Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

She’s only forty-two, which, okay, when she was twelve seemed like one foot over the threshold into God’s waiting room, but now, living it, is an age that makes her feel no different than she always has. She’s twelve, she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time. But she isn’t aging. Not in her heart. Not in her mind’s eye.

Jules looks away, bites her lip, a habit of hers when she’s fighting back tears. “I mean, where do we go, Ma? Next week, next year? Like, what’s the fucking,” she sputters, “what’s the—Why are we doing this?” “Doing what?” “Walking around, shopping, getting up, going to bed, getting up again? What are we trying to, you know, like, achieve?”

At least Commonwealth hasn’t erased her heart, she wants to say. At least she held on to that, you thickheaded, coldhearted Hibernian assholes. I might be one of you. But she isn’t. When they break the clutch, she wipes under her daughter’s eyes with her thumb. She tells her it’s okay. She tells her someday it will make sense. Even though she’s waiting for that day herself. Even though she suspects everyone on God’s green earth is.

They aren’t poor because they don’t try hard, don’t work hard, aren’t deserving of better things. Mary Pat can look at almost anyone she’s ever known in Commonwealth in particular, or Southie in general, and find nothing but strivers, ballbusters, people who treat ten-ton burdens like they weigh the same as a golf ball, people who go to work day in, day out, and give their ungrateful-prick bosses ten hours of work every single eight-hour day. They aren’t poor because they slack off, that’s for fucking sure.

They’re poor because there’s a limited amount of good luck in this world, and they’ve never been given any.

There are way more people in the world than there is luck, so you’re either in the right place at the right time at the very second luck shows up, for once and nevermore. Or you aren’t. In which case . . . Shit happens. It is what it is. Whatta ya gonna do.

Tina shakes her head. “I’m just mad. And I don’t even know why. Someone told me—I can’t even tell ya who, some guy—the pot roast wasn’t as good here anymore, and I thought, I can’t fucking take this. I can’t.” She puts her hand on Mary Pat’s wrist so they lock eyes. “I mean, you know, Mary Pat? I can’t fucking take it sometimes.” “I know,” Mary Pat says. Even though she doesn’t. But, then again, she does.

For the first time that day, maybe the first time that week, she feels useful, she has purpose. She’s doing her small part to stand up against tyranny. Nothing else to call it. Nothing else fits. The people in power are telling her where she’s going to send her only living child to school. Even if that endangers her child’s education and even endangers her life.

“G’bless,” he says before hanging up. G’bless. They could add it to the list that includes It is what it is and Whatta ya gonna do. Phrases that provide comfort by removing the speaker’s power. Phrases that say it’s all up to someone else, you’re blameless. Blameless, sure, but powerless too.

She stays on her side of town, her side of the fucking line, and is it too much to ask that they do the same? Why do they have to antagonize? You go downtown, okay, fine, that’s where they all intermingle, black and white and Puerto Rican. They work together, they bitch about their bosses, lives, the city together. But then they go back to their own neighborhoods and sleep in their own beds until they have to get up in the morning and do it all over again. Because the truth is they don’t understand one another. It’s not a plan of Mary Pat’s making, nor is it her desire, that they have different tastes in music, in clothing, in the food they put on their tables. But that’s the way it is just the same. They like different cars, different sports, different movies. They don’t even talk the same. The Puerto Ricans barely speak the language, but most of the blacks she knows have grown up here and still it’s like they didn’t. They speak that jive of theirs, which, truth be told, Mary Pat likes, loves the rhythm of it, loves the way they emphasize different words in a sentence than any white people she knows, have a way of punching out through the ends of their stories with big booming laughs.

So if you don’t speak like us, Mary Pat wants to ask, and you don’t like our music, our clothes, our food, our ways, why come into our neighborhood? To sell drugs to our kids or steal our cars. That’s the only answer left.

Mary Pat, not much for travel, has still managed to see parts of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine in her life. Not Big Peg. Peg married Terry “Terror Town” McAuliffe two days after senior prom. They started dating freshman year at Southie High, and neither of them has an ambition known to anyone beyond the fact that they never want to leave Southie. It’s a big day if they make it to Dorchester, and Dorchester is only six blocks away. And if the world finds their worldview narrow, well, Big Peg and Terror Town don’t give a fuck about the world, they only give a fuck about Southie.

