did not know — but this was the most terrible trial he had yet to endure. And he was a man approaching sixty-five.

  All the river knew about Father by the next evening. Sydney Henderson got drunk and confessed! Sydney Henderson had made a fool of the courts. Constable Morris, who had tried his damnedest to get the child molester off the street, heard about this as well.

  Mathew was seen driving his car up and down the road crying and carrying a rifle. He stopped on a level stretch and opened the door and was seen with his head in his hands. The sky was lenten and foreboding. There was a smell of raw ice in flurries of bitter snow. Finally some people stopped to speak to him. The man and woman who operated our gas bar, from where Mathew had stolen the gas and Dad had taken the wine, told him to keep a stiff upper lip, that everyone had sympathy for him.

  “He’s a drunken pig now,” the woman said, “so he’ll confess yet again — and you won’t have to do a thing.” She touched his hand.

  A wail went up from Mathew like the cry to God that Cain himself may have made. It was not that he did not believe what was being said; he believed it absolutely to be true. People had to do something about Sydney Henderson now!

  This couple, happy to help him because they had always feared him, stayed beside him, worried he would injure himself. He liked to hear them implore him not to act violently because it gave him a thrill of standing above others and being marked as special. But there was a moment, when taking out a Buck knife, he cut his finger in torment.

  “Please, Mat,” the man said. “How long has I known ya, boy — these bastards don’t get away with it —”