Crimes Against My Brother (37 page)

One night a week or so after he announced he was running and that his platform was to stop the mill, a rock came through his store window. A week after this, Ian applied for an injunction to hold up the mill in court.

Ian went to Mr. Conner’s house, pleading with him to reveal what concessions the government was actually making.

“What do you mean?” said Conner.

Ian left without obtaining anything. It was the longest walk, from Conner’s steps to the car.

The phone would ring at the house and at the store at all hours, with requests for pipes and insulation and siding and tubing from everywhere and everyone—so Ian did not know who the real customers were. And then came the warning: “Get out of your store.”

“His wife hates him,” the mayor said to Mr. Fension, who was meeting him in his office that afternoon, Fension trying to force an ultimatum within the town power structure itself and hoping they could bring pressure to bear against the recalcitrant citizen. Fension made a comment about the fact that such a beautiful woman was living with such an ingrate, and the mayor smiled at the universality of some blasphemies.

“Everyone hates him. We accepted him with open arms, and look what happens.”

“But his wife doesn’t own the land?”

“No, she doesn’t!”

“So there is nothing to be done. We will have to go through the other side,” Fension said. And he sighed. That meant they would stop trying to convince him to sell, and simply cut road out on the far side of Bonny—though they knew this would cost them much more than they wanted. And they had a proposal in to the government to seek even more financial help. Or to force Ian’s hand—but that would mean litigation, and they could not afford the time.

“We will give him one more week,” Fension said, “but he is one bastard!”

Sometimes the most fortuitous things one says are said without knowing. For in four days everything would turn in the company’s favour.

There was one man who had discovered a flaw in Ian Preston’s claim. The night Harold stole the money—not the fifteen thousand in the envelope, a payment for Liam’s security, but the fifty-three hundred that was also there, which Lonnie had initially salted away from Annette herself and others who owed him—there was a sketch of all
the Swill Road properties. For months Harold had no idea why this was in the envelope along with the fifty-three hundred. So he went to the courthouse on his own, and there he discovered Ian had not paid his back taxes.

Now, in three days, the mill was preparing to start the road on the other side of Bonny and had already begun moving equipment. Harold waited until the last moment because he himself was hesitant and unsure. That is, it was a terrible act of betrayal on his part. But when he decided, he decided once and for all. Yet a secretary at city hall had the audacity to put him on hold, and when the call was taken, he had to argue that he was the one who actually owned the property. Finally, when he was on the verge of hanging up, they realized what he might be saying. So they were very polite and apologized profusely. “Well then, can we see you?”

“Yes—but it better be today, or I will go to Ian himself!”

In fact, Harold still loved Annette and thought seriously of going to her. She could pay the back taxes, get the property and sell it—for Harold and her, and Liam. But on further thought he decided to teach them the lesson they deserved. So he paid the back taxes that had not been paid in years and no one in town had thought to inquire about, and now owned the property outright. And he thought: She would take off Ian’s diamond, and someday he would have it!

Later that same day the man with the walnut-shaped head went downriver, and a whoop of approval came from him—a strange little foreign man in high knee socks and flannel trousers, who nonetheless could whoop in delight. Some snowy rain began to fall and a trace of fog lay over the tops of all the great trees in the distance, which were to be cut.

Then, exactly a month after Annette had met Wally Bickle, construction on the road started and Ian Preston’s old house on Swill Road, with its windows busted and its steps sunken, was simply bulldozed under.

Ian got into his truck and drove down, passed eight graders and dozers and twelve dump trucks, sluicing all along the dirt road right
up the side lane until he crashed into a backhoe. “This is my land—get off my land!”

He had cut his head on the steering wheel and looked dazed. He began to stumble forward, and picked up a marker and tossed it aside. But everyone there ignored him, as if he had become a painful joke. Fension was on-site that moment and passed him a surveyor’s clip and a certificate of ownership.

“You should have taken the money,” Fension said, his high green boots tied up tight and his heavy pants bulging at both pockets, and the air so fresh it was like an insult in his nose. “All that money could have been yours.” He said this very sorrowfully, as if he was on Ian’s side.

Not knowing what Ian had been offered, Harold had sold the land to Helinkiscor for a quick twenty-five thousand dollars. Putting the road on this side of Good Friday Mountain would save the company some fourteen million dollars.

Annette was throwing up in the bathroom when Ian entered the house. Harold Dew had phoned her and told her what he had done.

The land had been taken away from Ian and he got nothing at all. He went into the small den and sat down, surrounded by magazines.

She came to see him, opened her mouth to speak, but no words came.

He looked up to see her standing in the door. She had not dressed all day, and her robe was open—she had nothing on underneath, and her naked body was still too beautiful for him to gaze at long because he had never deserved it, and he now knew this.

“Oh God, Ian,” she said, “what have you done? Dear Ian, what have you done to us all!”

She stood in her nakedness before him, in her beautiful nakedness, her face flushed, her eyes closed, tears running down her cheeks.

In fact, Annette Brideau’s tragedy would begin now.

A month or more passed.

In Clare’s Longing, Harold Dew sat up late. Yes, he had been forgotten by Ian and Annette. They had thought he was far in their past—a shadow, a ghost no longer noticeable in their lives. But now they were beginning to wake up. Now they were beginning to see things for the way they were!

