Finally car lights turned onto the frozen lane, and the men were gone in a second. Jay Beard had come back to get his guitar, which he had forgotten after singing at the church. He helped my father to his feet. Then he took time to drive us home.

"I forgot my carnation," Dad said. "It fell on the road."

"I'll go get it," Jay said. "If you go they might be back -them being roaring Christmas drunk is all - they won't bother you again tonight if you stay here with Elly. It's just drunkenness making them shine."

It was the first time I became aware of our true isolation. That my mother could be discussed like she had been. I wanted my father to say, "I will go with you and get them," but he only nodded. For the first time, more even than the work with the Christmas boxes, I realized there was a poverty in us that had nothing to do with dirt.

As I became older I would know any child of poverty, a smell like dark storm and milk. I would smell it in cities not only here but in Europe, and I would realize that all of them in a sense were a part of my blood.

Now it lingered beyond us in the sweet frozen darkness of the poor. There was in this poverty a scent of holy water my mother used to sprinkle on Autumn's dresses, for she cherished this little albino girl.

When Mother got out of the car she thanked Jay and modestly smoothed her dress over her exposed legs. I was suddenly informed of myself as a child of privation and disgrace. Just like the Voteurs. Cheryl Voteur and not Penny Porier was my kind. I had only thought I was different from her blunt knowing little face.

My father took off his shirt and sat at the kitchen table near the Christmas tree we had decorated with such passion. For the next few days he couldn't bring himself to read.

It's hard to think of that little house then. We did not have much. We had a radio, where Autumn and I would listen to a station in Boston - disco music was big. We watched television. Autumn read voraciously and would entertain us with her one-woman plays, and Mom made taffy. But my father was known as the Henderson boy who had helped cause the fire at McVicer's Works and so was out of work. He refused welfare.

I wanted to telephone the police. My father thought about it and said, "Let it go - for now." I was furious with him the next day because he hadn't fought. Every time he looked at me I put my head down. After a while I forgot about it. But one day, perhaps because of shame, or maybe just because I had grown, I met Dad walking across Highway 11 as he went home from an afternoon job helping shovel snow from the doors of a pig farm. He stopped and waited, smiling at me. I pretended I didn't see him. For the first time I did not run to catch up, and for the first time I never took his offered hand.

EIGHT.

Leo McVicer. The very name personified Chatham. His very suit pants personified struggle up the ladder, from pauper to prince. The great dark high-ceiling buildings of orphanages and tenements, the cement steps covered with wet snow. His childhood of pain and loneliness had made him idiosyncratic.

He was a Catholic Chathamer from the hill, a scrappy red-haired youngster with a fierce face and darting blue eyes who would chase the rich children (those who were Protestant) into Queen Square and beat them for the fun of it. He was a bully and a torment and a sneak and a ruffian and a son of a bitch. He had liked that.

When he was nineteen, just before he went overseas, he boxed as a featherweight, calling himself the Chatham Flash. There was a picture of him in a black T-shirt and trunks, with small six-ounce black gloves, on the upstairs wall in his house. His white, short, and uniform arms belied his powerful punch. It would be little problem for him to knock out a man twice his size. He knew this. Of course he had changed and grown out of it. He had gone to war, and he was in Company B of the North Shore Regiment, and he had faced fire and he had faced death and he had faced isolation and danger.

After the war he saw opportunity in owning the land. He bought it all out from under Roy Henderson, who ended up working for him. Leo knew work and he knew men who worked, he knew horses and tractors and how to take advantage of men to keep them honest and get the best from them.

My grandfather lived on a piece of land given to him by Leo. And that small bit of land was ours.

When I was twelve, in 1982, Mr. McVicer called Mathew Pit and Father to the office in his house, made them shake hands, and hired Mathew and Dad to clean his old sawmill, to shovel the grounds, to dump bulldog lime in the tailings pond and anywhere around the perimeter, and to haul the barrels of herbicide to an incinerator in Edmundston. He helped them start a well-digging business.

People said that this was because of Autumn, because of the snip of hair Mr. Gerald Dove had taken years before.

Sometime in 1977, Gerald Dove, a young man with receding red hair and a moustache, had come to visit, asking Sydney about the fire my grandfather started. He sat across the table from us, his eyes glowing brighter the moment he unsnapped his leather briefcase with his thin white fingers. We all watched him breathlessly as he produced a tape recorder and a questionnaire.

