"I shouldn't have tried to frighten her," he said. "It all came about because of Mathew's damn stubbornness."

"If there is a safety concern Porier should go to her, not you," I said.

But Porier was infuriatingly conceited, Father said. Someone being injured would mean little to him; not because Porier was bad, but because he had warnings posted about the weak span, and had an abutment in front of it.

Sydney asked my mother if he should phone Alvina and apologize.

My mother sighed. "Just leave it be," she said. "It is up to them. And Lyle is right, Porier should go over. Hopefully everything will turn out for the best."

My father then spoke, softly, as if to himself. I was sitting near him, and saw his hands tremble as he talked. He said he had no knowledge of why he was abused as a boy, why he was born in such poverty, why he had faced what he had, when others who wrote for the paper and became members of the Legislature had never seen a day like he.

"But remember," he said aloud, "we still have our faith in God that everything will turn out."

"Why?" I said angrily. "The old priest didn't even give us a Christmas box."

"Son, a priest is not the Church, and the Church is not the faith," Father answered.

He then told us that in order to run away from his life, he had read. And in his readings he realized that he was to suffer for some reason.

"Remember Cynthia's stillborn child," Mother said, "and how Mathew spoke about you then - he will say it again if he can."

"Leopards don't change their spots," I said. "The father of that baby was Danny Sheppard, everyone knows - and they blamed you for a long time!"

My father nodded and said nothing more.

FIFTEEN.

The next day was his last day of work at the site. We knew he would be let go after the holiday. The only thing he had managed to do was to keep Devlin in work while he himself was to be fired. This irony must have pleased Mathew.

Dad got up particularly early, and did not eat breakfast. They would have to rope off the third span, which had buckled along the side. This day has replayed itself in my mind for years.

My father left for work at seven and worked the whole day and came back home about five-thirty. At six-thirty the telephone rang, and Mrs. Pit asked if Trenton was there.

"No, he is not," Sydney said.

"You don't have him - and are keeping him from me?"

"Of course not."

"Please, is this a joke? Cynthia thinks you are keeping him on us for some reason. That you think we are bad people or are hiding the boy - for - for some purpose."

"Mrs. Pit, tell Cynthia I wouldn't do such a thing - I couldn't do such a thing."

It was bitterly cold. My father put on a worker's jumpsuit and left the house to search for the boy. I went with him to the inlet. He never spoke to me. I felt his anxiety as we walked.

There were gentle shrouds of snow falling from small fir trees in back of our house. From the far side of the inlet we could see the waving flashlight beams of people in panic, Cynthia and others, and hear the faint hollering of the old woman - a woman Sydney had never really spoken to until the day before, and a family he had never truly known.

They were searching the shoreline but were frightened to go onto the newly formed ice. (Trenton had gone onto the ice two or three times before.) My father was frightened as well, and perhaps he was very frightened, but decided someone had to go.

I told him that I was lighter and I could go. (I had always wanted to prove I was as brave as he was.) "No," he said sternly.

The ice was as bottled and grey as the back of a nurse shark and my father soon disappeared in the darkness. He walked toward the strait calling Trenton's name. But after a time he saw the open water, and felt the frozen wind, and turned back, heart sinking, and thinking of the bridge, just at the time he heard a thud, like snow falling from a great height, and he felt the ice shift under his boots.

My father ran to the bridge. He arrived twenty minutes later and shone his light along the yard, by the cranes, and down along the shore. The security lights had not been turned on; the whole structure was silent and forbidding. He went to the power house and tried to turn on the lights, and could not get in. He went back to the spans and stood where yellow cranes and tractors sat blanketed in snow.

He was about to turn his light out when he saw a form lying to the left of the last span, on the ice. And what was worse, a section of that span had let go. Rebar jutted out like spikes into the night, and eight feet of the span itself was gone. Just as father had feared. Teetering off the broken span was the company truck.

By the time my father reached the boy, Mrs. Pit had arrived. She wore boots over woollen stockings, and her woollen coat had a pink housedress button sewn on its neck. The wind wailed, and in the dark, clouds could be seen sweeping the sky above them.

Her rosary dangled in her hands as other men arrived and brought the boy's broken body up.

"Trent," she said, in a whisper, fearful of waking him. She kept walking about him, as if inspecting a strange sweet flower, breathing on her folded hands where the rosary dangled. Now and again she would bend over and touch him, touch the Saint Christopher medal on his neck; making sure he wasn't an apparition. Snowflakes fell on her bare head and covered his thin bare legs.

