On October 30 he called Hank Robb into the shed, into the back room, where he looked over the receipts he kept in the drawer and threw Robb’s severance at him: eighty-nine dollars. The other two fared better than Hank Robb: both had jobs offered to them within a month, and nothing Lonnie said about them stuck. But with Hank Robb it was different. He was considered a disgrace to begin with. I know, for he was my uncle; and in that way, I am connected. Robb went into a grave depression, and three times he brought his daughters with him to the shed and asked for his job back, using the daughters as leverage without a voice, their presence more conspicuous than their little bodies could imagine.
“Ahhh. If I got up from this here seat at this here moment, on this here afternoon with this here cigar in my mouth—you would run hind yer daughters and let them be beat for you,” Lonnie said the third time Hank came begging him.
“I wouldn’t,” Hank said. But he was trembling and alone. He was scared and sad and defeated.
And from what I have heard, as soon as Lonnie stood up, Hank ran and hid behind his daughters; and what is more, little Sara Robb tried to protect him.
Hank Robb’s torment was exacerbated by the deliberate taunts of others, some of whom had said they would stand with him if he took up the cause. And when he left the cold shed at night, holding his daughters by the hand, his former compatriots not only ignored him but enjoyed doing so. With the dwindling of the money, with the absence of work and with the idea, constant and unremitting, of his own shame, he began his drinking again, after seven years away from the bottle.
Before Christmas that year, Hank Robb drove his car off the Portage Bridge with his family still inside. The incident didn’t make many papers. My mother phoned me when I was in Boston, and asked me to please, whatever I did, stay away from the funeral.
One child, Ethel Robb, lived because of the courage of her sister Sara, who, shattering her left leg with the effort, kept Ethel’s head above water in the submerged car. Joyce Fitzroy happened by, and was able to rescue them both. Hank Robb was dead on impact.
“Why I came this way—why I walked down toward the river—for the life of God I do not know,” Joyce Fitzroy was heard saying later, wrapped in a blanket and drinking a cup of tea.
After that, Sara went from one doctor’s office to the other, in her one print dress, to try to repair her shortened leg, but it could not be done. She went to Dr. Mackenzie many times in the days just before Mackenzie retired. But except for the doctor taking off her sock, and tickling her foot on the bottom until she giggled, nothing more was done.
Then these visits to the doctor’s stopped and a kind of whimsical tragedy set into her lively little face and features. Soon she rarely went out at all—or only at night. For she was teased about her leg and how she walked—never by the majority, yet we all know the world is not made up of the majority and never has been.
Neither Harold, Evan nor Ian teased her.
But others did, and would.
I will skip ahead now by a few years.
Annette Brideau was Sara Robb’s friend, and liked to tell people that she was. It showed her to be kind and thoughtful, and she liked this too—that is, she liked that with Sara tagging along, limping behind her, she would be thought of as kind and thoughtful. And indeed, she could be both kind and thoughtful when she wanted to be, or had to be.
Annette Brideau was the same age as those three boys, and she was also beautiful. At fifteen she scraped together what she could to dress like twenty. Her heritage came from the very earth and trees around her, from where she was born. The trouble was, and it was not entirely her fault, she was often enticed to do mischief, and to be mischievous against her better nature, or in contest with someone else, to prove that she, Annette Brideau, did not have to follow rules. Then she would go to church and pretend to pray and look at the statues and declare she would do better.
Many times her mother took a belt to her. Many times people could hear her screeching as she was whacked. Then the house would go silent and the beaten child would remain inside, upstairs in her small room, where the roof angled over the porch. Many times I have heard that her mother, pious and respectable, was jealous of Annette’s beauty and of how so many youngsters loved her.
But her willful nature would overcome her, and Annette would find herself once again doing something she should not. And this led to a pivotal moment in our story. It happened in a small room at the convent on a spring day when she was in grade eleven. Annette was caught cheating on exams. (I sometimes wonder, did it matter that it happened at this moment in her life—that she was not caught cheating on her English exam the day before, or her mathematics exam the day after? Is there any answer to these things?)
