Mercy Among the Children Read Online Free PDF

should behave, and how he should approach this great chance. Cynthia had smiled and in a moment of sisterly diplomacy that would be for years captured in his mind, and now years and years later in mine, said: “Give it to her.”
    Mathew parked, revved the engine, and, reaching over, put Mother’s white bucket seat in the reclining position, so that she was no longer staring out the windshield but staring at the spotted ceiling. He opened a quart bottle of beer for her to drink, plunking it down between her legs. All about themthe half-burned acres of land sat mute and secluded in midsummer and the old sawmill looked melancholy with its main building sunken and its huge gate rusted and locked. It reminded one of years of mind-numbing work, of cold and heat and a degree of futility seen in deserted overgrown places where life once flourished.
    “McVicer has a million dollars and not one friend,” Mathew said with country cynicism. “That’s not how I’m going to turn out — here for a good time not a long time, I say —”
    My mother said nothing, for McVicer had once visited her and had given her an apple, and an orange one Christmas day and a sock with a barley toy and nuts.
    For twenty minutes or more not another word was spoken, and Mother’s thoughts might have been as flat, her face may have been as uncommunicative as Joseph Conrad’s Captain McWhirr, the hero of “Typhoon,” who wrote to his parents, when a very young seaman, that his ship one Christmas day “fell in with some icebergs.”
    Certainly Mother must have felt that she had fallen in with some icebergs, and she was unresponsive, as he now and again reached over to keep the bottle between her legs upright.
    Finally Mathew finished his own quart of beer; he did not hurry it, and supposed this is what my mother was eagerly waiting for him to do — finish. Then, with her still staring at the ceiling, and the quart bottle still plunked on an angle between her legs, he took off his shirt and showed her the two eagle tattoos on his biceps. Then he put his hands under her dress. Suddenly, after being dormant as a turnip for almost a half hour, she gave a screech.
    “What the Jesus is wrong!” he said, as shocked at her screech as she herself was. “What did you think was going to happen here? For Christ sake — this is a date, ain’t it?”
    Mother got out of the car and walked back and forth in theevening drizzle as he followed her, snapping gum, with his hands in his pockets and a beer bottle dangling from his right hand, blackflies circling his broad blond head. Her arms were folded the way country girls do, her lips were pursed, as she walked back and forth trying to avoid him. Finally she went to a set of barrels and kneeled behind them.
    “Please, Mr. Pit, thank you for the wonderful time but I would like to go home,” she said.
    He smashed his bottle in anger and upset the barrel she was hiding behind. “Get up outta that,” he said as if hurrying a draft horse out of a cedar swamp. “This is the same stuff they use in Vietnam — to flush out the gooks.”
    “Yes — that is very nice thank you very much — Mr. Pit sir I would like to go home —”
    “Go home now? We just got here!”
    “Yes please Mr. Pit sir thank you very much.” She kept her head down and her eyes closed as she spoke. She had been told not to sass her betters, never to think she was smart, and always to mind her manners. All of these recommendations from the Office of the Mother Superior, at the convent of the Sisters of Charity she was trying hard to remember. She was told this more than others because she was a child without a father, and without a name. A few nuns as unclever as she had rapped her knuckles raw trying to make her remember the five points of obeisance to the Lord and to her betters, and told her she could not be a nun if she was a nuisance.
    But she felt, and quite rightly, that Mathew was close to hitting her. If he had hit her, Mother