Small Mercies

26

Mary Pat spends a night in a motel on Huntington Avenue, just across from the Christian Science Mother Church. The motel accepts cash and doesn’t ask for ID and, most importantly, has an underground garage where she can tuck Bess away in a dark corner that smells of oil. She sits in the motel room in the near dark and looks across the street at the church plaza. She doesn’t know much about architecture or anything about Christian Scientists, but the mother church is an impressive structure. Two buildings — the smaller, sharper one with a pointy granite steeple is something she’d expect to see in Paris, maybe; the larger one behind it makes her think of pictures she’s seen of Rome: a big dome at the top, presiding over wide arches and thick columns, all of it mirrored in the long, narrow reflecting pool that stretches the length of the plaza.

If Jules had come to her just two weeks ago and said she was converting to Christian Scientology, or whatever they call it, Mary Pat would have disowned her. Fennessys and Flanagans were Roman Catholics. Always had been, always would be, end of story. But now Mary Pat finds the whole idea — of disowning someone for choosing to believe in a different interpretation of God — ridiculous. If Jules lies right now in the embrace of the Christian Scientist God or the Buddhist God or whatever the Episcopalians believe in, Mary Pat cares only that it’s an embrace. And that her daughter no longer knows anything of fear. Or hate.

She turns on the small TV on the dresser and, after fiddling with the antenna, finds the clearest picture on Channel 5. She catches the last half hour of a Harry O episode she’s seen before, floats away sitting there, has no idea where she goes or that she went anywhere at all until she snaps back from wherever she was to find that the news is now on.

This has been happening a lot lately, these little episodes of vanishing within herself. She doesn’t fall asleep or even doze, but time vanishes nonetheless. And she seems to vanish with it.

Halfway through the news, just before sports, they mention that “Funeral services will be held tomorrow morning at Third Baptist Church for Augustus Williamson, the young Afro-American man who died tragically at Columbia Station, further inflaming racial tensions on the eve of desegregation of our schools.”

She recalls the note Dreamy wrote to her when Noel passed. If Mary Pat could write half as well as Dreamy, maybe she’d consider writing a note of her own. But she can’t. Not only is her grammar bad, her handwriting is atrocious.

She finds herself staring across the street again at those remarkable buildings reflected, along with several other local buildings, in the long pool of water. We pass on and the buildings remain. And eventually, even buildings as magnificent as these crumble.

I’m not afraid to die, she tells those buildings, the room, God. Not even a little bit.

Then what are you afraid of?

Living in a world without her.

Maybe she feels the same way.

Jules?

No, you idiot. Dreamy.

Third Baptist Church of the Blue Hills sits on a small plot of land on Hosmer Street in the heart of Mattapan. When Mary Pat was very young, Mattapan was where the Jews lived in uneasy truce with a contingent of poor Irish. Then the blacks showed up, and the Jews headed for the suburbs or parts of Brookline while the Irish pushed into Dorchester or wandered into Southie. Synagogues and bakeries gave way to chicken joints and hair salons — as she drives along Morton Street looking for parking, Mary Pat loses count of how many hair salons. Not to mention army-recruitment billboards, menthol-cigarette billboards, and liquor stores. Southie’s got Mattapan beat when it comes to bars, but Mattapan has the edge when it comes to purchasing your booze for home consumption. Parking’s just as hard to find as it is in Southie, though, and people here love to double-park just as much. The walls and storefronts are more colorful, however — lots of vibrant murals, something you never see in Southie; plenty of bright awnings and clothing, on both men and women, that runs to tropical colors: bright yellows, mango greens, cotton-candy pinks. Before she can start feeling too kumbaya, like she could move here and be happy if she could only change skin color, she notices how many grates they have above their storefronts and how many of their windows have bars on them, how many of the side streets are cracked and ridden with potholes, and how many yards are so overgrown it would be impossible to see the fences if the fences didn’t sag and poke out through the growth.

Have some self-respect, she thinks with a sudden defiant pride.

We’re not the same. She pleads her case to some unseen judge as she backs into a parking space. We’re just not.

As she turns off her ignition, a thuggish hulk of a young man stares in at her as he passes, maybe thinking about what she might have in her purse or entertaining even darker thoughts.