She had cheated at school many times since grade eight, and many times her marks showed how competent her cheating was. She had the answers to questions about the Carthaginians written on some pieces of paper and was busy saying the rosary as she wrote, praying seriously while peeking into her sleeve. Mother Saint Silvia realized Annette had never prayed so ferociously before; she made her stand in front of the others, between two rows of old black grade-school desks, and searched her roughly, patting her breasts and hips while the child squirmed and others watched.
“Give—me those—notes, Annette! You behave! Those notes—where are they? I will—take—a ruler to your—fingers!”
Finally the small pathetic crib notes fell to the floor, and Annette was pushed to the door.
“Leave,” Sister Silvia shrieked. “Down the hall to Mother Saint Beatrice—NOW!”
“Go to hell,” Annette called back, “go to hell—all of you,” as she ran, the two books in her arms falling as she herself fell against the corridor wall.
“Go to Mother Saint Beatrice!”
But Annette did not go. She ran down the long hallway, down the back stairs and onto the side lane. There, her face filled with hot and furious tears, she took the apple from her lunch bag and threw it at the door.
She did not want to go home; she wanted to run—away.
She crossed the street at exactly ten in the morning and stood with her thumb out, hitching a ride. And in fact, this ride changed her life. But of course, like so much else, this would not be known for some years to come.
Hitchhiking back downriver she was given a drive by Lonnie Sullivan himself, who had just come from getting his hair cut at Nick’s.
Annette began to tell him about Sister Silvia, and how awful she was. And then she played with the dial of his truck radio. And then she took a cigarette when he offered her one. And then she took a drink of wine. And then Lonnie said, “Never mind nuns—nuns are worthless creatures most of the time. I have a job for you.”
“I will have to ask my mom and dad.”
“Well, you can if you want—but in fact you don’t have to ask no one. I will tell them, so you won’t have to. I’ll pay you good and treat you right—and that will be the end of the convent and Sister Silvia. Let your parents say what they want—I think you should do what I say.”
So Annette Brideau took a job at Lonnie Sullivan’s, filing certain papers in his big cabinet, answering the phone, cleaning up at the end of each week, both the bathroom and the office, and being at his beck and call to make him a sandwich or find him a drink of pop. She learned to type a letter or two, and to put his to-do lists in order. And he seemed to be appreciative and like her a good deal.
She would go home at night, and for the first time she was allowed out after nine o’clock. That is when she began to wear makeup and perfume. That is when the Annette we all know began to emerge. By this time, those three boys were often at the work shed as well, and for the most part she ignored them. That is, she seemed much older than they. But all of them looked at her and spoke to one another about her—for they could not help it. Of the three, Evan seemed far less interested in her than the other two. But the other two could not, for the life of them, take their eyes off her when she walked. And for the life of
her, she could not help but notice this as well.
One day Lonnie asked Annette, as they played their third game of checkers, to watch those three boys and pick who she thought would succeed. Would it be Ian Preston, Evan Young or Harold Dew? Whoever she picked, he said, he would be kinder to and help more. That is, whoever she picked he would pick too, to be his favourite around the shop. “Can you pick the one who will succeed?”
“It is Harold,” she said. “He is the one who I would put money on.”
“If you had any money, Annette,” Lonnie said, biting away at his cigar.
“Yes, if I had any money, it would be him I put me money on!” she said wistfully and with a kind of adolescent regret as she moved a checker, which Lonnie quickly jumped. “But I never have any money—and Daddy doesn’t even give me an allowance like the other kids.”
Lonnie laughed, looked at his cigar philosophically and shrugged. “You might be right about Harold—you might be indeed right!” Then he stretched and said he did not wish to play anymore.
Lonnie was a philosopher. He spoke endlessly about the plight of others—determined not only to look wise, with his cigar, and seem wise with his cigar smoke, but in fact to be wise, with and without the cigar.
