Small Mercies

32

Desegregation of the Boston Public Schools takes effect on Thursday morning, September 12, 1974. The buses that transport black students to South Boston High School are accompanied by police escorts. The police wear riot gear. As the buses near the school, several hundred white protesters — adults and children — line the streets. Chants of “Niggers go home” give way to “Niggers suck” and “Hell, no, we won’t go.” Several protesters hold up pictures of monkeys. One brandishes a noose.

The bricks come from a construction site on West Broadway. Other people use rocks. But the bricks make the most noise and do the most damage when they hit the windows of the buses. The children on the buses discover the safest place during the pelting is under the seats, and the only reported injury is to a teenager who gets glass in her eye; she requires medical attention but doesn’t lose the eye.

Inside South Boston High, the black students are met with something they’ve known forever at their own schools but didn’t expect here — no white kids.

On the first day of school, not a single white student attends South Boston High School.

When word of this fact spreads through the demonstrators, their chant turns to “Vic-tor-y. Vic-tor-y.”

A few hours before, at four in the morning, Mary Pat Fennessy’s body is removed from the parade grounds of Fort Independence on Castle Island and transported to the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Bobby, Vincent, and their hastily put-together squad of detectives and patrolmen arrive at Fort Independence about five minutes after Mary Pat’s death to find Marty Butler and his men gathering their spent shells and preparing to leave. They don’t put up any fight. The guns they used are legally registered. Mary Pat Fennessy fired at them after murdering Frank Toomey. Brian Shea was killed in what Marty calls “friendly fire.”

Bobby arrests them and confiscates the weapons and the tripod Marty rested his rifle on, but Bobby has little doubt that the crime scene investigation will reveal events played out exactly as Marty says they did; he’s acting too fucking smug for it to be otherwise. Bobby might — might — get the case into court, if only because Brian Shea died as a result of three citizens taking the law into their own hands. But the chances of that case making it to a jury are about as good as Brian Shea growing his face back.

At the medical examiner’s office, they pull five bullets out of Mary Pat Fennessy’s body. The kill shot was a 7.62-millimeter round to the center of her heart, but Drew Curran assures Bobby that another round from the same rifle which entered her body through the right armpit would have done her in within another ten minutes.

“It had to be a shot to the heart,” Bobby says to Carmen a few days later. “Anywhere else? She would have just kept coming.”

The day after Mary Pat’s death, Bobby gets a call from Calliope Williamson. They catch up on a few things, and Bobby apologizes for not being able to make it back to the house after Auggie’s funeral.

“That’s okay,” she says. “You’re a good man.”

Bobby thinks, I am?

“Is it true,” Calliope asks, “that she helped you get the kids who killed my son?”

“Mrs. Fennessy?”

“Yes.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Bobby says.

“Work. All the women used to be her friends are calling her a snitch, saying she betrayed her own.”

“I heard you had words with her,” Bobby says.

“I did, and I won’t apologize for any of them.”

“Not asking you to. Whatever they were, I’m sure she deserved them.”

“But she also helped you catch my son’s killers?”

“She did a lot more than that,” Bobby says.

“I don’t understand.”

“The man most responsible for what happened to your son won’t be able to do it to anyone else ever again.”

“Because of her?”

“Yes. I’m not saying her intention was to get justice for Auggie — I don’t think it was. But she got it just the same.”

Silence as she processes that information.

“Are you going to her funeral?” Calliope Williamson asks.

“Depends when they hold it. If I’m working, no. If I’m not, yes.”

Another long silence. Then:

“Maybe I’ll see you there.” She hangs up.

Big Peg McAuliffe spends the days after her sister’s death trying to track down family for the funeral. Donnie, down in Fall River, says he’ll attend and shares that he has a line on Bill, who’s no longer in New Mexico but might be in Hartford. Big Peg reaches a few cousins and an aunt who say they’ll try to make it.

It nags her that she can’t remember the last words she exchanged with her sister. She knows the last time she saw her and knows what they talked about — Jules being missing. She knows she walked her to the door, but she can’t remember their conversation. And it bugs her to no end; you should be able to remember the last words you ever said to someone.

Some of the people around Commonwealth shoot her strange looks, like whatever virus her sister caught in the last few weeks of her life might catch Big Peg too. It pisses Peg off, knowing what Mary Pat did to the family’s rep. It’s gonna take time, maybe a lot of it, to get their good name back.

She says to Donnie when he calls back, “I mean, yeah, they dealt with Jules harshly, but ya know, she played with fire and she got burnt.”

“She was a kid,” Donnie says.

That almost gets to Peg, but she swats it away.

“What’re you gonna do?” Peg says.

