Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  “She might be going,” Freddy said, looking over his shoulder toward the door. “God, you don’t want to lose her! We better do this while we can. I mean at least power of attorney — hmm?”

  Snook’s back was sticky with sweat, his gestures suddenly coarse. The air smelled of sickness and an aging man. Leo, cheeks sucked in, teeth in a jar, looked hopelessly after his fiancée — whom he had recently held for the first time.

  Freddy, kneeling by Leo, kept the paper straight, the pen in his hand. It was one of those bright, glassy January days.

  “Cripes,” Snook said at that moment, jumping up, when he realized that Cynthia’s leaving had caused Leo to wet himself, and it had doused his leg. Leopold McVicer, once the terror of the river, was now feeble and old.

  Freddy went to the door and called to her. Then he went to the bookshelf and came back with a thick history book, with “Gladys McVicer, Grade 8, Netherwood School for Girls, 1961” on the inside cover to place under the paper. Cynthia came back. She stood at the door watching, remembering she had studied that book in school so long ago, and had liked the picture of the mountains and the clear blue lake.

  Freddy was thinking he could not go through with it, but Leo, trying to wave Cynthia in, looked at them with sudden sharp glittering eyes, the kind that invalids have in a moment of crisis, and he signed his name legibly and in duplicate.

  Cynthia went weak. Her legs buckled. She did not know why God had shone His bounty and love on her. But she could not let on, in any way, that He had. She had done this for Leo’s peace of mind. Just as Leo wet himself when he thought she was leaving, Cynthia peed herself on seeing him sign, too excited to care.

  Once Cynthia had in her possession the greatest weapon of her life, power of attorney for Leopold McVicer’s estate, she no longer needed Mr. Snook. She did not answer his phone calls. She needed her family or her friends no longer.

  She believed her security depended on her finding the other will and destroying it. She knew she had very little time. Everything had to be done soon. The gossip about Leo having suffered a stroke and her being nothing but a gold digger was spreading out like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pool. This ripple grew wider and could not stop, for if it did, other, larger ripples would overtake it. Freddy would use this against her if he could.

  The Thursday I stayed at home drinking, Cynthia went to Leo’s room, closed the door, and dressed him. Folding her hands in front of her, wearing a loose top over black leotards and small ballet-shaped slippers, she told him that people wanted her gone, and were out to destroy her.

  “Never,” he managed.

  “Well, they don’t want me here — and I might have to leave —”

  “Why —?”

  “Why — jealousy,” she said. “I never seen such a bunch of jealous leeches as those I used to know.”

  She was suspicious of this word probate and what it may signify when Leo died. She asked him about his other will. She told Leo that he must trust no one but her, or Gladys would have to be sent to a mental institution.

  “What would anyone try?” he managed.

  “To take control of your money and estate so you can’t get at it — Freddy Snook been telling everyone you’re incompetent. He wants to freeze your accounts. That’s why I put him out of the house — he wanted me in on it. Imagine! Well, none of this is up to me, is it? So I am planning to leave tonight. The last thing I need is suspicion cast upon me! I’ll just take you to the hospital — it’s all I can do to keep from crying — I’ve done nothing in my life but shed tears!”

  Leo’s eyes sharpened. He kept pointing to the notepad by his bed. She handed it to him, and he scrawled, almost illegibly, “Take money out,” tore the sheet off, and handed it to her.

  She sighed. More power suddenly thrust into her hands.

  It was not yet noon when Cynthia took the cell phone, took Gladys’s Cadillac, and drove Leo into Chatham. She persuaded him to stop at the Peking Palace Restaurant. They had sweet-and-sour chicken balls in a dining room of empty tables with heavy silver utensils, white tablecloths, and a Chinese waiter in a spotted red blazer.

  The day smelled of gravel and sanded sidewalks, and winter sky, with its white traces of clouds. There was very little sun to be found.