At that time, the three boys worked in very dangerous places for measly wages, and did so with the exuberance of youth. Sometimes they worked up on Good Friday Mountain in the blinding and terrifying snow. They earned about twenty-eight dollars a week working after school and on holidays from the last of November until December 23, cutting and hauling Christmas trees and piling them on Lonnie’s two trucks to sell in the lots in town. Then, during the Christmas holidays, they would stand in the lot from seven in the morning until eleven at night, selling trees at two dollars a foot.
But there was a pivotal moment on the ridge near Good Friday summit. They got caught up in the terrible ice storm of 1974 and stayed together in a small shelter they had constructed. This storm happened late in the winter of that year, in March, when many people were known to have died from the cold.
Lonnie had sent the boys up to the ridge—and people later said it was on purpose, knowing they might die, and to see if they would or wouldn’t. But that wasn’t the case. Lonnie simply had an abundance of ignorance about what he put his workers through. He may have been selfish and vain, but he wanted no one dead.
He went home and ate dinner, and simply didn’t think about where his boys were.
They were stuck for three days, and no one went to find them because Lonnie did not report that they were missing, and their families, thinking they were sleeping safe in Lonnie’s bunkhouse, made no inquiry. They almost froze and had almost nothing to eat—for they were supposed to have returned at noon two days before.
It was then and there that they became blood brothers. They challenged one another to be heroic and loyal. Then they each cut a finger with Evan’s buck knife and drew out a spot of blood, that bright sheen of life, and mixed it together. They spoke of Sydney Henderson, who had made a pact with God not to injure, and how others on the flats below, like Mat Pit and the Sheppard boys, tormented him now because this pact made him weak, and they wondered how long he would carry on, and if he would snap out of it and go back to being himself. That is, they thought Sydney’s pact was a desperate sham, just as everyone on the road and along Arron Brook did. Oh, they would never be so careless as to make a pact with a Catholic God they did not know or believe in—and all of them were tough enough not to be bothered by the likes of Mat Pit. Ian, the smallest, was as tough as nails, and an ordinary boy would never want to try him. He had slept in the cold, been alone at nights, walked for miles to earn a dollar—and was known to have thrown a man down an embankment who once made fun of his torn jacket. Ian joined the others in becoming a blood brother that night and mocking Henderson as well.
But it was strange, and I might say even otherworldly, how this Sydney Henderson bothered them, not only that night but for years to come. And this Henderson, I would come to find out, bothered many—at the university and even within the church. So these boys were no different when it came to Henderson than most others in society. Henderson would bother them for the rest of his life, for they would see in him a virtue they would by times try to match and by times undermine. In a certain way, this became their quest.
The darkness pulsed around them, and they saw a vein of fool’s gold that ran in the rocks nearby; and sometimes in the midst of the snowfall thunder rolled and lightning bolted down. And once, when lightning bolted, Harold stood up, his face contorted in wonder, and yelled out, “Kill me now if you will, or forever leave me be.”
He waited, hanging on his own words, his body slightly weaving; if it wove too much, he would tumble two hundred feet into the Arron Brook below. But he not only seemed unworried, he seemed not even aware of the great danger he was in. And he only laughed when the others told him to come back in. They said, with youthful eagerness, “Please watch yourself, boy.”
Harold said he would never fall. And he added, “I challenge God of the weak liar Sydney Henderson, and say it is impossible to kill me without a gun!”
The idea of those who don’t believe in God (or say they don’t) is always to challenge God to prove himself. And this was in fact the mantra of those three that night, as the dark sky produced thunder and lightning in great swirls of angry snow. “God will never bother me—there is not one thing he will do to me. If he couldn’t make me fall, then he won’t make no one else fall either.” And Harold spit his certainty over the side of the cliff.
The other two laughed, not at his statement so much as at his antics. Then they each made a cut and mixed their blood, and the mixed blood dropped into the snow.
