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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Richards, David Adams, 1950-
Crimes against my brother / David Adams Richards.
978-0-385-67116-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-385-67117-0
I. Title.
PS8585.II7C75 2013 C813′.54 C2012-906599-4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover image: © Bruno Ehrs/Corbis
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
FOR PEGGY,
WHO LOVED ENOUGH TO STAND BY ME THROUGH DARKNESS
FOR MY CHILDREN,
WHOSE LOVE BROUGHT ME TO LIGHT
FOR PHILIP AND WALTER LEE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I should note that Sydney Henderson, one of the main characters in Mercy among the Children, plays a minor role in this book. For this novel takes place at the same time, and in the same world, as Mercy and deals with three people who knew Henderson, and of his pact with God. This is what propels them to make a pact with one another. Those who know my world will recognize certain other characters as well—ones who have minor roles in various parts of the text.
This place is fictional, of course—it always has been. The characters too are fictional. If this novel says anything to the reader, it is what I have managed to learn over many years of being a rather solitary figure in Canadian letters: take heart and know that no betrayal is so self-infatuated, self-serving or brutal it cannot, in the end, be overcome.
In great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good.
—Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Epigraph
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART NINE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART ONE
IAN PRESTON HAD SOME GOOD TIMES WITH HIS TWO COUSINS, Evan Young and Harold Dew.
There were two or three things that united them, as if they were tethered together in the hold of a ship.
One, each boy grew to manhood on the Bonny Joyce–Clare’s Longing stretch of the river.
Two, all three knew Joyce Fitzroy and Lonnie Sullivan, all of them had to work for Sullivan and all had a chance at getting Joyce Fitzroy’s inheritance. But the one who didn’t seek it got it. That fact is a strange anomaly in the heavens, one that might make us believe or disbelieve. That is, no matter how things happen, some will say yes, there is a God, and others will say no, this proves no God exists. As for God himself—he has already made up his mind.
I was their cousin too, or at least that is what was said. But I made myself away when young—my mother had that middle-class strain of belief, for the most part full of genteel hypocrisy, that her boy should be better than other boys—and I did not speak of our family relationship with old drunk Joyce Fitzroy, who was an uncle and rumoured to have money; or the local junk wheeler-dealer Lonnie Sullivan, who impoverished so many with his schemes. I escaped that world, and said I would never go back. But these boys, Ian Preston, Evan Young and Harold Dew, each of them every bit as smart as I, grew up in that world and never really escaped it. I remember them in grade two when I was in grade seven, or so says a photo that was taken and laid away; and then in grade seven, when I was in grade twelve, and they were standing together in the snow outside the small shack that was Evan Young’s home; and finally as I got older and was doing my thesis on adolescent angst and trying to get accepted to a college in New York, and taking the train to Yale and seeing myself as a winner, I would remember them and how they grew up without a chance—and how they were supposedly less than me. And I believed this until I saw the other world—that is, the world of the university, which held within its fallow bones its own fecal corruption. And then, after that—after my doctorate and post-doctorate, and after the swimmingly grand success of tenure, and after walking the streets of Madrid in autumn and seeing my work published in small academic journals—I longed again for their world. Yes, longed even, at times, for the pain and blood and remorse of that world. I remembered Sydney Henderson too, and how Ian and Evan and Harold turned against his quest for God—how they ridiculed it; that is, ridiculed how a man as hard and rough in youth as Sydney Henderson could turn to God. Sydney was a joke to them, so they made a joke of it all—just as many others did. But seeing how those boys had so little, I could understand why they would mock him. As you may know, this Sydney Henderson became the study of one book and at least seven theses showing how he longed for God in such a lonely place in spite of the odds.
So I want to tell the story of these three, and how they bashed God in the head and refused to believe, and valued one another above all. People initially thought they professed these things as a jest—a practical joke on the world—but by and by it came to be no joke at all.
I spoke to my students often—all of whom had written their inestimable essays, their left-leaning theories on the dispossessed, their brilliant studies of our disenfranchised, every piece so polished you would think it publishable in The Globe and Mail—about these three. Yet I realized that not one of my students had ever slept in a room with rats walking across the floor like Ian Preston had. Not one of them, at fourteen, had stood up against men coming in at night drunk to fuck his mother, like Evan Young. Not one had carried a water bucket up a gangplank, or tossed wood all day until dark, like Harold Dew. Not one had cut his own wood for the winter, trapped beaver against a black brook, killed an animal with a stick. Or gone at twelve years of age to work for Lonnie Sullivan. That is, even as I taught these students, these pleasant, affable, upwardly mobile young men and women, I wondered what could their inestimable essays ever say beyond what I myself had known in my blood by the time I was ten years old? And why did my mother and father want this for me—this world where I had become something of a figure of merit? To fuss and preen over me when I came home?
