“How do you know he has a safe?”
“Of course he has a safe — of course he has a safe. We have to get the money before the natives,” Mathew said. “That’s the next ones to go after it —”
“We will sue,” I said, shivering. “Sue him again.”
Mathew’s face was calm, and filled with the light from the weak sun. Afternoon was drawing on its shadows, and some boat trailers rested along the roadside to the bay, ready for hauled-up speedboats. He spoke softly, almost without interest.
“Suing will keep us in court,” he continued. “I don’t know how much time your mother has — I know Teresa May has a year or less — if we got bogged down in court — I know that’s more legal — but I tried it that way.”
I realized at this moment that all my life and what I had done and my poverty and my reaction to it, and my solitude in school, and my love of Christmas until it came, and my yearning madness for Penny Porier, and the dreary spotted tablecloth in our kitchen or the perpetual sadness of our lane with Percy and his wagon, or my mother’s smile when she was being bullied, or the circuses we could not go to or the foster parents where we sat, nay the very cough of my mother and the suffering of my father for unanswering Christ had caused this moment. I could say yes or no. I said nothing.
I realized that the money had mesmerized Mathew. He knew he would be in jail soon for Trenton’s death, and he had to either face up to his crime or boldly assert himself and rob a safe and escape. And I liked him well enough then to help him. Well, he had helped me with the chalice. I owed him something.
I wondered just fleetingly if Mathew was even thinking of sharing the money with me. Then I smiled. I wanted revenge as much as he wanted money. I needed it to fulfill my basic thesis against the false doctrine of my father. Except I might say, where had my thesis taken me? Exactly where my dad said it would.
I stared at Roy Henderson’s little stone with the date already invisible and stained.
I had become exactly as those who had hated us. And it had happened without my even trying. Mathew drove me back home. We didn’t speak. I thought of nothing as I walked down the lane.
I had wanted nothing to do with this robbery, until I found Percy sitting by himself in the small kitchen in the dark. He told me Mommie was in the hospital. Percy had been waiting on his small kitchen chair for three hours in silence.
I had to dress the child. I found a white shirt faded almost to yellow, and a pair of dark dress pants, and an old pair of shoes that I shined. I washed and changed and we started up the road.
All along our lane Percy was looking and waiting for Autumn, but she was not here. Then he picked some leaves, to make into some kind of a bouquet for Mom. Then, as if distracted, he said:
“I went to the church and prayed so Mom would be better for her birthday.”
“It’s not your fault, Percy,” I said, my voice breaking just a little.
“Lyle — it is not your fault either,” he whispered.
NINE
We reached the hospital after nine o’clock. My mother was on the second floor, in a room with two other women. Her hair, I saw now, was almost grey at thirty-nine years of age. Her face was sunken. Percy gave her the bouquet of birch and maple leaves. She kissed him gently and then asked for Autumn.
“She wasn’t home,” I said, “but I will find her — and she can visit you tomorrow.”
She said nothing.
“I will phone Dad,” I said.
“Oh no,” she said, waving her hand weakly, “don’t bother him — wait until he comes back — then Percy and I and Dad are going to Reversing Falls.”
She began to fuss with the yellow collar of Percy’s white shirt, and patted his chest. Then she straightened his bow tie.
Percy grinned at me as if this proposed trip was unquestionably true. I walked out into the corridor. The nurses were going from room to room on a night check of patients. I asked one what had happened to my mother. She told me to wait a moment and disappeared.
I sat in the corridor for twenty minutes or more. Then just as I was about to look for the nurse I saw Constable Morris coming toward me with another police officer. Dr. Savard was with them also. The doctor told me that my mother was suffering an internal injury, and asked point-blank if she had been struck.
“Of course not,” I said.
“Well, she has been bleeding very badly — we are trying now to stop it,” Savard said.
Constable Morris introduced me to Constable John Delano.
Delano had insisted he come to see me about the investigation.
“What investigation?” I asked.
He asked me into the waiting room, and we sat down.
Morris stood at the door. I knew Morris had needed my father to be guilty to save his career. His superiors had finally sensed this, and because of McVicer’s importance, had quietly asked for someone else to look into what had happened. And now everything pointed to other people. And Delano knew who they were but as yet could not find Connie Devlin to corroborate it.
“You believe my father did none of it?” I asked Delano.
“I believe there was a crime committed on the bridge,” Delano said, “but I’m positive your father didn’t do it. I believe it was done to set up your father — I believe the money was robbed from McVicer but not by your mother —”
Delano said he had met with my father twice.
“When?” I asked.
“At the camp,” he said. “Do you want me to contact him about your mom?”
“No — not now, please.” My voice sounded too eager suddenly.
“The trouble with suing,” Delano said, quite off the cuff, “is that it takes so long — it may make people wary — and then they lose the lawsuit and get nothing — like the five families a few years ago — they end up with a few hundred dollars. Your father wanted nothing to do with that. He stood alone — always. His life was not a convenience for himself, was it. You have Percy to think of.”
Delano got up, shook my hand, wished me luck. Clearly he was warning me not to do what I was planning to do. But how had he known?
