Crimes Against My Brother (27 page)

Lonnie Sullivan had bought the site and the ruined Jameson sawmill, with all the old saws as well, for a little under twenty thousand dollars. And it had sat there for almost three years, without Lonnie doing a thing with it. After Evan had come back from up north he had asked Lonnie four times to sell it to him. Lonnie had said he would want twenty-five thousand for it. Evan said he would work off the payment over three years. He went to sign the contract, but the price Lonnie wanted for the mill and the time it would take had mysteriously gone up to thirty-five thousand dollars and four years. Again Evan had said okay.

But just when he went to sign—desperate as he was to do so—Lonnie said, “Now that is only 50 per cent of the mill, and the price has to be fifty thousand.” He’d looked at Evan with a strange curiosity, and held the pen in his hand.

Evan could not sign.

“That’s too bad,” Lonnie said, dropping the pen with a thud. “Maybe you feel too proud to go into partnership with me, do you?”

The very next day Evan had gone to the sawmill and sat among the ghosts—the ghosts of great men such as Will and Owen Jameson, the ghost of Reggie Glidden and of Meagre Fortune, who was Evan Young’s great-uncle. All those men who worked fifty years ago far up on Good Friday Mountain. Their last run was at the very spot where he and Ian and Harold had become blood brothers.

He looked down over the small scrub along the flat vacant lots and wondered why his one dream was eroding before him.

Sydney Henderson once had walked out on broken ice all the way to the icebreaker, to try to find the boy he had been accused of harming. That was over six years before. But they said that Evan had harmed his little boy, made him drink antifreeze. This is what the rumour was, that men of little conscience could so readily repeat.

“I didn’t!” he would scream, but to himself alone. Still the rumours persisted. Just as they had for Sydney Henderson, who, people now were coming to believe, had been innocent as well.

So Evan, sitting on a plank beside the padlocked door that now read
PROPERTY OF LONNIE SULLIVAN—TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
, decided he too would prove to the God that was no God that he was every bit as brave as Henderson. He would walk all the way across the inlet.

He stepped out on the newly formed ice in a blanket of snow, with his hands in his pockets. Now and then he would stop and stare beneath him, see in the blue ice his own reflection and feel the ice still soft. He needed to shift his weight and move right or left—either that or plunge into twenty-seven feet of water. But he refused to pray to the God that was no
God that had taken his son and killed his wife. Snow wisped over ice, the day darkened and wind cut through his coat. And strangely, his lips had to press together tighter and tighter so as not to pray—and the one constant on his mind except the bubbles of ice under him was the idea that he would not pray. He would never pray! In the last hour of the sun, in the mean space of nowhere, he thought he could hear Molly’s voice saying: Poor dear Evan, you torment yourself, and all the angels in heaven know.

He made it to the far side, crossing below the cliff called Bennie’s Rock, and moved up into the frozen turbulence toward his little shack, shaking and sick and unable to eat, for what he had done was such folly for an unlucky man. But he had a letter in his pocket from Norman Casey, who had offered him partnership in a truck that ran on the ice roads. He would have to buy into it by the end of December, for they started the runs in January. The letter said: “You will make it all back in a year—and be set in four—if you can come up. Let me know.”

So now Evan decided he would get the money and go, or he would end his life. He was driven to this and felt he had no other options in the world.

The very next day he woke and made his way to town. He knew even as he put on his boots that he wasn’t really thinking of working in the warehouse but of robbery. He knew this and pretended he did not. He would rob his best friend’s store, just as his friend had robbed him of his dream. And in the wild snow he set out to do this.

Onlookers may think this is a story where people are always thinking the same thing—and as I told my students, they would be right, except for the fact that, even now, Evan had taken years to decide to do something he was still, in his heart, against doing.

The damp soaked through his torn boots. The small houses looked shuttered up in the storm, and the bridge was closed.

The lights along the streets in the centre of the town were out. And wires glistened and rubbed against one another in the wind.

What was true, then, was what the money caused.

“If only Lonnie Sullivan would leave me be,” Annette had confessed to Ian two years before, when he was with her at the hospital and the reason for the cramps in her stomach could not be determined. But he had not caught on to what she was saying. He’d looked puzzled and nodded. Then she had realized that he didn’t understand what she’d said, so she had touched his face as if he was a little boy and smiled.

Now, on this winter afternoon, she helped their son, Liam, dress in his blue suit with a red bow tie and new black shoes.

She knelt beside the boy and kissed him quickly. Her mascara sparkled in the light of the upstairs Christmas tree. The carpet was soft, and the window behind her head was adorned, and seemed to illuminate her. She was, Ian realized again, beautiful. And he had been frightened of her beauty. Perhaps, he thought, that was the reason she was unhappy.

“You are like a saint, Mommy,” Liam said suddenly. “That’s what I will always remember. Isn’t she, Daddy—she is a saint?”

“Yes,” Ian said, “yes, Liam. Mommy is like a saint.”

