MERCY AMONG THE CHILDREN.

David Adams Richards.

To Robert Couture.

PROLOGUE.

Terrieux lived in a small apartment on the fourth floor of a rooming house in the south end of Saint John, New Brunswick. One day in November of 1997 a man was waiting for him in the entranceway. His name was Lyle Henderson. He had a watchful look - the kind that came, Terrieux suspected, from being big when young and having had bigger, older boys and men challenge him; or perhaps from being an adult to children when he was no more than a child himself.

He was about twenty-five, dressed in a white winter coat, blue sports jacket, and a pair of blue dress pants. He wore a ring on the index finger of his right hand, which could be used in any street fight and added to his appearance of a tavern bouncer.

Terrieux's place was away from the city centre, among the newly renovated waterfront buildings and down a half-hidden alleyway, in an area that smelled of the docks and Irving pulp mill. There was a smell of diesel, and a shapeless conglomerate of depressed buildings and houses that ran off around a corner, where there was posted a Pepsi sign over an old convenience store, faded cigarette advertisements, and a newer advertisement for sanitary napkins. The door was open and cold air hung at the entrance.

Terrieux had retired as a police officer years ago, to join the Canadian navy. He had been a naval officer for some seven years. Then, feeling betrayed in a way by Canada, or by the failure of his marriage that came about because of his position, he had resigned and drifted to the States, where he had worked in New Orleans on the docks and in the Gulf of Mexico on an oil rig. He was heavy-set and strong enough that neither the work nor the rough life bothered him. He knew how to handle himself, something that showed on his face, the expression of which was an unapprehensive certainty in himself.

But, feeling displaced, he had come back to the Maritimes, with short stops in Virginia and Maryland, in 1995. His wife had gone years before, and was remarried to an accountant with W.P. and Maine. He sometimes saw her again and even now he felt a resentment from her that he would give anything to overcome. It was the sad look of a woman of forty-nine who had in her life dreams unfulfilled, and would blame forever her first love for this.

Now at fifty-seven he stood between fathers and their children, parolees and the parole board, a buffer between out-of-fashion men and those who wished to change the life of those men. He knew the men, because he was one of them. He knew the lives they led, lives no better or worse than others he had dealt with. And he was cynical of change in a way most intelligent people tend to be. That is, he was not cynical of change so much as cynical of those who would in fashion conscience alone commit themselves to it.

Lyle Henderson had a story to tell, perhaps about this very thing, and he was hoping Terrieux would listen. This was not an unusual request from the men that Terrieux knew, but was unusual for a boy of Lyle's age and demeanour. The demeanour was something seen only in youth, a kind of hopefulness in spite of it all. In spite of the blast of misfortune that would crumble lives to powder. It seemed as if Lyle understood this, without benefit of much in his life. Perhaps while standing here in the doorway of the Empire Hotel he understood how much the man he was talking to had himself suffered. Perhaps they were reflections of each other, in youth and middle age, a mirror into the past and future of rural men caught in the world's great new web.

Terrieux nodded, smiled, and invited Lyle upstairs.

Down below as they climbed toward the third landing they could see traffic and hear students getting on a bus to the university. The walls of the old wooden house, inside and out, were grey, with paint from a job done eleven years before. After a time they came to Terrieux's small apartment at the back of the house.

In the yellow rooms with a portable television, a couch, and a few chairs scattered about the kitchen, Lyle's face suddenly had a tenderness. To Terrieux it seemed a face that said it probably deserved much more tenderness than it had ever received and had given more also. Saying, even more, that tenderness was a commodity of valiant people. This is what Terrieux understood by Lyle's look, which was almost, somehow, entirely compassionate.

"Did you ever hear of a man named Mat Pit -?" Lyle said, taking a deep breath. Or perhaps he took the breath just before he had asked (which would, Terrieux knew, give a different reason for his breath).

"No," Terrieux said, "I don't think so."

"He was my neighbour," Lyle said, "when my brother and sister and I were growing up in our house in the Stumps."

"I know where that is," Terrieux said quickly.

