Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  I sat and faced him. If he was prepared to do this favour it would be the most important thing he could do for me. It would free me from the Sheppards, who would have killed me. It indebted me to him and I would have to repay him sometime, or somewhere. I knew this.

  I sat before him. He looked up from what he was doing and told me calmly not to trust anyone, especially the Sheppards.

  “I don’t trust them,” I said. I was about to say “Nor do I trust you,” but I checked myself.

  “But how will we get rid of that chalice?” he said sadly. “It was a bad trick that — you should’ve known better — didn’t your mom teach you to respect nothin’ about religion?”

  He said I had done it because of my ignorance and youth. But he knew nothing of the Christmas box years before.

  “We don’t touch the church here,” he said, “and you have to be reasonable — leave the older people alone — leave kids alone — that’s very important!” I fell under his gaze because of Trenton. No matter what I said, my father’s guilt was still possible.

  Then he placed a line of cocaine down for us to sniff, and bent over it with his huge forearms. I had never tried cocaine before and told him I didn’t want it. He just handed me the twenty-dollar bill and nodded his head, so I did a line.

  I told him I had no idea why I took the chalice. I also said I was sorry.

  “Never be sorry — that’s just what the Sheppards want from you — if they think you are sorry or scared you won’t be able to behave like a man,” he said calmly, looking down at the mirror and then rubbing some coke off his nose. “I never say sorry, never say please — I never say either to any man. Do you think McVicer is guilty?”

  “Depends of what,” I said.

  He looked up and smirked.

  “Of course he is — but will they get him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They won’t get him — and that little girl — Porier — she will the broke — but my lawsuit will get him.” He smiled self-indulgently, and a little crudely. He sniffed another line and looked at me carefully.

  Then he said that taking the chalice was a daring thing to do. I said I did not feel daring and the best way to fence it might be to sell it to one of the Catholic sailors on one of the paper boats. He reached out and slapped my face.

  “That’s shit! That’s the way to go to jail,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “You listen to me, because I care for you, and don’t go near the fuckin’ Sheppards!”

  I hesitated. Then I said, “You tell me how to fence this and I’ll owe you.” I did not rub my cheek though it stung like hell. Never once had my father hit me.

  He grinned. There were specks of dirt in his straw-blond hair, and his eyes were red from drinking.

  “Give it to me,” he said, “and I’ll get five hundred dollars for you.”

  That was half the reward the Knights of Columbus had offered.

  That night I brought it over to him wrapped in the best blanket I could find, Percy’s security blanket. It was a gold chalice, and when I had stolen it there were still some blessed hosts in it. They were still there when I handed it to him. He looked at it, took a few hosts to chew, dumped the rest on the ground, into the snow now soft with spring rain, poured some Napoleon wine in it and drank and handed it to me, and I drank. Then he took the cloth and wiped it out clean, and wiped the fingerprints off it, much like a priest might do after mass.

  “Go home and wait. I’ll call you,” he said merrily.

  Two days later he called. I went to see him, and he handed me five hundred dollars. He had taken the chalice to Rudy Bellanger, who took it to the Knights of Columbus, and they had cut the cheque for him without question. Mat could have kept all the money. I would have been in no position to challenge him if he had.

  That long-ago night the bells rang out for the blessed event of the gold chalice being returned. The priest said the theft was a mystery that only God knew, but the return of the chalice was a miracle.

  My mother came to me and asked me if I had heard the news.

  “What news is that?” I asked.

  “A miracle has happened today,” she said timidly.

  “Another miracle — what miracle?”

  “Our chalice has been returned to Father Porier.” Percy laughed and clapped. I said to myself I would not get into any more trouble. With the five hundred dollars I bought Mom and Percy and Autumn a new colour T.V.

  I was disgusted with myself. I had relied on others to take care of me. I was unable to protect Cheryl. And I remembered how Jay Beard protected my father while his own house was under assault.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Gerald Dove sat with his lawyers the very night the bells rang for the return of the chalice. The lawyers for the five families wanted to sue the government and use the tape of McVicer’s press conference to fuel the possibility of fresh litigation.

  Dove himself did not know why he thought this was a trap if the lawyers did not. But everything he knew about McVicer pointed to one. He had cornered the one man he never wanted to fight against. The man who had come to the orphanage about something years ago, and saw him, a red-headed child, sitting in the middle of a crib-lined room. McVicer had picked the child up, asked about his parents — the father had died on one of McVicer’s saws before the child was born, and the mother had died just a few months before. McVicer, in the grand way McVicer had, became his mentor.

  Dove was exhausted. That night they were sitting in Penny Porier’s small, freshly decorated apartment. There was light classical music playing from the radio beside her. Penny would listen to nothing else even though classical music troubled her quiet, beautiful face.

  She turned this troubled face on her lawyers. She had a blanket over her and drank apple juice from a straw.

