"Now that he's gone, Elly, what are you to do with yourself?" Morris asked Mom one night, spying father's books, making a mechanical nod to my sister. We were in an awful state. We did not want to insult him, yet had our mother's honour to protect. Nor did I want him there for a lot of other reasons.

I had stolen the chalice from the church. One Sunday I had gone past the vestry and saw it sitting out of its dome. It was snowing and blowing and people were helping push cars out of the parking lot. I went into the vestry, picked up the chalice, and put it under my thin red jacket. I brought it home and hid it in my room, in the wall behind Dad's books. I believed I could get a lot for it - but I soon found out how hard it was to move. The theft was on the news, and my mother said the rosary and prayed for it to be returned.

Cheryl Voteur asked who I thought would have taken it. I knew that it would not be long before people found out - and when they did, all of what was thought about my father and family would be justified.

When Constable Morris came, he sat fifteen feet from a stolen chalice the entire river was looking for - even the Baptist minister had appealed for its return. The Knights of Columbus had put up a reward, and it was spoken about at mass. People were blaming the Sheppards, and Bennie had made a statement that he and his brother would find out who the real thief was.

After hearing that, I did not go outside. It was deep in winter; the nights were frozen silent, with stars gleaming over our tiny house, shaped like a worn old shoebox on its edge.

Mom sat in the bathroom with the door locked when Morris came in. I would end up entertaining him by playing chess. I always had to manoeuvre my queen and bishop, my rook and knight into being vulnerable enough for him to take, so he could win.

He would stay for an hour or two and boast to me about his time playing hockey. He spoke about the case against us, and how he had tried to help Mom by treating her as a human being. He also said he understood I had some difficulty with my father, and he assured me that he would guard anything I wanted to tell him. So one night, in the midst of all my other worries, I said: "I have something to tell you about Dad."

"Oh? What?" he said.

"Do you remember when he and Mom went to visit you at the police station?"

"Of course," he said.

"Well - here it goes," I said. "It's from Shakespeare!"

"What is?"

"What my father quoted," I said, "It's from King Lear - he read it when he was sixteen by himself. After his father died he lived here. He redid the walls and added a room for Mom. Didn't he, Mom?" We were silent, listening to the wind. The bathroom door was closed and locked.

"Yes," Mom said from the bathroom. Autumn came over and sat down beside us with a shawl wrapped about her entire body and head, and only her completely white face visible. She blinked her tiny eyelashes. Her sitting beside him seemed to rattle Morris.

"Is that a good play - King Lear?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "It's a great play - Orwell has written a wonderful defence of it, because Tolstoy attacked it so mercilessly."

"Tolstoy didn't know what he was talking about?" Morris asked.

"No," Autumn said quietly. "Tolstoy always knew - didn't he, Lyle? And he knew this - that as great as he was - and Tolstoy is very great indeed - Shakespeare is greater. This is what Mr. Leo Tolstoy knew - and can you imagine, not being satisfied with being Leo Tolstoy?" She smiled at me - not at Morris.

"Yes," mother answered from the bathroom, and then was silent.

Morris went red in the face. "Why didn't your father say so?" he complained, looking from me to Autumn. "If he had only said so - things may have been different."

"I don't know," Autumn answered. "But he never begs the truth in front of those who are contemptuous of him."

"He didn't want to hurt your feelings," Mother said from behind her shield.

We all looked at the bathroom door.

"I don't know much about plays - or things like Tolstoy," Morris said, apologetically.

"There is no shame in that," Autumn said, tender-heartedly, but looking only at me.

"No," I said, "except the lowest common denominator attacked my father - those who would have burned books attacked my father. You were part of that, Constable Morris. You know that too - deep down in your heart. But my father - you could take any book you wanted, and my dad could tell you about it."

"Shakespeare's plays?" Morris said, sadly contemplating the books. "You have read them?"

"Of course," I said, though I had read only Hamlet and Lear.

"You people seem to have loads of education," Morris said, with an inflection that meant, Why do you live like you do? and another hidden inflection that meant, I am an enemy of that.

"Yes. Our father taught us," Autumn answered calmly, "not to want anything, but to live just like we do." She reached out and took my hand - oh, staged treachery of the moment. I held her hand, as if we were always holding hands; and as if this was not the first time since school we did so.

"Do you think I've gotten your father wrong?"

"Oh yes," Mother said again from the bathroom.

"Completely," I said. "But that doesn't matter."

"Why?"

"The case will be reopened," Autumn said, "for we will not let it die."

"As long as there is a breath in my body I will not allow my father's name to be so besmirched," I said.