And so the blood brothers’ bond came to be without God, and they all of them swore to that as well. They all spit, at the moment of the bond, in the direction of the church.
Let Syd do as he would; they would do as they did, and they would see who triumphed in the end. The challenge seemed worst for Syd: people used to fear him, but now he was mocked and scorned. He had become little and littler in the eyes of the community. Yet not one of the boys thought, in that moment, that their youthful celebration against Syd was in the least convenient. (This is what I much later told my cousin Sara Robb, and my students, those sometime young firebrands at Saint Michael’s University, who longed for truth in a perfect world, a world so perfect it would make us shudder.)
“We won’t be mean to him, or impolite—but we will see. Let’s just see how this will play out from here on in,” Evan said.
The boys looked at one another with carefree exuberance, knowing it was so cold that they might die in that moment. They were thrilled by this thought of their brotherhood. The idea of their pact without God not only enthused but enthralled them. It allowed them the freedom to do what they must—or in time, perhaps, to do what they wanted. They had seen little enough piety in the priest’s weary look to ever think anything could come of religion that wasn’t false and contrived. God: what a way to live; better to die.
So they agreed, although they might face death right here, this terrible night, or they might come out of it—whatever happened, life or death, pitiless or free, they would rely upon one another and no one else.
The night became cold and then colder still, and the small half-cliff they sat on became their universe. The vein of fool’s gold captivated them, shining against the blackness of the cliff with inordinate force, sometimes wrapped in a resplendent gauze of snow. They whiled away the hours, listening to the storm, sharing remnants of stale bread and hamburger almost burned black, and speaking of two things: women they wanted to bed and riches they felt they would someday have. Both Harold and Ian spoke of Annette, but Evan did not; he spoke only of Molly Thorn.
The snow swirled in the great sky above them, covering up all the paths along the great hills. It was as white as the purest soul, and as scattering as gossip.
Yet to those boys stranded half
way up Good Friday Mountain, the meaning of riches was less than what you might imagine. They huddled into one another in the storm. They stared at one another’s boots and hands in the thick darkness and felt the sting of cold and the taste of metal. But they spoke of a future as bright and alive as that of anyone who, at that very moment, was preparing to attend Harvard or Yale in the fall. They thought that if they worked hard, maybe they could earn twenty thousand dollars a year. All of them decided that twenty thousand dollars a year would be the most anyone could want—and to ever want more would be greed. And they agreed they would share all of these riches if they got them. Twenty thousand dollars to these boys was like a million to others. And they had seen one another’s loneliness and poverty through the years.
It was a great thought, and in that moment Shakespeare was right: love did feed on itself.
Evan Young said he would someday have the Jameson sawmill, the mill the Jameson family had owned in the 1920s and ’30s. He would refit it and dedicate his life to making it work. Not only would he bring industry back to Bonny Joyce but a sense of community as well.
Ian Preston said he didn’t know what he wanted to do. Perhaps he would work in town because he was good at fixing appliances and was a fine electrician. Yes, he often thought he would move upriver and work there. This was a town of six thousand people then, a town that was very large compared with what Ian had known.
Harold Dew said he would inherit some money and open up a pawnshop. He had seen the pawnshop Lonnie Sullivan had opened in the late 1960s and he was intrigued by that kind of enterprise. That is, people live according to their own level, and perhaps, even if he made a million, Harold would still need to have the pawnshop to satisfy himself. For in the pawnshop he saw the whole town, and the people in it, and the rise and fall of fortunes, and those who he felt he could know and help. They would all come to him someday, as they did to Lonnie now. And those long, warm, summer days in town with the pawnshop door open, and a breeze blowing the curtains slightly or a fan ticking in the corner, was for Harold the emblem not of success but of peace—something he had never had. He remembered Lonnie’s pawnshop just like that—the items all catalogued, and people coming in with little trinkets or wares to trade—and his feeling was one of calm and fulfillment.
Crimes Against My Brother Page 2