  Dove knew that he had used her. Worse, he didn’t know how much he had used her until that very moment. He told her that with those letters from McVicer’s safe it might be proven that our government knew exactly what was going on. That Canadian companies were hand in glove with government funding; a government needing the approval of larger companies in the States; and that not only she but hundreds and hundreds of people were harmed. Yet she was their main client. He asked her if they should proceed. She felt a tickle in her throat from the apple juice — and blushed because she had a crush on Dove, and had learned in a month to say the things that would please him.

  “Of course,” she said.

  In fact she did it only to please him — for nothing else mattered much.

  The next day her lawyers filed suit against the very government that had been funding their research, alleging complicity and gross negligence. Within three days they realized their mistake. Their research funding was immediately withdrawn.

  Dove could no longer travel to investigate other cases on behalf of the lawyers or get corroborating testimony from stateside companies. To go to court was impossible, because the government and McVicer and the chemical companies in the States were willing to stall for years. Penny Porier might be dead in a matter of months.

  On March 28 Dove tried to phone McVicer, but McVicer, when he heard Dove’s name, broke a fly rod over his knee and would not take the call.

  It became apparent Dove’s lawyers could no longer fight the case on behalf of the families unless they did it out of their own pockets. An argument erupted in Penny’s apartment, on the morning of April 1, while she lay on the couch.

  “Oh,” Penny said to them suddenly, lifting her head. “This is Bach — I think — yes.”

  By the next weekend only Gerald Dove and Griffin stood beside Penny, who was now seen as ridiculous and greedy and filled with schemes of betrayal.

  Dove tried to keep her in an apartment and have the nurse.

  But he was finding it impossible to pay the bills. In desperation he wrote to Gladys McVicer, Penny’s godmother. But Gladys, in terror of her father’s rages against Dove, was helpless.

  Finally Griffin, the
only member of her family to speak to her, drove her back home.

  The one remaining lawyer, as a favour to Dove, tried to subpoena the letters, but McVicer now asserted they were misplaced long ago, and the court, in the infuriating conceit of courts, smelling a blind weakness in Dove’s case, refused a warrant for lack of probable cause.

  In late April it was decided, for Penny Porier’s sake (whom everyone from the government to McVicer himself said they loved), to settle out of court. The government offered Penny what it offered the other families in a gesture of good will: three thousand dollars.

  McVicer also assured Abby that he was still the foreman, even though he had not called him in weeks. Abby had no pension, not a chance to be hired anywhere else. He was over fifty. He hung about the store, nervous and with a hopeful face. His wife made McVicer a pan of her famous date squares. It was rumoured Leo had thrown them to his horses.

  People began to gossip about Penny, saying that her disease was from a condition of modern promiscuity and she had set everything up to blame McVicer because she didn’t want it to reflect poorly on her strict Catholic family, her uncle being a modest and pious priest. Some men drove by in an old convertible and yelled insults at her house. Griffin ran outside and grabbed a rock, flung it impotently at the sky as the men taunted him and laughed.

  After gossip about Penny travelled on the wires, McVicer published a statement refuting the rumours and pleaded with the public not to listen to hearsay.

  Penny Porier, still with braces on her bottom teeth, died in the last week of April, at the age of eighteen. I did not go to her funeral.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Three days later I was walking the old asphalt lane that led to McVicer’s general store. I was happy the chalice scrape was over. The wind was soft and the night was sweet. I had my coat opened and my hands in my pockets. Lights were on in the houses and the snow was melting down in the dooryards.

  I knew someone was in the woods hiding from me. I kept walking and then spun around. I saw someone running to the far side of the road, then cutting across the field toward the highway.

  I went above him, through the woods, and met him as he came out just below the back field of the community centre. It was Griffin Porier.

  “What’s goin’ on?” I said. “You following me? You want another punch in the fuckin’ head?”

  “No,” he said. He was shaking like a leaf. He was carrying a canister of gas.

  “What the hell are you doing, then?”

  “Nothin’.” Tears ran down his face. “I wanted to burn his old store — for lying and cheating us,” he said. “Dad worked for him for thirty years — and now he is home alone — it’s as if he is dead — and Penny — but I chickened out —”

  “Give me,” I said. “You don’t have the fibre to do what you have to!”

  I hauled the canister from him in fury, and the broken hockey stick with a rag tied about it he had in his belt.

  It was one of those spring nights when the moonlight glints off fields full of receding snow and bathes the laneways in soft expectations of spring and summer. I approached the store from the back — and from the back it looked dilapidated, covered in tin and rivets and black tarpaper. It had stood for eighty years. I had worked in it. It was as if it belonged to me as well as anyone.

  I smashed a window with the torch, then lighted it and threw it down on a shelf of work pants, and then I poured gas over it. It was as if the store had been waiting eighty years for me to come to do this. I was out of my body watching myself from a great height.

  Two days later McVicer asked to see me. I went to his house, stood in his office, and looked at his great collection of fishing flies and the broken fly rod in the corner. He sat down and looked up at me. He was wearing Levi’s jeans, which always look strange on a man in his sixties, no matter if he is youthful or not. He told me he had not slept since the fire. His face looked weary. He had been away all yesterday with the insurance adjuster. He told me that the insurance people believed that because his own highway, which skirted north of our little community, had made his store superfluous, he had had it torched himself. They were going to withhold payment. He stared at me.

