Small Mercies

“I’m not. She’s just a fucking, ya know, an embarrassment. She’s what you get with the spoiling and the TV and the music they listen to, everybody glorifying the drugs and the free love. That’s sure as hell not how we were raised, but she thinks it’s okay to mouth off about everything. Like, fucking everything. If I believe in something, she believes the opposite. And not because she believes it. But because she wants to hurt me.”

“She wants to hurt you,” Carol agrees.

“She wants to hurt you,” Hannah chimes in.

“Who’s this now?” Mary Pat asks.

“My daughter,” Joyce says, waving airily. “Cecilia. Little bitch. Me and my husband are raising five kids, and four of them aren’t bad, but this one? The middle one?”

“The middle one’s always a trial,” Noreen Ryan says.

The Swab Sisters all nod in agreement.

“She’s just a teenager,” Maureen says. “They go through their phases.”

“Mmmm,” Joyce says, clearly not convinced.

The bus bounces across the Northern Avenue Bridge and takes a right on Atlantic, and now they’re officially out of South Boston and into Boston proper. City Hall is only a mile away.

“Time for us, girls.” Carol reaches into her purse and comes back with a palmful of small flags and tea bags.

Mary Pat takes a flag. Instead of sticking it in her hair, she slips the little wooden stake into a buttonhole of her blouse.

Joyce, Carol, and Noreen choose flags. Patty, Maureen, and Hannah go with the tea bags.

Mary Pat watches them help one another place them in their hair and has to ask, “What’s with the tea bags?”

“You don’t remember? We discussed it at a meeting.”

“I must have missed that one.”

“The tea party, Mary Pat. The Boston Tea Party?” Hannah says. “When they chucked all the tea into the harbor?”

“I know about that,” Mary Pat says.

“Well, we’re throwing our own rebellion against tyranny,” Patty says. “Hence tea bags.”

“Is anyone going to get that?” Mary Pat says.

Several of the women blanch, and Mary Pat can hear murmuring behind her, but it’s too late for debate because now they’re turning off Sudbury Street onto Congress, the JFK Federal Building canting in the window at the northeast edge of City Hall Plaza, and Mary Pat getting a look now at the sea of people streaming into the plaza from what seems like every direction. The traffic is reduced to a crawl. As they creep along, the concrete edges of City Hall come into view. It’s an ugly building, colorless except for some brick at the base of it, graceless from head to toe. Inside, it’s worse. It seems constructed solely to make anyone who has to do business with the city realize before even entering the building that the house always wins.

“How many people are we expecting?” Mary Pat asks the group.

Carol says, “Maybe fifteen hundred?”

They reach the curb. As they exit the bus, the bus driver hands everyone another tea bag.

They open the back door and each grabs a sign. Mary Pat’s says End Judicial Dictatorship. The woman next to her lifts one that reads Boston Under Siege. Mary Pat finds herself wishing she’d grabbed that one — it’s a better acronym.

They climb the stairs leading from the back of the building to the plaza. The clouds are gone. The sun, bright and blistering, immediately bores into the back of Mary Pat’s neck. The crowd moving up the stairs — so thick that Mary Pat and her bus companions seem but specks in the larger throng around them — is already sweating, several faces pink with heat. There are a lot of flags — American flags, Irish flags, sheets tied to poles with neighborhood names: Southie, mostly, but also Dorchester, Hyde Park, Charlestown, and East Boston. Halfway up the stairs, the crowd starts shouting the Pledge of Allegiance, and Mary Pat has to admit it feels good as the words leave her mouth, particularly at the end, when the crowd kicks it up several notches and shout-spits the final words: “liberty and justice for ALL!”

She’s starting to suspect there’re more than fifteen hundred of them, and when they reach the top of the stairs and spill into the plaza, she’s overwhelmed to realize there are thousands of them. She can’t see to the end of them. They have to be nine thousand strong, maybe ten.

Carol leads the group to a fountain where they add their tea bags to hundreds more, the tea staining the water a rusty brown. Mary Pat once again wonders if anyone will get it. She imagines an old flatfoot standing over the fountain later, saying, “Ah, now, don’t these morons know that tea tastes better when the water’s properly boiled?”