She has no idea why she does what she does next — terror? — but she does it: She smiles. A big friendly one and follows it with a small wave.

The young man — actually not all that big, not all that thuggish, just poor, his clothes not fitting him right — smiles back. It’s maybe a slightly confused smile, a tad hesitant, but it’s gentle, and he even returns her wave with a nod. And then he moves on, a boy really, couldn’t be older than fourteen.

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.

Inside the church, she steps into a pew at the very back. She’s mildly surprised to discover she’s not the only white person to attend Auggie Williamson’s funeral; there are nine or ten others among the crowd of about a hundred. It’s an impressive turnout, though she gets a sense from looking around at the clothing that a lot of the mourners are politicians or activists. It’s all over the papers, how what appeared at first to have been an accident now looks to be a race crime perpetrated by four racist teens from the racist hotbed of South Boston.

The head of the Urban People of Color Action Committee has questioned whether Auggie Williamson’s death was just the first of the “lynchings” they could expect once their children were bused into South Boston come Friday. A prominent community organizer asked if there was any end to the hate, and a spokesperson for the Roxbury Crossing Small Business Cooperative drew up a petition to rename Columbia Station Augustus Williamson Station or, at the very least, put up a plaque in his honor by the station doors.

The church continues to fill, and a lot of the folks look solidly working-class or lower-middle, dressed in clothes they bought at Sears or Zayre, not Filene’s or Jordan Marsh. Mary Pat has chosen the last pew on the right in case she needs to make a quick, unnoticed exit, but a group approaches and asks with their eyes for her to move down the pew, as an elderly woman with a walker takes up their rear. Mary Pat does so, and almost immediately, another five people enter the pew from the other side, and she’s stuck in the middle. When she looks around again, the entire church is full. Some folks even stand in the back, fanning themselves with hymnals or the program for today’s funeral.

Right before the service starts, Detective Bobby Coyne makes his way up the left side and takes a place against the wall between two stained-glass windows. He catches her eye and blinks in surprised acknowledgment, throws her that kindly smile of his, his eyes narrowing at her — a look that says, Don’t go anywhere when this is over.

The family enters with the coffin. Mary Pat pictures the boy in that coffin and her daughter at the morgue, and she feels awash in loss and grief but also in sin she can’t name or even fully define. But it’s sin all the same. For a moment she fears she might pass out. The air has somehow grown too thin and too dense at the same time. She grips the back of the pew in front of her and steadies herself until the light-headedness passes.

In the Catholic church, funerals are second only to weddings and Christmas when it comes to the length of the mass, but even with that exposure, Mary Pat is unprepared for just how long a Baptist funeral can go. There’re four spirituals before they even get to the readings. And after the readers, the minister, a Reverend Thibodaux Josiah Hartstone III, reminds the congregation that he was named after the town of Thibodaux, Louisiana, where, less than a hundred years ago, white militias descended on the homes of Negro sugarcane workers (including Reverend Hartstone’s grandfather and grandmother) who were striking for a fair wage, and those white militiamen killed upward of a hundred and fifty Negro men, women, children, and elders (including Reverend Hartstone’s grandfather and grandmother) for the sin of asking for fair treatment and a living wage. Mary Pat hears a chorus of “Amen” and a smattering of loud moans and “Help us, Jesus!” and “Help us, Lord!”

“And who were these four white children of South Boston if not another militia?” the Reverend Thibodaux Josiah Hartstone III asks his flock. “How is that militia of old any different than these four misguided thugs who murdered our cherished son, Augustus, for the crime of trying to get home? For the crime of driving a car that broke down? For the crime of trying to better himself in the management program of Zayre? For the crime of crossing their streets, treading their sidewalks, using their subway platform? Is this the milk of human kindness of which our good Lord Jesus spoke?”

Mary Pat feels light-headed again. And sick to her stomach. The eulogy for Auggie Williamson is turning, in some ways, into a eulogy for Jules. Into a eulogy for Mary Pat’s legacy as a parent.

“No!”

“No!” he roars, one hand raised to the rafters. “No! Because, brothers and sisters, it’s not their world. It’s our world. It’s God’s world. And they had no right to take one of God’s children out of God’s world because they didn’t like the color of the skin God gave him!”

