"Son," he said, "I did nothing."

"Well there you go - I just did," I said, laughing. I walked out through the crowd, everyone looking at me until I looked at them.

Mathew followed me out. I will tell you this, I was under his spell. There was no question about it.

Mathew brought out a paper towel for me to wipe Hanny's blood from my hand. He smiled when he saw it, and handed me a smoke. He said I had done a good job, and told me he had more wood to steal.

"I want you to go somewhere with me."

"Where -?"

"Just somewhere - will you or not?"

I shrugged as if to say it made no difference. Then I went home. Once I was alone, my elation subsided, and I was left only with a picture of Hanny's kind dark face looking at me in confusion and in shame because I had hit him in front of his wife.

I needed my mother to hate me as I went into the house that night. So I began shouting at them, and Mom began to shake. Autumn glared at me and got up and left the house, so I yelled at her and called her a whore.

"Please," Mother said, reaching a hand toward me. "I am glad you can take care of yourself, but tomorrow go to church and recite the prayer of Saint Francis."

The air smelled of medicine and night, her nightgown was white with small blue flowers; her throat was bare and showed the strains of her coughing. Dr. Savard had come down once - only once - to tell her it was her nerves, and that she was going through early menopause. He left her pills that sat upon a table. It is almost indescribable, how his affluence and modern knowledge was so out of place in our shanty. Its faded walls and small rooms, which I had once delighted in. Now her hand trembled as she held it out.

It was the very first time I never took her hand. In my spitefulness - in my feelings of shame and anger and poverty - in the accumulated terror I had suffered and made others suffer I lashed out: "The church has done a great shitload of good for you," I said. "A self-centred quiff for a priest."

I stumbled against Percy and the cup of tea he was carrying to Mom fell from his hand. He crouched down and began to pick up the pieces.

"I will get Mom another cup," he said.

"Never mind her goddamn tea!" I roared at him. He didn't look at me, and continued to pick up the pieces.

"Oh Percy, I'll get it," Mom said, and she tried to sit up. Ashamed, yet filled with newfound boldness and hate, and disgusted by their kindness, I fled. I sat on the old couch behind the house.

I had nowhere to go, and my head was reeling with the pointless drunkenness of youth. Mathew had told me things almost in code, and I was trying to understand them.

The code was this: A man - a true man - did what he wanted to. Society was fine for people who could profit by it, but the community had left the two of us, Mathew and me, out. So why be cowed by a community that spit in my face? Look it straight in the face and dare it to spit. The code also said, take care of the weak and never hurt the innocent This was Mathew's secret code to me. And I firmly believed he practised it.

It was a grand code, I thought. And if I had this code I needed nothing. Besides, weren't the community and the towns along the river prepared to accept people who relied upon this code, and weren't they frightened of men who used it? And didn't those who used it have greater and more admirable souls than those who did not, and didn't I acknowledge this myself by secretly envying those men? If I envied their spunk and irreverence, so too did others.

"My father believed them," I said to Mathew. "Now he owes taxes and they spit in his face."

"What would you do if they did to you what they did to your father?" Mathew said to me one day.

I thought, and said: "They wouldn't dare."

Mathew smiled.

I felt power surge through my body. I had given the right answer. And this was why I had needed to prove myself by hitting Hanny Brown.

In back of the house on this cool October night I watched the stars and wondered how long it would take to travel to one if I went the speed of light. I held my hand over my eyes and watched the heavens, while inside I heard my mother and Percy speak.

She asked Percy if he thought I was angry at them, for they were left alone so often.

"Oh no," Percy said. "Lyle finds me bugs and caterpillars and took me fishing."

"But he hasn't taken you to do any of those things in a long time - it's well over a year. He hardly speaks to me. He always looks angry - I've never seen anyone so angry with the world. I know he has had a bad time in the world. But your father has had a worse time, and your father never looked angry. And Autumn too - she has been afflicted since childhood - she has no money, and boys have made fun of her - and used her - I know they have. She has come home from dances quietly and secretly crying. But she faces it, works to give us what she can - and she had a poem published, did you know -"

"Lyle cut the wood, and I watched him -"

"Autumn," Mother said, "poor little Autumn. I think we have failed our children - your father and I - they wanted so much more than us. Percy, do you understand - I saw boys and girls with money, at the church picnics, and looked in my purse and there was nothing to give them. It broke my heart."

"Scupper Pit has a sore paw - and he has to ride in my wagon."