George was a part of the fabric of the Fennessy household for about ten years, always running in and out with Noel; in all that time, she never felt she got a clear view of him. It was as if a part of him, a core part, wasn’t there when you went looking for it. She mentioned this to Ken Fen once and he said, “Most people we know are like dogs—there’s loyal ones, mean ones, friendly ones. But all of it, good and bad, comes from the heart.” “What kind of dog is George Dunbar?” “None,” Kenny said. “He’s a fucking cat.”

Since birth, Ken Fen had no choice but to buy into the violence. He just never bought into the hate. When she met him, he was recently divorced, paying a king’s ransom in alimony to an ex-wife who’d told him once with bitter pride that she wasn’t capable of love, and if she were, she wouldn’t waste it on him. He and Mary Pat dated for a year before getting married. Ken Fen never had a nickel for himself until he got a job working the mail room at Harvard, which made it look like maybe, in a couple years, once he’d caught up on all his debt, he could move them out of public housing.

That’s where the trouble started. Suddenly, he’s coming home with books (Siddhartha is one she remembers, The Tin Drum another), suddenly, he’s quoting people she’s never heard of. Not that she’s heard of a lot of people, but suddenly, he’s quoting, and Kenny was never a quoter.

“I have no idea why I’m not happy,” Donna says after she gets them each a beer. “But I’m not. I mean, I got everything. Right? Look at this place. Brian’s a good guy, a good dresser too. He takes care of me. He’s never hit me. Can’t remember a time he even yelled at me. So what’s not to be happy about?” She waves her arm at the dining room. The china cabinet as big as a butcher’s freezer, the chandelier above them so enormous its shadows drizzle down the walls like vines, the table they’re sitting at parquet-top with seating for twelve. She says it again: “Why am I not happy?”

“You know what neighborhood sent the most kids to Vietnam?” He guesses. “Southie?” She shakes her head. “Charlestown. But Southie was second. Then Lynn. Then Dorchester. Roxbury. I got a cousin works for the draft board. She told me all this. You know who didn’t send a lot of kids to Vietnam?” “I can guess,” he says with a bitterness so old it comes out as apathy. “People in Dover,” she says. “In Wellesley and Newton and Lincoln—their kids get to hide in college and grad school and have doctors who say they got fucking tinnitus or fallen arches or bone spurs or whatever other bullshit they can come up with. These are the exact same people who want me to bus my kid to Roxbury but wouldn’t let a black guy take two steps into their neighborhood once the lawns have been cut and the sun goes down.”

Coyne turns back to Mary Pat. “We have witnesses who saw Auggie Williamson exchange words with a group of white kids on the outskirts of Columbia Park around midnight. Those kids then chased him into Columbia Station, where he died. We can’t confirm whether your daughter was one of those kids, but it would be very smart for her to come to us before we come to her. So, Mrs. Fennessy, if you know where she is, do yourself a huge favor and tell us.”

Back in seventh grade, Sister Loretta used to say that even if hell was not the firepit with the horned demons and the pitchforks that the medievalists supposed, it was, make no mistake, a void. It was an eternal separation from love. What love? God’s love. Anyone’s love. All love.

The guy standing behind the bar has a lit cigarette between his lips and squints at the smoke floating into his right eye as he pours himself a shot of rum. He’s a guy everyone calls Weeds because he’s skinny and unpleasant to look at. Has a harelip, a left eye that floats in the socket, and is rumored to have pushed his little brother off a roof when they were kids just to hear the sound of the poor bastard landing. He’s not wearing his Baracuta jacket tonight, just a T-shirt that looks soiled in the dim light. Larry Foyle sits at a table along the wall. Larry’s body looks like a set of tires stacked atop one another, and his neck isn’t much smaller. His head is enormous, like the head of a statue. His hands could cup a moose in one palm. He still lives with his parents and can often be found pushing his grandfather in his wheelchair along Day Boulevard. Larry is usually affable, a sly cutup, but tonight he looks at his beer and not once at Mary Pat. Like Weeds, he’s stripped down to a T-shirt. She can’t make out the state of it, or even the color, but she can smell his body odor from twenty feet.

“You didn’t keep your word.” “My what?” “Your word. You told me you would reach out to me by five o’clock. You didn’t.” The smile grows a little larger, a little crueler. “You’ve been around long enough, Mary Pat, to know that someone like you doesn’t make demands of someone like me.” “And you’ve been around long enough, Brian, to know I don’t give a fuck what you think I’ve been around long enough to know.”

