Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  But people relied upon him, and his one ambition was to work hard and keep his mouth shut. In fact, people went to the store where he worked because of Ian—his expertise in dealing with electricity and plumbing and all things of that nature was natural and profound. Soon customers were asking to deal solely with him. He found himself indispensable. It was at this time he was offered another interview for a job at the mill. He declined in a stiff, formal fashion. He remembered and hated the personnel manager with his wavy hair and small red tie. His bosses at the store knew about this and raised his salary twice. So he knew that someday—somehow—he would save enough to buy the huge appliance store he worked in. He began thinking that someday he would own his own house too.

  The store owners were two elderly brothers, who had over the years borne a grudge against each other to the point where they did not speak. Many times Ian would have to act as a go-between, and he became familiar with their finances and knew about the younger brother’s desire to sell. This brother muttered to Ian many times during that long first winter, and then into the second, that if he could find a buyer, he would convince his brother to sell.

  So Ian began to save toward this eventuality.

  All through his adolescence and into manhood, Evan Young had his hopes set on buying the old Jameson sawmill, and he had often walked up to the siding to view it, to walk its grounds, to stumble over its buried artifacts used by men dead a generation ago. He had been inside it many times, always in secret—for he wanted no one else to get ideas about it. That is, as old and decrepit as it was, to him it was a treasure. But over the last few months something had come up. Lonnie Sullivan had been to the grounds twice.

  For seven years, the estate that paid the taxes upon the mill had offered it for sale. No one had even looked at it. But now Lonnie thought he might buy it and sell it for scrap, and he was in the process of deciding if it was worth it. Evan kept silent when there was any mention of the mill, because he did not want to give his plan away. But Lonnie knew his plan, and just for torment decided one cold spring day to buy it out from under him. For there was always money to be made some way.

  So Evan knew if he was to own the mill, he had to buy it now. But where would Evan get the money? He was in worse financial straits than he had been three years before, with no prospects to get out from under. That is, he owed at least nine hundred dollars to Lonnie for loans he was trying to work off. So there was only one possible way. There was only one place to get the money: from Joyce Fitzroy, the person who had once offered him that money years before.

  Evan knew that if Harold got Fitzroy’s money, Annette and he would have it gone in a year. He had watched them from a distance, and knew this was the truth of it. Whereas he was certain he could both borrow and return this money to Fitzroy, and have the mill turn out finished product, in eighteen months. Then, if Fitzroy wanted to will his money to Harold, he could still do that.

  Yet Evan felt he needed someone to go with him if he was to broach the subject with Fitzroy. That is, as strong and as powerful a man as Evan was, he felt he had no ability to position himself as being different than society saw him to be. He was frightened to ask Fitzroy on his own. But he knew someone who seemed to have this trait he needed—that is, a clear vision about his own will. Evan needed someone sure of himself to come with him as support: a man who had thrown away booze at seventeen and said he would never again take a drink.

  So two years after Ian had started to work for Craig Electric, Evan Young showed up at the store. He stood inside the door, a huge man in work clothes and heavy boots, and asked Ian if he would like to go hunting.

  I suppose neither one knew the other was longing for money to go into business. Yet the one thing both men possessed that trumped everything else was honesty.

  Three years ago, as he’d left the mill that did not hire him, Ian had said to the smiling personnel officer, “You will never cut on Bonny Joyce.” And soon after that, he had started a group called “Save the Joyce.” He wore a suit and tie to the conservation meetings, and spoke to retired coast guard captains, widows, two men who lived together at Grey’s Brook, and a former teacher of mathematics, Miss Finn, who was now seventy-nine years of age. These people not only admired Ian Preston but somehow believed he could do whatever he said he could. Evan, in a way, thought this as well.

  So Evan met Ian that day with a particular request in mind. To have Ian come with him to Fitzroy and help him argue his case for the loan. Evan had decided he could sooner or later put twelve men and three women to work at the mill. He would cut out what lumber he needed from the area below where Ian’s concern lay, and this, in fact, would help re-growth. He felt this is what Ian could explain to Joyce Fitzroy, who was against cutting on the Bonny Joyce as well.

