Yet a different moral problem had confounded my father for the past week. It was something no one else who worked on the bridge would have troubled themselves with, yet to my father it was the only thing a man of conscience should worry about.

Connie Devlin had been fired for incompetence. He was accused of being drunk on the job. He had come to Sydney seven days before begging him to intercede with the boss. He said that being fired meant it would be difficult to get his unemployment and it was near Christmas.

Because Sydney was trusted, some men asked him to arbitrate on their behalf. Devlin coming to him was not unusual. They relied on him, and they teased him. All mocking is a form of fear. Those who are most mocked are generally most feared. My father was mocked all of his life.

He thought about what he should do. The next day, he went to the office and pleaded Connie Devlin's case.

Porier was a man who lived by McVicer's rules. He had built his house on McVicer property, shopped at McVicer's store, took a loan out for a car with McVicer's blessing. Porier was not at all a big man - but he had a bull-like neck and thick arms - and his two children, Griffin the boy and Penny, were looked upon by him and his arrogant wife as being far superior to other children.

Connie Devlin as night watchman carried a time clock that had to be punched at intervals of one half hour. During the night previous to his being fired the clock was missing seven punches. Thus three and one half hours had gone by when Connie wasn't cognitive enough to punch the clock.

Sydney argued that Connie should be given the benefit of the doubt and Leo not finding out would be the best course.

"Perhaps it's like he says - the clock is broken," Sydney said.

Porier did not want Leo to know how good a worker my father actually was. He was jealous of him. He was worried that Sydney might use this firing as leverage; and he was very worried about Sydney's capabilities with the men themselves. "The men don't appreciate what you do for them," Porier said.

Sydney said that it did not matter what the men thought.

"I hate gullible people - they are a burden to everyone," Porier said. He sniffed and hauled out a map of the river, for no other reason except to prove to Sydney how busy he was. On the desk was a picture of his children, and one of Gladys Bellanger holding Penny in her arms. She was Penny's godmother.

It was cold outside, and cement mixed with mud covered the whole acre where the trucks were parked, and the sky was like a blue stone. The yard was grey and barren. Small trees bent over the cliffs along the water, the same stifled colour as the muddied concrete.

The bridge had inched out and out into the river, and they were sinking the support shafts. Porier was extremely pressed by his work, and had disdain for anyone interrupting him.

Now he glanced up from his map.

"Devlin would never do this for you," Porier said, shaking his head in time to: "Devlin would not he would not he would not."

My father again nodded, and said that this was probably true but if he took his cue from Mr. Devlin he would never have told the truth in his life. He smiled at this, because it was said good-heartedly.

Then my father said: "If you give him his job back, I will do an extra shift as watchman. That would very likely relieve your suspicions."

Finally Porier, without moving, but throwing a pencil the length of the trailer, said he would give Connie Devlin another chance. His face was dark and riveted with anger, his neck swelling with muscles, his fingers blunt and thick. His anger was always like a passion coming over him. He waved his hand in dismissal and added if even one half hour was missed Connie would be fired and, he added, like the afterthought of a general who sends people to their death, so would Sydney Henderson. And if Leo did not like it, he himself would quit and he could get his son-in-law to finish the bridge.

Moreover my father would not become work foreman at this time, as Porier was planning, which meant no forty-dollar-a-week raise.

Later that morning, a week before the robbery, Sydney went to Connie's home. When he told Connie the conditions, Connie stared at him and said in astonishment: "You didn't do that for me?"

"Of course," Sydney said.

"Why?" Connie said, and he looked around at no one in particular as if wanting to relay to someone his feelings of astonishment.

"I don't think you being fired over one incident was fair," Sydney said.

"Fair," Connie said, mulling over the word, and licking his lips together. "My, my."

Tonight, a week later, as Elly slept, Sydney pressed his hands together like a child forming a church steeple and remembered the weak expression on Connie's face when he had said "My, my." He had taken two shifts as watchman for no pay. Connie had not once thanked him.

