Mercy Among the Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

would have only lowered her head and whispered that she was sorry. He yelled that she didn’t understand what a good time meant, and she nodded and with head bowed walked behind him back to the car.
    “I should leave you here,” he said. “Bears and bugs to eat you — pussy and all. How would you like that?”
    She did not know what he meant. She looked about her feet to see if there was a kitten.
    “Please Mr. Pit I want to go home.”
    “You want me to drive you home?”
    “Yes sir Mr. Pit.”
    “Give me a kiss and I’ll drive you.”
    She turned and began to walk, head down, along the old derelict road toward the highway. He drove behind her, honking the horn.
    “Yer some dumb to give up losin’ yer cherry to a man like me — tell you that!” he said, his head out the window and his hand on the horn.
    Finally, at the highway, she was persuaded to take a drive. She got into the back seat and sat like a child, her eyes closed, her lips recounting a decade of the beads.
    Mathew phoned her six times in the next four days to ask her out again, telling her they would go to a different place. She was going to tell him she had mumps — but since she did not want to lie she told him that she “once” had mumps.
    “It’s that good-for-nothing Sydney Henderson,” Mathew told her. “He has you braindead. He’s almost like a devil the books I heard he reads and everythin’ else!”
    Her spurning made Mathew wretched. It was a wrong that went beyond all others. For how could Sydney Henderson —Sydney Henderson, the boy whose father tormented him in front of them, so everyone had howled in laughter, the boy Mathew had slapped at school trying to make cry (Sydney didn’t) — have caught Elly’s eye? How could God allow this to happen? Mathew did not know. He only knew he would break this spell.
    By sudden inspiration Father was asked to a beach party by Cynthia, Mathew Pit’s younger sister. She had been in trouble many times (once for biting a bride’s ear), and already her face had a chameleon-like changeability seen in thosewho have studied social opportunity more than they have studied themselves — a beautiful face, no doubt, wanton at times, at times hilarious, but always resolute, fixed on purpose beyond her present state, which was rural poor.
    For Mathew’s sake Cynthia would break the attraction between Mother and Father. In the lazy heat of her upstairs room, beyond earshot of their mother, Mat lectured her on what she might do.
    “I’m not going to do it with him — I won’t go that far. He’ll get a hand on it but nothin’ else.”
    “I’m not asking you to do no more,” Mathew said with a kind of anger he almost always felt. Then something else happened, again by afterthought. He had had on his person for a month, given to him by Danny Sheppard — for the purpose of giving it to Elly — a tab of blotter acid. He had forgotten about it. Now he gave Cynthia the tab, to spike my father’s Coke. Cynthia took the blotter acid and put it in the back pocket of her tight terry-cloth shorts, without comment. This was at ten past six on a Friday evening; their large old house, with its two gables, its front door facing the back yard, smelled of stale summer heat, peeled and poled wood, and fried cod, lingering from the kitchen up the dark, forbidding stairs.
    My father drank a Coke at ten that evening. By this time Cynthia, bored with his conversation to her about Matthew Arnold (who wouldn’t be at a beach party), had drifted away to one of the Sheppard boys — Danny. But Father in drinking this acid did not act out and become violent or paranoid as Mathew had hoped. Instead he walked all the way to Millbank and woke my mother by throwing pebbles at the window of Kay O’Brien’s house next door.
    “Sir, you have the wrong house,” my mother said after watching him for ten minutes and deciding it must be her he was after. “You must throw your pebbles over here!”
    “Why didn’t you