Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  Out of class the days were always dark and black, and Penny’s father picked her up in his half-ton truck so she wouldn’t have to walk home, because she often caught colds. Griffin kept me away from her at school.

  I turned more bitter than Autumn. I cursed my clothes and my name — my name especially.

  At night I thought of Penny lying in bed in white pyjamas on a white pillow, and sadness like electric shock passed through me. I had never felt, or had never been allowed to feel, like this before.

  “I will love her to the end of time,” I told myself one day as I walked the river after school. The ice had a brilliant blue charm to it, and on the ice I could see who was coming behind me. I had stopped going down our lane, just as Autumn had hidden in the ditches.

  People said if it wasn’t for Jay Beard, already an old man, with his hands pained with arthritis, who constantly looked out for us, Father would be dead, our house and possessions burned to the ground. It was Jay Beard, using his old .38 revolver, that kept people away from us. I waited for my father, for once in his life, to stand by a friend and help him.

  But when my father heard that there was an oath some men had sworn to kill Jay Beard for helping us, he simply went back to mending his smelt nets for the next year and building a new shelf for Mom. I told Autumn that Father seemed too gullible to protect anyone. And all my worries were focussed on my mother and sister and Jay Beard. My hope was also — if for self-preservation or honour I do not know — that my father would die, and Jay Beard would become my father.

  Autumn told me that the men had broken a window in his trailer and smashed his television set when he was down protecting Dad and Mom.

  “He has no money to replace that,” Autumn said, “so we should raise the money — you and I.”

  But I had no idea how to raise the money, and neither did Autumn. Worst of all, my father didn’t seem to understand all that he owed this man.

  “When I get older I’m going to be like you,” I said.

  “Boy,” Jay said, “be like your dad. They will not bother you or Elly — as long as you don’t wander too far from home by yerselves — you have to take time to have this peter out — after a while people will come to their senses.”

  “My father will get them,” I said, looking first at Dad and then at Autumn. “He is planning it now — no one knows what he is planning. He will take care of those lads,” I said. The urgency in my voice almost caused me tears.

  EIGHT

  It was Sadie Hawkins Day. I walked into the corridor in a long dress, with an old purse, while my sister dressed as an outrageously well-mannered albino Huckleberry Finn, with a straw hat. We were such outcasts, we had to try during these contrived events to make ourselves belong. And in the weak-lighted corridor both of us sensed this too late.

  We were standing alone in the hallway when Penny’s brother, Griffin, approached.

  Ah — she has enlisted her brother, I thought. I actually thought like that then.

  Griffin was large for his age, with insolent, unhappy eyes. He had the eyes of most boys of fourteen and fifteen, at times haughty and haunted with impure thoughts boys can neither control nor advance and go to confession to relate. He wore loose jeans, a shirt with the tail hanging down, and new sneakers. He was famous for stealing pens and trying to talk like his father.

  As he passed by that day he turned and suddenly thrust a compass point deep into my arm. I hollered in pain as he fled down the corridor shouting, “Scum as you has no right to bother me sister!”

  Penny, wearing a sweater tied by its arms over her shoulder, walked quickly into her room, as if she were trying to escape me. Blood bubbled up and out of the dress sleeve, leaving a wider and wider spot. Autumn tried to get me to sit down so she could get the principal.

  “No,” I shouted. “No principal — a lot of good principals do for us!”

  I went to get a paper towel from the boys’ washroom. I had never fought or thrown a punch at anyone. It was an aberration to my father, and he had instilled in me this idea of physical violence as an aberration. I put the paper towel under the dress sleeve and pressed against my arm, which had turned numb. I felt nauseous.

  When I left the washroom it seemed the entire school had gathered to watch what I would do.

  I went into class and kept my head down. I believed what had happened to be my father’s fault. I did not go to the principal, for I assumed he would not help (just as my father did not go to the police). I tore off my dress — I wore my own clothes under it. I remembered the sadness after my mother and father had taken the letters to Constable Morris. I now recognized that I and Autumn were looked upon like they. Griffin Porier stared at me, gave my clothes that he once owned a knowing frown, and sat two rows over.

  My family was doubly reproached. This begged my silence.

  I was in a no man’s land made palpable by the smell of the old school itself, wherein lay a thousand forgotten moments, wherein sheltered a thousand callow children and urged them onward into pointless and mediocre lives. In that school years before I was there, there was our Rhodes scholar, Gerald Dove, groomed by Leo McVicer, and the year after I left, another Rhodes scholar. The schoolboard and principal were ecstatic. But is that not as miserable and as pointless a future as any other I have spoken about?

  Yes, it is even more pointless — for these Rhodes scholars go off to their destiny in middle management of petroleum companies and computer chains — brilliant in their civic-mind-edness and their slavish willingness to belong, and leave us, the unsatisfied ones, as Yeats might call us — the Devlins, Voteurs Pits, Poriers, and Hendersons — in the sweet aftermath of embittered winter storms, to our bloodied selves. Our lives were not the lives of Rhodes scholars, even if Autumn was brighter than one. We were instead people with a true destiny, recognizable only in our universal lunacy under the winter skies.