Dove asked if we had any trouble with our water, or was there any sickness in our family. He spoke to my father about other places - problems in Wyoming and Michigan that were very similar. He told Father that McVicer wanted him to discover the extent of the problem for possible restitution. My father said nothing to this at all.

Dove spoke about the circumference of the burn and the late rebirth of the hardwood ridge along the Point Road, which showed a certain dwarfism due to toxic properties, not all, he said, coming from McVicer's Works. But there was a prevalence of toxicity in certain molecular structures dumped throughout the sixties from the mill into the tailings pond that ran directly into Arron Brook and into the ground-water thirty families relied upon. He said that McVicer would soon take action because of his findings. He spoke of the nitrogen oxide core samples he had taken on wetlands above our own house the winter before and how they tested a certain amount of carcinogen.

"Tell me," Dove asked, "are there any incidents of diarrhea or stomach sickness?" Mother said she felt well, generally, and the water was okay.

After the interview Dove and my father went out to the mill ground for two hours, and as Father walked about the ground, Gerald Dove took notes, measured off certain things with giant steps, and scooped up samples of dirt.

When he came back to our house, he collected a sample of water. Then he snipped a bit of Autumn's stark white hair and put it in his pocket, but he didn't smile or say thank you. Then he shook my father's hand as an afterthought and walked away. I stared at the place where Autumn's hair had been snipped until I could no longer tell where the snip was.

Now, because of the snip of Autumn's hair, Gerald Dove had done five years of tests. Although these tests were inconclusive, people were saying McVicer owed us money.

Dad told me that Dove was McVicer's nephew (not really a nephew - he was a protege who was called that) and originally wanted to defend McVicer's environmental legacy because Leo had taken care of him as a boy. Dove had worked at the mill in the summers and after winning a Rhodes scholarship, got his doctorate in what was called environmental biology.

Dove and Leo's daughter, Gladys, had fallen in love as teenagers. Leo was given to acting rashly to protect her, and so disallowed them to see each other. This was the reason Gladys, who was a year or so older than Mom, had married Rudy Bellanger.

Still, Leo had brought Dove back to help him out of a controversy with the environmental agency. And after all, Dove owed him. And like everything in Leo McVicer's life there was a moment when he would collect what he was owed.

Now, after five years of exhausting tests, Dove had changed his mind. He wanted Leo to pay all the families fifty thousand dollars apiece. I asked my father one night, after we had come home from fishing and were sitting out back, if he had heard of this. I was very excited about it, and supposed he would be as well.

"Oh yes, I have heard of it."

"Well - do you want to get money? It might be a lot of money."

"No," Father said, looking at me and spitting on a whetstone to sharpen his axe. I stared at the side of his head in astonishment. It was a cool night in June and damp could be felt in the trees and grasses. I could not believe Dad would not want money.

"No matter how much?" I asked. I could smell my father's dark skin and woollen sweater covered with spruce, saw his tanned leathery skin, his huge hands, and trembled in anguish.

"No matter," Father said. "It was not McVicer's fault - he had no more knowledge of it than anyone else. We all used that herbicide - not only McVicer. My father had his own barrels to use on our lane, so who's to say it is McVicer's fault? The world has gone on - that's all that can be said."

So instead of suing McVicer he and Mathew Pit went to see him the next afternoon. McVicer helped my father and Mathew start a well-digging business. Initially this business was profitable. Yet came a certain problem with the drill bits, and after a while the company went bankrupt McVicer took it over, dug two more community wells, and sold it. But I know McVicer had done what he had set out to do. He had brought father and Pit temporarily to his side, and prevented, he hoped, litigation.

The pouring of bulldog lime as a purifying agent about the mill ground and hill beyond went on into July of that year. My mother helped Dad with this, and came home with burns as large as dollar pieces on her skin from wheelbarrowing the lime, which got between her toes and fingers. There are no burns worse, I can tell you.

It was shortly after that Leo McVicer himself came to the house to visit, bringing us a large assortment of cookies and teas from his store. My mom had just had another miscarriage; her third or fourth.

