Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  One time a man asked me if he was still alive. The man told me he knew him and had always felt the accusations against him were lies.

  “You know he is a great man,” the fellow said.

  “I don’t know him at all — nor would I want to,” I said, trying to control my voice, and the damn tears coming to my eyes. The man nodded and moved down the pool and disappeared in the grainy twilight.

  Why in God’s name could I not have peace from him? I would not spend another cent of his money, I told myself. And if he was a great man, so too would I be. That is, I did not know how much I envied him. But I envied him. He had made his life in spite of poverty, scorn, and intolerance. He had made it what it had to be. He had fashioned it as Marcus Aurelius advised. He had done what men all over the world say men should do. And in order to prove myself to him, what had I become?

  TWENTY-SIX

  Sometimes after fishing when I walked up Burnt Hill, I could see our small home on the flat in amongst the trees, and far, far away, a speck so small he was almost indiscernible, Percy hauling his wagon up the cool dusty lane to wait for me, with Trenton Pit’s old dog, Scupper, hobbling along behind.

  In the other direction, the Pit house would be steely quiet, with faint pink clouds far above it, and across the greenish blue bay, the indistinct houses of Bay du Vin, and behind me the ominous old house of Mr. Leo McVicer.

  The Pit house was a house of sorrow because of baby Teresa’s heart. The yard was filled with potholes, the house’s siding was faded yellow and covered with ten years of dirt. The house itself seemed to sit unnaturally on the foundation Cynthia had procured. The swing set in the yard was new, an addition paid for by Rudy Bellanger, and made the house look more desolate. Often Teresa was down in Moncton or Halifax in intensive care. I remember how Cynthia looked uncomfortable in the skirts and dresses she wore to the hospital.

  At least half of Rudy’s pay went to protect himself and keep Cynthia quiet. Cynthia was frightened that the child would die, a fear that came from a delicate reason she could not admit to herself. How could she hold Rudy to blackmail if the child died? Now that the store was gone, Rudy had no steady employment. At the start of that year he had eight thousand dollars put away, because one day he wanted to go to university, so impressed was he by Gerald Dove, whom he knew Gladys once loved. He had talked about university to me one night, thinking he would impress me.

  “Have you ever heard of a writer named — ah — James Joyce?” He squinted his sad eyes at me.

  I told him I had, told him what Joyce wrote, and he shook his head.

  “The more I learn, the less it is I know,” he admitted sadly.

  Yet he slowly gave that university money up to Cynthia over the next few months. He was still living in the huge house, still had certain duties to do for Leo, but every sharp wind from the bay reminded him that life was passing him by and he had done nothing. The same buoy he saw at ten was the buoy he saw now at forty.

  One night, I came home drunk, a bottle of wine still in my hand. I woke everyone. I called my mother down to make me supper.

  “Shh,” Autumn said.

  “Don’t shh me,” I said, raising my hand to strike her. I stopped.

  “It’s just you’ll wake up Percy — and he’s —”

  “He’s what?”

  “He’s going to go to first grade — Mom and I registered him for the fall — he is excited about it. He waited up to show you his pencil all day —”

  When I went to bed Percy pretended to be asleep, with his caterpillar collection on his nightstand, his small sneakers beside the bed with his socks in them, and his bow tie hanging from one of the bedposts. His pencil was gripped in his hand. Now and then, as I staggered and sang, he would open an eye and look at me and then quickly close it again. He saw the cuts on my arms, and a tattoo on my left arm that I had gotten at the circus.

  As I undressed I saw four dollars in an envelope on Percy’s dresser, and a strange word written on the envelope: Getir.

  The next morning I couldn’t look at them. They sat stone-faced at the table. I ran outside in the rain.