  I stood after school in the schoolyard, awaiting my sister, watching the yellow buses turn toward the frozen bay, carrying my mother’s dress under my arm. Autumn still in her Huck Finn costume walked up to me. The schoolyard had the smell of pulp and sulphur, the building was silent, and snow whispered from the pointed corners while the circular ventilators clattered from the centre of its roof and threw wisps of snow into the stark sky.

  That weekend we did not go outside. Jay Beard came down to our house with a box of groceries. The night was stony and cold, and yet on the television I listened to the closing stock reports from Toronto and New York as if our world was that world. For the first time I became cognizant of the idea of people living in different centuries — none more content than the other.

  In my little house, the nineteenth-century supper had taken place while on the television the twentieth-century stocks had just closed. The vigilantes, I suppose, could have been in any time, any place.

  Autumn said she would not allow her life to be held hostage by them outside. I told her she had no choice.

  “I have a choice — of course I do — everyone does.” She smiled gaily and tossed a copy of David Copperfield my way. “Now that’s your choice — once you enter it you will be free of Mat Pit.”

  NINE

  I went to school the next morning without a coat. I did this because my father was often impermeable to cold and I wished to prove myself to him. His rumoured excommunication had done nothing to him or Mom to keep them out of the grip of churches.

  I went to my desk and became distracted by work. I was behind in everything, yet still believed at this time that it would make a difference, that I would be a great doctor or lawyer or engineer; or, better yet, that I would build buildings to house people whom I had heard were homeless in the cities; I would do all of this and they would see that my father and my family were good. That is the only thing I dreamed of then.

  I was working on an essay about the reshaping of power in industrialized England in the 1840s and the burgeoning middle classes, and comparing this phenomenon to the reshaping of power in the inform
ation age, the age of the computer, where we had newly arrived. In reality the essay was a way to level a charge against the authorities who tormented people who could be easily bullied and humiliated. So this was the information age! The information of Constable Morris was no more true just because it had now been placed in a computer.

  It was an essay I had written in a flood of anger on small scraps of notepaper because I no longer had a scribbler. The notepaper was arranged in meticulous order later that morning, and I had reserved a time to copy it into the new library computer that afternoon. The last line on the last page of the notepaper said: “For my father has been treated unfairly, and has never hurt or bullied my sister or me, for he is a man of God.” It was a line I crossed out, not because it wasn’t true, but because Father said one should never beg the truth.

  Our high school catered to busloads of kids from all of rural downriver, the sons and daughters of miners and fishermen; a school made up of children whose fathers knew what it was like to work hard, and knew injury or death on the job, thrust forward slowly but surely into our tattered new age; a millennium waiting to burst forth upon us in all its pith.

  When I came back after lunch, the pages of my essay, all of them, had been thrown as paper airplanes out the window. The sky still hung black over the schoolyard, and four buses waited in the dreary lot.

  I could not now type my essay into the new computer and I was forced after school to go out and try to find as much of it as I could in the parking lot. Boys and girls gathered about and watched me as I struggled to collect the drab ink-marked papers. When I came back to the front doors I saw Autumn amid the disenchanted youthful stares.

  Griffin Porier leaned his heavy arm across my sister’s head, as if she were a post. I saw her knees buckle under the weight as she once again tried to make a joke of it.

  As cowardly as I was, I suddenly felt obligated to defend the idea of her life being as sacred as Griffin Porier’s.

  I remembered what Leo McVicer had told me. “Someday you will box — like me you will have no choice.” Why had that made Leo happy? I was now terrified.

  I put my hands up. I held them about two feet apart. I had never in my life put my hands up and I stared at them, in front of me, as if they were in themselves two enemies. Behind me stretched the walls of ice and the silent bay where small dark inland islands sat in a meticulous cold and glassy dusk waiting for the warm winds of the southwest to come.

  Griffin walked around me, throwing left hooks and staggering me until I went down. I looked up at the crowd, seeing no kindly face except my sister’s.

  Then, rolling over, I pressed my fingers on the snow and by that rose again to my feet. My tie flapped, and the air was harsh against my lungs as I tasted my blood. My forehead had swollen from a punch, my nose was broken, and blood scattered like red ribbons along my shirt and pants and over the desolate parking lot, indented by a thousand forgotten winter footprints where pages of my essay were caught on specks of swollen ice or disappeared into the last winter light, one with the words “McVicer’s company monopolizes all our life” written in a scrawl. The crowd pulsated in and out about us, driving Griffin on with its shouts and palpitations.

  I turned my head away when I was hit a fourth time and saw many faces looking at me, and Autumn’s face transfixed by my suffering — even though the punches never really hurt at that moment. Then as Autumn ran to protect me, Griffin threw out a left. Before I could stop her the blow glanced off her chin, and she fell. Everyone was silent.

  Griffin laughed, turned against me again, and threw a hard right hand. This time I stepped into it and grabbed his fist in my palm. Suddenly and quite strangely I realized a most terrible secret for me to know. I was twice as strong as he. His fist withered in my grip, and he let out a yell and dropped to his knees as if begging me to stop. I hauled him to his feet with my hand, but the pain on his face was unbearable to look at.