The Stumps was a at of land in northeastern New Brunswick, along the great Miramichi River, which flowed out of the heavy forests into the Northumberland Strait, north of the western tip of Prince Edward Island. The Stumps was part of the vast and stunted spruce and brilliant-coloured hardwood that shadowed the salmon-teeming river as it widened into the Miramichi Bay. It had been settled first by Micmac Indians and then by displaced French, who hid during the British expulsion of the Acadians in 1756. The Irish - like Henderson - came half a century later, for some reason still loyal to a British crown that had pissed in their face. They worked the woods and cut the timber, and towns grew up along the great river that ran south and east almost to the top of the state of Maine. Its people were fiery, rough, and not without brilliance. It was the river where Terrieux had been a police officer years and years ago, when he himself was not only Lyle's age but in height and colour looked exceptionally like that young man.

For a moment Lyle stared out at the old wooden docks of this largest industrial city in New Brunswick, part of the receding empire of British North America, quickly being swallowed whole by the more vigorous and certain empire to the south, so that the very name Empire Hotel took on a splendid quaintness for the detached, very unsplendid building in the fog.

"You were a police officer?" Lyle said.

"For six years."

"It is a very strange thing - all that has happened since then - you know - with him."

"Oh - with who?" Terrieux smiled.

"I do not blame you," Lyle said. "But if every moment and movement is in some way accounted for, no one knows what not killing someone sometimes does."

"And who did I not kill?" Terrieux said, smiling cautiously, and glancing at the boy's belt for a weapon while deciding which chair to thrust at the boy's head - if required.

There was still the scent of the fire that burned a building across the street a few weeks ago. A certain smell of ash in the cold air.

The boy (for this is how Terrieux thought of most under thirty) thought for another second, and reached into one of his pockets. He laid a picture on the table.

"It's - this," he continued, his voice shaking just a little. "I am thinking - looking at this man, who I grew up beside -what would have happened had things been slightly different. If on that night long ago when he fell through the ice - on the east side of Arron Brook Pool - a place I have lain my coyote traps - and shot a bull moose with a nineteen-point rack - you let him sink. I never suspected that that man I sometimes shared my thoughts with could already have been buried if, well - not for you. And I know the peril you put him in that night by chasing him made you give up police work. For another moment he might well have drowned at sixteen. You see, he has taken advantage of us both."

Lyle whispered this last phrase as Terrieux took the picture. Terrieux held the photograph out and looked at it. His eyes were going, and he took from his pocket bifocals and put them on cautiously, looked at Lyle and then at the picture again.

The man in the photo was wearing a jean jacket, with his hair combed back, his eyes like burning beads, and Terrieux quickly formed a mental picture of the sheer agony Mathew Pit must have caused others and himself. Must being the word, since this young man was here with this picture, and not a soft young man either but a young man whose blow-by-blow encounter with life was etched upon his still young face.

So certainly Mat Pit had caused him - something.

Terrieux had had a few run-ins with this man in the picture. He had taken him to court twice; both times the boy was let go. And finally he had saved Mat's life one late March night about 1964. Mathew had tried to cross the brook to escape Terrieux and had fallen through. The water beneath the rotted ice was deep and swift, but Mathew was not at all penitent. In fact he had tried to make it out himself and for the longest time refused entreaty from Terrieux to give him his hand. Terrieux suspected him of much but could prove little.

What made him give up police work was how he had almost, almost caused this Mathew Pit's death. Or how the media said he did. How they complained that Terrieux "overreacted" and that he had harassed this child many times before. When a suspension came because of this, Terrieux gave up police work.

He remembered Mathew Pit when he stared at his eyes and blond hair. He remembered that he had a sister, and a young brother. Something was wrong with the brother. Mentally retarded, as they said then. The brother, Trenton, did not grow above four foot nine.

It was all a long time ago.

"He was different than any other young fellow-more certain of himself, more dangerous because of this," Terrieux said.

"Yes," Lyle said. He kept staring at Terrieux. "He - from a certain perspective - ruled our road and took that precious air from everyone else's dreams."

Terrieux flipped the picture in his fingers and handed it back.

"I am thinking what if you had failed to rescue him?"

"I almost didn't. I lost him for a while. Then I could hear someone scraping away at the ground. It was Mat Pit trying to claw himself out of the brook. I went down with a stick and inched out so I could grab him. He hesitated a long while - but finally he gave me his arm."