So I suggest you think of your daughter in Florida, sipping drinks, getting a tan. I suggest you remember that kids leave, that’s what kids do, but neighbors are forever. They shovel your walk when you’re sick, tell you when someone’s looking at your house funny, that kinda thing.” He lights his own cigarette, his pale blue eyes holding hers through the flame. “But you, right now, you are not being much of a neighbor. And we’re all getting pretty tired of it.” “You’re getting tired of it?” “Everyone is.” “Well, tell everyone I’m just warming up.” She stands.

The car pulls to the curb in front of Kelly’s Landing. A takeout place going back to Prohibition times—best fried clams in the city—it closed a month back. Mary Pat’s parents went on their first date at Kelly’s; her mother remembered her own father taking her there as a child, as she took Mary Pat, and Mary Pat took Jules and Noel. And now it’s boarded up. A place that provided food and memories for generations. The owners, it’s said, decided it was time to try something new, time for a change. 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.

He shakes his head. “Your daughter is missing. My heart breaks for you. But her leaving to wherever she went does not overrule my right to conduct business in this neighborhood.” “No one’s stopping you from conducting business.” “You are.” He doesn’t raise his voice, but it definitely grows tighter. “You are.” “How?” “Everyone’s watching us. If this busing abomination happens? Cameras will be on this neighborhood like it’s the moon landing. And now with this colored kid getting killed and your daughter maybe being mixed up in it, they’re going to bring more cameras in here. And the one place those cameras can’t point? Is at me. And mine. But if you keep acting the way you’re acting, hon? I fear they may have no choice.” “I just want to find my daughter.”

“Take the money in that bag and use it to fly to Florida, stay in a nice hotel, and spend your days looking for your daughter. Kinda money that’s in that bag, Mary Pat, you could stay down there for a few years.” Lewis lights a cigarette, considers her through the flame. Marty stands in front of her. His eyes are very still. “I’m going to walk my friend Lewis back the way we came. You stay here for a bit and collect your thoughts and make a final decision.

Once they’re out of earshot, she stops constricting her face, and the sob leaves the back of her throat like a ball of bile and exits her mouth. She looks down at the money in the bag as her tears stream onto the paper. And she knows her daughter is dead. She knows her daughter is dead.

Driving along Broadway, he sees a young guy exit a bus and then turn to help an old woman who was waiting to board that bus. In his entire life, Bobby’s never seen more people help little old ladies cross streets, avoid puddles or potholes, carry their groceries, or find their car keys in purses overstuffed with rosary beads and damp tissues. Everyone knows everyone here; they stop one another in the streets to ask after spouses, children, cousins twice removed. Come winter, they shovel walks together, join up to push cars out of snowbanks, freely pass around bags of salt or sand for icy sidewalks. Summertime, they congregate on porches and stoops or cluster in lawn chairs along the sidewalks to shoot the shit, trade the daily newspapers, and listen to Ned Martin calling the Sox games on ’HDH. They drink beer like it’s tap water, smoke ciggies as if the pack will self-destruct at midnight, and call to one another—across streets, to and from cars, and up at distant windows—like impatience is a virtue.

Every guy has a thousand-yard stare. Every woman has an attitude. Every face is whiter than the whitest paint you’ve ever seen and then, just under the surface, misted with an everlasting Irish pink that sometimes turns to acne and sometimes doesn’t. They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met. Until they aren’t. At which point they’ll run over their own grandmothers to ram your fucking skull through a brick wall.

If four black kids had chased a white kid into the path of a train, they’d be facing life. If they entered a plea, the best offer would be a minimum of twenty years hard time. But the kids who chased Auggie Williamson into the path of a train won’t, Bobby knows, face more than five years. If that. And sometimes that disparity wears him the fuck out.

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. Bobby lies in a soft

They turn up the sidewalk together. It’s a soft summer night that smells of imminent rain. Bobby walks Carmen toward her car. He glances sideways once, catches her glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and 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.

The music begins and Mary Pat closes her eyes, floats in the light dance of the piano keys. Mozart knew what he was supposed to do. He didn’t hunt down what he was good at—at five, he wasn’t searching. It found him. Greatness. Just as it found Ted Williams’s arm and eyes and legs. Just as it found James Joyce’s pen. (Not that she’d ever read Joyce, but she knows he’s the greatest Irish writer of all time.) Work only gets you so far. You have to lean into what you were born to do.

Bobby is struck by the notion that something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t be unbreakable. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable. The paradox scares the shit out of Bobby. He’s met people over the course of his life who he truly believes existed as the ancient shamans did, with one foot in each world: this one and the one beyond. When you meet these people, it’s best to give them breadth the length of a football field, or else they may suck you right into that next world with them when they go.