  Evan knew that a single sawmill had never been Ian’s or anyone else’s concern; the worry was over the huge pulp and paper mills mainly owed by foreigners, mills that would come in and clear-cut a place down to the ground A sawmill, on the other hand, was looked upon as being the most traditional and the most caring way to use a forest.

  “I know I asked you late, but was thinking if you could make it, we’d go up to my camp and hunt awhile,” Evan said.

  “I don’t have a rifle anymore.”

  “I have a shotgun and you can use that. It was Harold’s—that little .410.”

  “How did you get that from him?” Ian asked, because he remembered the shotgun and its beautiful stock and silver barrel. “He wouldn’t give it away?”

  “He did not give it away—I won it. On one horseshoe toss—my old Chevy car for the shotgun.”

  But Evan did not complete this story—that is, he did not tell Ian that Annette had prodded Harold all afternoon into doing this, because she wanted a car to ride in and Harold was a great horseshoe player. But he lost on that toss. Annette could never have imagined how much that shotgun meant to Harold Dew.

  Ian agreed to go hunting on one condition: he had to be back by Friday morning for business in town. So the two men went to the camp deep in the black woods near the south branch of the Sevogle. The sun shone lonely through the cabin’s one window, and the wind rattled it half the afternoon. Ian took four birds that day at dusk and went back to the cabin, took the breasts from them, placed the guts and feathers in a bag, then cut up onions and green peppers, carrots and potatoes, and made a stew.

  But it was long after dark when Evan Young arrived back.

  Ian went to the front of the cabin with a lantern, and watched his friend carry his nine-point buck into the front of the yard. Evan must have been far away because Ian hadn’t even heard the shot.

  The night was warm, and smoke drifted out over a space near the lake. They had the buck hoisted and were taking off the hide. Evan did this with a small buck knife, starting at the hind legs and cutting a strip away to the haunches, and then rolling the hide back from the fat. The two men talked in special and spectacular ways, in an idiom that was peculiar to the river. Evan spoke of having to defend his mother, of being alone from the time he was seven, of always wanting something better and not knowing how to attain it. He finished by saying he was about to ask Molly to marry him. He was hoping to be married in a month.

  “It’s about time,” Ian said.

  Evan paused, flustered, then looked at Ian with great seriousness. “Well, if I ask you for a favour—would you help me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, I want you as best man, and you could put in a good word for me … Would you? It is the biggest favour I’d ever ask you, and I’ll help you in return, in any way I can.”

  “Of course—when?”

  “This Monday—come down!” Young said quickly. And then, determined not to give away his reasons, for he wanted nothing, not a word, to get back to Sullivan, he said little else. “Please come down,” is all he said. “I will wait for you. And then I will tell you what the favour is.”

  Over the years that followed, Ian Preston always maintai
ned that he thought the support Evan sought was for Molly’s hand in marriage, not for Fitzroy’s money. And the fact becomes more and more apparent as time passes that Evan did not tell Ian what this request was—not at all. I have wrestled with this riddle myself, in classes I taught when I came back to the university here—for I vainly used those boys as subjects—until I saw how little the clever people I taught respected the subjects I spoke about. Some young ladies in my class came to their conclusions by saying, “I wouldn’t have anything to do with any of them.”

  Or: “I wouldn’t clutter my life up with people like Evan Young, or anyone else from there.” Yes, with a grandly schooled middle-class sniff of disapproval—the first of many tyrannies associated with liberty.

  Still, my classes did reach this conclusion: that Ian never knew what Evan wanted from him. After all, Ian was to be best man, so it was not inconceivable that Evan would want him to approach Molly about his feelings. He didn’t know that Evan was asking for another favour. He thought that Evan, after all these years, and about to be married, had now come to ask for his friend’s good word.

