Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  These looks infused me with the condemnation neighbours had for me. Autumn whispered in my ear that Penny’s mother looked mortified to be seen with us, as if common decency should prevent us acknowledging them in front of decent town people.

  “So let’s not acknowledge them,” Autumn whispered. Autumn saying that if Leo McVicer had told them to treat my mother with respect they would have fawned the ground, and, as Autumn said, “licked my real white bum.”

  I was at that moment ashamed of Autumn with her apple-painted cheeks and her hanging dress. I was more ashamed of my sports jacket with the pockets torn, and a bit of leather saver showing in the winter sun. Penny walked away, covering her face with her white rabbit muff.

  Percy was bewildered when the prosecution called me a ruffian, and I realized for the first time how much both my brother and sister looked up to me; how both had come to support me.

  Still, my family’s lack of influence and power seemed a testimony of their love for me as we sat in that dreary place. I could not tell the court that my fights were in search of those men who had beaten my dad, those shadows that had formed about our house at night, with Jay Beard seated on a stump. Or that by my fights I had solved nothing.

  The judge told me that he had no reason to dislike me but wondered if perhaps I did not dislike myself, and that I had become what was considered a nuisance to all decent people down river.

  Isabel Young told the judge that these fights occurred because of my duty to protect my family; and as misguided as that might seem to him, she understood the events that had influenced them. I lived in a very different world from many — even many of my neighbours had not seen a night like I. Besides, my mother relied upon me and was not well.

  This was the first public acknowledgement of my mother’s illness. Also, now in the public forum was conversation pertaining to my I.Q., which I had no reason to hope was high. However, it being relayed that it was made me seem like my dad, another monster of his own making.

  “God almighty,” Autumn whispered, “another fucking genius in the family — how many is one family allowed?”

  The judge told me I would have to clean our downriver community centre and help with the upkeep of the community rink, and that if I was brought up again I would be dealt with severely.

  Because of my mother — because of how as she got to her feet she rested her hand on the shoulder of Autumn (who was now trying to look more and more like a woman) and how Autumn’s dress, for all of Autumn’s brilliance (and perhaps poignant because of such brilliance), hung lower on one side than the other — I hated myself when we went out into that January glare, into the snow that never had any more regard for us than anyone else.

  There was always snow that winter. I read magazine articles on space shuttles. I read magazine articles on Chevy trucks, Motorola homes, dreamed of getting myself a job. I found it hard to keep the family warm, though I did the best I could. And in the middle of January, still doing community service, I realized we no longer had money for oil. I trekked through the woods every afternoon, when the sky was grey or purple, and began to rob wood from the piles up the back road that had been yarded but not moved. This was still the four-foot wood. Not the eight-foot lengths — which it is today.

  I would lug this contraband through the woods along the iced-over Arron Brook on our old bobsled and put it with my pile, hoping my mom would not catch on. Once that winter she said to me, “It seems like a miracle.”

  “What does?”

  “I have prayed often that we would not run out of wood, and every morning I look out the cord seems the same size. We burn wood — yet it doesn’t diminish.”

  I was glad of my ability to keep her warm and guilty about the theft.

  There was one thing I did not know. While I did my duty at the centre, Constable Morris, who always knew where I would be, came to visit my mother, pretending my delinquency was what he was there to address. He spoke in familiar terms with Autumn and brought Percy candy. On two occasions he brought my mother presents. It was another opportunity to make her feel that Dad was inadequate and had abandoned her. He spoke of cases where fathers left their children. Each time Morris heard of one of these cases he would bring it home to Mother.

  Autumn would try her best to fend him off, but her brilliance was no match for his devotion. Her plan was to protect Mother from Morris and to spare me from knowing what was going on, sure I would get into more trouble if I did.

  I stayed out after I flooded the community centre rink and drank. I drank because of the dirt in my hair and the cut of my clothes. I met Cheryl Voteur at the rink during this time. She too was doing community work because she had robbed Vachon cakes from the back of a truck to bring home to her brother and sister.

  SEVENTEEN

  I do not know who lived in a poorer house, Cheryl or I. But I suppose I would give the nod to her. For beyond anything else there was a scatological violence the likes of which were different from ours. About the house was a cluster of red and frozen alders, the windows were covered in heavy plastic, the house itself sank down toward the road, the road it hugged was unpaved and broken down. Inside the walls one could hear the rats nonchalantly gnawing after nine o’clock at night. A desperate tree clung by torn roots to the back field and above them ran a yellow white sky. Her younger brother, Darren, seemed sorrowful and strange, and I knew that he was himself being bullied. Besides, his loss of Autumn’s love, which he thought he once had, bothered him. I spoke to him about this, and he shrugged as if it was nothing. He kept to himself in a small attic room upstairs, listened to heavy rock music, grew his fingernails and hair long. He passed us by with a brooding look; his room was filled with posters of the band Megadeth. I realized that out of those airwaves of information that always tell the poor who they should be, he had chosen strange examples.