"I had to come and see you - and tell you what happened after you pulled him out of that brook. I want to tell you what happens in life, if you don't mind."

"Ah," Terrieux said. "I who know nothing of what happens in life?"

"Well - that's not what I mean, of course," Lyle said unapologetically.

Terrieux did not respond. And then something happened to rankle him even more. The boy, Lyle Henderson, took out a giant notepad, filled from front to back with notes and quotations, and flipping to some folded newspaper articles said: "It was the Age of Aquarius - is that what gave rise to the Pits of the world?" He smiled, a little eagerly, as if growing familiar too soon, which is a trait that Maritimers have, so used they are to everyone being a neighbour if not a friend.

"Perhaps it was." Terrieux smiled.

At this moment the boy seemed nothing much more than a tavern thug, and Terrieux was disappointed that his past could be delved into by anyone so easily.

Terrieux picked up the photo and looked at it once again. Then handed it back again. Lyle smiled again.

When Lyle smiled his face changed just slightly to one that had appropriated enough pain to last a lifetime. It was a face that still, however, registered hope; a hope with an internal stop gap.

Here Lyle looked at his notes again - pages and pages of quotations and arrows. "Everything I relate is true. It is what I have witnessed and what has been told to me - the conversations of others even when I was not present are very near to being exactly what they were, told to me by those who remembered them first-hand, or talked to someone who knew. It has taken me almost seven years to piece together what it was all about, and I want to set it before you now. Maybe you can write about it, as a former policeman, just for interest sake, and maybe you can expose the Mat Pits of the world."

Lyle lighted another cigarette and looked out the window at the Church of the Redeemer, settled under the cold black Maritime day.

Terrieux nodded his assent, and Lyle began.

MERCY.

ONE.

The small Catholic churches here are all the same, white clap board drenched with snow or blistering under a northern sun, their interiors smelling of confessionals and pale statues of the Madonna. Our mother, Elly Henderson, took us to them all along our tract of road - thinking that solace would come.

In November the lights shone after seven o'clock on the stained-glass windows. The windows show the crucifixion or one of the saints praying. The hills where those saints lived and dropped their blood look soft, distant and blue; the roads wind like purple ribbons toward the Mount of Olives. It is all so different from real nature with its roaring waters over valleys of harsh timber where I tore an inch and a half of skin from my calves. Or Miramichi bogs of cedar and tamarack and the pungent smell of wet moosehide as the wounded moose still bellows in dark wood. I often wanted to enter the world of the stained glass - to find myself walking along the purple road, with the Mount of Olives behind me. I suppose because I wanted to be good, and my mother wanted goodness for me. I wanted too to escape the obligation I had toward my own destiny, my family, my sister and brother who were more real to me than a herd of saints.

My father's name was Sydney Henderson. He was born in a shack off Highway 11, a highway only Maritimers could know - a strip of asphalt through stunted trees and wild dead fields against the edge of a cold sky.

He did poorly in school but at church became the ward of Father Porier. He was given the job of washing Porier's car and cleaning his house. He was an altar boy who served mass every winter morning at seven. He did this for three years, from the age of eight to eleven.

Then one day there was a falling-out, an "incident," and Father Porier's Pontiac never again came down the lane to deliver him home, nor did Father ever again trudge off to the rectory to clean the priest's boots. Nor did he know that his own father would take the priest's side and beat him one Sunday in front of most of the parishioners on the church steps. This became Father's first disobedience, not against anything but the structure of things. I have come to learn, however, that this is not at all a common disobedience.

Back then, harsh physical labour seemed the only thing generations of Canadians like my grandfather considered work. So by thirteen my father wore boots and checked jackets, and quit school to work in the woods, in obligation to his father. He would spend days with little to comfort him. He was to need this strength, a strength of character, later on. He had big hands like a pulpcutter, wore thick glasses, and his hair was short, shaved up the side of his head like a zek in some Russian prison camp.

He worked crossing back and forth over that bleak highway every day; when the June sky was black with no-see-ums, or all winter when the horse dung froze as it hit the ground. He was allergic to horses, yet at five in the morning had to bring the old yellow mare to the front of the barn - a mare denied oats and better off dead.