And I began to think that since I knew all three, I could relate something of their story that my students might not have caught.
Harold Dew was the biggest. He would go bald at twenty-eight years of age. He would become a hypochondriac and worry all his life about colds or some odd disease taking him off. He would be known from Neguac to Boistown as “Big Harold Dew.” He would be as well known on the river as anyone here, and at times just meeting him would make your day.
Ian Preston was the smallest. His hair was ginger and his face fine—or refined, as if in the pale backwoods some grand nobleman had stopped 143 years before and put down roots near a stream, and built himself a shack. And there in that shack, near some hidden brook, Ian Preston would some
day be born. And when he was, the first rocket ships would be blasting away from the earth while his weak mother would be alone, on a rusted cot, in a soundless room.
Still, though I say this, touching Ian was like touching a piece of steel.
Evan Young was the toughest and kindest. He in some ways was the most enigmatic, the most secretive—perhaps too the smartest.
But all of them were smart—that was the problem. My students would never understand how each one of the three—Harold, Evan and Ian, standing in the snow against an old dark shack, waiting to have a bolt of the moonshine that Joyce Fitzroy ran off—how all of them were smarter, more resilient and more joyful than they.
The three of them, Harold, Evan and Ian, went to work when they were kids for Lonnie Sullivan, who hired boys to work the woods for him, for he could pay them less, and impinge upon their freedoms more and more as the years went on and they accrued more debt. It was an honourable idea: that workers themselves would accrue debt, not for God’s sake the man they were working for. In fact, Ian was told that when his grandfather retired from Benson’s store after forty-seven years of work, the old man had exactly $11.95.
So the boys worked for Sullivan. He would pay them ten dollars—easy enough for boys to live on at the start of a week. But before half the week was over they would want or need more money, and Sullivan would say, “I can give it to you—but you will have to work this long.”
And he would hold out his hands as if it was a joke and say, “You have to work as long as my dick before I can pay you more.” The conditions were always to his benefit. And their working environment at the time was harsher than most. In fact, I knew two dozen boys who worked this way for people much like Sullivan from one side of the river to the other, children who were thrust into the world with few options and little hope of finding ones.
Over those years Lonnie Sullivan had a host of women. He impregnated more than a few—usually widows or old spinsters, many older than he was. I know this now for it was researched in depth by one of my students, Ann Marie Delong, and she came up with many things—old baptisms and confirmations—that told a tale. The tale of long ago. That is, it was part of his nature to start out helping those he would eventually inflict with pain; that is, his great broad back and happy-go-lucky wave would seem like a blessing—for a tiny while.
From what I see, it started years ago, when he got the local contract to plow snow. He was a man of thirty-eight or thirty-nine then, unattached, big, brawling and loud.
Sullivan would use his snowplow to help certain women out. That is, he wouldn’t charge them a cent. He’d clear those roadways and drives with his old plow, the smell of diesel in the air and the pipe stack billowing out against the cold. He would park his tractor with the plow up, and let it idle as he went up the stairs of country houses; and he’d stay for an hour or two, sometimes leaving close to midnight. There were at least three women in their forties, widows with school-age children, making do on pensions, whom he impregnated and then left to fend for themselves in the boggy lands below us. They would end up terrified of him in some way—understanding too late that he meant nothing with his endearments. In so many ways, this was talked about and laughed at. And those women were left by themselves, alone in a house off some dark winter turn along the road.
Still, Sullivan’s main interest was in repossessing things from people who owed him for loans he gave at a horrible rate. This was a broad business and took him from one side of the river to the other, winter and summer, and indentured many. There was a story that he had knocked up Mrs. Brideau and left her husband to take care of the child. And this child was Annette Brideau. Most of us came to realize that this story was false, simple gossip, and as harsh as gossip can be in a small town—a story that made the rounds because the husband was a weak man who Sullivan often bullied. But Sullivan did have a certain power over this girl, just as he did over most others he knew for most of his life.
I met Annette when I was young, around the same time I first noticed these three boys whose story I am telling. I did not know what role she would play in their lives, or how their lives would play out in my life—or how I would come to view them at first as unsavoury backwoods examples of Bonny Joyce, and then come to recognize in all of them, after a time, my own history’s brutal and tender blood, hidden as it may be under my suit and tie.