  Then she helped him across the main street in the middle of the day, with sidewalks shaped like bobsled runs. She stopped the traffic by waving his heavy rubber-tipped cane, leading him by the hand past heavy dark wooden stores and shops separated by empty and lonely lots strewn with used Christmas trees, their icicles caught in the small breeze; the wild crazy Cynthia Pit and the last great lumber baron of our river.

  They went to each bank, and each one smelled of sterile winter and artifacts of business swiftly moving into the computer age. He had always mistrusted banks, since he was a child and his mother was home dying of tuberculosis. Leo never entered a bank without remembering this. And he never forgot that his people were more like Cynthia than Dr. David Scone or Diedre Whyne. His people had the country on their backs. His people came from the Hill or Injuntown. His people were the ones betrayed, laughed at, scorned as much as the natives and blamed for being bigots. His people were like Elly McGowan (McGowan the name Leo gave her — because it was his mother’s maiden name: all was hidden, you see, by wily Father Porier).

  His eyes glanced from one teller to the other, trying to decipher their thoughts, knowing them to be the others — those who did not know, and did not understand, neither boldness nor power, nor goodness. No, they were not the ones who could ever make a decision on a man’s life by themselves. He hated them, and he took Cynthia’s hand.

  “Mathew,” he whispered, “is better than the lot of them —” And he waved his cane in a high arc and then dropped it quickly.

  “We are here to do some business,” Cynthia Pit loudly declared.

  She followed his instructions implicitly. She kept open the main account for his construction company. She emptied the other accounts, some of them untouched for years, in four different branches. One was an account opened in 1954 that held money from the cut above Russell Road — that is a cut a quarter of a century old, and most of the men who worked it dead.

  At each branch there was a conference. They had to verify who he was (two of the banks had not seen him in years). They had to verify her identity and signature. But once this was done, she was looked upon with the respect, artificial or not, that the monied are always given. And it was given her.

  She brought his money back home with her in one large heavy paper shopping bag. She did not count it, and hadn’t an idea where to put it, but was confident that as long as she remained calm and organized she would be able to keep it.

  After Leo fell asleep that afternoon, she took the bag into the upstairs bathroom with its black and white tile, its tidy porcelain sink and flush. She sat on the side of the bathtub, and in the flat white light that lingered on the plastic curtains, she counted each bill. Her lips trembled in excitement, her eyes clouded with tears. She had to quell the urge to rush home and tell Mathew what she had gotten away with. She held $247,000 in her hand.

  Now everyone would try to stop her, perhaps the other will would be found. Certainly Snook would feel cheated. Perhaps the Henderson kids would hire him. How she hated them. Or worse — a robbery. Yes, there would be a robbery sooner or later!

  But before that — she had to find the other will and destroy it. Like Percy’s moth, she should concentrate on being herself.

  She went to see Gladys.

  “I want to see Gerald,” Gladys said. “I have a bit of money. We can live on that until he gets his grant — take me over to him. You don’t need me here no more. I know he has phoned here for me — I heard you talking to him — I know he wants to see me! I know he applied for a grant — it was in the paper.” And she picked up a recent newspaper and read what Dove had said in his application:

  “‘A look into the problems of regeneration after the defoliate year
s in the upper stretches of New Brunswick’s Arron Brook, principally at McVicer’s Works, and the question of applied reconstruction.’” She smiled after she read this, for it was so much like Gerald Dove.

  But Cynthia suspected Dove; he would change Gladys in some way and make her want the money. Make her greedy. And there was of course something pathetic about an invalid being greedy. So Cynthia told her that she thought Gerald Dove had gone.

  “Gone,” Gladys said, “oh no.” She smiled. “He is still here — still working toward his grant — still hoping to do something brave.”

  Cynthia looked out at the sky. It had turned mild and a snow had started. After Gladys went to sleep she went upstairs and took the money into her own room, with its small single bed. But she could not sleep. She kept looking down at the yard. Once she thought she saw Mathew’s shadow outside. It would be nothing for him to kill her. In fact, if he robbed the place he might kill her just to keep her quiet.