Annette smiled strangely, a smile that would be affixed for all time in Liam’s mind. He would carry that smile with him forever, and one day on a golden windblown stretch of Australian beach, he would remember it like yesterday, and be sad.

Ian had heard by now that Annette and her friends were planning to rob him—and though Ian did not know the particulars, he was certain that sometime today, or at the very latest within the next week, she would attempt to remove funds from his store. His uncles had come to tell him this, wanting a thousand dollars apiece for the information—but they had settled on a hundred between them.

“I don’t believe it,” he’d said. But in fact, the very way she and he had acted toward Sara, that very betrayal, was to be re-enacted with him.

His uncles had told him he had one friend in town who’d informed them it would happen the day of his party, when the store was closed. Ian knew no other details. (My student Terra Matheson found out later that this friend most likely was Harold Dew, who had discovered what
was happening from Ripp himself.) So Ian had had two weeks to do something to stop her, to pick up the telephone and inform the police.

But he had not. At first he did not think the story was true. Then he began to suspect it might be but was not sure. Now he was certain that she would leave at some point if the robbery was going to take place. And he felt she would leave with Ripp and Dickie. However, he still did not phone the police.

If Ripp comes first, I will know, he thought that morning. He was nervous, and shook so badly he could not shave. Even as he dressed, he was in a state of numbness. Worse, the pain in his back increased as the day went on, so by four in the afternoon he could barely move his shoulders.

Ripp came to the house early, bringing a man named Fleeger. Dickie arrived later.

Ripp was now wearing his blond hair long, and sported a gold chain. Ian did not pay attention to what Ripp and Fleeger said or did. However, sometime during the afternoon, after some provocation, Ripp threw the Fleeger fellow across the room, to show his strength and moral character, and then let Dickie kick him—to show his fury. The man was left bloodied and dazed for no reason—or the reason was that he had said something unkind to Annette and they were protecting her honour. Of course this was not true—that is, it was not true that Fleeger had said anything unkind. But her friends took enormous pride and pleasure in thinking he did, and they had to act. All of this, to Ian, was bogus—but he had been silent in her presence too long to say anything. In fact, he knew many people did not even consider him her husband. Perhaps she no longer did either.

After a short time, many other people left, until by mid-afternoon (and this usually happened when they came over) only Ripp and DD and Tab and Dickie and a few others remained. They apologized to Ian for the fight. It had been inexcusable to act like that, Ripp said, with the kind of mock sincerity violent men have after a violent act.

Ian had hardly spoken all day. He simply stared at Annette until she became uncomfortable. But he was shaking. His hands were trembling.

“What’s wrong, Ian?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“You’re staring at her beauty, aren’t you?” someone else said.

“Yes, I am, in a way.” Ian smiled. “And at what beauty does.”

He waited for them to go. But for a long while they made no motion to go anywhere. Annette kept looking at him and then walking to the landing on the stairs to watch the storm through the window. Then she would turn and pace across the foyer and look through the living-room curtains.

“Ahhh—it is really coming down,” she said.

The phone rang, and Annette went white. She clutched her glass of gin, and looked at Ian. “Ta-da,” she said, lifting her glass.

The phone stopped ringing. But then, shortly after, it started to ring again. Annette went into the den and answered it.

“God, she is beautiful,” Dickie said.

“Yes,” Ian agreed, “she is beautiful.”

“She’s the most beautiful woman on the river,” Dickie said, while Ripp maintained that a McIntyre girl from downriver, the first girl he’d ever kissed, was every bit as beautiful. And then there was Molly Thorn, he said.

“Yes,” Ian said, and tears started to his eyes. “Then there was Molly Thorn.”

“And Elly Henderson too,” someone added.

It was at this moment that Ian remembered what Sydney had said to him all those years ago: “Your wife will be accused of theft.”

“By who?” he had asked.

“By you.”

Evan puffed on a cigarette as he kept his huge hands in his pockets. Like Ian, he too was thinking of his wife. Remembering the note she had left him caused his eyes to swell with tears:
Thank you for taking me to the movie—it was the only movie I ever went to. Remember how the old police car skidded out of control? Ha! I was so proud to go! Thank you for everything, but I want to see Jamie now
.

He walked by the theatre, remembering how she had timidly gone to the theatre door with him as if the manager in his old worn suit was somehow a person of great distinction.

Evan now thought that the condition he most wanted to win back was his luck. It had been a condition of such easy lightness when he’d had it. How had it gone from him? Who had taken it away? And how could one describe it? Perhaps only one word could possibly describe it: faith. When he’d had luck or faith, he hadn’t had to think about it because it just was. Once he’d lost it, or it fled from him, in a thousand small and piteous ways he could no longer celebrate it or gain access to what it had been. He couldn’t even react to its loss without naming it—something he’d never had to do before. And so with each passing day he decided that this was the day he would get it back. But when he’d had it, he hadn’t even been aware of what it was. Now, as a man of luck, he had certainly fallen in all ways. He knew the world as others did, and it no longer sat lightly on his shoulders.