“I know,” Donnie says. “Can’t fight city hall.”

“It is what it is.”

“No argument.”

“And we all know how Mary Pat could get.”

Donnie laugh-snorts. “She got that look in her eyes? There was no reaching her.”

“None.”

“So, Billy says he’ll come.”

“Yeah?” Peg lights a cigarette, surprised how nice it feels to know she’ll see two of her brothers after all these years. “Be like a family reunion.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“So, all right, then,” Donnie says to wrap things up.

“All right, then,” Big Peg agrees.

They hang up.

Big Peg sits by her window for a bit, smoking and looking out at the projects. She spies a spot of pavement where she and Mary Pat used to play with jacks or do hopscotch or jump rope as kids. They were never the closest of sisters, but they had some good times. She can see the two of them out there; for just a second, she can hear their laughter and their small talk echoing off the project walls. A ferocious pang seizes her torso — heart, lungs, stomach. A bomb of desolation that explodes and ripples upward, eventually reaching her brain.

How did I lose my sister?

Where is Mary Pat’s soul now?

How did things get so far?

She focuses on a pigeon across the way. It pecks at a windowsill. She has no idea what it’s pecking at (some gum? another pigeon’s shit?) but it keeps its head down. It does its job.

The chest pang passes, the shock waves wear off.

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.

The day before Mary Pat is laid to rest, Bobby’s son, Brendan, ends up in the hospital with his leg broken in three places. He got it skateboarding with his friends on a steep street near his mother’s house. Tried to avoid a pothole, smashed into a Buick, went sailing over the hood. Broke his left heel, ankle, and fibula.

All clean breaks, luckily. Surgery goes off without a hitch.

Bobby and Shannon sit with him up the Carney. The cast looks bigger than the rest of him, a big white appendage jutting off his knee and hanging suspended at the other end from a metal U inverted over the bed. He’s in good spirits, a little loopy from the drugs, and he keeps giving them this bewildered smile, like How did I get here? His aunts and Uncle Tim all visit, bring him toys, cards, books. Leave silly messages on his cast. They make so much noise in there, the nurses keep having to shush them. Finally, they shoo them out until only Shannon, Bobby, and Brendan remain.

Brendan snores softly, and Shannon looks across him at Bobby and says, “Our boy,” and something in her voice breaks because something in Brendan is broken for the first time. He’s rarely been sick, never had stitches or broken a bone. Never even got a sprain.

Bobby nods, keeps his expression even and supportive.

She looks beat. She was the one who brought Brendan in. Was here for two hours before Bobby arrived. He suggests she go home, get some rest, take a shower, at least, freshen up.

She’s reluctant, but as Brendan remains sleeping and the night drags on, she gathers her things, kisses her son’s forehead, and gives Bobby a small finger wave, her eyes wet and shaken.

When she leaves, the smile Bobby’s kept plastered to his face since he got here — his cheerleader smile, his Dad’s-on-top-of-it smile, his everything’s-going-to-be-just-fine smile — drops. He imagines the black and purple leg underneath that cast, swollen and despoiled by swaths of black sutures. His son’s flesh sliced open like a Christmas ham, so the surgeons could insert their instruments inside his body and fuse bones that had snapped like breadsticks. And while Bobby is grateful — ever so fucking grateful — that modern medicine is here to respond in this way, it nonetheless feels like a violation.

It could have been so much worse. Brendan could have soared over that Buick and landed on his head. His neck. The base of his spine.

It could always be worse. That was a mantra in Bobby’s family growing up. And he agrees with it.

But he also must confront what he has grasped intellectually since the moment he first held his son in the maternity ward of St. Margaret’s and is only now allowing to infiltrate his heart. Not because he wants it to but because that cast has given him no choice.

I can’t protect you.

I can do what I can, teach you as much as I know. But if I’m not there when the world comes to take its bite — and even if I am — there’s no guarantee I can stop it.

I can love you, I can support you, but I can’t keep you safe.

And that scares the ever-living shit out of me. Every day, every minute, every breath.

“Dad?” His son is staring at him.

Bobby looks up the cast to his son’s sleepy face. “Yeah, bud?”

“It’s just a leg.”

“I know.”

“So why do you have tears in your eyes?”

“Allergies?”

“You’re not allergic to anything.”

“Shut up.”

“Real mature.”

Bobby smiles but says nothing. After a bit, he moves his chair closer to the bed, takes his son’s hand in his. He raises it to his lips, gives the knuckles a kiss.

The funeral for Mary Patricia Fennessy is held at nine o’clock in the morning on September 17. It’s sparsely attended. Calliope Williamson stands in the back and notices a large, fat version of Mary Pat standing up front with a group of unruly kids who all look in need of a bath. There’s two old men in a nearby pew with thinning hair who have similar features to the fat woman and to Mary Pat.