  I spent the rest of the summer dividing my time between fishing and cutting wood for the winter — the more wood I could cut, the less oil we would burn, the less money I would need. I found buyers for most of the things I had.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  About twice a month my mother received a letter marked “URGENT” from the tax department indicating how much she and my father owed, the accumulated interest on the back taxes, and the urgency with which they must pay. One day, looking through the kitchen drawers for a file to sharpen the chainsaw blade, I found these letters stuffed in a plastic bag, hidden behind the cleaning rags. I took them out and read them. It was the disaster my father had brought upon her, by his one venture into business, which she could not fight or endure and so hid from her children, even though I considered myself the man of the house.

  I took out my rage on my mother, who shook as I shouted at her. She had relied upon me so long that I was no longer her son. I remember hearing how Mathew Pit tormented Trenton. Well, I had become the same. Finally, after cursing her and Dad for an hour, spit coming to my mouth, I stopped, and sat down beside her in a stupor. She was shaking, her head down, her nose running, her left foot crooked over her right. She was staring at her shoes.

  Autumn had grabbed me and I had thrown her and blackened her eye. Percy sat on the couch, watching us throughout, without a word. Now, wanting to make it up to them, I asked, “How can they take what little we have?”

  But Mom did not respond. She knew that I myself had taken money. I myself had spent it on wine. She sat as she always did, hands on her apron, looking beyond me.

  “Well, we will go up and see them!” I said. “I’ll straighten this here out for you, Mom — I will.”

  Autumn would no longer speak to me. But my mother did what I said. Though she was ill and spent much of her time sitting on the porch now, she and I went to the tax department above the post office in Chatham and sat in the waiting room waiting for Ms. Hardwicke to see us.

  That afternoon we discovered that Ms. Hardwicke had been taken from our case and another woman had been given our file. This woman was working as a supervisor. Her name was Whyne.

  Diedre Whyne sat down at her desk, now and then glancing my mother’s way but keeping her eyes off me. She cleared her throat.

  She told us that the tax department had a plan of action. We could relieve ourselves of part of this burden if we sold the wood on the land we owned. She estimated that we could get ten thousand dollars. She had a topographical map of the area and it showed our property as lots 987–988 and 990. It was 988 where she focussed her attention.

  I told her she had overestimated the wood’s worth by about six thousand dollars. She asked me if I had cut any yet. I didn’t answer her. I told her the tax burden was my father’s. But this was not true. It was as much my mother’s burden, and it was the property that could be used to alleviate it, for that belonged to both Mother and Father.

  “I need that wood to cut,” I said.

  “You can cut it and sell it —” Ms. Whyne said.

  “I need to burn it for winter wood.”

  “But not if you move out of the house,” Ms. Whyne said. “If you moved into a low-rental in town — sold the property — the debt would be paid — I am not at all trying to harm you — you understand 1 am trying to help you. I have been racking my brain to find a way to get Elly out from under all of this. I have not slept because of it. I feel responsible for her —”

  “But we are not going to move out of our house,” my mother said. “We are waiting for my husband — he won’t know where we are.”

  Ms. Whyne sighed. “How many times have I predicted this? Men running away after leaving the woman with a houseful of children.”

  Mother fidgeted and looked at me quickly, as if to warn me not to say anything.

  “Fine —” Whyne said, “but i
f you cut the wood on your property, we would want you to sell it — for we do have a right to it, you see. I have looked at every angle here — and there is nothing I can do, besides offer you a two-bedroom low-rental on Margaret Street — I have it set aside for you.”

  “How did you know I was cutting wood on my property?” I asked.

  “Are you cutting wood on your property?”

  “For firewood for the winter.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to Mother, “but you are obligated to sell it — you cannot just use it.”

  We went back home. Whyne’s position was one of pointless and limited provincial power. I learned years later that at any time someone either here or in Saint John could have, in what would be called “an act of mercy,” taken this burden away from us completely. This is what Ms. Hardwicke knew, and why she was transferred from our case.

  I sat in a kitchen chair in the dark and tried to think.

  “They can’t take everything away,” I told my mother. But she simply put her hands on her lap and sighed.