"I'm sorry," my mother said, "but when your daddy comes home he can fix that - he is the bravest man you will ever meet - and see those books - you and I could not read them all, but your daddy could. I get so confused with books, and money - I get all mixed up - I think I have the money to pay something to keep the whales alive and then I don't - but not your dad - he is the only brave man I have met - well except for Mr. Beard. One night your dad was sitting here and I was standing in the doorway to the study. I was pregnant with you - which means you were in my tummy - and I turned and your father - Sydney, my husband - said, 'You have to come here and lie down now.' I don't know why he said this, but he did. He stood and made room for me to lie down, and walked by the study door. He stood there as if facing a test from God. He said nothing. He waited. There was a loud sharp noise and he held his arm. A man had shot through our house - you and I would have died. How did he know this? He is brave - good and kind, you will see."

"Lyle is brave," Percy said.

I waited, holding my breath, my hand still over my face looking at the stars. I wanted my mother to say, "Yes, he is very brave." I wanted her to acknowledge my bravery, because I had put my hand through a window, hit a big fisherman, and carried a knife. No one fucked with me. Even as far down as Tracadie they had heard of me by now, and when I looked into the mirror I saw the cold self-mesmerizing eyes of youthful disillusioned pain; the kind of eyes I had sought since seeing those eyes in Mathew Pit when I was ten years of age.

But my mother said something, and I did not catch what it was, which disappointed me. Perhaps she did say I was brave. That was all I wanted.

My mother told Percy his tea was delicious, and that she had at one picnic served eight hundred cups of tea. Again there was silence. The light went out in the house. The wind in the trees blew. Percy said softly: "Mom - I am making a wish that you won't go away."

The evening was still sweet, even with the harsh aftertaste of wine.

EIGHT.

The next morning Jay Beard asked to see me, so I went to his house. He came outside and sat on an old drum, looking at me with his craggy face covered in grey beard. He asked me what had happened at the dance.

"I'll backhand any son of a bitch who comes near me."

"Our river has enough bastards like that - but only a few brave men," Jay said quietly. "And you hanging around with Mathew will do you no good - or do you remember?"

This comment scalded me, and my regard for Mr. Beard allowed its truth to wound, while my respect for him disallowed any reprisal. I remember how he stood outside with a service revolver in midwinter protecting us. I owed him much, and he never asked for anything in return. Strangely I had thought I had become more like him, but he was here to tell me I had not.

The next Friday I was busy cutting some support staffs for our old back shed while Percy sat on a stump watching me. The day had a stiff wind across the bay, and from far away I could smell salt off the water. When I looked again Percy was gone.

After searching the house I went into the woods and crossed Arron Brook and went up the long crooked road toward the hill - the one where I could see both mine and Pit's property. I saw Percy far away, near the highway. Then he crossed the road, in cautious steps, and ran to Jay Beard's trailer. I walked back through the broken windfalls and made it to Arron Brook. Then I crossed onto Russell Road and walked into Beard's yard. It was now late Friday afternoon and there was a smell of fish somewhere along the old highway; the pointless fast that lingered in the spots of blue autumn heaven.

Inside Jay Beard's trailer was my small brother, listening as Jay played his guitar. Percy had his hands folded on his lap, his feet in red rubber boots still almost six inches from the kitchen floor, and his bow tie as always crooked. Suddenly he looked up at me through the window, and smiled a delightful smile in the late-afternoon sun. Then he went back to watching Mr. Beard's fingers, with Scupper waiting patiently at his feet.

On those days when I had thought he was going up the lane to wait for me he was actually going to hear the old country and western music of Mr. Beard. And I realized what the word Getir on the envelope was. Percy was saving for a guitar.

I turned and went home. I was sad, and a little envious, and I did not know why. Mathew met me at our front door. He had been waiting for me.

"Can you come?" he asked.

"Where?"

"I have somewhere to go."

"How long?"

"Just an hour or so."

I went inside and told Mom I had to go. She was lying with her eyes half-opened staring at the ceiling while Autumn was making her soup.

"Where are you going, love?" she said.

"Oh - I have things to do - people to see."

"I've been thinking of my life in the orphanage," my mother said, "all day - all those sad little children that I knew. It is very strange."

I never knew that her words, her movements, and her smile would haunt my every moment the rest of my life.

We travelled that day for fifteen miles, and then along a broken, winding road toward the bay. The trees' leaves were tinged and frostbitten, the sun lingered on the dash, and there was a scent of fall on the car seat.

We were going to an old lot, down an overgrown road against the bald autumn shoreline, that once belonged to Leo McVicer. I saw a moose trail thrashed toward the dark spruce on the far side. In the air was a hawk circling like a bitter omen of winter. I saw ten or twelve tombstones, overgrown, twisted and mossy.

My heart stopped.