  She kept staring at the bag, trying not to think about it. She needed the other will. Finally she got up again.

  She woke Leo. He came awake with a terrible start. And she whispered; “I have to help you upstairs —” She kissed him and placed her warm hand on his. “We have to put the money in the safe,” she whispered.

  He nodded, and she brought the walker over for him.

  “I don’t need it,” he managed, and he stood.

  She helped him along the hallway, and with his good right arm he firmly held the bannister, and she held his left arm. In this way, they made it upstairs. On the landing he stopped and waited. He was sure he’d heard a noise. Cynthia, who was brazen but never brave, felt her heart jump. If it was Mathew now she would never be able to stop him.

  “What what what what?” Cynthia said.

  Leo waved it off after a minute, saying it was the elm behind the house tapping on the ice. They continued.

  The third-floor stairs were crooked and endlessly narrowing into the dank walls. At the top of these stairs there was a door, with a Robin Hood flour logo faded with time on its front. This door was locked. But searching the brick on each side, she found the key.

  Far above even the second-floor rooms with their autumnal pictures of deer at streams and partridge on birch woods roads, she could feel the wind blowing and a kind of haunted feeling of time that had not passed. Some of the third floor was unfinished, and at each end, the exposed red brick chimneys were still bright orange all these many years, while their outsides were crumbling and black with soot. There were furnishings in the three rooms up here, dressers and old rugs and wall hangings and kids’ games like Monopoly and Clue. There were pictures too, pitiless in their lost meaning. A picture of Arron Brook at twilight before the mill was built — when the water was crystal clear. An older picture of nuns at the Lazaretto in Tracadie in their underbibs taking care of three old women, obviously lepers, circa 1924.

  And another picture of five woodsmen stripped almost naked washing their stockings. It was taken perhaps forty years before on an autumn afternoon in a batch house, and one of these men, stern as fire, was Leo McVicer. The man behind him was Roy Henderson — and staring at her with the dull lazy eyes that he always had was her own father, Kyle Ike Pit. She trembled when she looked at him now, as she had when she was a little girl. Often when he went to beat her Mathew would step in and take the beating for her. She remembered that now, and also how much she loved her father, and that one day he bought her the largest sucker in McVicer’s store.

  She wanted the other will. Once that will was destroyed, she would be free of McVicer, and of us all.

  Cynthia handed him the bag of money. He looked in it, jostled the bag up and down, and they went over to the safe.

  He blew on his right hand as if for luck and turned the combination; 12 left, 3 right, 20 left, and then back to the centre. With a jolt, the safe door opened.

  He took the bag of money and tossed it in and closed the door.

  She kept whispering the combination of the safe. It was his birthday. The twelfth of March, 1920.

  She sat in the kitchen drinking a gin. She had to do something. There were not many options. She could call the police and give Mathew up and say she knew of the sabotage on the bridge and that he was planning a robbery — but if she did that, she would no longer have a free hand with the money. Secondly, if she left the old man and his daughter, they might get hurt when Mathew did come.

  She decided she would leave, take the money and the old man and his daughter with her. She would leave them some-where safe. Then she would go and get her daughter in Halifax. If ever caught she would say she was an abused woman who had to take her daughter because Rudy had threatened her. And wasn’t that the case? Of course it was. No one would blame her for that. She knew also there was an underground railway for women running from abusive relationships. No one would ever find her.

  She drank another gin and thought, sitting forward like a man, with her arms on her knees and a cigarette dangling in her mouth. Yes, it was the only way. But where could she leave Leo and Gladys? She thought of dozens of possibilities and dismissed them all. If she left them at anyone’s house they would be suspicious and telephone the police. No, it had to be some place public — yet, still private? And where in God’s name could that be? She thought of the Chinese restaurant — food waiters — but that would rouse suspicion as well.

  Finally she butted her cigarette. At the back of her mind, Mathew’s eyes were looking at her. He knew she had betrayed him. She was as good as dead. But so was the old man if he came in between Mathew and the money.