"You told me this would happen-" Alvina said suddenly to Sydney. "You pushed him down - you told me you knew what would happen to him today - you said he would be dead and he was!"

Sydney, too stunned to speak, looked at her, and then at Mathew and Cynthia.

At the very moment my father looked up, Elly came running out of the darkness, and her face came toward him with the expression people have when late for an appointment. She wavered and stood still, like a post being put into place.

The body didn't move except for the hair being blown by the wind. The hair that, as Alvina had said just the day before, Christ had counted and knew. Cynthia glared at my father for so many reasons. No one knows why a woman as beautiful and as free as she was attracted to my father. But she had been for a number of years.

"You - you pushed him down," Alvina said again. "You drove that truck - you brought him here in that truck for something terrible, and when he didn't want to you pushed him!"

However much Alvina, Cynthia, or my mother wanted my father to speak now, my father could not. He simply stared at them. He respected the old woman in her moment of trial, and did not want to trifle with her feelings by contradicting her accusation so soon after her shock. He felt others would know it was said in shock. He stood silently in the freezing air. From the comer of the bridge Leo McVicer glared at him. His bridge, his crowning achievement - all gone in a thud of snow.

He said, absolutely calmly, "What in Christ was that truck doing out there, Sydney? There was nothing supposed to be out there." He turned and went home.

Finally paramedics came. They gathered up the body and moved away.

Worse for us all was the money. Trenton had the money that had been robbed from old Leo's house stuffed in his pockets. Of course, Leo McVicer believed Sydney took the money; that's why he was letting him go after Christmas. Though he entertained a thought of someone else robbing him, he now no longer could, because in his mind both events fed off each another. He telephoned the police the next day and told Constable Morris his suspicions. He wanted to help the police - but he also wanted his money back. The question floating in the air was this: Why would the money be in Trenton's possession? This is what Leo himself addressed to Constable Morris, and Morris, fed information since the time Father was accused of stealing the box of smelts, retaliated against my father - set up a scenario against him, judged him without any evidence. But that everything fit seemed incontestable -the threat to Alvina, the truck to whisk the boy away, the money to give the child for a sexual favour (the whole five hundred dollars for a sexual favour given to a retarded boy, that in itself is perverse), and the child's death. The more information that came to him, the more Morris made it fit.

Besides, his feelings for my mother's suffering were kindled anew, and flared in a romantic way as he remembered her in our little house. This was part of the grand labyrinth my father had to traverse - and he had no string to follow even if he managed to slay the bull.

When I heard what they thought my father had done, when I remembered how Mother sent me to him with his lunches, when I remembered his years of suffering, my scorn was for every man or woman who had ever trampled my parents down - and no scorn burned brighter.

"Man can overcome any fate by scorn," Albert Camus said in his essay on the myth of Sisyphus. Perhaps I was thinking of my father as Sisyphus. His plight seemed the embodiment of some great callous stupidity, comic in its futility. Yet there was something else, held off until now, until this moment. It was my first unmasked contempt for propriety.

It was the propriety of the event that I was actually reacting against and ultimately challenging. This is what made me renegade.

At Gratton's funeral home a few miles down our old highway on that Tuesday afternoon there was a lineup of people waiting to pay their respects. The graders were out plowing the road down to the bone. Men and women, simple good-hearted working people, bright and filled with love - people one should never have to explain away - stood in line to pay their respects to that child who had walked among us with his dog, Scupper, and run in fields hidden from the highway.

His funeral was paid for by Leo McVicer.

Part of this outpouring came because Trenton was a retarded child who had died such an unfortunate death, and any community would have reacted the same. And part of this mourning was a spontaneous outpouring that comes when the family who has suffered such a loss has already had an unlucky life. These good-hearted people needed to be there for this troubled Pit family, to prove that they stood shoulder to shoulder in such a horrendous loss and that past deeds, mistakes, or feelings toward Cynthia and Mathew Pit meant little or nothing compared to grace and love.

A rumour that last summer my father had taken Trenton to the drive-in theatre in Bushville was rampant.

Father Porier did two services and two high masses for the repose of the soul of Trenton Pit.

A picture of Trenton holding Scupper - who since his death walked to the bridge every evening searching for his master - was carried on the front page of not only the local but the provincial paper. There was a picture of the collapsed span, the unlucky company truck my father had supposedly driven, and the dog at the bridge sitting in the snow.

People said my father went to the bridge in the truck because he would be safe from spying eyes - but God had judged him and had collapsed the span. When a rumour surfaced that dynamite had been thrown at the span it seemed also knitted into my father's plans. He was to be let go, so he threw the dynamite in retaliation.