Elly was pregnant again, we were growing older, and here he was still living in a shack. He knew the world Elly had come from. But he had not improved it much. Diedre Whyne of course was right, and this was part of the reason his soul was inconsolable. If they took the child away things would be better. As far as finite things went, Ms. Whyne was right. But of course Elly and he would not do that. Could not.

What about the car he had just promised her, which she had told Autumn and me? All his life my father had witnessed men who had had better luck and had gained much more than he, some through deceit and treachery. But there was nothing to be gained in worrying about them.

"It will happen as it is supposed to," Father muttered that night. Although saying this was no comfort at all. Suddenly Devlin's smile pressed a heavy weight on my father's heart, just as Prof. David Scone's dismissal did years before. He reached forward and stroked Elly's hair. Then he kneeled and prayed. Why did a grown man do this on his knees in his underwear? I do not know. I have never been able to understand why.

I have always known my father believed in the necessity of a stoic life, and still and all hoped with stoicism for some proof of life being worthwhile.

Wind wailed against our house, and it was dark up on the highway. Now and again a tractor-trailer with a load of peat moss would grind along the road, stopping to turn toward the detour and the old bridge farther along the river, and the lights would catch our upstairs window, and show Father pale and almost naked. Yet no matter how thin my father looked, he was strong and impenetrably faced the cold and snow. He would work and had worked in below-zero all day in a sweater without a coat. Ice and snow was his world. The fire of ice; the sweet blue orb of snow.

TWELVE.

When Rudy Bellanger went to Mathew Pit late the afternoon after his incident with Elly, shaken and white, with a story about how my mother had tricked him by showing him her panties then refusing to comply, and would certainly tell Leo that he had assaulted her, Mathew looked unimpressed. He had always felt she was like that: a bitch from the village of Tabusintac who milked cows as a little girl, went to church, and kept a crucifix under her pillow. And now was married to a simpleton who read books and talked in riddles. These antics were nothing. Mathew said he knew all about women like her, and he banged a bottle of rum down heavily on the table as if to prove it.

Mathew said he had himself dated her and had long known the girl. Rudy's fault, Mathew advised, lay in his good nature and his kindness, and his general decency. Mathew sniffed and folded his arms and tapped his boots on the linoleum floor. But now it was time to get tough, Mathew said. Rudy shuddered when he looked at Mathew Pit's face.

"How are we going to get tough?" Rudy whispered.

"If that's the kind of woman she is - we can get her back soon 'nough," he said, in a raspy tired voice.

The air was dulled by the smell of burning wood and autumn air coming through the front window onto the dust-covered sill of Pit's old house.

For seven years Mathew felt himself best friends with Rudy Bellanger, whom he called Banger, and had done everything he could to be entitled to something when the old man died. His biggest mistake, however, was at certain times to trust Rudy with information. Last year, he had advised Rudy about the property where the highway would go, and was exasperated when Rudy told his wife, who immediately informed her father. Leo then bought that sliver of property for himself, making another thirty thousand dollars profit. Mathew, who never had the front money to buy it, had informed Rudy because he wanted a split.

"You stupid no-nut bastard - you don't do that," he had said. "You keep these things quiet," he said, pinching Rudy's cheek and pretending it was a joke. But his smile, showing white even teeth, was angry. "The goddamn McVicers get everything - everything all the time - this shoulda' been for you - the Whynes and McVicer share this whole area and we is nothin' but peasants."

Still, Mathew was not about to see anything else go up in smoke because a bored wife flashed her crotch hair. He knew how Leo liked this woman, and was of course aware of her good looks. For the last few months he was wanting to discredit her not only for his own vainglory but because being a realist (and knowing Rudy's weakness with Cynthia) he could sense that something would happen that might jeopardize his friend. He had warned Rudy to stay away from Elly on four different occasions, but the last thing Rudy understood was himself.

Mathew was more angry with my father, whom he had always considered slow and dumb. (He did hear that Sydney had read Tolstoy and Conrad, but what did that matter?) How could Sydney have set this all up, he thought.