Mary Pat lowers her head and swallows repeatedly against hot bile. Beads of sweat slide down behind her ears and into the collar of her shirt. One continues on down her spine. She keeps her head lowered. She takes deep breaths.

“But God is good,” he says.

“Amen!”

“God is just!”

“Mmm-hmm!”

“God says Augustus is with Me now!”

“Praise Jesus!”

“And I, the Lord and Savior, will pass judgment on those who have hurt our brother Augustus! Because I am the Lord!”

“Praise the Lord!”

When Reverend Thibodaux Josiah Hartstone III wraps up his fire and his brimstone, he launches into a rendition of “The Day Is Past and Gone,” and the congregation joins in with a kind of fever — a mix of joy and rage and God-love, heartbreak, and passion — that is unlike anything Mary Pat has ever witnessed. The floor shakes, the pews shake, the walls shake.

After “The Day Is Past and Gone,” Auggie’s father, Reginald, rises from the front pew and takes a place behind the lectern. He’s a tall, elegant man. Mary Pat has met him several times over the years and has always been struck by his mix of deference and gravity. Now what strikes her, even from the back of the church, is the unreachable despair in his eyes. It’s not the despair of the hopeless, it’s the despair of the forsaken. The first is weakness, the second is a knife blade. Those who quit are victims, but those who are abandoned grow vengeful.

“Auggie was a typical kid,” Reginald begins, his voice hushed against the microphone, “rebellious at times as a teen but never to the point where we truly worried. Loved his momma. Fought with his sisters. Oh, did he ever.” He chuckles a bit. “Graduated high school but not with the kind of grades would get a black boy a scholarship to any colleges, so he went to work for that department store, was on the management track, hoped to run the whole New England district of the chain someday.” He looks out with a gaze that rides above the congregation by several feet. “Loved his clothes, Auggie.”

A soft chuckle hums through the crowd.

“Right?” Reginald says. “‘Threads,’ he called them. Even as a little boy, he was so fussy about his clothes. Liked his hats, his shiny shoes — had to shine like a brand-new dime — them big-collared shirts of his. He snagged a pair of pants on a doorjamb coupla weeks back? Was stitching up the tear himself. I said, ‘Boy, why don’t you buy a pair of dungarees so that don’t happen?’ He said, ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead in dungarees, old man, you know that.’”

Reginald says nothing for a bit. Mary Pat can feel the whole church waiting, wondering where this is going.

He leans into the microphone. “He wouldn’t be caught dead in dungarees.” He breathes heavily through an open mouth. “Instead, he got caught dead in South Boston. Well, he got caught alive. But then they killed him. And the Lord says forgive the sinner, if not the sin, but, ya know, fuck the sinner.”

Lots of murmuring in the pews, people looking around. Up on the altar, Reverend Thibodaux Josiah Hartstone III sports a tight smile but leans forward like soon he might just make a dash for the mic.

Reginald Williamson says softly, “What’s gonna change? When’s it gonna change? Where’s it gonna change? How’s it gonna change? Human beings don’t kill fellow human beings. Not easily. They just don’t.” He steps back from the lectern and runs a hand over his mouth. He freezes that way for a moment, the hand covering the mouth, as if to keep the words in forever. 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.

The bile she’s pushed back down to her stomach surges once more, a series of hot pebbles climbing up her esophagus. She lowers her head again, takes slow breaths.

When they escort the coffin back down through the church, the pews empty out in order behind it, front to back, so by the time Mary Pat exits the church, the coffin is already in the hearse and Dreamy and Reginald are in one of the limousines behind it and Mary Pat realizes that her plan to express a brief condolence to Dreamy and move on quickly was a fantasy. She sees Bobby Coyne talking to his partner, who’s parked an unmarked haphazardly by the curb and is speaking urgently to him. Bobby is nodding and at one point looks around, possibly for her, but she uses the milling crowd to her advantage, and he soon speed-walks away with his partner and they drive off in the unmarked.

At the cemetery, Reginald, Dreamy, their family and closest friends, and the political activists stand up front by the coffin. Mary Pat and most of the other white people stand all the way back by the road.

