Mercy Among the Children

by David Adams Richards

  Jay Beard saw it all from his trailer and ran outside in his bare feet. Autumn ran from the corner of the bridge, and someone shouted for Jay to get an ambulance.

  Scupper was still lying across his master, and licking Percy’s face. I have heard that Percy’s nose was bloody, his blond hair wisped in the wind. I have heard his eyes were open and filled with tears.

  I once told God I did not want that child to live. So just to prove to me what life was really worth, and what I in fury had cursed, God allowed me him six years.

  Mathew did not stop. Cynthia tried to pull the car over but couldn’t. Mathew looked once in the rearview mirror and kept going.

  “This is my chance,” Mathew said, sniffing. And he hit her.

  “Shut up,” he yelled. “Shut up or I’ll send you straight to hell — I’ll send you straight to hell!”

  Even though she did not say a thing he kept yelling shut up and hitting her for a long time.

  She lay against the front door, with her feet tucked under her to make herself as small as possible, as the wipers clacked against the frozen window. For fifteen minutes she said nothing as he beat her.

  Finally, in the middle of town, right near an old cement wall, in front of one of our three-storey 1920 wooden houses, she opened the door and jumped, and rolled, and the Cadillac kept going.

  She stood. Her back was bare and the wind lashed it. Her breasts and ribs and face were bruised. Little had she thought last night, or any night previous, that it would all somehow end here at the civic centre. She could not get the little boy’s face out of her mind, and she staggered forward in a daze.

  It was already after three. The door opened and she was swept in by others. Her fingers were red raw, her hands bent like claws. She was dressed like a man.

  The place was filled. Waiting most of the day were nine thousand people. She was just one more as puny and insignificant as anyone else. The money had been left behind on the kitchen table, the legitimate will had fallen from her clothes when she was changing and lay in the upstairs room of that faraway house to tell the world that I and Autumn and Percy were the beneficiaries of three-quarters of Leo’s estate.

  She stood looking at the makeshift altar, with a few candles fluttering and people lining up at confessionals with beads in their hands — people in wheelchairs, on crutches, people with cameras, journalists who had come as critics, boys of nineteen scoffing and drinking at the back, babies crying, and thousands of men and women dressed in their best winter clothes all craning their necks.

  Then there was a sound from an anteroom behind her, and an RCMP officer tried to move her out of the way. She looked and saw Constable Morris, given these civic duties now more and more. She nodded and tried to step aside, and stepped instead into the path of Vicka, the child visionary from Medjugorje.

  Cynthia looked at this young woman and went numb. It was a rather blunt and rural face, not unpretty but far from sophisticated; she was dressed extremely plainly, and wore no makeup. Still, never had Cynthia seen such a face — it was filled with joy.

  Vicka was just a foot from her and passing her by, seeming not to notice her at all. In her presence Cynthia could not control her emotions, and began to shake, and she lowered her head.

  Suddenly Vicka stopped dead, turned to her, smiled, touched her shoulder softly, and whispered something in Yugoslavian, making the sign of the cross on Cynthia’s forehead. When Cynthia looked up, the young woman had passed on, forever. Yet the message Cynthia Pit always maintained she felt through to her soul was this:

  Holy Mother has asked you, her daughter, here today, and now wishes you to change your life.

  Yet how could the Holy Mother (if there even was) know that a tough independent woman such as she was would come here today, Cynthia thought? And how could she know, being dressed as a man, Cynthia was her daughter?

  THIRTEEN

  I did not go to Percy’s funeral. No one could find me. He was waked in our living room for a few days and was buried near the house. It was where Autumn wanted him to be, since he had spent all his time there, near what was called his lumpy ground, where we played marbles. I felt I was unworthy to attend. I did not go to my father’s funeral either — that spring he was found by Jon Driver, who brought the body out, and he was interred beside Mom. I was away, looking for Mathew Pit.

