The Mercy Rule

Freeman whirled and stalked into his office, slamming the door closed behind him.

In his living room a line of tiny elephants marched tail to trunk in a caravan across the mantel above his fireplace. They were made of blown Venetian glass.

Fra

Now, finally home a little after nine o’clock, he stood in front of them, wondering if he could hear what they might be saying to him.

The elephants were part of their history. When they had decided to get married, he and Fra

(Her brother, Moses, did the same thing – rearranged the elephants – almost every time he came to visit. Hardy thought it must be genetic.)

It was a night for shadows. The living room, as the lobby in his building had been, was dimly lit, in this case from one light over the telephone in the tiny sitting area off the dining room. The house was eerily quiet. It was a ‘railroad-style’ Victorian with a long hallway, living and dining rooms up front. In the back the house widened with the kitchen and, behind that, three bedrooms. j The kids were asleep and Fra

He poured an inch of Bushmills into one of the jelly glasses the kids used. Returning to the living room, he lit a fire and drank his drink. When it was finished, he showered and slid in beside his wife’s possibly sleeping form.

The elephants were dancing in an amber glow.

A naked man stood in front of the dying embers, watching the beasts. There were fourteen of them, in a line, perhaps preparing to caravan. The wind howled outside.

Outside the fire’s perimeter the night was pitch, and out of its shadow a woman appeared. She was dressed in something white and flowing. Red highlights shimmered in long hair, worn down. She was barefoot.

The man half turned, afraid to step toward her lest he stumble. Twice already he had free-poured Irish whiskey into the Tom and Jerry drinking glass, too thick to break.

‘Are you coming back to bed?’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘I guessed that.’ She laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. ‘Don’t hurt yourself.’ A reference to the drinking. When he’d been younger, before this marriage or their children, he had a personal rule forbidding hard spirits in his house. Now he sometimes thought they could open a liquor store.

‘I love these elephants,’ he said. It appealed to him to see one of the strongest animals in the world rendered in the most fragile of substances. ‘They look like they’re dancing, don’t they? Excited about going somewhere, doing something.’

‘Come on back to bed,’ she said. ‘I’ll rub your back.’

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Two. The kids’ll be up in five hours, Dismas. It’s going to seem like five minutes.’

His hand was around the glass, on the mantel over the fire. He was aware that he was leaning on it for balance.

Fra

He sighed, left the half-empty glass where it was on the mantel, let her lead him back down the long hallway to their bedroom.

5

Hardy wasn’t going to acknowledge the fatigue, the slight headache, the buzz behind his eyes. He had set his internal alarm for six-thirty, and it didn’t fail him.

Of David Freeman’s words the night before, the ones that had the most impact were those concerning the children – Hardy had chosen to have them, and he could choose how he lived with them.

He was failing there, with his kids, lost in some downward spiral he didn’t quite understand. He wasn’t taking any joy in them, in Fra

Maybe all of that wasn’t too far gone to reclaim.

He didn’t even know any longer where his black pan was. The cast-iron fryer weighed ten pounds and was the only physical legacy of Hardy’s parents, Joe and Tola, who’d died in a plane crash when he was nineteen. For years – all through his first marriage and second bachelorhood – he had cooked almost everything he ate in that pan.

He’d kept it pere

If that was true now, he thought, he was in trouble. He didn’t know where it had gone. He had searched the kitchen and finally found the pan under his workbench on the landing that led down the stairs and out to their backyard. Sometime in the past few years – and he hadn’t even noticed – Fra

This morning Hardy didn’t go through his routine: shower, dress in his suit and tie, coffee. Instead he pulled on his old jeans and a faded Cal Poly sweatshirt, slipped into his Top-Siders and, keeping quiet, first went in search of the black pan.

Twenty minutes later he had the French crepe batter made and the table set for breakfast at the kitchen table. He fixed a cup of coffee the way Fra

Rebecca – they called her the Beck – was Fra

‘Crepes!’ She was immediately awake. Her arms came up around him and squeezed and then she squiggled free. ‘Vincent!’ she yelled. ‘Daddy’s making crepes.’

Vincent was up and on him before he knew what hit him. He was knocked backward, wrestled down onto the futon in a jumble of arms and legs and tumbling, kid-smell and laughter.

With a roar he grabbed at both of them, holding them to him, tickling whenever he could get a finger free. He caught a knee in the groin – a constant – and groaned, which the kids ignored as a matter of course.

Finally it stopped. His back was against the Beck’s bed and the kids settled against him, one on each side. He heard the shower start in the bathroom and the alarm went off next to his bed. He patted the kids on their backs. ‘Let’s get some clothes on,’ he said. ‘Breakfast in five.’