“Get in the car,” Cynthia said, “you stupid crippled old cock-sucker — who I love.”
She attempted to pull him to his feet. The old man sat where he was, his hair, in spite of his new hair style, slightly messed up.
“Please, Daddy, let’s go,” Gladys said.
Cynthia went upstairs. Upstairs there were almost a dozen rooms she had not entered before. Suddenly she sat down and put on Leo’s clothes, shirt, pants, and sweater. She would run away by herself. But then, zippering his pants, she saw two figures far away, dots coming toward the house.
No one would get her money! She ran throughout the house to lock the doors. Then she went into the doll room to hide, forgetting the money on the kitchen table, in the paper bag.
Mathew walked toward the house in the gloomy snow, and Rudy trudged in front of him, turning around now and again and prodded on by Mathew’s look. Rudy was talking, trying to get out of doing this horrible thing. But it was to no avail now. Every time he looked back over his shoulder, there was Mathew’s implacable expression. Rudy’s pants got caught on barbed wire and tore, and his knees were cold and shaking. They came to the woods in back of the house. Here Mathew loaded the shotgun.
“There’s big money in there,” Mathew said. “Big top dog money — that the McVicers stole from me.” (This was Mathew’s latest claim.)
“There is?” Rudy said.
“Thirty or forty thousand,” Mathew said, sniffing. The shotgun fell into the snow and he had to pick it up and wipe the barrel. All in all, he said, he liked shotguns much better than rifles.
“A shotgun will blast a man in two,” he said.
“Oh, I see,” Rudy said.
Rudy was trying to make the moment seem natural to himself, but vomited once more.
“Why are you puking?” Mathew asked, astonished. “Something you eat?”
“Yes,” Rudy said. Rudy said he would like to sit in the snow. His face looked pleading, like a little boy’s. But Mathew prodded him with the shotgun, and Rudy went over the fence and into the field, marching before Mathew like a prisoner.
“After this I’m gettin’ myself a pizza,” Mathew said, but the gale, the trees filled with ice battered by this gale, drowned out his voice.
TEN
Though the school was closed that day, the run-through of the play Autumn had written on the Escuminac disaster took place. In the pivotal scene, a fisherman whose life was the centrepiece of her work, facing death in waves ninety feet high, managed to tie his own son to the mast before he was swept into the water and lost.
The scene she wrote was part of the true historical events of that night of June 29, 1959, which she could not have recreated unless she knew and held them in her soul.
From ten that morning they had gone over this pivotal scene, she changing lines and blocks for two actors, and her drama teacher — a young man of twenty-two, a writer just like she wanted to be — became more and more silent and respectful.
They rehearsed until two that afternoon. Behind the stage, where other students were still working on the props, she could see the snowfall covering the whole world outside. But she felt cosy in here, and flushed and excited by work, by the true nature of her work. She was secretly in love as well.
Her drama teacher came over to her, and took her hand in his and whispered, “What are you going to do with such large talent?”
“I am going home and make little Percy his supper,” she whispered in his ear, standing on her tiptoes.
She told me later that as soon as she said this, the drama teacher looked strangely at her, and she felt ice cold.
ELEVEN
Mathew smashed the window at the back door — the door Rudy had entered when he believed he loved my mother. He reached in and unfastened the lock, and he bullied Rudy through the door. There was no more pretense that he or anyone else was a partner with Mat Pit. Mat Pit who had begun his struggle against the world when he was sixteen.
Cynthia was sitting in the doll room with her two invalids. The heat and lights were out — the power was off. Mat and Rudy moved through the kitchen, never looking in the bag that sat on the table, and right past the doll room.
Leo realized too late why Cynthia wanted them out of the house. Far above them they heard footsteps. They heard the two men walking, now and then they heard the crash and bang of furniture as both hunted for the safe. Not even Rudy had been up to the third floor before. Cynthia was only the fourth person to have seen the safe.