  After a while I came home. It was a long and dry spring, the brook was low, and the bay was calm and serene. There were dried-out grasses and condoms in the field above. Autumn’s play won first runner-up at the provincial drama festival. People were in swimming by June.

  I walked down to the beach often. Poor sad Rudy Bellanger was dead and Mathew had disappeared. The Bellanger place was empty and was up for sale — and I would walk about it now and then, watching brown leaves drift over the patio. I could have easily bought it if I wanted. In fact, Gladys told Autumn and me we could have it without paying a cent. But we didn’t want it.

  Cynthia spent time in jail, but not much, a few months, and came back home to be with her mother and take care of her.

  Leo lived another four years. He never got better, but he did not get any worse. He learned to play backgammon and would have men come in for a game all hours. He was present at Gladys and Gerald Dove’s wedding, and lived with them later.

  After a time Dove began to teach at the high school, and Gladys’s health improved enough so she could walk with a cane. MS is a disease that can go into remission, and hers did.

  Dove re-established McVicer’s Works on our river and in our province to the tune of some millions. Some of those millions now belong to me.

  I sometimes long for Penny Porier. At night I speak to her and make plans. Once I visited her grave and sat down and cried. But as Camus has informed us, I was only crying over something that no longer exists — is putrid and dead.

  One day when I woke, Autumn was gone. It was not that she could not forgive me. I could not forgive myself. So she had to go. I didn’t even know where.

  I was sitting upstairs in the bedroom, the room I had shared with Percy. It was Easter Sunday. Percy’s bow tie and shoes were still near his bed, as was the church bulletin we had received about his First Communion that he had kept on his mantel.

  “Autumn,” I said.

  But she had left for somewhere I was not wanted.

  I had all the money I ever wanted, I suppose hundreds of thousands of dollars, and could go anywhere I chose. So I chose to look for Mathew. That was as good a life as any. To prepare myself for this, I called him every name under the sun that I had learned growing up where I had, whatever name I had come across in the lexicon of pain and fury. But there were never enough names.

  I packed Percy’s clothes into a box, and found the five dollars Mom had left him. I left it with his clothes. I also found some dog biscuits in the pockets of a pair of his pants. Deep in the pocket of his suit jacket I found a picture of Mom sitting on the veranda. I left it where it was. I had not known greatness at all, had I?

  I closed up the house, left the tiny little home and the obscure New Brunswick river. I found myself in Halifax. Walking along one night, to my great comfort I saw him. He stared at me, and ran, and I ran, chased him into an alley, and he jumped me. I broke my hand punching the top of his head, and he flattened my nose — but he was gone. I followed him to Toronto.

  Here no one knew what destruction I had caused. If I thought people were getting close to me, I would leave instantly. In that way I’m sure I was like Mathew Pit. We had both been created out of the same soil of the damned, the same wide empire of the poor. I slept on the streets just like he must have, haunted by voices as much as he was. Not because I could not afford a room — there was a trust account opened for me — but because I deserved no better.

  “You’re nothing but a gutless fuckin’ punk,” one of the officers said to me one night after I was picked up drunk. “I’d love to get you out on the street — how about I take off my uniform and we go outside.”
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  “How about we do that right now?” I said. I took my sweater off, and he stared at the scars on my body and my arms, and said nothing more about our contest.

  I carried no pictures, had no good memories, chose no occupation. I conspired to forget everything I had ever learned or known except for Mathew Pit. But I could not drink the pain away, or even keep it down. The hand I had broken on his head did not heal right — I went to no doctor because none had the kindness to visit my mom during her miscarriages. My hand pained in the dampness in the middle of winter.

  FOURTEEN

  In February, three years after I left home, I looked up and Gerald Dove was standing in front of me. He had placed a loonie into my hand as I sat near Maple Leaf Gardens.