My grandfather bought a television in 1962, and during the last few years of his life would stare at it all evening, asking Sydney questions about the world far away. The light of the television brought into that dark little house programs like The Honeymooners, The Big Valley, Have Gun Will Travel, and The Untouchables; and glowed beyond the silent window into the yard, a yard filled with desolate chips of wood.

My grandfather Roy Henderson would ask Dad why people would act in a movie if they knew they were going to be shot. He would not be completely convinced by my father's explanation about movie scripts and actors, and became more disheartened and dangerous the clearer the explanation was.

"But they die - I seen them."

"No they don't, Dad."

"Ha - lot you know, Syd - lot you know - I seen blood, and blood don't lie, boy - blood don't lie. And if ya think blood lies I'll smash yer mouth, what I'll do."

As a teen my father sat in this TV-lightened world; a shack in the heat of July watching flies orbit in the half dark. He hid there because his father tormented him in front of kids his own age.

I have learned that because of this torment, Father became a drunk by the age of fifteen.

People did not know (and what would it matter if they had known?) that by the time he was fifteen, my father had read and could quote Stendhal and Proust. But he was trapped in a world of his own father's fortune, and our own fortune became indelibly linked to it as well.

In the summer of 1964 my grandfather was asked by his employer, Leo Alphonse McVicer, to take two Americans fishing for salmon at the forks at Arron Brook. Roy did not want to go; first, because it was late in the year and the water low, and secondly, because if they did not get a fish he might be blamed. Still, he was obligated.

"Get them a fish," Leo said, rooting in the bowl of his pipe with a small knife and looking up with customary curtness. Roy nodded, as always, with customary willingness. He took the men this certain hot day in August to a stretch of the river at the mouth of the brook, where the fish were pooled. He took his boy, Sydney, with him, to help pole the canoe up river and make the men comfortable. Then in the heat of midday, he sent Sydney north in the canoe to scout other pools for fish while he spent his time rigging the lines and listening to the men as they spoke about places as diverse as Oregon and Honolulu, while being polite enough to have no opinion when they spoke of the quality of Leo McVicer's wood and his mill.

Sydney poled back down river later that afternoon, looking in the water, and saying the fish had gone far up but that four salmon rested here, taking the oxygen from the cool spring, lying aside the boulders at the upper edge of the rip.

These men were important. They had been instrumental in helping Leo McVicer and Leo wanted to amuse them the way Maritimers do - by pretending a rustic innocence under obligation to real human beings who have travelled from real places to be entertained.

So after three hours, Roy whispered to my father: "It would be better for Leo if they caught something - if they are here to help finance the new barker for his mill."

And with those words, and with his shirt covered in patches of sweat and dust, and with his neck wrinkled in red folds from a life under lash to sun and snow, with his blackened teeth crooked and broken, showing the smile not of a man but of a tobacco-plug-chewing child, and with all the fiery sinewy muscles of his long body, he set in motion the brutal rural destiny of our family. Asking one of the men to give him a rod, he tied a three-pronged jig hook to it, had Sydney pole above them and then drift silently down through the pool without pole in the water, to point out where the salmon were lying. He threw the jig where the pool joined the spring and jerked upwards. All of a sudden the line began to sing, and away ran the fifteen-pound salmon jigged in the belly. After twenty-five minutes he hauled the spent cock fish in, killed it, and hooked another. The Americans were laughing, patting Roy on his bony back, not knowing what Sydney and Roy and the wardens watching them knew - that this exercise was illegal. The wardens watching stepped out, confiscated the rods, and seized the men's brand-new Chevrolet truck.

Leo McVicer heard of this at seven o'clock, when he got back from the mill. He paced all night in quiet almost completive fury. My grandfather went back to work early that Monday, willing to explain. But Leo fired him on the spot, even though Roy had sought to please him. For that I was to learn was Leo McVicer. Never minding either that the great Leo McVicer had often poached salmon for New Brunswick cabinet members and the occasional senator from Maine who partied at his house. This of course my grandfather did not know. He was kept from knowledge of the decisions of his great friend, as he was kept out of the dark rooms of his gigantic house.

To be fired after years of faith and work broke him, and he sat, as my own father once said, "like some poor sad rustic angel confined to hell."

Still, there was a chance - if only one - to work his way back into the fold. That summer Leo's men were unsatisfied and twice threatened a wildcat walkout. Finally McVicer beat them to it, and locked the sawmill's gate.