I found Percy sitting by his sleeping mother and we went out. The streets were quiet, and the world still. Moths gathered under the streetlights in town and fell to the raining pools, bathing their powder in water. Percy picked one up, dried it with a touch, and released it into the night.
“There are millions of moths, Percy,” I said scornfully as I watched it flutter in its zigzagged bafflement a few feet away.
“It doesn’t know that, Lyle,” Percy said, taking my hand to cross the highway.
I carried my little brother down the long road to home as he hugged my neck. With his head resting on my shoulder, I whispered: “I love you, Percy — I love you and Mommie and Autumn, and I love Daddy too.”
He had fallen asleep and did not hear.
I went that night and sat by our river. The water of our great river makes us disappear — we become at twilight in the babble of water a symphony of ghosts. As spots on the river darken, and the shadows are gorged by night, we remember the ghosts of children, of ourselves as boys and girls at six and seven far up on the Bartibog or Arron Brook, turning to smile when a trout is hooked. Of our mother in a light-hearted moment fifteen years before. The moment passes, the water continues on, the boys and girls leave the trout stream for the uncertain stream of life, and become as I was now, sitting beside it.
But somewhere in a magical twinkling as you walk in the faraway future, you remember those children around a small blowdown in the middle of a faraway time and are filled with sweet sadness. I wanted to go back there, to that time; the time when I believed my father was a hero and took his offered hand.
TEN
Mother planned for Percy to go to First Communion, spoke to Autumn about him, all the while knowing that death was in the room with her, waiting.
Mom had arranged for a boy to come to take care of him in those forgotten afternoons after clas
s. Darren Voteur. He was the only person available at that time. Since Autumn and I knew him, we felt comfortable having him there a few hours a day.
I did not know until later that things did not go well.
“What can you do, Percy,” Darren asked one afternoon during a week of drizzle and storms, “about your mom? She will the soon — will you cry?”
Percy sighed. “I can pray when Autumn takes me.”
“Prayer doesn’t do much good —” Darren said.
“Mommie likes caramels,” Percy said. “I could buy her caramels.”
“It’s more than caramels, Percy,” Darren said. “She has a big tumour eating her away every day — and every day you go there your mom is littler.”
The afternoon was pale and crisp and smelled of ice on fallen leaves.
“And you think you can just buy her caramels.”
“I know, Darren,” Percy whispered. “It’s much more than caramels.”
“Why am I here with you? Where is Lyle? Did you know, Percy — your brother and sister have left you — you’d better find me money or I won’t stay.” Darren wiped his hands across his mouth and looked over his shoulder.
“When Lyle comes he will give you the four dollars,” Percy said.
“If it wasn’t for me your mother would be dead now. Autumn and Lyle don’t care about your mother. You think your mom likes caramels, do you? You know what I think? I think she is happy she is dying — to get away from you —”
When Percy looked up Darren smiled at him, his lips thin and his teeth white, and he had a small moustache, with two small moles on his cheek and two earrings in each ear. He had a Walkman he listened to, and he had cowboy boots, and he had a big wallet, and he liked Megadeth, and he said he had been to Toronto, where he had his tongue pierced.
“I heard your mom tell my mother last year she didn’t like you.”
Percy looked at Darren but said nothing.
“You know what Autumn likes, Percy?”
Percy smiled. “She likes to tickle me.”
“She likes my big prick up her white cunt — that’s what I think — she wanted to go out with me, but she looks like a ghost,” Darren said. “Have you ever seen Autumn’s white cunt? I bet it’s pretty. Have you? I know other boys have — they have all seen it — I told her I didn’t want to go out with her — I told her.” He was breathing strangely, excitedly as he spoke.
Percy kept his head down, ashamed of what had been said. Then he moved a checker. Percy’s right shirt sleeve was busted through at the elbow. The autumn sun was faint and far away; the graders could be heard on the shore lifting timbers and rocks.
“I moved a checker,” Percy said. “Now you move a checker.”
“You moved a checker,” Darren said, and he swiped the board clean. “I moved all the checkers.”
Percy got down to pick the checkers up. When he stood up with the checkers, Darren struck him in the mouth.
The checkerboard went flying, and Percy fell. Blood trickled from his nose and lip. He got to his feet and sat on the couch where my mother had spent so much time when she was pregnant with him. He tried to get off the couch and go to the bathroom, but threw up on the floor. His bow tie was crooked, and he tried to straighten it. There was some blood on it, and his shoes were bent at the front and two sizes too large, so he looked like a little clown. He had waited for me to take him to the circus last summer. I never did.
“My head feels dizzy,” Percy said.
“I’d better not have to hit you again, Percy,” Darren said, walking about the room with his arms folded, “so you better clean that up — clean it up — go get the pail — go get the pail —”
The boy looked at him and tried to get up.
“I hope I don’t have to hit you again,” Darren said, and raised his hand.