Because they’re going. Make no mistake. They are fucking going.

“Mary Pat,” he says gently, and she looks up at him, “do you have someone you can talk to?” “About what?” “About whatever you’re going through right now?” “I’m talking to you.” Fair enough. “And I’m listening.” Mary Pat studies his face for a bit. “But you’re not hearing.” “What am I not hearing?” Sitting on the hood of that ugly car, her eyes still far too brigh...

Now, standing in front of Carmen Davenport’s building, holding both her hands by the fingers as she tells him she had a nice night and he agrees that he did too and they both smile goofily and wonder if they should try another kiss, he realizes that what scares him about her is what scares him about all intelligent women—that she’s smart enough to see, very quickly, how completely full of shit he is. He doesn’t know what he’s doing; never did. Doesn’t know where he’s going; never had a clue. He feels, at his essence, that he is a baby who was dropped by a stork and is still falling toward a chimney. Everything else he shows to the world is costume.

“They tried to bury her in the basement, but they mixed the cement wrong, so they had to do it all over again.” Two thick veins, one on either side of Mary Pat’s larynx, start to throb. “Say her name.” “Jules.” A lazy smile for her as the heroin bathes his inner body from head to toe. “They had to bury her twice.”

“Why’d he kill her?” she says softly, surprised the words left her mouth because, in the end, no reason could be good enough. “She wanted money to raise her kid.” “He has plenty of money.” “Doesn’t mean he wants to share any. Plus, I heard she was asking for a lot. Said she didn’t want to raise her kid the way she was raised.”

“If you don’t care about any of it, George, why’d you pick a fight with Auggie Williamson?” He lowers his hand and looks at her, and the sun bathes the side of his face in harsh yellow that bounces and refracts as she drives. “He was weak,” he says. “You could see it in his eyes.” “Maybe he was just scared.” “Fear’s a weakness.” He holds his hand back up to the sun. “I don’t like weakness.”

“So, so, help me, Mrs. Fennessy. Please.” “I’d love to, George. I would.” She caresses the back of his head and presses her forehead to his for a moment. When she speaks, her voice is kind and motherly. “But then? Then I remember that you sold my son the drugs that killed him, you murdered that poor black boy who just wanted to get home, and you helped bury my daughter in a basement.” She removes her forehead from his, holds his hateful gaze with her own. “So I don’t give a flying fuck, really, whether you die tonight or live a long hellish life in prison. I just know if I never look on your face again, it’ll be a blessing from God Himself.”

“My dad,” Bobby tells her eventually, “was the best housepainter you ever saw. Inside, outside, didn’t matter. He was a magician with a brush or a roller. People would ask him questions, though, about wood rot and load-bearing walls, even the electrical. My father would say, ‘I do one thing better than anybody by not concerning myself with anything else.’” “Sounds like a cool guy,” Mary Pat says. “When he was sober, yeah, he was.” Bobby realizes how much he misses the old bastard in that moment. “I’m a homicide investigator. I don’t investigate arson.

Turns out the house behind the Fields of Athenry isn’t in Marty’s name. It’s in the name of a guy whose body was found in the trunk of a car in long-term parking at the Amtrak station in Pawtucket in 1969. The guy’s name was Lou Spiro, and he left no surviving relatives, so no one ever looked into his estate. But Lou was sitting on some gold mines—a Southie liquor store, a Medford car wash, a metal compacting company in Somerville, and two strip clubs in Revere—that everyone has long assumed belong to Marty Butler.

“Mary Pat,” he says, “don’t wreck your life trying to do something that is doomed to fail.” “My life,” she says, “was my daughter. They took my life when they took hers. I’m not a person anymore, Bobby. I’m a testament.”

“That’s what ghosts are—they’re testaments to what never should have happened and must be fixed before their spirits leave this world.” “Mary Pat, you need help.”

“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.” “Phew,” she says. “You’re cynical.” “I prefer skeptical.”

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.

“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.

Auggie Williamson’s dead too because I sold my daughter lies. And before she ended up swallowing them? She knew it. They always know it. They know at five. But you keep repeating the lies until you wear them down. That’s the worst of it—you wear them down until you scoop all the good out of their hearts and replace it with poison.” She has no idea how long she weeps. Only that

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.”

“I think . . .” he manages as he works his way back into a sitting position, “I think she did it as a small mercy.” She looks back at him. “What?” “Possibly,” he says. “Mercy from what?” He doesn’t say anything for a bit. “Mercy from what?” “I told them to fry him.”