Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  We were driven home. The house felt unnatural. Seeing the couch with the cushion at one end where Mom used to lie, and seeing my old suit she used to mend for me so I could go to school, made me choke back sobs, and I quickly went into the back room because I did not want Percy to see me cry.

  It had been snowing up north all day and now it started here. The flakes came drifting into the small porch. Percy sat calmly on the couch. He never spoke, and his face was deathly white. A few people started to come to the door, people from both sides of the brook. Someone mentioned the funeral, and said Autumn and I should go to the undertakers. People sat about the house, bringing baskets of food, talking to Autumn about both Dad and Mom, while I couldn’t stand still. Others came in and roughly assessed the place, wondered how anyone could spend winters here, let alone bring up children.

  The next day in a heavy snowfall Jay Beard took us to the funeral parlour. We were to pick out a coffin — for about fifteen hundred dollars — but the young undertaker very solemnly told us that McVicer had picked one out for nine thousand.

  “No,” Autumn said, “she will not mind this coffin — she would mind the expensive one — she would say, ‘No, that’s too dear!’”

  A day later the funeral mass was said by the Monsignor from Newcastle. He in his rather opulent church attire spoke of Mom’s gentle heart and her yearning for Christ. That was true, but how in Christ would he ever know?

  After the funeral mass the Monsignor sat Percy on his knee, and both looked very uncomfortable.

  Everyone told Percy how brave he was.

  When my mother was buried the day was solid and white. Wisps of snow energized the graveyard, and the stones rose solidly from furrows of snow. It was strange how few people actually knew her compared to those who knew of her. It was as if she had never existed, as if her whole life here — from her church picnic duties to her little sandwich-making empire — had caused not a ripple on the surface of our land.

  So I want people to know that at her death she weighed 103 pounds, was thirty-nine years of age, had read three books, had travelled from Tabusintac to Newcastle on six occasions, had knitted her husband a new sweater for Christmas that very year. Her favourite birthday was her twenty-seventh. Her favourite girlfriend was Diedre Whyne. Her favourite person besides my father was Jay Beard. Her favourite television program, the one she watched with Percy, was Lassie, her favourite colour was blue, the colour of Percy’s eyes. Of the three books she had read her favourite was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I want people to know — I loved her.

  I bent to the ground and kissed where she lay, and have not been back to it since.

  REDEMPTION

  ONE

  My father heard of Mom being sick two weeks before she died. He gave his notice and prepared at that moment to come home.

  The nights had turned cold, the bit of light during the day was extinguished by about four-thirty, and the earth had become still, puddles froze, old tractor ruts turned as hard as iron, and the blades of saws and graders whined a protest to humanity when they were started at dawn.

  He had helped put the powerline through new green forest, through bog and cedar swamp, and it stretched from clearcut to clearcut, over rivers and beaver dam and brook. It lighted homes where they did not know him, computers of young women who would look at his life in dismissal, the main computer in the office of Dr. David Scone, the champion of human rights. And embedded deep in that computer was the file on my father, which my father had never seen.

  Men and women certain of the new world and their right to be entitled would not have known my father’s world, or known so little about it — never known the miles of trackless barrens the tons of rock moved. And what if anything would it matter?

  Sydney Henderson had not read a paper in a year, knew nothing of current events. His hair was grey, his weight a solid 185. The men who had one time tormented him because he was different now held a place for him in their hearts.

  “Why did you learn all of that, and read all of those books?” a glad-faced youngster named Alcide Dorion asked Dad three weeks before he went home. “What good is it for Sydney? What good did it do!”

  “It is good in itself, and reason enough in itself,” my father answered.

  “What should I get from books?” Alcide asked in French.

  “That you are not alone — even along this broken tractor road. You need to know nothing else,” my father answered in French.

  There were a few men who did not like him, never had any use for him. They were sardonic men, hard working with limited futures, and bitter at Sydney, whose ideas had spawned new and glorious concepts.