Leo asked Mother how she was. He was dressed in a three-piece suit, with a golden watch chain hooked to the inside pocket of his vest. He looked at the thin walls of our house, and was concerned about the centre pole in our main room. He knocked on it and pushed it as he looked at me, as if I had anything to do with it. He picked up Autumn and smiled at her. He felt her shoulder bones and her feet. He shook his head. We all looked at him in astonishment, as the little Voteur girls had looked at me from the window.

He was by far the richest, most important, most charismatic man to have ever entered our house, and here he was, pouring my mother tea, handing cookies to Autumn and me off one of Mom's plates, talking about people we all knew, as if we were all friends.

He went and sat beside Elly and took her hand.

"I will start building a bridge sometime soon," he said, "and put a highway through. It will swing north - where the mill once was - all of that will be road - highway. It will put a stop to this nonsense about the bad molecules in the soil. I will hire Sydney. Elly, you are a friend of Diedre and have done no harm to me. So Sydney will have a job if he wants. It will mean you can leave this old shack - and find another one bigger and better."

With this he bit a cookie carefully, and listened to the great wind from the bay tossing against the branches of the trees. Both Autumn and I watched him chew the cookie, I suppose trying to determine if he, a millionaire, ate like other people. He then asked me had I ever boxed.

"No," I replied.

"Would you like to?"

"No," I replied.

"You are a strong youngster - nothing wrong with your bones, is there?" he asked.

"No," I said.

He never took his glinting blue eyes off me, and I became more uncomfortable the more he spoke. It didn't matter his size, or what people had called him. Inside he was a conqueror.

Then he asked Mother, in a long roundabout way, to work as a domestic in his house. The work would be steady and not hard. She would be paid well. She would not be bothered with cold or wind, or bulldog lime. When he said this he picked up her left foot and looked at it. Then he told her he had a salve he would bring to help heal her burns, bums that had turned her foot both red and black. Father, who bathed it for her at night, called it the Stendhal foot.

"I love the name Autumn," McVicer declared. "What are you going to be when you grow up?"

"I am going to be a writer," Autumn said, still hiding behind her mom.

"A writer," he said.

My mother, thinking this answer presumptuous, smiled awkwardly.

"Like Zane Grey? Well, as long as you don't write about me," Leo said, chuckling.

I stared at his large brown hands, his white starched shirt cuffs pulled down over his wrists. I looked at his silver cufflinks. There was a rumour this man had killed an opponent in the ring when he was nineteen. I knew he could easily have done it.

Leo then looked at me, as if he realized what I was thinking. He put a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth and nodded. He told me that he had followed the lightweight Roberto Duran for many years. Now, after the "no mas" fight against Sugar Ray Leonard, he was saddened. He smiled, alone in his thoughts.

"Someday you will box," he said, pointing his finger at me in mischief. "You don't want to. Well, neither did I. I didn't want to fight - no, at first I ran. But like me you won't have any choice. You have no choice, do you? Already you have to protect this girl here - this Autumn - and as she gets older the more you will have to - I know it won't be easy for you - life is never easy for McVicers or Hendersons. It wasn't meant to be easy - but grab life by the throat like a scrapping dog - and when it throws you on your back never hesitate to fight dirty, because it won't fight clean with you."

With his eyes burrowing into me, I nodded neither one way nor the other and glanced at my mom. Here, then, was a man much different from Dad. I think I was instantly in love with him.

NINE.

My mother went to work in Leo's drab masculine three-storey brick house out on the bay, with its yard filled with alders and gardens and secret alcoves.

Leo's son-in-law, Rudy Bellanger, had the responsibility of driving my mother to and from her job. It has taken me almost ten years to discover, down to the very conversations, what happened between them at this time.

After a cool June, the summer days were humid, and each morning she would wait for Rudy at the top of our lane by our small twisted mailbox that would go months without its flag up. Sometimes I walked up the lane with her for company and sat beside this mailbox.

"It's not any of my business," Rudy said to my mom one day, after I left her. "I don't know anything about Sydney, but he's not much of a provider for you and the children, living in that spruce bog of yours - must be something - in the summer the mosquitoes and blackflies - you can't sit outside. Really - with your looks, he's not the man for you - is he? Think of that little boy there - what's his name - Lyle - just looks like a scarecrow - you don't want that, do you?"

