Small Mercies

Jules’s boyfriend, Ronald “Rum” Collins, arrives along with her best friend, Brenda Morello. Mary Pat does not think much of Rum, and his childish small talk about cereal confirms her opinion of him. As Jules leaves with them, Mary Pat silently hopes that Jules will leave Rum before his dullness curdles into cruelty. meanwhile, lacking money to pay the gas bill, Mary Pat can’t use the stove and goes to eat instead at a local pub. While there, she commiserates with a local woman whose husband is in prison for a botched robbery. However, for all their professed fatalism, Mary Pat and her fellow Southie women are angry and exhausted by life’s many struggles. Mary Pat returns home and assembles signs to promote the rally. She doesn’t think of herself as a racist, but she resents it when the rich and powerful make rules that turn the poor against one another. As she drifts off to sleep, she thinks about her husband, Kenny, who left her, and about the electronic circuits connecting the neighborhood, which sometimes shut down.

The following morning, Jules still has not come home, but Mary Pat is not yet overly concerned. She heads to her job as a health aide in a Catholic nursing home, which is unpleasant but predictable work. Her coworker, “Dreamy,” the only Black person on staff and a woman with whom Mary Pat feels an affinity, has called in sick: a highly unusual occurrence. After lunch, Mary Pat learns that a 20-year-old Black boy was found dead on a subway track in Columbia Station. Because this is a majority-white area, the racist attitudes of the locals lead them to suspect that he was in the area to deal drugs. Mary Pat reflects that everyone is better off when they just stick to their own neighborhoods and their own people. Still, something about the news story bothers her, and she realizes that she does not know Dreamy’s last name, only her real first name, Calliope. Learning that Dreamy’s last name is Williamson, she realizes that the dead boy from the news is her son Augustus, or “Auggie.”

When Mary Pat returns home to find that Jules has still not returned, she calls Jules’s friend Brenda, who says that she last saw Jules with Rum at Carson beach around midnight the previous night. She says that Jules had had drinks and marijuana but seemed fine. Mary Pat thinks again of Dreamy, who sent her a kind note when her son Noel died. She wants to return the favor now, but she doesn’t have the right stationery. On the news again, the reporter announces that Auggie was a high school graduate in a management training program.

Frustrated by Jules’s continued absence, Mary Pat visits her sister Peg, who is even more tightly bound to Southie than Mary Pat. Mary Pat’s niece, Little Peg, admits to seeing Jules in Columbia Park close to midnight, with Rum and the drug dealer, George Dunbar. Mary Pat is horrified at the news, for George also sold her son the drugs that eventually caused his overdose and death. Even though the local crime organization led by Marty Butler is supposed to prevent hard drugs from entering the neighborhood, George’s mother is Marty Butler’s girlfriend, and George is therefore untouchable. Mary Pat also learns that George is dating Brenda, and that Brenda lied about being at Carson beach.

Driving her faded and battered 1959 Ford Country Sedan, “Bess,” Mary Pat finds Rum at his job at the supermarket loading dock and questions him with increasing frustration. Finally, he admits to letting George Dunbar drive Jules home because he himself was too drunk to escort her. She then goes to see George, who denies Rum’s account and claims that they went from Columbia Park to Carson around 11:45 pm, echoing a precise timeframe that Mary Pat finds suspicious. Mary Pat promises to come after him if he had anything to do with Jules being hurt, reminding him that he has already killed her son with drugs.

Mary Pat goes to find Rum at the Fields of Athenry, a pub and headquarters for the Butler crew. When Rum brushes her off, she breaks his nose and beats him up until Brian Shea and others pull her off. They take Rum away for underground medical treatment, and Brian warns Mary Pat about starting fights on Butler territory. Learning about Jules, he insists that she should have come to him first, and promises to spend the next day tracking Jules down. Brian tells Mary Pat that because of the busing crisis and the body found in the subway station, the neighborhood cannot afford any more negative attention, so he will take care of things quietly.

Filled with anxiety and exhaustion, Mary Pat finishes her shift and travels to Harvard Square in Cambridge, contemptuous of the hippies smoking marijuana and singing folk songs. She visits her ex-husband, Kenny Fennessy, who works at the Harvard mail room. While Ken is a big man capable of terrible violence when necessary, he is mostly gentle and empathetic, and is eager to sit in on Harvard lectures as a perk of his job. She tells him about Jules, and he listens and provides comfort despite his general unwillingness to see her. Like Mary Pat, he also notices how strange it is for the teenagers involved to agree on a precise time when they had been drinking and smoking. He also notes that they report being near Columbia Park around the same time that Auggie Williamson died at that station and observes that their curiously consistent stories might be designed to conceal knowledge of or involvement in the crime. At that moment, a young Black woman walks in, and when Mary Pat realizes that the woman is Kenny’s new partner, she seethes and asks how Kenny can live with himself, imagining the resulting censure and judgment of the community. Kenny responds that life with Mary Pat was like drowning, and that now he simply wants to live.

Brian Shea does not report back that evening as promised, so Mary Pat returns to the Fields and then to Brian’s house in search of news. Brian’s wife, Donna, is an old friend who enjoys the perks of her current husband’s rising status in the Butler crew. Brian is not there, but Donna still invites Mary Pat in and confesses that she is unhappy with life despite the fact that her husband treats her well and provides for her. Mary Pat admits to having slept with Brian in high school, and after the initial shock, Donna laughs at the old memories. They bond over having lost their first husbands, Donna assures Mary Pat that she will find love again. She then reveals that Jules’s boyfriend is not Rum, but Frank Toomey, a married father who is both a beloved neighborhood fixture and a notorious hitman for both Butler and the Mafia. Donna thought that Mary Pat knew about her daughter’s relationship, because everyone else in the neighborhood was aware. Mary Pat is disgusted that nobody bothered to tell her.

Mary Pat returns home to find two detectives, Pritchard and Bobby, waiting for her outside. They ask where Jules is, and she tells them that she has been looking for her daughter for two days. Noting Bobby’s Marine Corps lighter, she recounts the story she heard from Jules’s friends and admits that she does not believe it to be true. Bobby makes it apparent that he is a local from nearby Dorchester and chats with Mary Pat about his time in Vietnam. She tells him about her son, who served in the military and then died upon his return. They note that poor neighborhoods like Southie, Dorchester, and Roxbury sent kids to Vietnam at a much higher rate than the rich neighborhoods and agree that those who dodged the draft are now imposing busing rules on those same neighborhoods.

The detectives then hint that Jules may have been involved in Auggie’s death. Witnesses claim that Auggie had a confrontation with a group of white teenagers just before he died. Mary Pat withholds her knowledge of Jules’s association with Frank Toomey, since giving such information to a police officer would sign her death warrant. Bobby hands her a card, and Mary Pat realizes that Bobby is a homicide detective. However, she is still reluctant to cooperate with him due to the standard neighborhood attitude of hostility toward the police.