But suddenly he was picked up by the scruff of the neck and thrown out the door. Darren stood up and came back in. And old Jay Beard, now nearing seventy, threw the boy outside once more, and kicked him in the behind, and Darren ran up the lane. Jay came back inside, washed my brother’s face, rolled a cigarette and smoked it, and, holding Percy in his arms, told him that the boy didn’t mean any harm. He was just not right in the head.
After a while the day got dark, and a breeze blew leaves across the lane, and neither turned on the lights.
ELEVEN
A few days later when I came home and walked down the lane, I saw Percy asleep in some ragweed, near his wagon. It was late in the day, the leaves had fallen and were being sucked along in the brook. There was a slight wind, yet most things were very still, and the ragweed branches carried the glow of the autumn sun. Jay Beard had gone to a meeting, and Autumn was in a school play, so he had been alone since he got home at three o’clock. Scupper Pit sat beside him, and I picked Percy up and carried him to the house with the old dog hobbling along behind us.
Percy told me that he had fallen asleep waiting for his father.
“What does your dad look like, Percy?” I asked.
“He is a kind man, and his face glows and he never says anything that isn’t true. I saw him in the field.”
“You saw him in the field when?”
“When Scupper Pit and I went to see Mr. Beard, he was standing looking at me. There was red sun on the branches, and he was there. He told me he would visit me again. He talked to Scupper and Scupper wagged his tail. Then he said I would go away with him when he came to visit me again.”
“Who told you such a thing?”
“The man in the field!”
“Where did he say you would go?”
“He never said.”
“Don’t talk to him —” I said. “If you see him again come and get me — I will deal with him.”
He screwed up his face in wonder and then gave me a smile.
“Don’t be sad, Lyle,” he said after a moment, touching my face with his hand. “Everyone is sad. Darren is so sad I told him not to come back — for whatever I do, I cannot make him happy anymore.”
Tears flooded his eyes. His shoes were untied, his pink socks were wrinkled, his nose ran, and burdocks stuck to his shirt, and in his shirt pocket was a dog biscuit Jay Beard had given him for Scupper.
“I am not sad,” I said, trembling suddenly. “Why did you say that?”
“I see into your heart,” Percy whispered. “I see into everyone’s heart. It is sad, just like Darren’s heart, and Mathew Pit’s heart. But the man in the field’s heart doesn’t beat — it glows.”
He lay down on the couch with Scupper Pit and fell fast asleep. I sat with him all that night.
The next morning Diedre Whyne came to see me. She looked at me politely and held her purse with both hands. She wore a coat with padded shoulders and had a barrette in her hair that made her look younger than my mother had before she took ill. She told me she was looking for Autumn. I told her that Autumn was at school with Percy.
“We are dropping the charges against you,” she said.
“What charges are those?” I said.
“The taxes,” she said. “You should thank Ms. Hardwicke for this — she has been a tireless supporter of your cause. We just got the letter sent to us from Ottawa.”
She took it out of her purse and handed it to me. I didn’t take it, so she put it on the table.
“I see,” I said. “Well, I’m glad.”
“I was too strident — with my concern. Anyway, people did try to — adjust your life — I know you are angry about it. But if you knew the conditions in which your mom and dad grew up. The fifties and early sixties were much different than today — you couldn’t imagine the poverty your father saw. It might seem to you that all we did was meddle — but that wasn’t the case at all. Back then I had a duty to protect her. I knew your mother as a little girl — oh, she was so beautiful — I did not want to see her ruin her life — I was against the marriage — but perhaps I didn’t help her, perhaps I tried things I shouldn’t have — but I was young! It was
the times we lived in — I got caught up like everyone. Do you think I was wrong?”
“How the hell should I know?” I said. “Certainly we’ve all paid for it.” I added, “For your being young.”
She gave a start, and cleared her throat. She asked for a glass of water, and I gave her one. She took a small drink and set it on the table.
Then she explained that three girls had come forward to say things against her, and one of the uncles, Bennie Sheppard, had come by to ask her for money. She told me she had not done anything like that to those girls, but people might believe them. She asked me if I knew them — the Voteur girls, and the Sheppard girl.
I told her I knew that they all stayed at Covenant House. She told me that Convenant House had been taken from her. She had worked tirelessly to start it — but an upstart, a younger, more volatile and self-righteous woman had come forward in the past little while with the accusations of the girls fresh on her lips.
“She is just out of Mount Saint Vincent and she thinks she knows everything. The girls all went to her to complain. None ever darkened my door with an allegation. None of it is true, but if people believe them — you know what might happen? Nothing has hit the papers yet — my family has managed to keep it out. But the damage is done, for once an idea is planted in someone’s mind it is impossible to erase without — some kind of help.” She took a breath as if our air was more valuable to her now than it had ever been before. She took another drink.
“I am in a very delicate situation — dealing as I did for twenty years with homeless or sexually abused girls and being —” She paused. “This was the reason I left social services and went to the tax department — I didn’t go to the tax department to get you, as you suppose — it was only a coincidence.”
I said nothing.
“There was an opening — I had training and my father had a few connections. I’m sorry also about the wood. But in reality it’s what the tax department is forced to do. I was only doing what is required by law. I really thought I could get you some-where else — some better place.”
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