  “Lyle,” he said, at first unsure and then kindly. He told me he was in Toronto taking some high-school children to a Leafs game against the Montreal Canadiens. He made me promise I would meet him for breakfast the next day; not only did I have part of a large estate to manage — and he wanted me home, for the decisions were mine and not his — but I had a compensation package to be settled with the provincial government, and David Scone and Diedre Whyne were both interested in seeing me to make headway in that regard.

  Dove and his students gathered around me. Everyone wanted to shake my hand. I became emotional and self-conscious.

  “You see how much your family is now honoured — because of your father and sister,” Dove said.

  “Autumn?” I said. I had not even known if she was alive. So many had left me.

  “All these kids have read her — this is their reward for passing their mid-terms — to come to the game.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her novel — and your father’s poems — you didn’t know? I can take you to any bookstore here and you can find Autumn’s novel — can’t he, kids?”

  I started to shake violently. I was ashamed of representing my family to them. I turned and ran away, clutching myself; into the dark bowels of Toronto’s midwinter.

  I walked in the dark toward the lake, hoping to drown. But I couldn’t even do that.

  I left that night. I went to Europe. I wandered through Oslo on sunny winter afternoons. On the trains and in the bars I spoke to people who had their lives ordered, fastidious and kind-hearted, used to being punctual and correct.

  I asked one young man I drank with if there was a Catholic church where I could go and light a candle. It was my mom’s birthday. He looked at me with alarm, and whispered that there was, but he would not be sure where. That here Catholicism was looked upon as a sect, and its observers looked upon as imbeciles.

  “Let us drink to my mother.”

  “Skoal,” he said.

  That night I went to the Oslo airport, a huge empty place filled with cement and glass and a few desks for security. The lights cast a cold glow on this ugly chamber while outside it was almost dark. In this grey northern darkness, much like our own, with people dour and alone, their lives seemingly as transient and as unfulfilled as mine, I was walking by a news kiosk when I stopped dead. I turned and went back, to a book section called, “New Voices for the Millennium.”

  She was looking out at me, wearing her contacts, but her hair was white, with just a small yellow streak at one side. The jacket said she lived in Toronto and was married, with one son. Sydney.

  So she had raised herself above the torment of our youth. Unlike me she had crossed into a realm where her affliction did not matter anymore. I could see that her affliction was now a part of her grandeur and looked upon as a quality of artistic bravery.

  She had a translucent beauty and a wilful Henderson look. Her phoenix could not be otherwise. Where were those boys who had tormented her now, took down her panties for candy — those girls who did not let her join? I remembered her clothes were almost rags doused with holy water, and the pink glasses she wore always folded on the window sill at night.

  Now her white hair was the hair of an oracle, her eyes were the eyes of mercy. I too had once been ashamed of her, and couldn’t protect her from the vileness of our youth.

  I could see that the picture of her in our provincial paper, taken to expose us, had not succeeded in destroying our family. I bought her novel, though I could never bring myself to actually read it. It was dedicated to Percy.

  Often I would go to airports hours before my flight and would sit and watch and wait and hope. What was I watching for? I did not know. Not for the longest time.

  I knew that very few of these humans dressed impeccably and hauling their indespensable luggage would have seen moose and coyote blood, have stolen wood to survive a blast from winter, have carried a knife into a strange house in order to perpetrate a murder, or have seen a father almost beaten to death. I knew I was free of my past as long as I remained in transition from one place to the other, travelling with these newer, more organized, and more modem humans. Humankind that I could never really join. Not even if I tried. My gaze whenever I wanted told people to stay away.

  I arrived in Paris this past spring. I visited Napoleon’s tomb, walked by the Place de la Concorde, and went to the Montparnasse graveyard where Colette and Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are buried. In the middle of this vast city graveyard I could not stop crying.

  I had a room on the rue St. Denis and went back to it late on that cloudy afternoon. I lay on the bed, and wept.