  One of these men was called Terrible Jon Driver. Once he had thrown Sydney’s meatloaf in the fire and on many occasions he had made jokes about Sydney’s manliness. Like ignorant men everywhere, Driver was self-righteous, egotistical, and petty. Two weeks before Sydney left camp, Driver hit the young boy for asking all those many questions.

  “What do you need to know that tripe for?” he had said. He sat on his bunk with his arms folded.

  Sydney jumped from his bunk and pulled Alcide to his feet. Driver looked at him with a contemptuous certainty that cold and barren work like his was given only to good men.

  The next morning few men spoke with Dad, and Alcide Dorion, in here because his own father was dead and he had little brothers and sisters at home, embarrassed at having had my father protect him, could not go near him again. There were many ways for men like Jon Driver to win battles. One was understanding the supercilious contempt weak men always had for strong.

  When Sydney sat upon his bunk in the half-lighted room, in the dark days of fall slipping now into winter, his body was solid muscle. He had twenty-five thousand dollars in his leather bag inside his canvas backpack. And he was ready to go home. He would walk nine miles out to the highway and catch the bus back to the Miramichi. Tomorrow night he would be with Elly again. He would hold and kiss Percy. He thought of the miles ahead of him and they seemed an insult; he wanted them to be gone in a second. After all this time, after three years, he had broken the great fetters of his self-imposed exile and was anxious to live. To live like other men, but by his own rules.

  In his last letter home, which came to us after Mom was taken to the hospital, he had sketched out his future with bright hope and light blue ink. With hard work, he would finish a B.Ed. by the age of forty-three, and he would teach children like Percy. Life would be indeed different for us, he wrote.

  “Lyle, you have suffered the most, I realize this. Even more than Autumn. Your mom and I remember you in faded and torn pants and shirt, alone while other children played. And I know your struggle has been harder than mine, but think of your abilities, the rainbow in our future.”

  He did not know how I had fallen from that great rainbow height in his heart.

  And his trial was yet to come. The one he always knew would come. The one he had been awaiting ever since he made his pact with God when he was a child shovelling snow from the roof of the church. He knew it would come with snow.

  Like Gerald Dove’s trial over the molecule, Dad’s trial was with his own human heart. Both were Old Testament trials, which people pretend no longer exist, or have forgotten in their world of internal clocks and self-assertion. In the book of Proverbs one might believe that all wrongs are rectified, justice measured equally, and to the good the triumph of the good — this is what we hope is true.

  My father’s trial came from another book — a stronger, more brilliant, more penetrating, and more painful book. He had forgotten about it now for a while, so content he was. He had saved his money — he could pay back his debt, he was finally free of everyone; John Delano in his visit to the camp some months before had told him he would not only be exonerated but get an award, perhaps as much as a million dollars.

  But my father knew by heart the book of Job, where the world is not a certain place, where anything man has can be taken from him, leaving
him to sit in stunned acceptance of the horrible Word of God. Only the young think there is freedom from that book — wise men and kings know it is the greatest and truest book in the world — and my father was nothing if not both of those.

  Present at the camp was one Connie Devlin. He had slipped away from our river in panic, knowing his past of dishonour had now caught up to him. He by accident had found himself here and had been hired on as cook’s help.

  Soon, my father was plagued again by his youth. All over again his promise clutched his throat like a viper. All over again his miserable youth, his allergy to horses, his furious father, his blemished adolescence where he drank in his house to forget who he was, came back to him, and he saw himself at eleven years of age. All over again, behind him, sat Connie Devlin waiting to torment.

  At camp Connie was implicated in a theft of some cassette tapes, and he ran to Sydney for protection. Two men came after him. One held a wrench in his hand ready to swing it until my father stepped between them. My father said nothing. He just stood where he was, his chest bare and his arms muscled. He made no move when the man lifted his wrench, like some old slave who has been hit too many times to ever flinch again.

  Sydney was tempted to turn his back on him. If he did he would be safe, and he knew this. Connie was there for a reason Connie himself did not understand.

  Sydney awkwardly asked the other men to be kind to Connie, for he had had a hard life. The other men, who had a reservoir of questions about Sydney himself, now saw in him a weakness, a crack full scale up his soul. Soon his defence of Connie embittered them, and he was shunned.