  Cheryl had had a baby when she was fourteen she called Moo Moo. She had the same dreams of any girl her age from California, New York, or Toronto — she dreamed of being a model, of being like Madonna or Cyndi Lauper. She had her ears and nose pierced and read novels like Love’s Light Anew, The Weekend Romance, The Tall Dark Stranger, Love Island. They filled the small crooked bookshelf in the living room of the dank drab house. She gave me some to take to Autumn, not knowing that Autumn was reading Malamud and Flannery O’Connor; nor I think knowing that books could be different than hers. Cynthia Pit was her mentor.

  I did not understand then what I now believe. Cynthia and Cheryl were examples of how our family had failed the river. For the river was hurrying on, like the world, and had no time to stop to reflect on the greater ideas of where it was going. The music was new, the age was new, the idea of freedom for Cheryl seemed new as well. How could my father, who believed in the ancient quest of absolute truth, ever compete here? No wonder he was laughed at. His wisdom did not bring money, did not alleviate hardship, but caused a lack of one and a surplus of the other, and who would opt for that? Worst of all, his wisdom never told people they had no moral responsibility. It told them they had, and must at every waking moment be conscious of it. No wonder they hated him.

  I found out, one cold winter night when I was seventeen, that Cheryl shared the same secrets of poverty as my sister, Autumn Lynn. Her panties were faded and ripped when I took them off; and when she had her period she often used rags from the upstairs closet.

  She asked me why I fought. I told her I wanted to get even with those people who had blamed my dad and beat him.

  She smiled knowingly and said, “The Sheppards beat your dad.”

  The Sheppards kept their drugs at her house. So I had to be careful of her indictment. Samson, skinny and blacker looking than when my father brought him the groceries, was afraid of the Sheppards, of being caught, not only with the drugs but with whole sides of moose and deer meat the Sheppards stored in his back room and sold on the black market.

  Cheryl feared the police as well, not only for her father’s but for her daughter’s sake. Too
often they had been kept indentured because of what those they associated with had implicated them in. That was the secret in our world. Now moose and deer meat hung to their rafters out back.

  Cheryl did not want to lose the child. And I began to realize, as she kissed me and stroked my hair (and other parts of me), this is why I was here. She wanted me to protect her family from the same shadows that had once plagued mine.

  Strangely, the Sheppards were nice to me. That is because they knew where Morris was before I did. And Morris would never ruin his chances with my mom by raiding the place and implicating me in anything.

  So my interest in Cheryl helped them. Being nice to me meant that they believed I either did not know they had beaten my father or, worse, I knew but did not hold it against them — which was closer to the truth.

  Cheryl told me that after Dad’s beating, someone gave the Sheppards runaway money. They had both left for Ontario; that they ran like rabbits.

  “Someone has to be brave and put a stop to them,” she said.

  Her life, almost like Cynthia Pit’s, had been pressed out and stamped. The dizzying mathematics, history, all the multiple questions on a sheet had been marked with an X to make her a failure. She had gone on, believing that leaving the torturous tests of the old school would make her a success. It had been just one more way to lose. All of a sudden her choices had lessened and she was scrambling in the dark. But her eyes were tender and the hope in her heart still soft.

  “Of course I’ll help,” I said. But saying that and doing it were two different things, I knew.

  Besides, Danny Sheppard had put his arm around me after I got community service work and hugged me, his harsh breath in my face as he asked me how I was.

  “Keep a stiff pecker, boy,” he had said. “You’ll be a good lad someday.”

  Did I want to ruin that feeling? No, never — no one had treated me so kindly. At least none as tough as they. To gain their approval had made me self-deluded and vain. Powerful people had finally smiled on me. I was known as a tough boy. And this is what my father had feared and years ago had cautioned me against. But I had crossed the Rubicon — or another river, or Arron Brook.

  Cheryl wanted me to descend into Dante’s hell. I smiled at her, like my Beatrice, but, even after all my talk of revenge, was unsure whether I was ready for the plummet.

  So one night when I left her house I made my way home by the back road. I came upon the Sheppards’ house, a huge rambling place near the water and hidden by ragged, half-bare spruces. I stopped to look into the orange light of a downstairs window. I saw Bennie and Danny Sheppard handing a toke back and forth. Scrawny, muscled, tall, and dishevelled they stood before me. I knew these were the men of the shadows, the very men from my youth, the men who had defiled my mother with their talk. I had reason to hate.

  Then Mathew Pit himself entered the room, with a platter of moose steaks, nodding at something one of them said.

  All of a sudden Mat Pit, putting the steaks on the table, looked through the window and stared straight at me, his face as bold as it was inscrutable. His hands came up to his face and he continued to stare at the vagary of darkness outside. I did not know if he had seen me or not, or what I would do if he had. I knew at that moment that I had fought with young men I knew in my heart were not responsible for my dad’s beating, but the much more dangerous Sheppards I did not seek out.

  Perhaps it wasn’t them, I thought. Yes, it would be hard to prove it was.

  I went home that night, and saw Constable Morris’s car in my yard. It was fortuitous for him, my trouble with the law. I went inside and saw Autumn playing checkers with Percy, long past his bedtime.

  “Another cup of tea, Percy, dear,” she said when I entered.

  I began staying at home.