Mathew Pit believed people viewed the world as he himself viewed the world. And Mathew was totally unaware of how far his imagined plans had gone, over the last few years, and unaware of how dependent he was upon plans to secure Rudy's trust and receive recompense for this trust. When he was drunk Rudy often said they would be partners as soon as the old man died.

But because of this incident with a woman Mathew himself was still sometimes enamoured of, Mathew's house of cards was beginning to implode without anything being realized.

Mathew had looked at Rudy that late afternoon, a stained bolt-shaped ring on his index finger and a cigarillo in his mouth. Behind his head under the dreary window a calendar with a picture of a half-naked woman was grimed with thumbprints.

"Don't worry, we'll take care of that girl," Mathew said, snap ping a bit of leather shoelace with his heavy hands.

Mathew talked in a whisper. His eyes glanced to his left and then his right, and he went back to repairing a snowshoe, tying it off as conscientiously as an artist.

When Rudy left Leo McVicer's that afternoon, a half hour after my parents had, he was well aware of what had really happened. Mathew had robbed the house.

Rudy had been appalled by the look of Elly, and he could not justify destroying the young woman's life. He drove to Mathew Pit's after he left Leo's, determined to get the money back, to cut all his ties with Cynthia.

Mathew shook his head and yelled something indiscernible to Trenton's dog, then kicked at it. He did this to further his control over Rudy Bellanger. What infuriated Rudy about this was that he sensed in Mathew's movement how much Mathew knew about him, and disliked about him.

"You can't do anything else to her - this must be the last thing - she is just a poor woman - they have nothing," Rudy advised Mathew Pit. "I don't mind getting rid of them, as you say, but I don't like cheating old Leo in order to do it."

That is, Rudy said what weak people always say to prove they are of one and the same mind with others. Of course he minded getting rid of my mother. It was the only thing he minded more than cheating old Leo. Besides, he felt Leo had cheated him, and was at the bottom of his heart somewhat happy.

But by his own weakness all this had happened. Now he said: "I need the money back."

Mathew laughed. "The hell you do. I'm the one got you outta this scrape - you are the one, my boy, who loused up my deal with the land north of the river - I bet Leo thanked you for reminding him there was one sliver of land he didn't control."

"I know - he was wrong - but you can't keep the five hundred," Rudy implored.

"I'm going to keep it till after Christmas - by then everything will have blowed over." Mathew spoke with calm assurance and had the studious look of a man who is used to holding others' feet to the fire.

Rudy could do nothing but say he would go see the police if this continued.

"Police - police, is it! Leo would want that - he'd welcome it." Mathew gazed at Rudy with eyes that were unfocussed and unnerving. There was a bit of blond whiskers on his upper lip and chin. He wore a jean jacket and heavy work boots covered in mud. His blond hair was slicked back in the ducktail he always wore, even though the fashion had long ago changed.

Mathew thought anyone who dressed differently was a faggot. He did not know how else to describe his anger and frustration when he saw them. The boys looked like girls and yet condescended to him because of their education. And if he was anti-intellectual (as Leo McVicer was), he had a right to be, by birth. All his life they in some way or the other had spit in his face, and those whom he had trusted after three years away at university looked upon him with dismissive conceit. But when their cars or motorboats were broken they came to him.

Their treasure was education, which he did not understand, and so he (and his sister, Cynthia) teamed with Rudy as a business partner not because Mathew knew business but because it didn't threaten or hurt him. In this maze of confusion he had of late suspected Sydney Henderson of being one of them, the intellectuals, one of those who with half a chance would dismiss his entire life. So it was not important if Sydney or his wife got blamed for anything. He would blame them for anything he chose. He had dated her and she had scorned him. Worse, Sydney had a job on the bridge. The bridge was a large project, part of the project that would create the new highway through land Mathew had instructed Rudy to buy. It would have meant over a year of high wages.