  The next day I took Dad’s old chainsaw, which he had used for cutting the ice during smelting season. I cut a number of birch trees in the morning. I cut them into four-foot lengths and hid them as best I could under bushes and smelt netting. Then I took my rod, with a few butt bugs, and proceeded to the water.

  I got home late that evening. I saw the lawnchair sitting out in the front yard, on a patch of grass and dirt. The house was dark, and a bird or two still twittered. A piece of Percy’s birthday cake was left out for me on the table. I went upstairs. In the room I saw Percy’s envelope, with the word Getir written on it and the few crumpled dollars in it. I looked for a dollar in my pocket to give him, but my pockets were as empty as my heart.

  The next day I went to collect the wood I had cut. It was early in the morning, with pearls of wet dew on the tall grass. I walked along Arron Brook, smelling the rot of windfalls, and saw the sunlight meander through the tops of the trees. A crow made a racket at me. I began to look for my wood and thought I must have walked up too far.

  But I hadn’t. A truck had come in on the path that led from the highway and had taken away my wood. There wasn’t a stick left out of my four cords. The chatter of a squirrel made me look up, high above the trees, to curse.

  I went to the tax department and waited for over an hour. I had almost talked myself out of staying when Ms. Whyne said she would see me. It was quarter after four in the afternoon. They worked until four-thirty in the summer months.

  I was ushered along the hallway toward her cubicle, past pictures of streams and old spruce trees. The day had turned hot, and the air conditioner was on in the office. Behind her cubicle stretched others in the half dark. Faraway sunlight pressed through the narrow window blinds.

  She was wearing large earrings and a flowered blouse, and a plain light blue skirt. Her face was damp white and her eyes wide, a look prevalent among people in offices during the summer.

  “My wood was taken,” I said.

  “Yes — we were able to get the truck right in,” she said.

  “That is my wood for the winter,” I said. “We need it to heat our house.”

  “It belongs to Revenue Canada,” she said. She cleared her throat and picked up a glass of water, shifted some papers and glanced up at me, with her eyes very wide and dry. Her lips touched the water in the glass, and she smiled slightly, as if to herself.

  “I’ll pay you back,” I whispered.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ll pay you back,” I whispered. “My father was ruined, over nothing at all. But I am not my father. I will not be.”

  “Oh — a threat.” She said, “I’ve never had a threat.”

  I had no weapons to fight back. Not the weapons that are now allowed. So I turned and put my fist through the window.

  I was taken to the hospital needing eleven stitches. The police came and questioned me at supper hour, as I sat on a gurney. Constable Morris came in.

  “Lyle,” he said, “think of Elly.”

  He questioned me as to whether or not I had threatened Ms. Whyne. I said I had not, and had no intention of it, nor did I mean to break the window. What I realized was this — my father had told him the truth and deserved to be believed, and he did not wish to believe my father, for my mother’s sake. I told him a lie — and he desperately wished to believe me for my mother’s sake.

  He told me he did not know what I was into, or with who — but he wanted to tell me this.

  “What?” I asked.

  He told me the Sheppards were to be raided soon, and not to dare go near there or the Voteur house.

  I told him Cheryl and her family should not be harmed, it wasn’t their doing.

  “If you mention a word of this I’ll run you in,” he said. “I’m doing this for your mom — for your mom — don’t go near that fuckin’ house. I’m doing this for Sydney,” he said, “not for you. I don’t want to see you in a scrape.”

  I was released at eight o’clock. There were conditions. I was not to go near Ms. Whyne or the tax department again or I would be charged with assault and I would have to go to jail.

  The east wind reminded me of fall, and that my wood should be piled under its stable. My hand pained. I thought of how Dad had grabbed my knife — how utterly useless I thought his act. But what had mine garnered me? Nothing more or less than Dad’s. And I saw my father’s act as a proud and noble act of a man. An act selfless. My act was of a youth foolish. Besides, Father had no guilt. I could not walk past a mirror during the light of day.

