Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  “You touch me again, I will crush your head,” I said. “I will kill you — no matter who your uncle is, no matter if I am excommunicated, no matter what happens to me — you will be dead.”

  He looked at me, smiled weakly, and said, “Oh, sure.”

  But as I approached him he backed away. It was the first time anyone had ever backed away from me.

  Griffin ran from the washroom.

  In his run I felt seared into my brain the horrible dishonesty of the universe dressed up in a moral accusation against my father. And I now realized that everything my father trusted — the church, hard work, the saints, the Poriers themselves — was bogus. And in a real way it didn’t matter that my father had caused nothing. I should not be so quick to forgive him just because he had caused nothing. Because in another way, his inaction had caused it all — all the misery forced upon us was caused because he elected to be passive. What if he had taken action sooner? If he had fought years before, he would not have left it up to me — or worse, to poor half-crippled Jay Beard. I smelled the pungent hide of the rabbit on my hands — what other child on the river this day, with microwave ovens and video games Autumn and I had never played, had to gut a rabbit for dinner that night? No, those I sat beside, shared my noon hours with, had been a part of the twentieth century for a long while; and would soon become a part of the twenty-first.

  We had our stew that night, for I stole both the carrots and the potatoes from the gas bar.

  The winter moon bathed the houses in light and the wind was gentle. Spring was coming, a month after it came to most other places. Easter was here. My mom had not lost the child in her belly. I could smell water in the snow and the houses were dim and dark, and the lives in those houses warm and cosy. These were houses of men who had worked for McVicer for years. Their sons and daughters had ordinary ambitions, became lawyers and engineers. There was laughter from those houses, and rock music played from an open window.

  What, I asked, had my father ever given my mother? I cursed him. I wanted to fight him. I remembered how Mom told me he walked the highway and back to visit his father in prison without complaint. Had I ever done anything close to that? But, then, rebellion is such a savage against itself, in youth and all men of no consequence.

  ELEVEN

  On Easter Sunday we went to church. The pane-glass windows shone brightly and the pebbles were bare on the shore. A stiff breeze blew all morning, and our clothes were clean and pressed. After we got home a bit of snow fell, and as happens sometimes in spring, the day turned cold, the ditches froze. Mom brought our clothes in from the line. The wood my father had cut was dwindling.

  I went for a walk before dinner. The sky was pale, with floating clouds; and the ditches held forlorn trappings of early spring — bent grasses, bottle labels, used condoms in the field above home, and other signs of the winter ending. The bay was brown and choppy now that the ice was gone, and as I went toward it, feeling somewhat lost under the opening salvo of spring, I found myself in Pit’s back field. I was suddenly filled with a fancy — I would have to call it fancy more than an urge or a craving — a fancy to confront Mathew Pit, to boldly go up to him and slap his face. Which with my size and strength at the time might be suicidal. But then, if considering the Machiavellian proposal to be daring rather than cautious, to entice fortune to your side, it could be done, I thought. I always knew that daring was not beyond me. And since we had tried it my father’s way, now perhaps we might try it mine. I believed Mat was guilty of blasting the bridge, though I could not prove it. But why in God’s name did I have to prove it? They had proved nothing about us. How could anyone think my father a bad man and Mr. Pit a good one? Yet they did.

  The day grew colder, and the sound of faraway traffic petered out. It was the day Christ was resurrected into the clouds, or appeared to Mary Magdalene in a form she did not know. It could be my resurrection as well if I did this right.

  I walked through the short spruce stands, past the dog house, with dog hair caught on a nail, and into their back yard sunken with half-melted ice, the flurries of falling snow making the ground like black pencil streaks on a white scribbler page. I thought of my essay I had never been able to redo, and my almost certain failure this year at school.

  I had never been into Pit’s yard before, and was surprised at how solitary and unattended the place was. I had expected their lives to be much fuller and happier than ours. Yet their house looked shabbier and more desolate than any I had ever seen, except perhaps for the Voteurs’.

