Mercy Among the Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

unnatural self-condemnation.”
    My father never answered; he just turned and walked away.
    Connie Devlin was to plague Father all his life. And it was from that day forward my father’s true life started. After that day, things happened to his life that showed, or proved to him at least, other forces.
    What my father believed from the time his own father died was this: whatever pact you make with God, God will honour. You may not think He does, but then do you really know the pact you have actually made? Understand the pact you have made, and you will understand how God honours it.

TWO
    My mother, Elly, was an orphan girl brought up by a distant relative, Gordon Brown, originally from Charlo.
    My mom was reported to have had two siblings adopted byother families in other places. This fact, the fact that by her own family she was left in an orphanage, and then taken to the home of Gordon Brown, had a profound effect upon her. It made her solitary as a child, and nervous. She had many rituals to keep herself safe, because she felt anyone could come and take her away, and felt also that anyone had power to do what they wanted with her life. She therefore went to church every day, praying to God, and hoped for miracles in finding her siblings and her mom and dad, whom she never stopped looking for. She was considered odd by the people — even by her adopted parents and her stepbrother, Hanny Brown; pitied and looked upon with sadness as a very unclever girl. Worse for her social welfare, she saw miracles — in trees, in flowers, in insects in the field, especially butterflies, in cow’s milk, in sugar, in clouds of rain, in dust, in snow, and in the thousands of sweet midnight stars.
    “Why would there not be?” she once told my sister, Autumn Lynn.
    But others of course tormented her continuously about this. No one considered her bright, and she left school at sixteen, her second year in grade eight, hoping for a life in the convent. Two years passed where my mother did chores for neighbours, babysat, and attended church. Then her friend Diedre Whyne — a girl who had a much more affluent family, who was sharp and gifted, had taken two years in one at school on two different occasions — took Mom under her wing, finding a job for her in Millbank, away from the prying eyes of the nuns at the Sisters of Charity. Thinking of the circumstances, who among us would have done differently?
    In Millbank, still considering the convent, Mother met my father, when he was about nineteen or twenty. They met at the community picnic, where she was working the tables and he was helping hitch on.
    To hitch on a load at a horsehaul — where a two-horse team proves its strength by hauling sleds with incredibly heavy loads — is extremely dangerous. Some men won’t do it with their own teams because the horses are so hyped on tea they bolt as soon as they hear the clink of the hook being snapped to the sled. A man has to jump out of the way in a split second or be run over. However, my father earned extra money to buy more books, and if he was not oblivious to the danger, without conceit he was not concerned by it.
    The last day of that particular long-forgotten horsehaul, the horses and even the horse owners now long dead, held in a large field near the main river, Sydney went to the huge canvas army tent for water. My mother was working the table just inside, which looked exactly the same as the outside except the grass blades were covered, and saw Father approaching. The old cook rushed to her side and forbade her to talk to him, for he was a danger to people.
    This woman arranged a date for my mother with her nephew Mathew Pit, home from Ontario, where he had spent two months in the Don Jail. This date was arranged and Mathew picked Mother up that evening at her rooming house and drove to the sand pile, a kind of lovers’ lane without the lane, near McVicer’s sawmill.
    He had asked his younger sister, earlier in the evening how he