Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

To cut oneself entirely from one’s kind is impossible. To live in a desert, one must be a saint. —Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

“You’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.”

Poor people talking shit about poor people. Race don’t come into it. They keep us fighting among ourselves like dogs for table scraps so we won’t catch them making off with the feast.

Change, for those who don’t have a say in it, feels like a pretty word for death. Death to what you want, death to whatever plans you’d been making, death to the life you’ve always known.

But he knew they were really dead because they were in the way. Of profit. Of philosophy. Of a worldview that said rules apply only to the people who aren’t in charge of making them. Call them gooks, call them niggers, call them kikes, micks, spics, wops, or frogs, call them whatever you want as long as you call them something—anything—that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That’s the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.

he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.

He points at the protesters, stragglers now, but still a decent number of them working their way up A Street. “Look at these fucking morons. Whether niggers walk the halls of Southie High this year or not, you’ve all already lost. The towelheads just told us to go fuck ourselves and get used to walking until they decide to let us have more oil. But you’ll pick a fight with the niggers, who are just as poor and fucked as you are, and tell yourselves you stand for something.”

“But how come it’s always the poor who are expected to eat the food that’s good for them no matter how it tastes?

“Our suburbs,” he says, “are designed to escape the melting pot. But now they’re telling all the people they left behind precisely how they should go about rubbing elbows.”

“No matter what we claim in public, in private we all know that the only law and the only god is money. If you have enough of it, you don’t have to suffer consequences and you don’t have to suffer for your ideals, you just foist them on someone else and feel good about the nobility of your intentions.”

“But they also weren’t racists. Something about the idea of it—the pure irrationality of it—offended them. They didn’t think black people were necessarily good, don’t get me wrong, they just thought everyone—regardless of what color they were—was probably an asshole. And to say you were less of an asshole because your skin was lighter was reprehensible to them. It just made you a bigger asshole.”

But just before my mother died, she told me, ‘We never approved, but we were always proud.’ Isn’t that a weird thing to tell your kid?” He thinks about it. “It’s nice, actually. She’s saying you took your path, and it wasn’t what she would have chosen, but you did well.”

She sits there, overcome suddenly with a fresh horror of the self. Her daughter is dead, Auggie Williamson is dead, the lives of several teenagers on the platform that night are ruined, and her mind still grasps with grubby desperation for ways to feel superior to them. To feel superior to someone. Anyone.

Those who quit are victims, but those who are abandoned grow vengeful.

Then he steps back to the lectern and says, “They only kill other human beings easily. So, so, so, it can’t change if they don’t see us as fellow humans. Can’t change if they only see us as others.” He hangs his head. “It just can’t.” But you are others, Mary Pat thinks before she can kill the thought. And even as she’s trying to stanch the words barreling into her brain, the follow-up plows through. You just are.

“Don’t.” Dreamy holds up a hand. “Do not speak of my son. He’s dead because of you.” Whoa, Mary Pat thinks. Hold on one fucking second there. “I didn’t kill your son,” she says. “No?” Dreamy says. “You raised a child who thought hating people because God made them a different shade of skin was okay. You allowed that hate. You probably fostered it. And your little child and her racist friends, who were all raised by racist parents just like you, were sent out into the world like little fucking hand grenades of hate and stupidity and, and, and you can go fuck yourself, Mary Pat, if you think for one second I’m okay with that. Or that I forgive. I do not forgive. So go back to your neighborhood and sit with your monster friends and get yourselves all worked up to stop us from attending your precious school or whatever. But bitch, we’re coming whether you like it or not. And we’re going to keep coming until you quit, not the other way around. Until then, get the fuck out of my neighborhood.”

“Why are you my friend?” she manages eventually. “Because we’re both parents,” he says. “I was. Not anymore.” “No, you still are. You always will be. And all parents know failure. It’s the only thing we know for sure. So, yeah, your daughter, Jules, she had some failings that you passed on to her. Okay. But everyone I spoke to about her? They all talked about how kind she was. How funny. What a great friend she could be.” “What’s your point?” “You gave her those qualities too, Mary Pat. We’re not one thing. We’re people. The worst of us has good in him. The best of us has pure fucking evil in his heart. We battle. It’s all we can do.”

How things got so far, Big Peg reminds herself, is because Mary Pat meant well, but, let’s face it, she was never much of a mother. Those kids ran the show in the house because Mary Pat spoiled them. Simple as that. Let them talk back to her, rarely beat them, gave them her last dime if they asked for it. When you spoil people, they don’t thank you. They’re not grateful. They grow entitled. They start demanding things they got no right to demand. Like with the coloreds and the school. Like with Noel and the drugs. Like with Jules and another woman’s husband. Peg can’t blame herself for Mary Pat’s failings, can’t go on a guilt trip because she walked the straight and narrow like a good citizen while Mary Pat wandered off the path and into the weeds and the swamp beyond. And now Peg finally remembers the last thing she ever said to her sister. It was about their kids, and it feels like a prophecy when you look back on it. You can’t let them rule your life.