Family, then.

Some of the nuns from Meadow Lane Manor attend but no coworkers. About another dozen or so mourners are scattered about a church that could easily hold a thousand.

Detective Bobby Coyne does not show up. She knows he would have if he could have — he’s like Reginald that way, a man of his word.

Directly across from Calliope, in the opposite pew at the back, stands a handsome giant with kind eyes. He wears an ill-fitting suit and a tie with a knot that’s bunched up and wrinkled. He keeps a handkerchief at hand and weeps silently but often.

She’s seen him before — he used to pick Mary Pat up after work sometimes. It’s her husband. She knows his name is Kenny, even though they’ve never been formally introduced, and that everyone calls him Ken Fen.

After the mass, she introduces herself on the church steps and expresses sorrow for his loss. Not just of his wife but of his stepdaughter as well.

He says, “You’re Dreamy.”

She shakes her head. “No one calls me that.”

“I thought—”

“The women at work — about the only thing they remember about me is that I told them a story about my father calling me Dreamy when I was a kid. Never said anyone had called me it since, but they decided not to hear that part. Gave me the name so I’d feel more like their pet, I guess.”

He sighs. “Well, I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Her eyes pulse, as if someone just slid a metal skewer sideways through her heart, but she says nothing.

“A lot of loss going around,” she says.

The other mourners are filing out. No one pauses to express their condolences to him. They walk around the two of them as if they have leprosy.

They remain on the steps long after everyone has gone, saying nothing. And it’s strangely comfortable.

“Want to get a drink, Calliope?”

“I’d fucking love one.”

They walk to the nearest bar past signs and graffiti that Calliope refuses to look at. She doesn’t need to see the words to feel their ugliness. The ugliness is everywhere over here right now; it rides the air, it hangs from streetlamp poles. Hell, she can even taste it, like a pebble of tinfoil clamped between two teeth.

The bar is one that Ken Fen tells her stays open eighteen hours of every day to serve the men who work the three shifts at the electric plant. For ten in the morning, it’s got a sizable crowd inside and two bartenders behind the bar, a waitress working the room.

They sit there for ten minutes. And not a single person acknowledges them. A giant and a black woman in a Southie bar and they may as well be invisible. The waitress passes them four times. Both bartenders catch their eyes. But no one takes their order.

On the waitress’s last pass, Ken Fen once again raises a tentative hand to her and catches her eye. She blows right past him.

He turns back to Calliope and gives her a tired smile and raised eyebrows. “Good thing I brought my own.” He reaches into his suit jacket and comes back with a flask.

Calliope matches his tired smile. “Me too.” She reaches into her bag and comes out with her own flask, a gift from Reginald for their ninth — or was it tenth? — wedding anniversary.

They raise their flasks over the table.

“What should we drink to?”

“Our dead,” Calliope says. “Of course.”

“Of course.”

They tap their flasks together and drink.

“One more,” Ken Fen says.

“Oh, I’ll be having more than one.”

He chuckles. “Toast. One more toast.”

She leans in again.

“To our living,” Ken Fen says.

“To our living,” Calliope agrees.

They drink.

Following the release of her remains by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office, Julia “Jules” Fennessy’s body is interred at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. Per the last will and testament of her mother, the body is placed in a mausoleum atop a small slope in the southern corner of the grounds. Funds are dispersed from the estate of Mary Pat Fennessy every month to pay for flowers to be placed around the mausoleum door. Funds are also dispersed to satisfy an odd stipulation. Once every weekday, the assistant sexton, Winslow Jacobs, is tasked with spending half an hour inside the mausoleum with a transistor radio tuned to the local classical station, WJIB.

Winslow Jacobs has had some strange jobs in his time on this earth, but this might be the strangest. He ain’t complaining, though — the head sexton, Gabriel Harrison, pays Winslow an extra fifteen dollars a week for the duty (which means Gabriel’s got to be making thirty), and the truth is, within a month, Winslow has developed a fondness for the break in his day. Plus, the music grows on him.

As time goes on, he falls into the habit of talking to Julia Fennessy most afternoons. He tells her about his son, who works for a company paves road out in California, and his two daughters who are raising families of their own not far from where they grew up, and his wife’s cooking, which won’t win any prizes but tastes like home and that’s good enough for him. He tells Julia about his father, who he’s certain never loved him, and his mother, who loved him twice as hard to make up for it, tells Julia Fennessey most of what he can remember about his life in all its highs and lows, all its dashed dreams and surprising joys, its little tragedies and minor miracles.