Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  Bliss was an average man. He kept looking at my father trying to devise some idea. And he wished to be cautious, and did not want to be overly sympathetic. Still, he knew Connie and Mat, and he also knew that the letters were written by others. That he had not come forward with either piece of information made him now less reticent about my father’s innocence; and a guilt tugged at him.

  My father was let off in late afternoon, north of Campbellton along a stretch of interconnecting woods roads, and walked until dark. There he found the camp and the foreman, and was hired the next day.

  Later, Hanrahan spoke to an RCMP officer, just in passing, about these strange things. This officer’s name was John Delano. He had been following the events from afar, interested in them because all did not seem right. He placed a phone call that night, and finally set in motion events that would change our life.

  There were times after Dad left when our lane was frozen stiff, and we were all waiting for him to come home, and Christmas was nearing. I would then remember the sunlight on his glasses when he spoke to me and I would be transported into the land of his gentle sorrow — a sorrow like brilliant old wine, a sorrow that comes with knowledge and wisdom. That is the closest I’ve ever come to knowing my father. I do not think that when in happier times he spoke of a gentle life as we picked blueberries in the field — spoke about the ideas that encapsulated both him and my mother — that he had ever thought (and why in God’s name should he?) he would be forced to literally live it with the excruciating balancing act of a man on a tightrope in the wind. But then again, in some way — don’t we all? I found Tolstoy’s The Forged Coupon he had taken out for me to read and placed it back on the shelves of books without opening it. I vowed not to ever read another book.

  For an instant, a split second in the dawn air, I felt free to pursue my dreams. Yes, and they were so different from my father’s I almost cried.

  FIFTEEN

  Dad left before Percy was three. I carry a picture of Percy on his third birthday; Dad’s chair is empty, so he must have been gone.

  I tried for a time to be Percy’s father. I took him for walks, in his wagon, and we would stop along our lane to collect his bugs. Our lane was overgrown with green whip grass, and surrounded by high trees that waved above our heads in the summer breezes.

  Percy had four jars filled with grasshoppers and crickets, caterpillars and snails. He’d wait for me to come home from fishing, jar in hand. He’d open the front door and run to give me a hug.

  “You should not wander anywhere alone, Percy,” I told him one day. “You might tumble in the brook.”

  I would bring the wagon around and Percy would tell me he needed his lucky bow tie. We would search the house for it. A red snap-on bow tie. Then, bow tie secured, jar in hand, he would sit in the wagon, his feet in red rubber boots.

  My mother had almost lost her life giving birth to him. She had bled and her afterbirth was hard to issue. To the day three months later, Cynthia Pit’s child, Teresa May, was born. She also was a child of sorrow, had a bad heart, and Mathew and Cynthia were at the hospital in Moncton many times while the little girl was examined and re-examined, always dressed impeccably and with pearl stud earrings. Most everyone, I think, except Gladys, knew Teresa to be Rudy Bellanger’s daughter. Or maybe she did know by the time the child had her third birthday.

  Percy and Teresa, in spite of their family histories, were like brother and sister from the start. Nor could Autumn or I help but love the little girl Percy did.

  I constantly worried about the way Percy would wander by himself. One day, fearing he had drowned, I went along the old smelt path and found him sitting on a stump, his hands folded, looking at the leaves budding on the trees above him, his mouth slightly opened as if he was speaking to himself, or singing.

  Another day, when I was pulling him in the wagon, he asked me if I was going away.

  “Of course not, Percy.” I stopped the wagon. He looked up at me and shielded his eyes from the sunlight. His face was calm. Yet my answer did not convince him.

  “I have a deep feeling in my heart that soon you are going away,” he whispered.

  I started pulling the wagon again. “Oh, Percy, that’s not true — Daddy has gone away to work — but that’s not so bad, he will come home again. You shouldn’t worry about these things.”

  The wagon stopped with a sudden jerk and one of the back wheels began to wobble, so I bent down and hammered it back into place with a rock.