  I looked through the hallway window and saw an open door to the dining room, with a bit of light coming from it, and just the edge of a tablecloth on a wood table. This was where Trenton had spent his life, I thought. The last thing he might have done was look from this window at the setting sun.

  Right beside me — I touched it with my hand — was a double-bladed axe, old and rusted but still with a strong handle, which was covered in snow. I clutched it as I stood there feeling the snow burn my bare hand. Then Mathew Pit himself came out of the dining room and walked toward the window I crouched under, with his shirt off, his chest and arms tattooed and heavily muscled. He who had destroyed our life stopped, near this window, and looked across to our house. He who had beaten my father, had forced him to drink alcohol (though I could not prove it), laughed at my beautiful sister and coveted my mother.

  Easily I could have killed him. (I was strong enough to put the axe through his chest.) He had called my father a coward, but he would never call me the same, I thought. I held the axe. I gulped air and felt dizzy.

  The air was turning more bitter and darkness was falling over the trees. I could hear the coyotes begin to yap and round each other up. I tried to think of Mathew with hatred; at what he had said to my mom and my sister and how he had treated my dad. But I could do nothing.

  He closed the drapes, and I heard him say, “Cynthia? Is someone here? Why am I alone today?” I realized that though it was Easter Sunday he was alone; the resurrection never mattered to him, and his house bore the oppression of that disinterest. I realized that to kill him now would be the most appropriate time. No one was home; and if I covered my tracks, it might be thought to be someone else.

  To kill him would betray my father. But not to kill him would be to betray my father. I have deliberated on this moment for years. It has been my life’s deliberation. My life would have forever changed if I had had resolve at that moment. My action might have saved us all — Autumn, and my little brother, Percy, about to be born in a shack off Highway 11.

  I held the axe, and I counted. I said to myself that if I closed my eyes and saw red spots, as one sometimes does, I would stand up and thrust the axe through the pane. I closed my eyes. There were no red spots. After another long wait, with me shivering and shaking, I heard Mathew walk away. I was angry that I had missed my chance. It was the same as if I had a dangerous bear in my sights and chose not to fire, and watched him waddle away over a hill, knowing that bear might come back to maul my sister.

  I stood and ran across the field toward the brook, laughing my head off. If power was so easily attained, there must be something fundamentally the matter with it. One swipe of that axe, powerful or not, would certainly have made my mother’s life tolerable, my sister no longer pee the bed, and me happy for the first time. Even my father’s appendix might stop acting up.

  I came home, and my father and mother and Autumn were at the table with a pink ham. The house was warm. There was a window near the kitchen table, and a window much higher on the far side of the opened room. Under that window was a mantel where Mom placed her knicknacks, and a picture of Autumn at her First Communion (I had taken mine down). Next to the stove was the cot Mom lay upon. Next to that was the back door. Next to the back door was the bathroom door. Dad’s books were on shelves everywhere in this room.

  To the left of the kitchen table were five small steps to the “upstairs,” where our three bedrooms were, not much more than cubbyhol
es really, which Dad had built on as we grew.

  My father was saying grace, and he stopped and looked at me. I smiled and he smiled also. But there was something in his look that said he knew where I had been. The smile, mild and kind, said he knew what I had not done.

  I lived in that torment for three weeks. It was coming on to May, and I was lucky enough to earn some money by cleaning the yard about McVicer’s store. Perhaps he felt guilty about something. Each time I came home, I saw Mathew in the distance and had a strange desire to kill him. But something happened that prevented it, showing there had been an ongoing conference about us in places we did not know.

  Ms. Whyne, receiving much support from altruistic groups, came to “the children’s rescue.” Jay Beard came to our house to tell us this might come about, a few weeks after Easter, and for Mother to prepare herself for the worst; and that he would act as a character witness whenever he could.