"These are others McVicer never spoke of - these are men who died working for him. Most of them was bachelors, lived alone - and had no one but each other. Here now," Mat said, walking along the old moose trail, "is ninety to a hundred barrels I buried - he was still using it up until ten year ago. This is what he didn't want Dove to know." He looked about at the gravestones. "These men worked with him in the forties and fifties after the war - this was their graveyard - but the community about here faded away. A few of them were married with kids and stuff - though the majority weren't. They all died of poison. This is my grandfather - and my father, Kyle Ike Pit - and here, Lyle, is your grandfather - Roy Henderson. Your mother is dying because of what these guys sprayed -"

We were very close to the bay. Chokecherry bushes lined the old fallen graveyard. The sound of a bird twittering and trailing the last of its stay here came to me through a cloud of cold.

"I helped me old man bury a ton of barrels. I know the government is happy to blame McVicer if they can or side with him if they have to. It is time to get him back!" Mathew said, and then with a soft hand on my shoulder he said, "Think of what he did to your father."

I took a drink and looked out past the trampled field to an old horse standing in thigh-high grass, to a cloth of some kind wrapped about a clothesline in a faroff yard of a bleak yellow house.

Mathew's eyes were steely blue now, his voice soothing.

"That's all been said and done," I answered, "said and done."

"But what if we find the letters as well? That would prove it - isn't that what we should do? There's probably money in it too - lots of it. But think of the government letters - it'll prove what I know - and if I do, everyone - the premier, his lawyers from Chatham, all of them - will pay."

"How do you know he has a safe?"

"Of course he has a safe - of course he has a safe. We have to get the money before the natives," Mathew said. "That's the next ones to go after it -"

"We will sue," I said, shivering. "Sue him again."

Mathew's face was calm, and filled with the light from the weak sun. Afternoon was drawing on its shadows, and some boat trailers rested along the roadside to the bay, ready for hauled-up speedboats. He spoke softly, almost without interest.

"Suing will keep us in court," he continued. "I don't know how much time your mother has - I know Teresa May has a year or less - if we got bogged down in court - I know that's more legal - but I tried it that way."

I realized at this moment that all my life and what I had done and my poverty and my reaction to it, and my solitude in school, and my love of Christmas until it came, and my yearning madness for Penny Porier, and the dreary spotted tablecloth in our kitchen or the perpetual sadness of our lane with Percy and his wagon, or my mother's smile when she was being bullied, or the circuses we could not go to or the foster parents where we sat, nay the very cough of my mother and the suffering of my father for unanswering Christ had caused this moment. I could say yes or no. I said nothing.

I realized that the money had mesmerized Mathew. He knew he would be in jail soon for Trenton's death, and he had to either face up to his crime or boldly assert himself and rob a safe and escape. And I liked him well enough then to help him. Well, he had helped me with the chalice. I owed him something.

I wondered just fleetingly if Mathew was even thinking of sharing the money with me. Then I smiled. I wanted revenge as much as he wanted money. I needed it to fulfill my basic thesis against the false doctrine of my father. Except I might say, where had my thesis taken me? Exactly where my dad said it would.

I stared at Roy Henderson's little stone with the date already invisible and stained.

I had become exactly as those who had hated us. And it had happened without my even trying. Mathew drove me back home. We didn't speak. I thought of nothing as I walked down the lane.

I had wanted nothing to do with this robbery, until I found Percy sitting by himself in the small kitchen in the dark. He told me Mommie was in the hospital. Percy had been waiting on his small kitchen chair for three hours in silence.

I had to dress the child. I found a white shirt faded almost to yellow, and a pair of dark dress pants, and an old pair of shoes that I shined. I washed and changed and we started up the road.

All along our lane Percy was looking and waiting for Autumn, but she was not here. Then he picked some leaves, to make into some kind of a bouquet for Mom. Then, as if distracted, he said: "I went to the church and prayed so Mom would be better for her birthday."

"It's not your fault, Percy," I said, my voice breaking just a little.

"Lyle - it is not your fault either," he whispered.

NINE.

We reached the hospital after nine o'clock. My mother was on the second floor, in a room with two other women. Her hair, I saw now, was almost grey at thirty-nine years of age. Her face was sunken. Percy gave her the bouquet of birch and maple leaves. She kissed him gently and then asked for Autumn.

"She wasn't home," I said, "but I will find her - and she can visit you tomorrow."

She said nothing.

"I will phone Dad," I said.

"Oh no," she said, waving her hand weakly, "don't bother him - wait until he comes back - then Percy and I and Dad are going to Reversing Falls."

She began to fuss with the yellow collar of Percy's white shirt, and patted his chest. Then she straightened his bow tie.

Percy grinned at me as if this proposed trip was unquestionably true. I walked out into the corridor. The nurses were going from room to room on a night check of patients. I asked one what had happened to my mother. She told me to wait a moment and disappeared.

I sat in the corridor for twenty minutes or more. Then just as I was about to look for the nurse I saw Constable Morris coming toward me with another police officer. Dr. Savard was with them also. The doctor told me that my mother was suffering an internal injury, and asked point-blank if she had been struck.

"Of course not," I said.