  “I think I will go away some day, too,” Percy sighed. “But don’t tell Mom. It’ll make her sad.”

  He rubbed his eyes, because sunlight was in them. The afternoon shadows lengthened, and at a dusty warm place on the lane between two large pines, sunlight filtered down, and there in that patch of sun stood Autumn with her plastic book bag, waiting for us.

  “Hello,” Percy called.

  “Big Percy,” Autumn shouted, and waved, and she walked out of the filtering light and became a visible part of us. That day was the first time I realized that she was or would be beautiful. I had never known that she could be. She walked with us to the house.

  We had a comfortable house by then, with a small greenhouse off the kitchen that made it feel like summer, even when there was six feet of snow over our back-yard trees. Jay Beard had built this for Mom the spring Dad left. And beyond the upstairs window, there was a view of the bay and lower Arron Brook. There was wood panelling on the walls and checkered drapes my mother made in the den. The wood stove was new, and our little oil furnace heated the house well.

  But more important, we were not bothered now by anyone, because my father was away.

  Like Dad, I went fishing in Arron Brook. And as I explored this vast area of bog and forest I would take Percy and Autumn with me; but Autumn was frightened in the woods, having no sense of direction — so I was honourbound to stay with them when we went anywhere off the road.

  One day Mom said in a strange tone I had never heard before — it seemed to no more come from her than it had from the wind: “Lyle, you have to take care of your brother — and sister — do you understand?”

  “Of course, Mom.”

  “Your father is away, and we are alone — do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Good.” She smiled and smoothed her dress, and went inside and closed the door. Her voice sounded like the trees waving over my head, or the clouds moving, and there was a moment when it seemed she was no longer there.

  It was now June. The hollows were filled with old leaves, the sun was out, the lanes were filled with dry mud. At night the sky was like building blocks of eternity — the stars were everywhere. Up on the road McVicer’s men were at work repaving a stretch, and every day I took Percy up the lane in the wagon to watch them on the rollers and await my father’s return. (I knew Dad wasn’t coming, but Percy was never convinced.) Then after a while Percy would sigh and say:

  “I guess he isn’t coming home today.”

  “No, not today.”

  One day in late June, Percy and I had a game of marbles in a dirt hole at the back of the house. It was Percy’s marble pot, near a patch of grass called the lumpy ground. He would sit there whenever we were away and watch for us. Or he and Scupper Pit, Trenton’s old dog, would lie side by side and stare at the sky, surrounded by dandelions and bees. Once he made his mom a daisy chain that she wore about her neck.

  After that game I got my rod, and we walked to the field and down the road to the brook.

  Percy carried his marbles and his picnic with him. We met Autumn coming down the lane, and she dropped her book bag and joined us. I kept walking farther up the brook, over windfalls and wild stingers, and they followed me. When I came to the place I was going to fish, I waited for them, and threw a small lean-to together for them.

  “Where is the way back?” Autumn said.

  “Up through the swale there,” I said.

  “Up there?” Autumn asked. I looked to where she was
pointing.

  “No — if you go up there you will get lost. I said there —” And I pointed again to my right. Autumn, whether she understood or not, said nothing more.

  Percy was holding Autumn’s hand, and she was covered in burdocks and kept swatting away flies. Percy sat down and unwrapped his sandwich. As long as Autumn and Percy were together and could see me, they would not be frightened.

  Anyway, I don’t know if it was some idea that I was through with them taking advantage of me, or that I was angry with my mom, but that day I moved away from both Percy and Autumn and crossed the roaring stream.

  I crossed the stream. I left them alone.

  There was a pool farther down, along a stretch of the stream that had a gravel bank, a doff of warm sun upon it. I knew there were big trout lying there. I had seen them at this time last year, at dusk one evening when I was coming home.

  The earth was still damp. Birds were sitting on the branches flitting away — and I forgot about the time. I knew I was committing an act of dishonour by leaving my brother and sister. But it was like all acts in youth, both thoughtless and somewhat intentional.