Annette was an only child and from the age of fourteen a strutting beauty—and she could not help this. She could no more help commanding attention than a meteor bursting out of the dark air, or a metaphor so beautiful you put it in a song. Lonnie Sullivan had many youngsters hanging about him, but she was his favourite, and she designed to be his favourite from the first—just as she designed to be everyone’s favourite as much as she could. Nothing exemplifies rural life more than those who with longing and hope want, in one fashion or another, to escape it.
No matter how he spoke about helping others, Sullivan committed offences against these people, almost clandestine, almost whimsical and almost unnoticed—a dollar here, a quart of oil there, a mistake in numbers that lessened your pay or a bill you paid back in agony and destitution that was not counted in your favour. Sullivan would sniff and shrug when you tried to plead your case. Or look hurt when you happened to catch him in a lie. But this was true: it could happen in any life, urban or rural. And Sullivan from the first moment he spoke to someone—as he stood in his office with a cigar in his mouth—never really hid his intention. We must, in some way, give him that.
I discovered this next part of the story almost by accident—and have no reason to disbelieve or discount it. It starts out one early spring long ago, with a thousand board feet of lumber that Sullivan told Ceril Palmer he could have to redo the back of his house. But when it came time for Ceril to take it, Sullivan demanded the price be deducted from his pay. A pay that had been withheld since April 15.
“I have had enough of your lies,” Palmer said.
“I have never told a lie,” he answered, and went in and closed the office door with a quick snap of the lock.
The quick snap of the lock allowed some to think Sullivan was frightened. It was a careless assumption.
Over the next month or so certain of those men came together and plotted their revenge like you would an assassination. Where to do it, who would be involved and how to get it done consumed many people for a long time. Sullivan had six men who worked for him full-time, and at least four of them were included in this conspiracy.
In mid-May a Barryville man attacked him, punching him off his milk box at a horse haul at the community centre. Wearing a white shirt and tie, and heavy old suit jacket and frayed suit pants as part of his obligation as president of the Bonny Joyce Community Centre, Sullivan stood and fought back with two quick punches to the ribs and a left hook, delivered so fast and hard that he left his opponent prone on the ground. And the two others waiting to attack, seeing their biggest ally stunned, left off and moved away. In fact, they snuck away in the confusion of the crowd and loitered together behind the tents.
This was always remembered by us as a strange and pivotal moment in Lonnie Sullivan’s life.
There was a sickening pause as the man lay there, beaten, his blood on the dirt, unconscious, like a sleeping child, with Lonnie Sullivan standing above him in triumph. But how in triumph—in what way was it a triumph? It was the triumph of a great man burdened by sudden betrayal, and looking from side to side to see who he might or might not implicate, and wondering about those who now stood together behind the dinner tent. The look in his eyes, and on his brooding, callous face, was almost depraved, and everyone spoke of it later.
Few ever bothered Big Lonnie again. Yet he was hurt by this incident, deep in his soul. He smoked his cigars in the dark by his work shed. He accepted no offers of copper or tin roofing, but whiled away his time playing crazy eights with a boy who came by. And it was then, while talking to this boy, Harold Dew, that he decided he would hire boys instead of men. T
hat he would reorganize his little empire, and it would be “done right this time.”
And a week later he sent Harold Dew to find out who had set up this attack on him.
“You come back with that information and I will be in your debt—and it is a debt I will carry,” he said. He said this most solemnly, and with great feeling.
So Harold left the shed. I saw him as he walked away, seemingly almost stunned by a certain obligation, incurious and detached as he looked at me and passed by, nodding only at the last moment in recognition that I had come home from my college courses. He disappeared down the road, a youth conditioned already to be who he was and nothing else, already blunt, brutal and brave.
Harold went back to see his mentor in the rain three days later, as drizzle was falling off the porch roof. He had one name to offer—a name he had heard while playing horseshoes, and that he’d carried with him until he found out the other names.
Hank Robb. Hank Robb and two others had set up this attack.
“Ahhh,” was all Lonnie Sullivan said, “ahhh”—as if spellbound, as if he had known it even before he sent the boy to find out. As if he believed he had done so much good, and so much injury had come to him because of it.
But for some long time—some many excruciating days and weeks—Lonnie Sullivan seemed to do nothing. Hank Robb and the other men came and went from work, and the endless days tagged onto one another, filling the void with agitation and worry, until Sullivan had settled not only on who might have done it but on how he might gain retribution. And so when he had blackballed the men from any opportunity for a job or other employment—from the piles to the wharf, from Neguac to Doaktown—he called them to come see him. The first he called into the office on October 27; the second, on the twenty-eighth. Then he waited a day, to let the last one suffer and not know.
Crimes Against My Brother Page 1