  So I knew first-hand that what my father had said was right — that every injury done to someone is done again to the perpetrator of that injury; and the only way to lessen its effect is to cultivate “a hardness of heart” against other living beings.

  I picked up Autumn, put my arm around her, and turned along the snow path, the snow dotted with specks of my bright red blood.

  “I’ll get you, you cowardly bastard,” Griffin Porier yelled, but the crowd looked at him differently than they had two minutes before.

  I went home. Later that night I heard some commotion outside, and someone tossing a bottle. My father lay in bed listening to men as they questioned his courage and asked him to come out and face them and have a drink. It went on for an unbearable length of time.

  A man would yell, “Come on out and have a drink,” be silent for a moment and then shout again, “Come on out and have a drink!”

  Then they advanced on the house, but a pistol shot rang out. Reeling in drunkenness, they ran away. They didn’t even stop to pretend they were brave. Another shot was fired from old Jay Beard’s pistol. We heard them yelling and a truck driving off.

  I began to cry. I wanted to go out and help him. But I did not.

  My tie lay in the sink. My mother got up early and dried it, and resewed my pants. My boots, once my father’s, eight years old, were shined by Autumn in the morning. And in some dreadful way I knew, because of my strength, what it was like to be the men outside.

  TEN

  The next night it started to snow, and the snow came down over our small house and the yellow yard, and I thought of my rabbit snares I would check in the morning. I had to kill them because my father refused welfare and we needed to eat. It was always worse when the rabbit was alive because then I would have to find a stick of wood to club it.

  My face was bruised and swollen, and Autumn and I sat in the far back room of the house, where the one chaise longue and our few summer things were kept. I looked at her for a long time, and then I said:

  “Things will be different from now on — we will never be bothered from now on — I will not allow anything to happen to you from now on. Not a tear from your face will flow —”

  At first she said nothing — stupefied, I suppose, at what I was whispering. It was like Adam talking to Eve — I had left my mother and father, left the valley of the Saints, and had been thrust forward into the thorns. There was a sense of myself apart from the wishes of my family.

  “Do you believe in hell?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe in heaven?”

  “Yes — but not as much as hell,” she said, smiling.

  “Do you think good people go to church?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does Jay Beard go to church?”

  “No! He hates church — he hates the priest. You know that.”

  “Does the priest protect our family — has he been down to offer comfort? Has he ever said a kind thing about us at mass? Has he ever spoken to us when we went to catechism? Or has he told people to leave Mommie and Daddie alone?”

  “No — of course not — he wouldn’t come near us!”

  “Does Jay Beard protect our family?”

  “Yes — with his life, it seems.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “Well, I might have self-interest — but I would say offhand yes.”

  “What do you think of him?” I said.

  She thought a moment. Then, “I think he is wise,” she said.

  “But is he as wise and brave as Dad?” I said, almost trembling.

  “I suppose.”

  “Would you like me to become more like Jay Beard?”

  “No — like Dad,” she said.

  “Do you think I could become like Jay Beard?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I lighted a cigarette. She stared dumbfounded at me. Then I handed it to her. She inhaled and coughed and clutched at her throat in a mocking death throe. I lighted another for myself, and blew the smoke out slowly.

  I stood — exe
rcising my grand sense of morality — and I took out of my back jean pocket the heavy Bowie-shaped bone-handled knife with its seven-inch stainless steel blade. I had bought it with the money Rudy Bellanger gave me. I smiled at her when she looked at it.

  “Oh,” she said. “Will that gut a rabbit?”

  “I would someday like to become like Jay Beard — I have to!”

  Autumn was silent. Yet I think the thought of freedom suddenly seemed promising to her. I took out a small ring with a small stone and put it on her finger.

  “I was going to give this to Penny — well, a girlfriend — but I have no girl — so I will give it to you — this will be our marriage.”

  “I finally have a boyfriend,” she said.

  I asked her what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a veterinarian and win the McVicer scholarship and — she blushed — write a book. The McVicer scholarship was worth fifteen thousand dollars.

  “McVicer will never give you that scholarship,” I said, “but I will pay him back.”

  Autumn admitted she was scared and stayed in her room whenever she was alone.

  “You will never have to do that again,” I said. “You will never have to worry anymore — I will go to jail before you are teased again.”

  The next morning I got up in the cold and went to check my snares as my father set out for mass.

  “You go pray — and I’ll find us something to eat,” I yelled, my breath floating in front of my face.

  I found the snow had covered most of the snares but there was a rabbit in one, buried up to his back. The trees were still, and in the hedges I could smell smoke from fires burning in wood stoves up the inlet.

  I walked out of the woods, skinned the rabbit, and left it hanging on the back clothesline. I woke Autumn and told her I would find potatoes and carrots and we would have a rabbit stew.

  Then I went off to school. I walked into the boys’ washroom and saw Griffin Porier there. I stood still, my heart beating a mile a minute — just like the heart of the poor rabbit before I had killed it that morning.