Trenton's mother spoke of finding Trenton's hockey cards neatly lined up on his dresser that night before they went to search for him, and a prayer for the protection of children on his bedstand that Father Porier himself had blessed.

The lineup grew longer.

Of course Father's innocence afforded him nothing. This is the torment I have carried with me. From the time of thirteen I have thought only revenge. I have thought only revenge.

The funeral was attended by seven hundred people, and dignitaries - mayors from the four largest towns on the river, our member of Parliament, and others.

The day after the funeral there was another article in the paper showing the procession. I have carried it in my wallet for fourteen years. I have wanted to understand it. I have sat near streams when I was alone fishing as a child, and I have looked at it. I have seen it grow yellow with age, and still it incorporates the strange giddy pain of our family. And I have yet to understand it. But I see in it the pedestrian moral high-mindedness of accusation unaccompanied by the search for truth.

This is an article of expediency, and it comes from our river, and doesn't even mask its gloating outrage.

SIXTEEN.

I now know Trenton found this money and took it back to Sydney, for he had overheard Sydney's name mentioned by Rudy and Mathew. The money had been hidden in the same hole behind the couch where Trenton would hide his plastic soldiers and his candy. When he reached in to hide the candy cane Sydney had given him that night, he realized what money it must be. So he would give it back to Sydney. The Christmas candy cane my father carried in his hand on that dark night he spoke to Alvina was his and Trenton's vial of poison, the paper discharging the sentence of death and ostracism. I had handed the candy cane to my father in a thoughtless moment, as a goodwill gesture from my family to the Pits, and told him to take it to the boy.

Trenton picked the money up and did not know where else to take it. The money was stuffed in his pocket, with his glasses. All that day Mrs. Pit, fearful of something happening to her child after the strange conversation she had had with my father, would not let Trenton out of the house. She telephoned Father Porier and he instructed her to say the rosary and bless the child with holy water. She did this, and as always prayed for the intercession of the Virgin. And then finally at five in the evening fell asleep in her rocking chair in the small room off the kitchen. She often fell asleep there because of heat from the stove. Trenton was sitting in the dark, looking at the soft blue and green lights on the Christmas tree.

It was dark when Trenton managed to get the door opened. The snow had frozen at the end of the wood and up against the boughs being used to bank the house - a tradition throughout our rural Maritimes. The snow piked over the paddock fence, and was seen in patches between the trees. The moon was out over the great water. Our twisting road was silent, the flares were set up as warnings at the end of the bridge, burning away in a smudge drifting to the sky. Trenton expects to see my father, because all he knows is that my father works on the bridge. He steps onto the gravel road being engineered, and walks toward the troubled span. The watchman is not there to stop him, the lights are off. Worse, Mathew had just parked a thousand-pound truck on a weak span. The sabotage collapses it at the moment Trenton is walking toward the truck. At first there is just a slight groan and then a loud swish, and a section of concrete span collapses with a small blast of dynamite. Mathew sees the body fall while the truck remains caught up on the steel beams above. He thinks to himself it must be Connie Devlin who is falling.

When they find the boy, Mathew knows exactly where the money came from, yet cannot say. He did not know his plan would work so well. This is what secretly terrifies him - the damage he alone managed to do.

The day of the funeral, at home, sitting with his mother, he is awakened by his own culpability. Now for the sake of appearances he will seek revenge on someone else for his own crime. He will kill Sydney Henderson. He has to!

He cries over the dead boy, not only in love but because he fears he will be caught. But he is not caught. He isn't even suspected.

Another scenario is envisioned. My father sabotaged the span because he was not given the job of foreman like he had been promised, and was to be fired after Christmas. The night before, he had threatened to take the child away because he was infatuated with him. He had even bragged that he knew what would happen to the boy that very day. And didn't it happen! How brave he was to kill an innocent retarded child. And was this the first Pit child he had killed? No - for hadn't he tried his handwork with the Pits before, when he helped deliver Cynthia's child?

One person is sought out as a reliable witness - Connie Devlin. And what does Connie say? Nothing - yet. He is waiting to see what will happen and what is planned. He is ingeniously quiet for the moment. If it looks like Mathew will be caught he will side with Sydney. But if it is Sydney who is suspected, he will be compelled to come forward.

Ms. Whyne is furious at my father. She knew this would happen. Hadn't she predicted it?

"People like poor Elly Henderson should be aggressively informed about their options when it comes to having children - here she is pregnant once more to that hideous man -" she says. "When there are other options - is our world so backward as to not see what must be done for her?"