For the next two weeks things existed at a simmer between Leo and his men. They milled about the yard like atoms bouncing off each other, collecting and separating, collecting again, in pools of dusty, loitering brown-shirted figures, caught up at times in wild gestures, at other times almost grief-strickenly subdued. And within these two states there was talk of sabotage and revenge. No trucks or wood moved on or off McVicer property, and they stood firm when a welders' supply truck tried to enter, howling to each other and holding it back with their bodies, knowing little in life except what bodies were for, to be bent and shoved and twisted and gone against. At the end, the welders' truck was defeated. With a jubilant shout from the men into the empty September heat, the driver turned back and a lone truck of herbicide was left unloaded in the yard.

Finally Roy Henderson asked my father's advice. What could he do to make things better for Leo, and regain his job?

There was one thing my father advised: "Go to the men." My father at fourteen stated, "Convince them to end their walkout." He added that Leo would be grateful - the contracts filled, the herbicide unloaded, and Roy would be considered instrumental in this.

Roy headed into the woods on a warm September afternoon, with the pungent smell of spruce trees waving in the last of the summer heat. Just before he arrived onsite three men cut the locks to the gate. They stormed the truck and rolled the hundred barrels of herbicide off it, busted the barrels open with axes, and dumped them all, along with forty barrels of pesticide from the warehouse, into the upper edges of Little Arron Brook. The new barker was sabotaged, a flare was lighted to engage the men in more hellery, and a fire raged.

All of this was documented by a local reporter. A picture was taken that day long ago. Unfortunately, standing on the hulking ruin of smouldering machinery, a half-crazed drunken smile on his face, was my grandfather. It made the front pages of the provincial papers. He had not exactly done what my father had advised him to. In fact he looked like a vigilante from the deep south stomping the ruins of innocence. It was how they wanted him to look.

I have this picture still. As faded as it might be, the image is strikingly familiar, savage and gleeful, as if in one moment of wilful revenge Roy had forgotten the reason for his journey that afternoon.

Grandfather told Dad that he had tried to stop, not start, the conflagration. But his picture, even faded to yellow in an old archival room, shows him a rather willing participant in the mayhem. As if his grin leering from a newspaper at me, a grandson he never knew, was his only moment of bright majesty, caught in the splendid orb of a flashbulb, which signalled our doom for the next thirty years.

All others there that day got away when the police arrived but grandfather, too drunk to run, fell from the machine he was prancing on, and crawled on his knees to the police car to sleep.

The tire burned eleven hundred acres of Leo McVicer's prime soft timber land; timber subcontracted to the large paper mill. After my grandfather's picture was published, this fire became known locally as the "Henderson horror."

"Roy is bad - his son is mad," the saying rose from the lips of everyone.

Meanwhile Roy Henderson, illiterate and frightened of people who weren't illiterate, had to go to court and pay a lawyer to defend him on both counts; that is, of poaching and the destruction of the barker. My father described Roy as he stood in court in a grey serge suit. He had lost his beloved television. He was confronted by a menacing prosecutor. He shook and cried. He was sentenced to three years. People teased him on the way out of court.

Sydney, at fourteen, would make him biscuits and hitchhike to Dorchester to visit. But Roy, who had never been in jail in his life, refused to eat.

"Tell Leo I will not eat unless he forgives me," he said, sniffing, and sitting with his hands on his knees. His hair was turning grey and grey hair stuck out of his ears; his eyes were as deep set, his brow as wide, as some rustic prophet. But Sydney knew he was no prophet. He gave Sydney this message, as the sunlight came in on his prison trousers: "Tell him that my life is in his hands - and then see what he has to say. Tell him that the biscuits are hard now, and gettin' harder. Go on, fella - get goin' -"

My father left the prison, in his old red coat and torn gumboots, and ran all the way to Moncton - thirty-seven miles. He caught the train, went to Leo - not to the house, but to the office in McVicer's store that had served our community for years. The store was a monument to the class of people it served, where calendars of halter-topped blonde and blue-eyed girls shining Fords with Turtle Wax were hidden by Leo under the counter, and where diversified products were unknown but Humphrey work pants and boots, and corduroys for children, were sold, along with erasers and scribblers and pencils for school.