  You see, those tombs and mausoleums where all those grand people lay are larger and better built man the house Percy lived in, the place where he waited for his mother to come home — for me to take him to the circus — and I thought of his grave by the lumpy ground.

  So I ended my travels. I came back home two months ago. But everything had changed in my house. It wasn’t the same as it was when Autumn and I had slid across the new wax job in our sock feet or I had taken Percy for walks in his wagon. I just got lost in my house as small as it was. I would sit in a chair for a while, and then, remembering some painful incident, I would jump up and move to some other chair. This happened until I had nowhere to sit or stand. I couldn’t even cook supper, because Mom and Percy had made tea there.

  The Sheppard boys came, telling me lies about Mathew — how they had found him and had beaten him for me. They each wanted five hundred dollars. So I gave them money. They were quite fond of me now.

  But when they came back the third time, giggling and laughing about how well they had managed things, I locked my door and went at them. I beat the teeth out of both of them. I smashed Danny’s nose and cut Bennie’s tongue when I punched him with my ringed finger. I’m sure they didn’t think I could. They fled into the late-afternoon drizzle with a smell of balsam in the air. I never saw either of them again.

  I went to visit Cheryl Voteur. I had bought a diamond for her. I started to propose. She smiled, and took my hand, and told me she was getting married to Griffin Porier. He was working now for Gerald Dove.

  I stayed at home after that. I pawed through Dad’s bookshelves, flipping books open and closing them. I would stand for hours at a time doing this.

  I picked up Tolstoy’s The Forged Coupon. I flipped it opened and saw words underlined and notations made not only by Dad but by Autumn. The pink carnation Autumn had won for Dad at the Christmas fish tank had been placed in it for safekeeping before Father went away. Age had faded it to a peach colour. I carefully put the book away and went outside.

  Outside at every instant I would see Percy turning toward me, and smiling, with his hand to his mouth to stifle a cough, or his shirt out and his bow tie askew. I would talk to these ghosts, to all of them lingering here now. I would wake and sleep with them. Why not join them?

  Three weeks ago, I placed my sister’s novel and my dad’s poems together on the kitchen table, along with Percy’s First Communion bulletin, took the rifle from under the bed, loaded it, and sat in my chair with the barrel at my head.

  I was wondering how long it would take for them to find my body, since no one, not
even old Jay Beard, would come here now. He could not stand to walk the lane that Percy had, or play his guitar anymore.

  I stared at the T.V., too lazy to go and shut it off. And the program was interrupted by a breaking news story.

  A large fire was burning on the south end in Saint John. The residents of several buildings were forced outside in the cold. There were firemen and water tankers fighting the blaze — and far in the background at the doorway of this very place — this Empire Hotel — someone was sitting on a chair. It was Mathew Pit, a blanket around him, shivering and shaking.

  He had come full circle — back to you — to this very building where you live, Mr. Terrieux. I saw his head and put the rifle down.

  I came to Saint John the next day. I took a room in the tavern for the night and waited without sleep. The next morning I walked along the street in the cold and fog.

  Mathew seemed to know I was coming. He was destitute, living in this rooming house three floors beneath you. He was lying on a mattress, staring at the water marks on the ceiling. He turned his head toward me and pointed his finger. I did not look at what he was pointing to. But the daylight came in through the window and made red spots on his bed. There was also a smell of flowers; the place was heavy with it. I reached over, right across his bed, and turned on the lamp. Perhaps this is what he had wanted me to do. I moved the lamp so I could study his face. He looked almost sixty now, and his hair was much thinner. His freckles had turned to blotches. His mouth was sunken. He lay above the covers, in long underwear, and was thin and gaunt. Here was Mathew Pit who had once bench pressed three hundred pounds and caused terror on our road.

  Next to his bed he had some Chiclets, a few straws, a lime drink — I remembered how he liked lime drinks.

  He was the last casualty of McVicer’s Works. He had struggled in that fight in Halifax because he was in pain. But he had never admitted this, had never given up.