Mathew had spoken about sabotaging it. He was now set on this course.

"I don't know about their concrete - and part of that last span is buckled," Mathew had said the week before. "What if I took a piece of dynamite - then look out, eh?"

"Connie Devlin is the watchman," Cynthia had told him. "He will come back to haunt you if you do it."

Cynthia was beautiful - and more ruthless than her brother. Nevertheless, Mathew was prepared to go ahead with his sabotage on the bridge. He felt that it might help Rudy with his problems if he could cast doubt on the worth of the foreman, Abby Porier.

Now he stared at Rudy Bellanger wearing his suit and gold cufflinks and said: "How much that cost ya?"

Rudy didn't answer. His face turned red, and he fidgeted and asked for water. Mathew poured him a glass.

Rudy finished his water in a gulp and asked for more.

Then Mathew smiled kindly at Rudy again.

Rudy wanted to build a marina to cater to the dozens of new pleasure boats and sailboats on the river. Rudy had planned this manna for ten years, secretly for the first seven. One night, drinking with Mathew, he had told him his plan. Pit's eyes widened as Rudy took a paper napkin and drew his plans on it, showing the sports bar, the upstairs lounge, the deck lounge. It was very much a replica of a marina he had seen in Halifax. He said he could easily get a grant from the Atlantic Provinces Business Bureau because he knew three people on the committee.

Rudy believed his planned takeover was moral, very moral, until the robbery. For thirteen years, since the day of his marriage, it was his store, and his property. Now, because of Elly, everything had hit a snag. His whole life seemed nothing more than a house of cards imploding. He was the last one who would be able to complain about any moral snag now.

Though Rudy had not been involved in the robbery, how could he not say he knew who had? And more to the point, how could he not pretend it was Elly and Sydney to save himself?

There is no worse flaw in man's character than that of wanting to belong.

Rudy believed he needed men like Mathew Pit. Men like Mathew Pit had no structure, nor needed any. They had no class affiliation and needed none. Mathew was by trade a mechanic but he could be anything. He did not need a business structure, as businessmen like Rudy needed. He only needed a scheme, and that scheme was more important than any office or committee boardroom. People like Mathew would know what it was like to sell shoelaces fifteen for two dollars, or how to make two million in a week. It depended only upon the scheme. Mathew had his scheme, and that involved sooner or later moving to Ontario with a lot of money (that he would get from Rudy) and buying a fishing and hunting lodge in the north. He had told no one this.

Far from being a throwback to another time, as anyone looking at Mathew Pit might think, he and his sister were the new ruthless entrepreneurs. They would listen with almost stupefied inattention to the words "ethics" or "moral responsibility" - but they both knew fierce loyalty and hatreds. Sometimes they could be burned at the stake before giving up a friend. But they also both knew, especially Cynthia, how to use friends, and how to give them up in a heartbeat.

Here in a hallway of Pit's old house, the walls crowded with pictures of old men and horses, Rudy could see into the far back room when Cynthia came downstairs after her shower.

He had succumbed to her advances, right under his wife's nose, and he had promised himself he would never do that again. She was beautiful, with dark hair and eyes, but was far less genteel than Elly.

Of course at this moment he was through with all his philandering and had decided wild horses wouldn't be able to haul him back; that he would never get into trouble again, or cause anyone any more grief.

Now, as Rudy sat before him, Mathew looked genuinely concerned.

"What is there to worry about? Didn't I do as you asked?"

Rudy had never asked Mathew to do anything, let alone rob the house. But Rudy convinced himself it might have happened that way because the alternative was just too hard to accept - that Mathew respected him so little he would do whatever he wanted.

Rudy told Mathew that this was a terrible thing. And what he wanted more than anything else was to be reassured that Mathew, his partner, knew that this was a terrible thing.