  Three days later, Danny Sheppard was picked up at his house. Knowing he was in for a prison sentence, he fired a rifle at a cop. The shot missed. This police officer was Constable Morris.

  Danny came up for trial sometime later. And by chance Rudy Bellanger was on the jury. They had all kinds of evidence against him, and found Danny guilty of trafficking to children on the reserve. It was his fourth offence and everyone knew he was going away, even though with his hair cut short and a clean suit, one of the police officers could not pick him out in the courtroom.

  Rudy was the jury foreman and pronounced the verdict with great relish. Rudy did not understand why Mathew was so quiet and alarmed. But I did.

  As soon as the sentence of eleven years was imposed and the courtroom cleared, Danny told Constable John Delano that both he and Bennie knew things about the bridge and the long-ago robbery at McVicer’s house.

  With Rudy boasting his part in their downfall, I became aware that when he helped sentence Danny Sheppard, he had sentenced Mathew and himself. He just did not know it yet. Mathew took two trips to visit his friend in Dorchester and came home glummer each time. Even Connie Devlin did not speak to him now.

  Their world would crumble without my help, just as my father had said. They who lift a hand against you do so against themselves. If only I had believed him just a little I might still be free.

  LOVE

  ONE

  Mathew and Cynthia had convinced themselves they would be able to retire after they won their lawsuit. Yet almost six years had gone by and they waited, as people of little knowledge wait, always thinking their lawyer had their best interests in mind, and that he was more than a lawyer, he was a friend. That is, they believed what Snook himself had cultivated, and understood legal procrastination only in the way he wanted them to. Until the entire community was tired of hearing about their legal battles. As for Snook, he had taken three thousand dollars from them and rarely, if ever, thought of their case.

  A week after Danny Sheppard’s sentencing, Frederick Snook came down from town. I watched as his car pulled into their yard. He got out in the twilight, wearing the same loud suit I had once seen him wear in court. He brushed some dust off his loafers and, looking unfavourably upon the large old house, went inside. He took little Teresa May’s fingers in his and made faces and took a quarter from her ear and handed it to her. Though five years of age, she looked like she was
three.

  He asked about her condition and discovered how serious it was; that someday she may need a heart transplant. Then, feeling he had done a civic duty, he faced his clients and said what it was he had come to say.

  “I’ve gotten an offer — an offer to put all of this behind us now.”

  Cynthia looked at Mathew and winked. Mathew sniffed.

  The offer was a one-time lump sum payment of two thousand dollars.

  There was silence at the bare metal table. They could not speak. The offer was a thousand dollars less than what they had already spent on the litigation.

  Frederick listened with a pious blankness as they cursed everyone, as if his failure was their fault. They shouted at him about all the plans they had had and what they were led to believe. He left with a sense of heaviness and the injured merit that men of Snook’s legal and business acumen often have at just these times.

  They drove to his office two days later. He had not thought he would be seeing them again and looked startled when they came in. Cynthia held little Teresa May, who had a flowered hairband about her head and a long scar visible on her chest. But the lawyer did not feel it was the proper time to shake the child’s fingers. She had become just a sickly kid whose mother this lawyer had always considered “white trash.”

  Snook took out two file folders and went to the desk. He extended his hand to two chairs.

  He told them that the lawyers for McVicer had come up with what they thought was a reasonable offer.

  “I wouldn’t want to be rich in this parish,” Snook said, as if Cynthia and Mat should empathize with their opponent’s position.

  That they did not take this offer was understandable but completely up to them. It was the words reasonable offer that cut to their souls.

  Mathew wore the same sports jacket and the same cowboy boots he had worn all those years before; Cynthia the same dress, the one she also wore to hospital with baby Teresa. Snook shook his head sadly as he kept looking up from a dossier to one or the other as he spoke.