He smiled and touched her cheek quickly and gently. My mother did not know what to say. She did not know what everyone else knew about Rudy.

The next day Rudy bought her a cassette so she could listen to music as she worked. She told him she had never been to a rock concert.

"I still go to them all," he said, walking in his high-heel boots about her ironing board as she ironed McVicer's shirts. "I can take you to one," he said. He put his hand lightly on her back and took it away.

That day he seemed to be upset with his wife, Gladys, over something. Then the next day he showed Mom a wad of twenties, held by a tie clip. "See that clip," he said. "Yeah - you see it, don't you - gold."

My mother was embarrassed by this, and said nothing about it to father or me.

Rudy was a friend of Mathew Pit, and Mat would tease him about her. Rudy's fifteen-room brick house stood out on a promontory over the bay and like everything else in his life it was owned by Leo McVicer. He resented this, and had plans to use his father-in-law's influence to make his own way in the world of Liberal party politics. Mathew and Cynthia monitored these plans of his with great sympathy and understanding. He was forever driving Gladys to and fro, but she gave him no affection whatsoever.

One morning in August of 1982, a month or so after Mom started work, Rudy asked her to go to lunch with him at Polly's Restaurant. When Mom said she didn't have the money, he simply laughed, took her by the arm, and walked her to the car.

Polly's was an unruly place where people drank away the afternoons. My father himself would not go in there, given the temptation he felt when it came to drink. Rudy, however, was comfortable here, and spoke in a self-pitying way about his wife.

"I'm a full-blooded Canadian man, left alone," he said with great piety. "She can't even get out of a chair without help now - it's just terrible."

"I could go and sit with her if she doesn't have many friends," Mother said.

Rudy tipped a glass of rye and water, bit on an ice cube, and looked at her.

"Why don't you drink your gin?" he said.

"I - don't drink very much," she answered.

"Why, just because yer husband can't handle it?" Then, seeing he had alarmed her, he smiled. "Well - what I really want you to do is to come with me to the Bob Seger concert in Montreal - if you want to see a concert, I hate to travel there alone -we could get a room - you know, hotel room - you could tell your husband you have to visit some people for the weekend - I'd tell Gladys - oh, something -"

"Bob Seger. Who is he?"

"Ha!" Rudy exclaimed as he chewed his ice and looked quickly around. "I'll have to teach you."

She stumbled over her order, trying to decide what she might afford, staring now and again at the glasses of gin he put in front of her. He then told her he had gotten away with some big deals in his life. But Mom didn't understand about big deals.

Nor did she want to go to lunch at Polly's Restaurant, where men cursed, and where my father was the butt of jokes.

After work she would have trouble eating supper. And I remember her making us dinner and shaking, staring at her plate and pushing it aside.

Then the days became shorter, and fall changed the colour of the leaves, and the leaves died, and fell, and soon I could see the frozen brook through the bare branches and notice the ice along the riverbank as snow started to fall. My father had started work on the bridge, and worked ten-hour shifts. All of this made Autumn and me very happy - because for the first time we felt ordinary. Once I thought I saw Penny Porier smile at me - I was almost sure of it.

Elly was determined that we would go on vacation the next summer and spoke to us about it often. By November she had some money saved. We were going to go to Saint John; to the art gallery and museum. She revealed her plan to Mr. Bellanger at lunch one day.

"Oh yes," Mom said, "next summer - we will take the bus to Saint John - I haven't been there before -"

"I suppose big spenders like you have a luxury suite," Rudy said.

She tried to make lighthearted conversation as they drove back to McVicer's house, but he said nothing. She felt guilty for bragging.

After she got home that night she went over the brochures she had collected, calculating what we might or might not be able to afford. I know now she wanted to give up her position. She did not want to let Mr. McVicer down, yet she believed Mr. Bellanger thought she was being ungrateful.

She did not see him for a while. Then one day a week or so later he went to the McVicer house. The stones and pebbles on the long cold drive were muted and there was a vague smell of burning branches. In the fields behind his old barn were traces of the snow falling hard from the raw sky. Rudy saw my mother bringing in some bedsheets at the clothesline.

"Look at this," he said, holding up two plane tickets. "See?"

My mother looked at them.

"I'm - sorry - I don't know what they are."