  She heard Gladys and went to her room. The woman was lying on her side in a housecoat. She needed help to turn. Cynthia tried to make her comfortable again, and took a facecloth and washed her face.

  Out of the blue, Gladys mentioned Medjugorje.

  “What is that?” Cynthia asked.

  “It is a place in Yugoslavia,” Gladys said. “The Virgin is appearing to six children there — and has been for some years now.” She reached into a stack of papers and found the latest Catholic Bulletin.

  “But isn’t it at war?” Cynthia said.

  “There is no need to go there — one of the young women is coming here, Friday — maybe Leo and I can go. Leo helped finance her trip. Now he might benefit if he were to go see her. I don’t care for myself, but it might help him. We can drive up to town and see her — her name is Vicka — and they are having a special mass — with the priests from town.”

  “Where — ?” Cynthia asked without any emotion.

  “At the civic centre. It’s been on the radio half the week.”

  Cynthia did not believe the Virgin did appear — at least to people like us. She scratched her nose as she read the Bulletin.

  So Cynthia thought, take them to Vicka, leave them safe and sound with the Virgin Mother, and take the money and go. Leo would be expected there if he’d paid money to bring her, and what would be more natural than wheeling the ailing Gladys Bellanger and the elderly Mr. McVicer right to the front row!

  “I will go,” Gladys said, “because I think I was meant to go. I will ask forgiveness for poor Rudy, and having betrayed Gerald Dove. I will ask forgiveness because of my sisters.”

  “Yes yes — of course,” Cynthia said. She smiled because of her continued good fortune, and leaving the woman went to bed.

  She fell into a fitful sleep in her room. She saw everyone coming into her room to try to steal the money. Then she was naked and being washed over her breasts and face by a strange young woman. And this aroused her. Then someone was running away with a bag of money and she ran after them. She saw Mathew and a bear running down a hill toward Connie Devlin. The bear was telling Mathew that she had stolen the money — and had betrayed Mathew many times, not just this once. Cynthia fought with the bear and rolled down the hill. At the very bottom of the hill the bear became my father and began kissing her. She was naked because the young woman had washed her. She waited for my fathe
r to make love to her but he did not.

  “Take care of your little girl,” my father whispered. “She is more important than Leo’s money.”

  Cynthia woke in a sweat. She stared at the ceiling. She stood and went back to the gloomy third floor that made her think of ghosts.

  She opened the safe and took out the money. She reached deeper inside and found a brightly new manila envelope; it contained the first will, dated and signed by Leo McVicer, Diedre Whyne, and Isabel Young. Most of his estate was to go to Elly McGowan’s children.

  She stuffed it inside her blouse. She took Autumn and Percy’s future — like that, without a qualm — and left the second will, the one Snook brought her, in its place. She took the money for her own little girl and walked as soundlessly as she could back down the stairs.

  She started to leave the house, got to the door and opened it. The wind off the bay had turned cold, the whole road was a slick of heavy black ice, and snow fell.

  “Cynthia?” Gladys called. “My legs won’t stop aching!”

  She hesitated, cursed, and closing the door, went back to Gladys.

  Cynthia did not know that when she opened the safe an alarm went off near Leo’s bed. He had set it the time they went upstairs together. He opened his eyes, listened to the wind in the willows, heard her creaking steps going downstairs, heard Gladys sneezing, remembered fleetingly Cynthia washing his chest, them making love, and then went back to sleep. Cynthia herself slept soundly until Friday morning.

  SEVEN

  Snow fell, cold, monotonous, and wondrous snow.

  Leo McVicer woke. He saw a thoughtless parade of years, and was haunted by Penny Porier’s body in her coffin. He was also haunted by years ago when he had to cross the bay in a storm, on a scow, alone. His mistress was having a child. He arrived late in the night. He remembered how he had disliked the feel of that child in his arms. Now that child, whom he too late loved, was dead.