  He was an outcast.

  “Didn’t I give everyone turkey at Christmas? Who would burn my store, for cripes sake, Lyle — who?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” I said.

  “And I never paid minimum wage — I always paid a nickel more.”

  He opened up his glass fly box and, fastidiously peering over them, asked if I wanted to take a few. I took a Royal Coachman, for luck.

  “Show me your hands,” he said. I did so. He looked at them curiously and held them in his, close to his chest. His eyes flashed when he held them. He ran his thumb over my knuckles. It was on the tip of my tongue to confess. But then he said:

  “Ah — I told you you would box.” His rough old hands were shaking just slightly. “I have no store anymore,” he said, releasing my hands and reaching out to pick up the remains of the fly rod he had snapped in two. “No — don’t have no store no more. I want you to know I didn’t hurt your father or mother — I liked them.”

  He didn’t look at me, but continued to inspect his rod for a moment. I said nothing.

  “Man can be defeated but not destroyed,” he said, a line that finishes, “Man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

  I told him it was from Hemingway. He did not know that. He told me someone had said it to him once when he was in trouble.

  I nodded and he let me go.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It was summer of 1989. My father had been gone almost three years. Percy had no memory of him, and I was more content.

  Dad sent us letters, with money, telling us how he prayed for us (not one of his prayers, which I called his praters, did I keep or return) and that what he was doing now would insure our future (a lie) and we would all be together again (I did not care).

  Elly read these letters by holding the paper straight out in front of her because her eyes were growing weak. My mother loved him and was still lovely, her hair with just the first traces of grey would fall in front of her eyes in the old sunlight that came upon the kitchen table in the after-supper hours.

  She and Percy kept a garden with some beans and peas — we were trying to get Percy to try a pea, and would put one on his plate every night for supper. Which he did not trouble himself to eat. He would, however, eat around it.

  Elly and he would go to their garden each morning and look at the crop of carrots and beans and turnips, which Autumn informed us were rutabagas. Then in the afternoon as summer went along Mom would sit on the porch shelling the peas and Percy would lie out in the grass with Scupper Pit. Autumn, who had a job as a summer counsellor at school, would come home about two.

  My mother had taken a catering job that spring for the McTavish woman whose house she used to board at. My mother, twice a week, had to deliver twenty-five sandwiches to those workers on the road, and the names of those she had to deliver sandwiches to were written out on a piece of notepaper on the kitchen table in her crooked hopeless handwriting. Often when I woke she was gone out to get those ingredients for those sandwiches.

  My mother’s little sandwich empire. She would walk up the road alone, a small woman with soft auburn hair, and a slight sad smile. Sometimes in the evening she would tell Percy and Autumn a story about how when Dad came home she wouldn’t have to make sandwiches anymore, and she might take a course at a university.

  “How wonderful it will be,” Elly would say, folding her hands on her lap. Then she would sigh, and in a moment of vulnerability say again, “Yes, how wonderful it will all be.”

  Father wrote saying he would be home before Christmas. I do not know why but I defended him to others and hated him myself. But when Autumn asked me to pose with the rest of the family as Jay Beard snapped a picture to send to him, I would not.

  Over the last few years, I took the money that Father sent us and with
it paid the hydro and the oil and bought the groceries. I told Autumn I never spent it on myself. But I never showed her how much Dad sent. At first I spent just a little of it, and then a little more. Until his money obsessed me each time I went to town; I drank much of it away. I heard Father worked until his feet bled, in places that could bust you apart. So I knew I was obligated not to touch a cent. I tried to put this money back. I had trapped the winter before for muskrat and beaver and, setting up a bait using a poor deranged horse, shot ten coyotes with the old over-and-under .22/410 my father owned, and pelted them out and sold each for thirty bucks. I suppose I thought myself tough, and I had a reputation. But the money came and went and I still had nothing to show for it. I was going nowhere, neither to university nor to hell.

  Autumn knew I was taking Dad’s money for myself, so it was hard to look at her. It was hard to look at myself. Each time I took ten dollars I cut myself a small mark on my left arm with my knife, to remind me when I took off my shirt how much in blood I owed my dad. Then I started on my right arm. Then the cuts became deeper and longer. And one day somewhere up Arron Brook, far away on a windy bluff, I realized I had spent more than twelve hundred dollars of money that belonged rightly to the family, and that the marks crisscrossing my arms did nothing more than mock me for my weakness.

  “Are you going to take Percy and me swimming up to Gordon’s wharf?” Autumn asked one day, trying to make amends. I said I would.

  But I had no time for them. Not even to take Percy to the circus that year. Though I promised, and promised again and then once more. And he waited to go. Every morning he got up and, brushing Scupper Pit, would say: “This will be the day — Lyle will take me to the circus.”

  I stayed out near the brook for days at a time.

  Even there, I sometimes heard of Father. I would hear of him from strangers I met fishing on the Bartibog in the reddish brown pools at twilight. I wore a knife on my hip and carried a knife in my boot.