The Williamsons own their own home in Mattapan. A small Dutch Colonial on Itasca Street. It’s set up the way white homes Mary Pat aspires to live in are set up. Tidy. Well-kept lawn, recent touch-up on the trim. The floors are shiny blond oak. The entire house smells of wood soap. Front hall arrayed with photographs of Auggie and his sisters and some white-haired people Mary Pat assumes are grandparents. Living room off to the right past an arched entryway. Off to the left, a small dining room with stained-glass windows which leads into the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen, a brown wooden deck overlooking a small yard. The deck and the yard are where most of the mourners congregate.

Mary Pat, reaching the kitchen, looks around for Dreamy. She just wants to express her condolences and get gone. But the first person she runs into is not Dreamy, it’s Reginald.

“I just want to say—” she begins.

“Fuck you want to say to me?” he says.

She looks closely at him to be sure he’s the same Reginald she’s met several times before. She’s honestly not sure. Until his eulogy, she never heard him use profanity of any kind. Assumed he might be the type who didn’t believe in it.

“Bitch, I said what do you want to say to me?”

She locks on his tie — she noticed it when he passed her pew on his way out of the church with his son’s coffin. It’s dark blue with light blue crosses on it. Definitely him.

Did he just call me a bitch?

“I, um, I wanted to express my condolences.”

“Oh,” he says kindly. “Oh. Thank goodness. That means a lot.” He touches her arm with his big black hand. Gives it a light squeeze.

“What did you think I wanted?” she asks.

He squeezes her arm a little harder. “Thought you wanted to explain why your moron, nigger-hating daughter killed my intelligent, purehearted son.”

“Can you let go of my arm?”

He squeezes even harder. “Am I holding your arm?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Sure it ain’t just a circumstance? Like, say, you went and put your arm in my hand and I ain’t got no choice but to squeeze what you put in my hand? Ain’t that a possibility?”

“No.”

“No?” He cocks his head at her. “Well, I say it is. I say that whatever thought crosses my mind, Mrs. Fennessy, is the rule of fucking law in this house. You want to complain? Take it up with me right here, right now. You don’t think I look in your eyes and know a tough bitch when I see one? I know you’re a tough bitch. I know you could fuck many a man up, but I ain’t that man, and you ain’t in a place where you can afford to find out. Because if I were to — right fucking now — crush the windpipe of the mother of one of the demons who killed my child? A woman who trespassed into my home on the day of the funeral of my only son? If I were to do that, Mrs. Mary Pat Fennessy, I wouldn’t go free, but I would have enough credit in prison for killing your ass to ensure I would live like a goddamn king for the rest of my days.”

Far worse than the pain of his fingers gripping her arm like the teeth of five socket wrenches is the hate in his eyes. She’s a bit of an expert on hate — she’s been around it her whole life — and his hate for her is truly depthless.

“Reginald!”

They turn to see Dreamy entering the kitchen.

“You let her go right now.”

Mary Pat will always remember these as a few of the most dangerous seconds of her life. She knows Reginald will choose one of only two roads — listening to his wife or doing something extremely violent extremely fast. Mary Pat is certain in that moment that if this man decides to kill her, he will succeed.

He drops her arm. “Get her out of my home,” he says, and walks past his wife toward the deck.

In front of the house, some mourners mingle, so Dreamy walks Mary Pat to the end of the block. They stop by a mailbox, its blue paint faded and chipping from exposure to the elements.

Dreamy says, “I’m sorry for—”

“You don’t have to apologize for that. He’s angry. He didn’t know what he was saying.”

Dreamy’s eyes narrow at her. “I’m not apologizing for Reginald. I stopped him from hurting you so my girls could have their father at home, not in some shithole prison.”

Mary Pat can’t help think, Dreamy cusses too?

“I was expressing my regret for your loss,” Dreamy says. “However I feel about your daughter or about you, Mrs. Fennessy, I don’t think any mother deserves to lose a child, never mind two.”

“And I’m sorry for your loss,” Mary Pat manages.

“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.”

And that’s it. She’s gone. Mary Pat stands by the mailbox and is mortified to realize she’s crying — hot actual tears stream down her face — as she watches Calliope Williamson walk back up the block and disappear into her neat, well-tended home.