  EIGHTEEN

  For a long while I said nothing to him. I only listened to him. He came and went when he wanted.

  “Now that he’s gone, Elly, what are you to do with yourself?” Morris asked Mom one night, spying father’s books, making a mechanical nod to my sister. We were in an awful state. We did not want to insult him, yet had our mother’s honour to protect. Nor did I want him there for a lot of other reasons.

  I had stolen the chalice from the church. One Sunday I had gone past the vestry and saw it sitting out of its dome. It was snowing and blowing and people were helping push cars out of the parking lot. I went into the vestry, picked up the chalice, and put it under my thin red jacket. I brought it home and hid it in my room, in the wall behind Dad’s books. I believed I could get a lot for it — but I soon found out how hard it was to move. The theft was on the news, and my mother said the rosary and prayed for it to be returned.

  Cheryl Voteur asked who I thought would have taken it. I knew that it would not be long before people found out — and when they did, all of what was thought about my father and family would be justified.

  When Constable Morris came, he sat fifteen feet from a stolen chalice the entire river was looking for — even the Baptist minister had appealed for its return. The Knights of Columbus had put up a reward, and it was spoken about at mass. People were blaming the Sheppards, and Bennie had made a statement that he and his brother would find out who the real thief was.

  After hearing that, I did not go outside. It was deep in winter; the nights were frozen silent, with stars gleaming over our tiny house, shaped like a worn old shoebox on its edge.

  Mom sat in the bathroom with the door locked when Morris came in. I would end up entertaining him by playing chess. I always had to manoeuvre my queen and bishop, my rook and knight into being vulnerable enough for him to take, so he could win.

  He would stay for an hour or two and boast to me about his time playing hockey. He spoke about the case against us, and how he had tried to help Mom by treating her as a human being. He also said he understood I had some difficulty with my father, and he assured me that he would guard anything I wanted to tell him. So one night, in the midst of all my other worries, I said:

  “I have something to tell you about Dad.”

  “Oh? What?” he said.

  “Do you remember when he and Mom went to visit you at the police station?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Well — here it goes,” I said. “It’s from Shakespeare!”

  “What is?”

  “What my father quoted,” I said, “It’s from King Lear — he read it when he was sixteen by himself. After his father died he lived here. He redid the walls and added a room for Mom. Didn’t he, Mom?” We were silent, listening to the wind. The bathroom door was closed and locked.

  “Yes,” Mom said from the bathroom. Autumn came over and sat down beside us with a shawl wrapped about her entire body and head, and only her completely white face visible. She blinked her tiny eyelashes. Her sitting beside him seemed to rattle Morris.

  “Is that a good play — King Lear?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a great play — Orwell has written a wonderful defence of it, because Tolstoy attacked it so mercilessly.”

  “Tolstoy didn’t know what he was talking about?” Morris asked.

  “No,” Autumn said quietly. “Tolstoy always knew — didn’t he, Lyle? And he knew this — that as great as he was — and Tolstoy is very great indeed — Shakespeare is greater. This is what Mr. Leo Tolstoy knew — and can you imagine, not being satisfied with being Leo Tolstoy?” She smiled at me — not at Morris.

  “Yes,” mother answered from the bathroom, and then was silent.

  Morris went red in the face. “Why didn’t your father say so?” he complained, looking from me to Autumn. “If he had only said so — things may have been different.”

  “I don’t know,” Autumn answered. “But he never begs the truth in front of those who are contemptuous of him.”

  “He didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” Mother said from behind her shield.

  We all looked at the bathroom door.

  “I don’t know
much about plays — or things like Tolstoy,” Morris said, apologetically.

  “There is no shame in that,” Autumn said, tender-heartedly, but looking only at me.

  “No,” I said, “except the lowest common denominator attacked my father — those who would have burned books attacked my father. You were part of that, Constable Morris. You know that too — deep down in your heart. But my father — you could take any book you wanted, and my dad could tell you about it.”

  “Shakespeare’s plays?” Morris said, sadly contemplating the books. “You have read them?”

  “Of course,” I said, though I had read only Hamlet and Lear.

  “You people seem to have loads of education,” Morris said, with an inflection that meant, Why do you live like you do? and another hidden inflection that meant, I am an enemy of that.

  “Yes. Our father taught us,” Autumn answered calmly, “not to want anything, but to live just like we do.” She reached out and took my hand — oh, staged treachery of the moment. I held her hand, as if we were always holding hands; and as if this was not the first time since school we did so.

  “Do you think I’ve gotten your father wrong?”

  “Oh yes,” Mother said again from the bathroom.

  “Completely,” I said. “But that doesn’t matter.”

  “Why?”

  “The case will be reopened,” Autumn said, “for we will not let it die.”

  “As long as there is a breath in my body I will not allow my father’s name to be so besmirched,” I said.

  “Well — so much of the accusations seemed to fit at the time — I’m sorry, Elly — but isn’t that so.”

  There was no sound from the bathroom.

  “Sooner or later it will be solved,” I said, eating a banana and looking at it. “They are saying that Constable John Delano is back on the river. He is known to be smart.”