Now, though he in his lucid moments knew he wasn’t Liam’s father, in some way known only to himself he
was
the father, and Annette had cheated him out of a son. Long ago he had secretly plotted to take Evan’s traps, and look what had happened; now he had Ian’s land—so he should let it go.

But he thought: One more thing and I’ll be done with them for good. One more thing—and then Liam will come to live with me.

So that night, cold with shadows on the ground from the glimmering roadway light, a man walked toward the old grey farmhouse with its tattered shed and barn, those frameworks bent and twisted down, gone hollow even before the Korean War.

The young man was dressed in a sheepskin coat with a woollen collar pulled up, and his blond hair wavy and combed back. His eyes were dark and his face chiselled in a kind of youthful toughness. He had dark workboots on his feet, the heels of which heightened him by almost two inches to just under six feet four. He was Rueben Sores, Evan Young’s half-brother. He believed in nothing and therefore he was free.

He had been called to come to this house by Harold Dew.

He walked onto the soft and dark veranda, where a thought of riches once had been, and even here it drifted in the stifled cold and boredom of a place lonely and faraway. He knocked on the heavy door. A muffled voice was heard inside. He entered to the tinkle of a doorbell.

There in the kitchen, abiding the time by an out-of-date calendar, Harold sat, with his feet in a pail of hot grey water and a woollen blanket draped over his shoulders.

He waved Rueben forward and shifted the table light to look at him. He spoke to Rueben Sores about a clandestine campaign against the one who had taken his money and his fiancée.

“He lost the land—the road has started—all as he has left is his quest to be MLA. So tear down his posters, kill his campaign!” he said in a hoarse whisper, the way he had spoken now for a number of months.

“I don’t know if I want to do that. Besides, his campaign is done for anyhow,” Rueben said, for Rueben had in some respects always clung to a sense of honour.

Harold took out some money—two hundred dollars.

“Why not? It has to be done when he is down—that’s when to kick his nuts off.”

Rueben looked at the money, hesitated, and picked it up. Harold licked his large White Owl cigar and lit it.

“If you disrupt him enough, I will get you a truck to haul wood from the Bonny Joyce.”

Then Harold went to the door, his wet feet marking a trail, as Rueben was walking away; and holding the door open, so the kitchen light shone on both his bare wet feet and a patch of snow, whispered thus: “Light a fire—we’ll see what happens to him without his store.”

Rueben nodded, and said nothing. He set out to meet two young friends, Spenser and Kyle, both reliant upon him for drugs (for that is the bond that glued so many). They went to the tavern across the river in Chatham and planned what they might do to disrupt the campaign.

“The campaign is wrong for the whole river,” Rueben said. “It’s a shame. Is your brother trying to get work up there?”

“Yes,” Spenser said.

“Well then, it’s awful. So is mine. You see, he stole his money to buy the store from Harold.”

“He did?”

Rueben nodded.

It became a solemn and moral moment occasioned by the town’s revulsion of Ian Preston.

“Get his boy,” Kyle said, as if this was a brave thing. “Give him a whack or two.”

Spenser nodded at this: “Yes, get the boy.”

Rueben was silent.

They wore their woods vests, their eyes glassy. Each of them had steel-toed boots and a good luck charm in his pocket.

“Tomorrow, then!”

Liam continued to protect his father’s posters:
VOTE FOR IAN PRESTON. STOP THE THEFT OF BONNY JOYCE—FOR OUR FUTURE
.

After school on March 26, Liam had climbed a snowbank and on to the pole nearest the lane that led to his house, to try to protect one of them. And he had other posters in his hand, which had been torn down by other schoolchildren.

“What future?” Kyle asked, walking toward him.

“Ya, what future if there is no work now?” Spenser said. “How much yer daddy pay you?”

He did not know who they were.

Rueben needed to say nothing, and stood behind a shed smoking, with the light of afternoon still strong on the sidewalks and the snow. He only needed to feel justified. And since he believed Ian Preston had cheated both Harold and his own half-brother, Evan, he did.

“The mill will ruin the river. It’s what my dad said …” Liam answered.

“Yer dad—yer dad is a criminal,” Spenser scoffed, and not a tooth showed in his head while his stringy hair fell in front of his eyes.

“He’s a gutless puke, yer daddy. He run from my dad down at the piles.”

Liam was asked three times to give up his signs. But he refused and turned to go home. The street was darkening. And the houses were silent. And then, so sudden it took the wind from him, he was thrown to the road by Kyle and slapped by young Spenser Rogue. They kicked him twice in the side, but he still hung on to his posters. Then they grabbed him by the hood and hauled him backward across the street, as the day orbed toward darkness. Still he would not let go.

“Get some matches and burn them out of his hands,” Kyle said. He
lit the last three matches he had, and held them until the glassy posters caught afire. It smelled of evening now, of some vague kindle and spark, the sky solemn and whitening to dark.

“Singe his hair!” And Kyle lit the boy’s hair until it crinkled and a patch of it whispered and blackened.

With the posters burning, Liam held on to them, until his hands started to burn.

“Kick his face.”

So Spenser kicked his face. Finally Rueben came over and threw them off—anxious about what they had done to the child.