Everyone agrees with this completely. The shack we live in, with its small clumsily fitting tin pipe, seems foreboding, and Autumn, beautiful clever Autumn to me, once so special, is now with her snow-white hair and skin considered a sign of my father's rural depravities. The idea of the carcinogen in the soil is forgotten. Our house is framed in the local paper just after the funeral. God, it looked sad.

Those men my father had done favours for, filled out application forms for, helped with their unemployment benefits, forgot him and remembered only a man who read strange books. They crowded together, I am sorry for saying this, like the gutless pukes men tend to be.

It is now January. There is going to be an inquest. Those police officers and prosecutors tell my father that if he gives himself up they will not charge my mother with the robbery of the McVicer house.

"You don't want your next child to be born in jail," they say. "Or your children to be taken away."

Nowhere to turn, they go to Connie Devlin. My mother convinces my father to do this. She is certain that those he helped most would now have to help him. A certain willingness of people to trade upon the lines of common human decency. Besides, she is only human, and doesn't want her child to be born in a jail or Autumn, especially Autumn, to be taken away.

That day, with all the work on the bridge halted, Connie sits at the table in his kitchen, his head down, his eyes cast upon the floor, his thin stringy hair neatly combed over his balding head. He listens to the radio, the country and western station from Fredericton, smoking an Export cigarette and tapping his beige cowboy boots. My father asks him to help. Connie glances at Elly, exhaling smoke.

"I have no idea what I could do," Connie says finally, "to save you."

"You know he helped you," Mother says.

Connie says nothing for a long time. Then he shrugs, as if this is not a subject to discuss amongst gentlemen.

"So," he says, "I didn't know he were like that?"

"Like what?" Elly smiles.

"I just didn't know he were like that with little boys," Connie says, sniffing proudly. "I mean, I heard things 'bout it - but I was too good a person myself to believe it -" he adds, astonished at his own goodness.

My father accepts this insult in silence and, his voice still even, asks: "Connie - did you see anyone at the bridge any time of night besides - well, besides the boy - who would have been silly enough to drive that truck onto that weak span? Who left those floodlights off?"

Connie, tapping his cowboy boots on the linoleum floor, shakes his head, as if the question itself is a monstrous insult and his integrity is at stake. The last of the winter sun has left gold streaks across the snow and along the kitchen window, and gold dust from the sun filters into my mother's auburn hair as she stands in her orange winter jacket and boots. Here is where you see my mother as a child even though she is thirty-two. They could hear a grader on the highway. The bright windows of Connie's house rattled.

"I can tell 'em only what I know - that I haven't seen nothing at all," Connie says. "Except you." He smiles solemnly at this, and the curl of hair at the front of his head, with his enormous red face, makes him look like a baby in a crib.

The air in the house is warm, and Connie's work mittens hang over the radiator in the living-room corner, and his work socks padded at the heels and toes hang over a chair in the kitchen. Again he glances up and then glances away.

The next day Father got the first of the letters: "Eye for eye - your oldest child will die."

Perhaps they should have been more careful about who they targeted.

The note was written as everyone says and no one believes actually is. It was written from letters taken from those articles in the paper and pasted to a typewriter sheet. There was a warning for my mother pasted at the bottom of the page: "I will get the cunt too."

It was the first time I had ever heard that word, yet I understood exactly what it meant. My father had no intention of showing the notes to Mother. But she discovered them. I remember my parents at this time - when I was thirteen. For the last few months, because of their jobs, they had been trying to enter the world - they would tell each other about music, and fashion, not because they wanted so much to keep up, but because neither had ever been involved in the great world beyond their doors before.

They set out in mid-afternoon to the police station with the letters. The road had a glare upon it; the day was silent. A few school buses sat in parking lots waiting for students to get out of class. The wires above them hummed in the wind. And my mother kept up the pretense that everything was all right. She asked my father questions about books, because this is what she knew he wanted her to be interested in. She wondered what it would have been like to have graduated. She took my father's hand as she spoke.

Her life had taken a dramatic turn without benefit of education, and she now must protect my father and her children, who were all as confused about the great world as she.

That is how I remember them, on a day six months before Percy was born, walking hand in hand the eight miles to the police station, assuring each other that their lives would be like the lives of other people, while the substance of snow blew about them, from their feet to their chests, in small, twisting eddies, and left their boot prints on the road, obliterated before dark. And they were making this trek for our benefit - because you see it was the children who had been threatened.