"Look," Mathew whispered, "I had to take care of Sydney when he was a kid - because he was always being smashed about, and I never got no credit for it neither, nor do I want none. That damn house he lives in, three rooms, no heat in the winter, and you couldn't sit in it in the summer for the smell of human piss. It ain't much better now - he still owes me money from the business, he cheated me, he lied about us." He waited for this revelation to take effect. Then he continued in a soft whisper.

"And think of what will happen - she'll just try to hang on to you - that's the kind she is, Tabusintac bitch, and that's not right, get rid of the both of them. Somewhere in the future is your money, so think - don't let a bitch who's not gettin' it at home between you and your dreams. I won't touch the money - and when everything will have calmed down - later on - next summer when things with me and you are going better I'll just slip the money back into the store - no one will be out anything. Whole thing will be forgot."

"I don't know," Rudy said. "I feel bad - for the two of them - and their kids. I know how Autumn is laughed at - once I got angry at people for it."

"Listen," Mathew whispered, "Sydney is a troublemaker. Get that through yer head. I had to bail him out a dozen times and finally I just give up. You ask Connie Devlin. Pushed him off a roof fer god sake - the boy's not got all his load - and here I have a retarded brother livin' next to him - I almost cry to think of it."

Then he got up and squeezed Rudy's shoulder, and Rudy nodded and smiled.

As he spoke Mathew remembered his humiliation at not getting on the bridge when Sydney had. And as for Rudy -well, Rudy decided, as others sometimes had, that it was in his best interest to invest in a lie, a complete fabrication when it concerned my mother and father. He did not contemplate at that moment how large the lie would grow, or what dimension the monster would finally take, and who all it would swallow; nor that in the end others he did not know as anything but children would have to turn in the dark and combat this monster with courage he himself never needed to have.

But more important, he knew that my father was a greater man than Mathew Pit. Yet what he did now was say to himself: "Who am I to know who is a good man and who isn't - in this day and age, with cocaine and all the rest?"

He thought of Sydney; how he, Rudy, believed him, just the morning before the assault on Elly, to be superior to him. And how he had used this notion of superiority to play havoc with his wife. He thought of Diedre Whyne, who, feeling herself superior to Elly, had once spoken candidly about Elly needing her tubes tied.

Still hadn't he himself profited from people's opinions of Elly, from her beauty (since the intolerant nuns until now a mark against her) and her gentleness (considered from the days of the nuns to be stupidity)? Yes, hadn't he profited from the liberal idea that she was not enlightened - and hadn't this "energized" his feelings toward her?

Rudy had argued against Elly needing her tubes tied, and Ms. Whyne had put him in his place. But actually Ms. Whyne's opinion allowed a licence when it came to my mother that was surreptitiously attached to the very fabric of Rudy's disagreement with her. It became clear to any person willing to think it through that those who were trying to help her, as Ms. Whyne was, and those who would use her, as Rudy had, were essentially the same type of person; both felt superior to her, and felt their humanity not only superior but different in kind from hers.

He had not seen this until now.

He, Rudy Bellanger, had in effect cast Elly and Sydney away as thieves; and worse, both of them went away without a sound of protest. Worse, Elly admitted to the theft to protect her husband. Moreover, he saw how this lie against them was not considered important by Mathew Pit, who sat in the heat of the kitchen with his large red arms, and his tattoos visible.

Now Rudy, knowing everything, and understanding it all, was willing at that moment to let my parents suffer. Moreover, he could not take back what he had said, or confess what he had done. His father-in-law may have forgiven him before, but he would not now. Now every day that passed made it worse than the day before.

Therefore, though he thought it was only my mother and father, and by proxy their children, who had been cast out, by this casting out Rudy's own Golgotha was now beginning. He had to keep it away by whatever means he could, if not for himself, then for Gladys, whom he loved. Oh yes - that was the real tragedy - his love for her; even though he was bossed around by both her and her father, even though whenever Gladys got angry she would yelk "I will leave you without a cent, Frenchman!"

He still loved her.

He looked at Mathew. "You aren't really going to sabotage the bridge?" Rudy asked, smiling.

"What do you think?" Mathew said, quietly.