“Shhh,” Cynthia said. “They’ll not find us — just be still.”
Gladys sat where she was, tears running down her face, not so much because of fear but because she could not help.
“My cell phone,” she whispered. “It’s in my purse — we can call Gerald.”
“Where?” Cynthia whispered.
“In the living room — in my purse.”
“I can’t go out there,” Cynthia said after a moment.
“Why not?” the old man said.
“I’m frightened,” she admitted.
The wind blew. They were silent again. Leo stood.
“Well, I’m not frightened,” he said.
There was no sound from upstairs. But Mathew and Rudy were two floors above; the door had been kicked in, and Mathew had come face to face with the picture of his father. Even he shuddered at this. If Rudy had been able to open the safe, and if they had found nothing in it but those letters from the government of years gone by, they would have simply left the house.
But Rudy could not open it. Mathew began to chide and hit him, causing a cut on his ear much like my mother had suffered in this house years before.
“Damn you,” Mathew said. “You promised me riches — it’s been fifteen years!”
Rudy had never had the combination to the safe, and he had never been hit since he was a child. He had simply lied. He had told everyone he handled money, hundreds of thousands, had paid cash for his Monte Carlo when it really belonged to the family business, as did his empty house. Nothing at all was in his name. Mathew, who all his life believed to be true what at the moment he wanted to be true, had fallen again and again for these lies, because the man had something Mathew had never enjoyed — wealthy connections.
Rudy hunched over, listening to the gale wind shake, felt his ear bleeding.
“Come,” Mathew said, “open it.”
Rudy tried again and again and again. “Don’t hurt me,” he pleaded, “I’m trying, you know.”
“Trying,” Mathew said, “trying — if you think I hurt you, wait until you see Danny Sheppard and the boys in Dorchester prison.”
Rudy looked back over his shoulder at him and nodded like a little boy.
“Move,” Mathew said. Rudy scrambled out of the way. Mathew fired point-blank at the safe. Some pellets ricocheted back and hit his leg. He roared in anger.
Mathew went to the rectangular window overlooking the side yard and smashed it open with the butt of the shotgun. He came back and began to haul the safe to the window. It was not easy and he roared to give himself strength. He believed the fall from the window would break the safe and all the money would tumble into the snow.
“If you can’t help me lift it onto the ledge I just won’t give you any,” Mathew said. Mathew’s pants were torn and both his legs were bleeding, and what was stranger still, smoke was coming from his skin.
Leo heard the shot. The fury of the gale told him he might have one chance and one punch left, and the way he dragged his left leg in his new white sneakers told him he would probably the after he threw it But his life as a boy coming to manhood, the memory of his mother’s agony, told him it did not matter, that he had lived his life as best he could, and was resourceful and brave when he needed to be. And now as much as any time, he needed to be.
He waited for those upstairs to come down. But they did not. He reached the purse, and began to carry it to the room.
Suddenly he saw his safe fall through the air and land on his pea
r tree outside the bay window. It landed with a dull thud, which did nothing at all to it, and all was silent again, with snow from the roof whispering down over it. Leo smiled, and walked toward the doll room.
Unfortunately the purse was upside down. Behind him, ten one-dollar coins Gladys used when she played the poker machines at the new marina that one time fell one after the other onto the carpet my mother had once fussed over, all the way to the door.
“You’re not getting a sniff of my money,” Mathew said to Rudy, “after I did all the work.”
He turned and started down the stairs, his footsteps falling in brutal fashion toward the main floor, mindless of the blood running down his legs. Inside the doll room behind the kitchen, Leo was preparing for a final battle. He would wait, as if waiting for a fighter to move laterally, and then he would throw his right cross — a punch he well knew how to double up. Then he would see how tough Mathew Pit was.
The phone was not in the purse, though Gladys kept looking for it. Cynthia remembered that she had taken it to the Cadillac. Now she could not admit to this. Leo stared at her, not in anger but in pity, remembered her fascinating body not in lust but in sadness, and shook his head at his own folly.