"Well - so much of the accusations seemed to fit at the time - I'm sorry, Elly - but isn't that so."

There was no sound from the bathroom.

"Sooner or later it will be solved," I said, eating a banana and looking at it. "They are saying that Constable John Delano is back on the river. He is known to be smart."

"I think it will be considered terrible that this ever happened to us, and many people will be sorry," Autumn said.

"Yes" I said. "Do you know, someone took rum and set my father drunk - and I had to tie him to the bed. Now, beyond the hilarity generated by that there is also profound indignity."

"I know that," Morris said, surprised that I and Autumn could speak with authority.

It was a night in late February months after Dad left. And Morris was troubled by these words. He was shocked - that all along his actions, and his motives, were easily seen through by my mom and dad. His face flushed at the name of John Delano.

"Who do you think set your father drunk?" he said.

"I know who, and I will get them," I said, but my voice was sad.

"You should tell me."

"I'll tell you everything I know someday," I said.

Morris did not come back to the house. I remember him now as a man who had no idea of the responsibility or maturity his vocation required.

Later, one night in March, when the wind was warming and I had come home from the Voteurs', I saw him skating with one of the women from Legaceville on our community's homemade rink, the one my community service kept flooded.

The night Morris left our house was perhaps the last happy night I spent with Autumn. She made taffy again, and we hollered and sang, and I held Percy as I danced about the floor, and Percy hugged us all and made up a song called "Mom and Me and Me and Mom."

Autumn said everything would turn out now, she felt it in her heart, and she hugged Mom and gave me a kiss.

Still, what was I? I tried to think of what I was, and came up with the answer.

I was nothing more than a thug with Tolstoy in my pocket.

NINETEEN.

What happened to my soul because I stole the chalice? It began to shrink. Not because of the saints whose memories it housed in its circular hole, or not for any threat from the heavens. But because the Sheppards over time, a time when I was paralyzed about how to react, found out I had it. Now, along with everything else, I was terrified they would turn me in for the reward. I was slightly less worried that they would kill me, as they said they would. I had been outflanked, because having been suspected in my stead, they had attained a moral power over me that they would never have attained over my dad.

Worse, I had puffed myself up in front of Morris. How could I now go to him and beg his help by telling him I had stolen the chalice?

There are vague and cavernous reaches in Dante's hell where the worst sin is betrayal - but the hell I was in was not Dante's so much as Milton's, where Satan stood facing his son - Death.

I had descended to a place I did not believe in. A battle raged inside me, with grand marshals and winged regiments fighting over the contested ground of right and wrong. A battle almost everyone partakes in, and almost no one any longer believes.

A few weeks after I entered this hell, politely trading on Cheryl Voteur's warm legs and kisses, I was told by her (the only one I had confided in) that the Sheppards now knew I had stolen this chalice and were out to get me, and that she had put herself in danger by trying to stop them.

I felt I had to ask their forgiveness. That did me, carrying my seven-inch Bowie knife, a lot of good, didn't it?

That is when I began to see the nature of my crime; no matter who the Sheppards were, no matter whom they had harmed, it was who I was that counted. I realized it was part of the hidden decree in our natures that my father spoke about. And worse, Cheryl saw this. I was no longer her hero. And she was susceptible to heroes. She needed them. Yet here she was doing all she could to protect me!

Just like Rudy's sin against my mother, by this unthinking act of theft I had boxed myself into a corner. I had cursed my father's lack of action - to find at the end I had no moral stamina to do what I swore must be done by him. The moral stamina came from not doing it. Jay Beard was an exception - and his road had no guarantee.

"Bring the chalice here and I will sneak into their house and set the fuckers up," Cheryl said, sitting naked and facing me with her bum on my thighs. "You go tell Morris you saw them bring it to their house - when Morris comes I will have put the chalice somewhere it can be found! - and I'll fill the fuckin' thing with morphine and cocaine." She kissed me.

"That would be appalling to do," I said weakly.

"It would not at all be appalling to them," she said angrily. "They would do it to you in a second."

I saw the world as much more complex and internecine than I ever had before. I saw how comfortably the Sheppards fit in a world I did not. They fit as easily as Mat Pit, because everything was potentially viable to them from the beginning. And Mat Pit? Well, Mat Pit fit as easily as Leopold McVicer.

TWENTY.

By early March the accusations Gerald Dove had made against McVicer's Works mounted. The incidences of allergy, cancer, and miscarriage among our community were eight times the provincial or national average.