  Dad said goodbye to the young boy Alcide, but the boy did not look at him. He had heard stories now, about Dad on the Miramichi, whispered against him by Connie. Father again had become an outcast, and the boy was only protecting himself.

  Dad packed his duffle bag, dressed in his coat and boots and hat, and prepared to walk to the main road. He left a note for Alcide with a list of authors both French and English to read.

  The day was bitterly cold. He walked out on the creaking steps at dawn, where just one part of a tin roof of a bunkhouse across the makeshift tractor road showed a patch of sunlight.

  Connie hurried toward him, packed to go. He looked like a forlorn gnome, a patchwork of a dozen different fabrics to keep him warm, and a pair of old heavy leaden rubber boots, the kind that miners wear.

  “I can’t stay here without you,” he pleaded. “I can’t — you have to take me with you. Please, you have to — what will I do —”

  “You have hurt me all my life,” my father said quietly. “I should not have made my pact. I made my pact and knew the Sheppard boys forced me to drink and said nothing — it is a hard pact.”

  “I don’t care about your pact — it’s probably a stupid pact — but I did nothing to you — I haven’t. It was Mathew — he robbed McVicer. I’ll go to the police for you — as soon as we get home — he did it for Rudy, because Rudy tried to rape Elly — he did it, I swear. It was a set-up to take the heat off Rudy. Later he sabotaged the bridge. I was scared, let me tell you. Trenton just happened to be there looking for you at that time. Everyone soon thought it was you. I was scared to tell — haven’t you ever been scared? I was so scared.”

  My father looked at Connie’s small red ears and the tuft of hair on top of his forehead. How could his life have been so infused with treachery?

  “Please please please give me one more chance — please just one more! — I’ll tell everyone as soon as we get home.”

  My father said nothing, only nodded.

  So Connie fell in behind Sydney, and disappeared with him around the corner of the waving frigid trees, talking as was his habit a mile a minute, so happy that he still had a friend.

  It was dawn of November 17, 1989, the day of Elly’s death. After a while snow began to fall, bitterly, as sharp as wire.

  TWO

  It was a few days after Mom’s funeral before anyone knew Dad was missing. I had to go to Campbellton and try to find him. But no one knew what had happened to him, or even if he was alone or with someone. Jon Driver spent all his spare time searching the ravines to the north of the powerline. I searched to the southeast of Otter Brook until my feet bled in their boots. I stayed a month. Every day I looked at a map, and every day I waited for my father to come walking out of the trees toward me. I know as the search petered out and as men drifted away that I was looked upon as mad. In the end only Jon Driver and I remained. Jon Driver would not leave me.

  There were too many storms, too many ways to turn. It was in Campbellton that I met Bliss Hanrahan, who had once given my father a drive. He stopped me on the street and spoke to me about Dad, and asked after Mom, not knowing she was dead.

  “Where are you sleeping?” he asked.

  “On the street.”

  He offered me a place to stay and I told him I did not need one.

  “Why not?” he asked, grabbing my shoulder.

  “Where were you?” I shrugged, tossing his hand away. “Where the fuck were you?”

  The search coordinator between our Department of Forestry and Search and Rescue wanted to lock me up. I kept phoning him in the middle of the night from a phone booth, cursing him for not doing enough and not keeping the helicopters in the air. I told him that Autumn and Percy had just lost their mother, and now their father.

  “I cannot help that, son — I am sorry.”

  And once he said: “Son, you are destroying yourself with guilt — it is you who have abandoned them, not your father and mother —”

  “How — how have I abandoned them?”

  “In your heart, son,” he said, sobbing, “in your heart.”

  ——

  I came back home in January 1990. I got off the train at noon hour and made my way back down river. I waited at the little schoolhouse.

  Then Percy appeared on the steps, Autumn holding his hand. Under his dark blue winter coat he wore a small suit jacket and old bow tie, just as his mother would have wanted. He looked down, and his face lighted and he ran into my arms.

  The snow was reddened by the sun, the tamaracks as hard as steel, and the sky still with cold. We held Percy’s hands as he walked between us.