Rudy could not bring himself to move, knowing that if he remained where he was, he would be safe. All his life he had asked whomever it was people pray to, to be safe. But it was his own life that manoeuvred him here at this time. He thought, If he finds them he will kill them.
Mathew was mesmerized by his own nature, by his own self-aggrandized viciousness, the immense fear he instilled with his bellowing.
He almost missed it in the gloom of the house as he went to leave. But something made him turn and go back to the living room again, past that old paper bag on the kitchen table. He saw the coins leading to the small door of the doll room. Perhaps, he thought, those coins fell from the safe. Yes, that was it, and he picked them up, one at a time, thinking them a great treasure. He followed them to the door.
If Leo had not gone for the purse, nothing would have happened besides a botched robbery. Rudy was now on the lower stairs.
Mathew began to feel about for the door handle.
The first thing Cynthia said when she saw him was, “Go away — and nothing will happen.” The three of them tried to bar the door. They were all like children, I suppose. At the end I think almost everyone is.
Rudy walked downstairs shaking, standing at the very spot where my mother had stood declaring her innocence. The great old house was cold and silent.
“Where’s the money?” Mathew kept shouting. “Come and open the safe for me and no one will get hurt.”
“You may’s well go — for I will not open the safe,” Leo said.
Mathew kept lifting the rifle butt to hit the old man. But the old man stood his ground.
“Come and open it or I’ll smash yer face in,” Mathew said. “All of this is your fault, Leo, all of it — every stinkin’ bit!”
“Leave us be.”
At first Rudy did not know who had said this. Then he realized it was the sound of a feeble old man. Rudy went closer and stood outside the door, listening to what was going on.
At that exact moment Mathew slapped Cynthia as hard as he could, “for cheating him,” and Leo threw his right hand. Mathew sprawled backwards. When Leo threw the punch — the hardest punch he had thrown in forty-five years — he himself fell to his knees. When he fell to his knees Rudy instinctively ran to pick him up. But he stopped, because of fear, and the sight of the shotgun. He looked at it, and it paralyzed him. Leo and Mathew began to fight for the shotgun, and Leo was kicked in the face. A spurt of blood from the old man shot straight into the air like a geyser.
“Help him, Rudy,” Cynthia pleaded after Mathew threw her back the second time against the wall, her own nose bleeding.
“God,” Rudy said, trembling.
Mathew kicked Leo again.
“Rudy, dear — you have to now,” Gladys begged.
Mathew wrestled the gun away from the old man.
Still, Leo managed to throw his right once again and send Mathew reeling, so that one shelf of dolls, immaculate in their dresses, and perhaps worth thousands of dollars, came tumbling onto Mathew’s head.
Mathew turned the shotgun toward Leo.
He hesitated. In that second the world seemed to stop for all of them. In that second there might have still been time to put everything back in its place.
As Mathew turned the gun, Rudy held his arms up over his face and jumped as if jumping into a pool of cold water, coming down between Mathew and Leo. Mathew saw this at the very instant he pulled the trigger. He had intended to fire over Leo’s head, to make him stop. Rudy’s smile was pleading and hopeful when he jumped, just as it had been most of his life.
No one heard the shot until Rudy fell backwards. Another shelf of dolls crashed down, and Rudy could see his own hands falling, and it was as if he was holding little Teresa May who was hugging him, and she was smiling as he picked her up one summer day when he was wearing Bermuda shorts. But that was all; there was someone else in the room, talking to him now, telling him to come away quickly, to hurry, for they had to go; and he was dead before he hit the ground, the plans for his marina sticking out of his jacket pocket, his eyes wide open.
Mathew grabbed Cynthia by the hair and dragged her toward the car.
“You fuckin’ fuckin’ fuckin’ cunt, you’ll open the safe,” he said as he passed the paper bag on the kitchen table. “Think the likes of you could fuckin’ trick me!”