There were weekly meetings at the one-room schoolhouse, and I went to them. The highway was dark, the stars out at seven. I walked across the new bridge and down the old Bowie Road to the school. It was well lighted, and you could see your breath even though it was crowded. People drank coffee in Tim Hortons cups. There were ice crystals inside the window, and everyone kept on their hats and gloves.

I saw Penny Porier for the first time since she had seen me in town. Did she know I still loved her? Did she know that at nights in summer when the breeze was gentle I made up stories to myself of how she would soon phone me, or come to see me? But I had lost my virginity to Cheryl Voteur. And Penny? She had watched as others ridiculed me.

She had left that past September for Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, but had been forced by illness to come home before Christmas; hence the visits to the doctors. She had always been sickly, I knew that.

She stood so close to me I could see her breath in the cool schoolroom. She told a friend near her that she had undergone many tests in Halifax. She felt she was very ill, but she didn't know why.

"You're only eighteen," I whispered hoarsely. "You'll be all right - they'll find out what it is! You have to be - you do." There were tears in my tough eyes. I don't know if she heard.

And then I got close enough to touch her - my fingers touched her coat as she passed by. I saw her turn and walk toward the front.

Mr. Porier had not wanted to blame her sickness on anything to do with McVicer. Her illness in his mind was only temporary, and a woman's thing. Anything else would make false his entire life.

Now his own daughter had gone over to the enemy camp. He had tried to threaten her. One morning he had broken into the bathroom when she was sitting on the flush and had shaken his belt in her face. Griffin had to rush in and step between them. Porier, his eyes blazing, his short thick arms furiously moving at his sides, threw the belt at his son and kicked the yellow bathroom wall. And now McVicer phoned every half hour, wanting to find out if there was anything he could do.

Her father had begged her not to go to the meetings. He went to her room and, looking distraught, he tried to cajole and coax her into staying home.

"I don't know what Leo's going to think," he kept saying.

Penny initially had few allies here. Certain people wanted to use her sickness against McVicer - and for them it would be good publicity if she died. I think Penny knew this; but she rode this wave as long as she could.

What McVicer feared came to pass. At the third meeting they put her on the stage with Dove and took a picture, his arm around her, protecting her from her own family. She told us about her symptoms. For years her period had not started, her weight was always low; she was forever tired. And in the mill - behind her back yard - dozens of barrels of herbicide and pesticide were stored when she was a baby girl. Ike Pit had worked there and he had died, and a dozen others as well.

The next day McVicer went to her and said he would pay for her education if she would not be part of these meetings. He told her that Dove was out to crush both him and her father. McVicer took her hand, patted it, and insisted he make her tea. He brought it over to her, along with tinned cookies from his store, and asked if she would like to see a specialist in Toronto. He looked at her, his eyes filled with the power her father feared. He told her about his war experiences - how he had fought at Caen. How he had been pinned down by a German machine gunner outside Antwerp. How he had put three hundred men to work in the woods. All the while he held her hand.

She had swallowed hard (for she could hardly eat) and told McVicer she mustn't take his kindness. "Oh," she had said. "What education will I need now? What specialist should I go to? When was the last time you came here to serve me tea? How often have you phoned my dad in the middle of the night to do some errand? How smartly he jumped to your tunes, how trite was his life, to feel important by waiting for you to make your Christmas visit! We lived our lives in a frugal house, without books or knowledge or even much love."

McVicer chuckled, and looked at her father with grave, penetrating eyes.

She climbed the stairs that night to go to bed and saw her father sitting in his room, everything in place, staring at the floor, while the clock ticked behind his broad, muscled back. The next day, he and her mother came into her room, with its pink bedspread and dried flowers in a green vase.

It was this visit to her room that hurt her more than anything else they did. She remembered their vacation to Prince Edward Island when she was a girl of seven, and how they had to leave three days early because McVicer needed Abby home. They never got back to that little cottage where she had collected red mud and seashells. It was this memory that made her fight back with tears in her eyes. Griffin, sitting in his own room, listened to the argument and, not being able to stand it, lay down on his bed, and bent a pillow to cover his ears. It was her eighteenth birthday.

"It's just a woman problem - girls have them - that's all -" Porier said finally, in a loud but faltering voice. "Think a Mr. McVicer - now ain't the time to desert him."

Penny didn't answer. She sat on the side of her bed, fumbling with her bedspread and staring at the floor.

"You know, your father's been very good to you - think of that," Betty said to her, holding her head high.

"Listen," her father added, "yer mom says you always wanted to get away for a shopping trip - say we do that - just me and yer mom and you - how will that be? Wouldn't that be fun - away on a shopping trip - down to Boston on a shopping trip?"

In offering her this, he offered her all he ever had. But she went to the meeting.