  For my thought might have been something like this: “What if I do go and leave them? It’ll give them some spunk — that’s what they need. I have spunk, surely they need some too. It is a hard world when you are born without protection.”

  And that made me feel not like their older brother but more like their master. They did not know that I felt that way. I was their older brother who loved them, and yet this was the game I was now playing. They did not know I was playing a game, exercising a moral thought or judgment upon them.

  The day was hot, but the water cool, and the sun played on the refreshing rip of water just south of the gravel bar. Beyond that rip was an old log where I knew there were big trout. The trout of my youth. The trout of my youth are forever gone.

  I had no waders. Waders at that time seemed to me to be for rich Americans — and even rich Canadian sports I called Americans at that time.

  I stepped into the water, and with my line wearing the hook and bobbin, I waited. I was in a bad position to land a fish — I would have to cross again and try to haul it up on the beach. And as I was thinking this, I felt the pull — later on, when I was older, I could tell the difference instantly between a trout and a fish — by fish I mean salmon — by the way they pulled. The pull with a trout — even the ravenous ones are somewhat less intense. But it was on and it was a big trout. It wasn’t a sea run but a beautiful big brown trout that rolled and rolled and sank my bobbin — I was too excited and I pulled — and pulled. And then perhaps the worst feeling that anyone is ever to have — the line went limp. It was as if I had been cheated out of pay.

  Still and all — I had lost it but I knew at that moment I was a fisherman.

  Also — I didn’t mind losing that fish. In fact, there was always something strange about getting one trout. But it was more complex than that — it wasn’t just the idea of one fish on a string making you look derelict, with your knees muddy and pants soaked. It was also the idea that I must pay observance to an apprenticeship — the apprenticeship of life that none had taught me.

  I spent the rest of the day looking over my bobbin and line, setting them just right and casting into that rip, letting the bobbin move in the laconic deep current toward the log. But nothing more happened. No other fish attended me. And then it was falling dark, and I was way out upon a rather opulent log — I don’t know how I had crossed the stream.

  That was when I suddenly realized it — the children. I had been gone for hours. I had let my mother down.

  In the dark I rushed back through the woods. If I move my hair I can show the remnant of a scar. It was dark and I could hardly see — I had my rod and tackle box with me. I also was secretly frightened of bears now. I had seen two before, and now it was dark.

  The night held a soft warmth in the spruces. What sickened me was this — my response to the feeling I had had earlier in the day when, unknown to them, I bullied them into being alone by saying to myself that it would give them spunk. It was for this cringing feeling of power that I held the greatest anger now. It was the cringing feeling of power of people like Mathew Pit. So now I knew it. I began to understand what my father had been fighting all his life. Not that power was not in him, but that, like all mankind, it was. But he fought it!

  I heard the slap of a beaver tail to my left. All was still, and then suddenly a great black shadow appeared in front of me, a huge animal moving just beyond my reach.

  I went into the stream, at the worst place possible, and found myself up to my waist in high water with the moose no more than three feet away. I ran from it, so that I lost my balance and went under completely. I believed (for Arron Brook filled with fickle eddies and hidden undertows is a deadly brook) I would drown and never see my parents or my siblings again.

  The moose ignored my ignorance, and just trying to stay out of my way went on across the bar, a great beast and was lost on the other side. The trees were in that warm gloom of a late-spring night.

  I reached the little lean-to. But they were not there. Only silence and the pulse of my heart in my ears. I saw Percy’s sneaker tracks alongside Autumn’s leading directly into the swale. Inside that bog and tall grass they would soon lose sight of, and not be able to hear, the brook. It was the one place I did not want them to go.

  I let the blackflies light upon me as if penance was needed, watched them suck at my sunburned arms, and then went up the warm and shadowy hill looking for a sign of my children (for this is how I thought of them). I searched the pathway that led to our small house, and then turned right, through the ghastly burned-over stumps, from where our area got its name, all looking like spectres from some terrible civil war battle. The Wilderness, perhaps. I called out to them, and every tree seemed to stare back dumbfounded at me.