  So one night Diedre Whyne came with Constable Morris, who always looked appropriately grave and somewhat put out when he faced my mother, as if her character had let him down. The paperwork was in order; another RCMP officer stood outside with a shotgun in case my father returned some kind of fire.

  We were taken. A dozen or more people waited at the top of our lane to watch us leave, and as we were being driven slowly away, they clapped their hands. Autumn went in one direction and I in the other. Mom was six or seven months’ pregnant.

  Mother went to court and sat listening to Ms. Whyne describe her as semi-literate and our family as poverty-stricken, her husband suspected in a series of crimes that, when drinking, he freely admitted to.

  From the transcript of these hearings I learned what officialdom thought of us:

  “Their mother is a woman who has lived with a violent-prone individual named Sydney Henderson, who himself has come from an abusive home. He has seen a life of violence and has often been violent himself. Elly is pregnant again, and has no means to take care of her other two children. She is childlike in her ideas, kind in her attitude, and has endured one terrible pregnancy after the other because of her husband’s religious belief, suffering miscarriage and hemorrhage.

  “There is a bullet hole in the wall of their house, and they live in constant fear since the death of Trenton Pit, a boy Sydney Henderson was influencing. Lyle is fourteen, just the age when children need strong parental guidance. His sister, Autumn Lynn, is an albino child of thirteen who is tormented at school. She has started her menses and is easily led. If we do not rescue them now they will not be rescued.”

  Christ, even I could believe that.

  I was sent to live with Hanny Brown and his wife, and Autumn stayed in Chatham with Ms. Whyne in Covenant House, a place Ms. Whyne ran with government funds. The Voteur girls had stayed there, and relatives of theirs from down river. It was called a safe house for female children who have been abused. That Autumn Lynn had not been abused did not seem to matter, because she seemed a prime candidate for abuse.

  Just the amount of stuff I was given by my foster parents induced a surreal feeling of the betrayal of my parents. Hanny Brown took me to movies, and with Autumn and Ms. Whyne we went to the Atlantic Exhibition, rode the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Octopus, ate candy apples and cotton candy — while my father in his old blue suit pants and Mother in her maternity dress suffered in silence in the scorching summer heat, with the black woods and chirping frogs all around them.

  I hated myself for a candy apple, but I could not stop eating it. In Hanny Brown’s house, I found an old fishing knapsack. I stole what I could to take home — baking soda, salt, ketchup, sugar, coffee, tea. I hid the knapsack in my room. One day, checking the sack, I found a bag of flour placed there, and going down to supper that evening could not look my hosts in the face.

  Ms. Whyne shared the duties of Covenant House with her friend Dawn Fleager, and they were subsidized by government money. Their relationship was incorporated as strange celebration into small-town civility toward non-conformism at that time. That is, Diedre was at the height of her power, and I had none at all. Her mistake, as well as mine, was to think her power would last. That those very conformists who now hated my father would not someday in some way, seeing their chance, turn their turret tanks on her.

  What Diedre wanted was to help Mother in some kind of self-awareness course. The idea that Diedre was self-aware and my mother was not has often struck me as hilarious. My mother, however, said she would travel once a week to the Bowie school to learn about nutrition and health care for herself and her children. I know this was not really what Diedre had intended, but it did work in my mother’s favour.

  On September 7 I came back to Hanny Brown’s house after fishing. I walked into the porch at four o’clock. Two men and a woman were standing in the front room. I didn’t know who the men were; they both wore suits and had beaming faces with startled eyes, and rather fine rings on their fingers. They were from the provincial office of the Department of Social Services. They were Ms. Whyne’s bosses and oversaw all her affairs at Covenant House.

  Ms. Whyne was with them. She had a striking face, a pronounced jaw. She had the type of face that as she got older its traits of social cruelty became more pronounced; traits always hidden in our culture just under the surface like the effects of sin on a picture of Dorian Gray. She smiled at me, with a kind of unfelt affection, and asked me to go pack my things. I came down without the knapsack filled with stolen staples, but Hanny Brown went up and got it for me. And as I was leaving, bright tears burned in his wife’s eyes.