In the afternoon twilight, he hauled the safe into the back seat, pushed his sister into the front seat, and drove through the heavy snow, veering right and left in a trance of his own making.
Cynthia’s face was spotted with Rudy’s blood, which ran from her eyes like tears. She was dressed much like the man who had told Percy that he would someday have to go away.
TWELVE
Percy was waiting for me to come home. He had set the clock before him on the kitchen table, and had made himself a glass of Quik and a peanut butter sandwich — half for him and half for Scupper.
I did not come home, just as I had not come home many days. Just as I had not taken him to the circus. Finally he went to the phone and dialled Jay Beard’s number. He waited. There was no sound, but he did not know why. He went and sat beside Scupper again.
“Scupper Pit,” he said, biting into his peanut butter sandwich, “what do cows do on Saturday night?”
He waited.
“They go to the MOOO-vies!” He laughed. “That’s a joke Mommie told me — when I was little.”
He looked inquisitively at his sandwich and took one more bite. Then he put it down on the plate carefully, and looked about the room. Everything he had ever known was here, waiting within forty yards of his house. The birds he fed, the daisy chain he had made for his mom one summer day.
He sighed, and clasped his hands together and waited as the clock ticked. Then he stood and went quietly to the telephone again and dialled Jay Beard’s number. And he waited. There was no sound at all. He did not understand that the phone lines were down. He went back and sat on the chair. Again he listened to the clock ticking.
“Scupper — I’m sorry,” he said finally. The dog was, at fifteen years, unable to walk, and over the last week was unable to eat. It could not go outside to urinate, and Percy cleaned its fur of pee every day. Percy believed that the vet would make it all better again.
He looked out the window. The sandwich sat on his plate, and his Quik was half-finished. He put on his boots and coat. He did this, and sat in the seat again waiting for me.
“When Lyle comes back, Scupper,” he said, and the wind blew, and far above him the clouds moved. But then, as if something finally prevented him, and went out of his spirit, he stopped saying I would be home. I had never been home for him in a long time.
He put Scupper in his old security blanket and picked him up.
He should not have ha
d to carry the dog. Nor did he know he was putting the dog in more distress. He opened the door, stepped into the blinding snow, and tried to make it to the road five hundred yards away. He fell three times and the dog fell with him. Each time Percy struggled to catch his breath in the gale-force wind.
Each time he fell he would pick the dog up again, and cross from one side of our lane to the other, staggering and seeing places where I used to help him collect his bugs; the thing he remembered about me, I guess.
He talked to the dog and told him things he told no one else. They would all be happy and go for a picnic. And Lyle had a funny story, and Autumn showed him how to dance, when we all got in our sock feet to wax the floor; and his mommie showed him how to make muffins one afternoon. He stopped in the middle of the lane, snow falling on his orange hat, and thought of Elly, and how she smoothed her hands on her dress the day he made her the daisy chain — the only thing he remembered of her now. He looked behind him, as if he might see her sitting on the porch, smoothing the dress with her hands and saying, “Oh, Percy darling, how are you?”
But there was no one there anymore. And she would not be there ever again. And suddenly for the very first time he was aware of it.
He was not even sure if he was on the lane, for the drifts were so high and the snow so blinding. He did not know where the road was, because of the storm. It was almost impossible for him to breathe. But he kept struggling with the dog. Everything was white and the trees were blotted out and shrouded in twilight Our mailbox too was covered now — his last indicator of where the lane stopped and Highway 11 began was under snow.
He kept walking to the trailer, where Jay Beard often gave him cookies and played the guitar.
“Scupper,” he said, turning his face away from the wind, “I hope Lyle doesn’t know that my heart is broken.”
He stumbled again slightly, the snow past his thighs. He sat down, not knowing he was in the middle of the highway.
“I am tired, Scupper Pit,” he whispered.
Looking up he saw too late the car lights and the man who once told him he would have to go away.
Mercy Among the Children Page 36