  “How did you let this happen — where are your children?”

  I was sixteen years old, and I had done a disreputable thing that my father never would.

  “All is madness without love.” This is what I heard, in the gentle late-spring wind. It was exactly what my father said to me when he grabbed hold of the knife I had showed him that night. The blood was so red that had dripped on the floor. He looked up at me in terrible tenderness.

  “Lyle,” he said, his face white.

  And what had I said?

  “You fool — goddamn fool — cut your hand now, no-nothin’ fool — I never —”

  At that moment my father looked pleadingly at my mother.

  “I have failed everyone,” he said. “Constable Morris was right — you are too beautiful to be stuck with me.”

  Elly, who still had her suitcase with things to take to Saint John on a trip we never made. And too, why had she stayed with my father when all others had cast him away — was it pride? Or stubbornness or folly? I’ll tell you what, it was worse than pride, folly, or duty. It was done — it had to have been done — for love.

  Until I was walking through the ghostly remnants above Arron Brook I had forgotten those lines. I had simply remembered turning and seeing Autumn. But now those moments returned to me.

  “All is madness without love.” And my father had not said it. My mother had.

  I had lost her Percy and I sat crying and cursing God. I told God that I would kill myself if Percy died. If He didn’t want a suicide on His hands He had better shape up and give Percy back! I knew I had told myself — no, told the Virgin Mary! — I didn’t care if the child was born — and now He had taken me up on it.

  I turned back and walked toward home to tell Mother. When I got home the porch light was on. Mother was out. She must have heard and gone to look for them.

  I panicked. I could not think clearly enough to grab a flashlight and go into the woods again. I went into my father’s room. What had I ever accomplished in my life except to harm others? I held the knife to my throat, closed my eyes. (It would be, you see, my s
ense of honour. I pictured people crying over me, seeing finally my great tragic scope.) I heard a cough upstairs. I turned almost hysterically and climbed the stairs.

  Autumn was asleep in her bed, her few dolls set up about the room as if to protect her, her white dress hanging in the closet, her small shoes covered in mud on the mat, a book by Turgenev lying face up on the bed. Her nightgown was opened and her small left breast was visible in the light. To me she would probably become the most beautiful woman on the river. It usually took her an extra forty minutes to get home from school, because of Darren Voteur waiting to follow her. Her excesses with other boys did not diminish his love for her, and there was no way to shake him unless she walked across the highway and travelled along the ditch so she would not be seen. This was a predicament issued by the decree of poverty. Her poverty. Poverty I could not cure, nor God want to. Darren himself was caught in it — he could have no one else — but he thought perhaps he could have her. Worse was the fact that there was a moment when he might have had her. The moment had passed, and he couldn’t forget it. So he followed her, at a hundred yards, in the forlorn embrace of unrequited love, and waited near the mailbox until darkness and squalls of cold drove him home.

  Sometimes he would come to the house, sit with Mom at the kitchen table, sometimes for hours.

  Thinking of this I gently covered her breast, turned, and went into our room.

  Percy was lying face down in his bed in our room, his fists clenched about some wild flowers he had picked. He coughed in his sleep again and, turning to me suddenly, smiled.

  SIXTEEN

  In the next eighteen months I got into three fights with those I accused of having partaken in the vigilantism against my dad.

  I was brought to juvenile hall just before the Christmas break. Mom and Autumn and Percy came along, Autumn’s face painted like rouge on a porcelain doll.

  The day I was brought up I chanced to see Penny Porier. She was in town for a doctor’s appointment with her father and mother. Her father gave me a glance, and in that glance the whole weight of the roadway’s scorn was distributed on my shoulders. Her mother held me longer in her gaze, wearing her mink stole with the mink eyes embedded in it.