  Ms. Whyne took my hand as I walked to the car. I said nothing against Ms. Whyne, and I held her hand. Part of me was by now a social slave. I would squeeze the slave out of myself, as Chekhov said, but not for a while. They had made me love cookies and cakes and wanting to belong, and to lie to myself, to believe they were brighter than me or Autumn or my father, to accept reprimand without question. No — I had always wanted to belong; and my father had prevented it. By belonging I betrayed him; and so too did Autumn.

  Still, my mother had come through. Thirty-three and exhausted, she had cleaned and scrubbed. Dad had redone two rooms and had taken a job the unemployment department had found for him — a job picking up garbage. They bought a new crib. They swallowed all the little pride they had left. But we were going home.

  Four or five months later Diedre Whyne found work in another department. She had given her all to our case, had worked on us for fourteen years. She pulled back her divisions and retreated into the hills. We felt we would never see her again.

  Percy, our brother, whom I had told the Virgin Mary I did not care lived, was born. I came home to find an infant in the crib, covered in a blue coverlet, with a sudden burst of sunlight falling on his bald head. His eyes were closed, his little fists were clenched.

  I ran to find Autumn. She was sitting out back on our one lawnchair, near the fir trees smoking a cigarette — her face, I realized, suddenly beautiful, and her life, as far as most people were concerned, already damned.

  TWELVE

  Well over two years passed with Dad collecting garbage for Elliot Pearson. When I came from school I would see him hanging on to the back of the five-ton truck, or throwing garbage up into the box. He did this methodically and like an artist, his tie flying back over his shoulder. He wore his suit I tell you this not because I think it unnatural for a man who lived like my father to wear a suit collecting garbage; it was as frayed and worn as the garbage he collected, so at some level it was appropriate.

  Dad would hold on to the side of the truck with one arm, allowing his other arm and his leg to lean out over the pavement as the truck moved along in the drizzle of snow. And the snow fell. Our river was dredged and opened by ice breakers all winter, and huge paper ships came into port, from Europe and the States.

  However, with us, it was as always. And it didn’t seem to matter to Dad or to anyone at the unemployment office that Isabel Young had told Mom that Sydney’s I.Q. might be near 170. God
, if it took that I.Q. to get a job as a garbage collector for Elliot Pearson, I was in trouble.

  I fought every day and I stole. When I fought, my father was never again mentioned to me. And people knew I carried a knife. When I stole from McVicer’s store, I was respected and feared by those my age. I would steal diapers for little Percy and nylons for my mom. McVicer knew this, for later that year he offered me a job sorting work pants and shirts two days a week.

  “You’ll be able to buy something for yer family — who knows — diapers, maybe — or who knows — nylons for yer mom —”.

  What I did buy — what I ran to buy, what I rejoiced in buying — was contacts and a wig for Autumn Lynn.

  One day I saw in a small field hidden from our house two older boys with my sister. She was laughing, and smoking a joint, and one kissed her — and one put his hand between her legs.

  I did nothing, because those boys had given me my first bottle of wine. So in this time of our acceptance, the other way to be a slave reared its head. I, and Autumn, were considered “one of them.” Others made “allowances” for my father. And as long as I made these same allowances (which didn’t seem like much) I would be included.

  I accepted the allowances, which said my father was guilty. One day I overheard a remark intended for me to overhear: “He’s not responsible for what his old man did — his old man’s a pervert — he’s a good lad —”

  It was a profound moment, one that told me that I — and Autumn — no longer had to own up to who they thought my father was, and that I could disown him like a fleck of lint on the new shirt he had bought me with his last paycheque. I tried to fight this moment, to go to my father and beg forgiveness, to go to my mother and ask for her blessing, but I saw how easy it would be for me now if I went along with them. This is why Autumn lay in the field with her panties off.