  “Do you know what Mother and Father meant to this world?”

  I told them that Mom and Dad meant greatness. I told them that McVicer did not mean greatness, nor did Dr. David Scone, nor those men who wrote about native rights without spending one night with Cheryl Voteur. I told Autumn that did not matter. Everything in our world was backwards. I told her I had hurt my mother and father.

  “Percy, when your birthday comes, we will go to Saint John,” Autumn said. She told Percy all the things he would do. “How wonderful it will be,” Autumn said.

  THREE

  Peace? It was that very week that Connie Devlin came home. I saw him walk past my mailbox at nine one evening. He wore a beautiful new coat and a pair of sheepskin boots. He was interviewed by police and said he knew nothing of my father’s disappearance. But he was soon under their protection and within three days people said he had told them everything. A rumour started that I was looking for him and wanted to kill him. I came to believe this rumour. It caused in me a kind of anxious desperation that I loved. It was then that Mat Pit came to me. His face was sunken. I saw the look of a hunted man, a man who feared daylight and other people. Of all the people he had maimed, harmed, or influenced in his entire life, only Rudy Bellanger and myself still listened to him. Rudy, kicked out of his house long before Christmas, and under an investigation his own father-in-law had started, was also a broken man. Rudy still made plans, but no one listened to him now. Gladys had returned to her father’s house, lived in the old doll room off the kitchen, and her large ranch-style house was up for sale, desolate as empty brick houses tend to be.

  Pit came to me alone. The far-flung plans for empire, his parasitical hopes of inventing himself in the style of Leo or anyone else, had been snuffed away,
like a candle snuffed by a finger. It left only the erupted blister of malcontent. Angrily he told me this, in violent, almost virulent language. And Cynthia? Cynthia he hated. For she wanted nothing more to do with him, ensconced as she was in the huge house on the bay. Did I know that she was engaged to McVicer? I nodded. How dare she be engaged, he ranted. Did I know she had a two-thousand-dollar diamond engagement ring? Again I nodded. How dare she!

  He told me he no longer existed for her. The gravel drive, the old house she grew up in, the sunken yard, the desolate windows, the men she had given herself to — bullies and punks — had been swept away by a wave of her hand. To Leo she was a woman who had suffered at the hand of a brother now demonized — a victim he had rescued from some wild horror. Leo would not believe anything about Cynthia except what he wanted to. Leo had taken to wearing clothes Cynthia had picked out for him, and had his hair cut in a new style. It was obvious he was senile, Mat said. I nodded. It was rumoured that he had slapped his own daughter when she mentioned he was being silly.

  “Ah yes — that’s what Cynthia is like —” Mathew said. “I can’t bear to think of my sister like that — but there you go.”

  I might have taken some pleasure in this, but I did not. It was not so peculiar to rural men suffering the new age. His jacket was torn, his boots were frayed, his hands blistered with cold. He was sick, and trying to find work. He also needed, more than anything else, to get away.

  “How can you let Connie Devlin get away with this?” he said, after we drank wine and did two lines of cocaine. “You have to take him down — for your dad’s honour. Remember we spoke so often about honour?” He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Police patrol his road every hour and he orders them about — he is in his glory,” I answered. I was now sickened by everything, and Mat saw this and became desperate.

  “Well that’s easy — wait for a storm,” Mat said, “when the patrol cars are off the road — when no one is around. I’m not thinking of myself,” Mat said, “I know you have no reason to trust me — but Connie — rumour is he threw poor Sydney down a cliff — I’m shamed to think he’s my cousin — he turned the floodlights off — he was the one who got Trenton — I know that now in my heart when it is too late. If I could bring yer dad back I’d soon trade places with him — yer dad suffered ’cause of what Connie did — me own cousin actin’ like that there — Connie was the one who made me think yer dad hurt Trenton. I was beside myself, and for one time I didn’t think clear. When a storm comes, that’s yer best chance — he’ll be alone — I’m not saying this for myself. I’ve got to go because I’ll be blamed for a crime I never done — no one should have to suffer that! To be blamed for a crime they never done.”