  So Ian decided he would wear his suit jacket, and his new fashionable pink shirt and his big yellow tie, and speak to Molly about Evan. Perhaps, he thought, he would bring a bottle of Mateus wine down to celebrate, even though he himself did not drink. So he bought a bottle of Mateus. And maybe he would bring some of that new cheese that he liked. So he bought some Gouda cheese as well. And maybe he would tell Evan and Molly how he was saving for the store, pinching every penny.

  But nothing like this happened.

  Evan Young never got those funds; and neither did the man who most coveted them, and thought of them as his, Harold Dew.

  Ian Preston, who I maintain never knew about this money, did, however, acquire it all.

  Ian Preston worked at the big electrical appliance store for one reason: if you had no connections in town, you were dead at the mill. It was that simple. People here will deny that. But people will deny anything that makes them look weak and selfish. They will parade their paycheques and their cars, their camps on the river, and many will not take the time to think that they never managed to do one independent thing in their lives, that they were both selfish and vain, as were their wives, believing that the cheques would never stop, when in fact the thousands of acres of moulted and thrashed timber was their own death warrant.

  So Ian hated the mill. He hated its smell. He hated its smoke. Everything about it irritated him. He could not stand that so many of the men who worked there, not half as bright as he, made much more money by killing the very land they were born to; and he hated that they were men who all their lives had been told what to do by outsiders and how and when to do it, and they did so without question. That they would scrape and bow and cheat in order to be the number-two man on a paper machine.

  But here is why he disliked the mill even more: he disliked it because of the man who did not hire him. He could never forget that man’s smile and thin wavy hair, the picture of his wife and family on his desk, the pin that said he belonged to the Kinsmen.

  What has he ever done to deserve this power over me? Ian would think. And he would dream of a day when he could pay that man back. That is, even his conservation group was formed to pay that man back. And everything he decided about how he would stop the mill was to pay that man back. He secretly knew this about himself. And twice he’d had meetings with the minister of the environment to relay his concerns about the greatest tract of timber in the north, the Bonny Joyce tract; and twice the minister had assured him that no cutting would be done along that stretch. And yet both times Ian was a little disappointed—for he actually wanted a confrontation with that man, and he wanted to tell everyone at the mill to go to hell.

  Two months before Evan visited him, Ian had discovered that the family he worked for wanted to sell the store he worked at. Now all his energies were directed toward one point: Ian wanted to buy this store to prove to himself he was better than those men at the mill, to prove he was better than that man who took his application and smiled and never thought of him again.

  But now, looking over the notes I have written on these three blood brothers, I will jump ahead just a bit.

  The store Ian Preston soon owned refurbished second-hand appliances. It was a very good, sound business. He had many new appliances for sale. But he also received second-hand goods twice a month, and worked to make them ready to sell. He also sold gyprock and plywood, cupboards and cedar and roofing shingles—and therefore he relied upon economic benefits from the mill he hated. This was the quagmire he was in, a quagmire that he did not admit to. And that was the flaw in his “progressive” stance. He believed the only thing he wanted was to save the river basin and the prime wood that stretched back beyond Good Friday Mountain. This is where he pulled the wool over his own eyes. And this was to become his fight with the very town he had adopted and loved.

  So what happened to Ian after he and Evan went hunting?

  Ian had to be back on the Friday to go to the bank and see about a loan to buy the store. And so, on that Friday, he travelled from one bank to the other. He began in the morning and ended late that afternoon. Yet, as everyone knows, he was refused in each bank.

  Here is what every banker saw: This was young Ian Preston from way back on Bonny Joyce Ridge who had worked himself to exhaustion and now wanted to buy a store on his own. What would they look like giving him a loan? The store would go to ruin, and they’d be laughing stocks. Besides, he was asking for far too much money without any collateral.

  As Ian sat in the offices with loan officers, all this became apparent to him. It left him desolate. And now he had to go down to Bonny Joyce and witness on Evan’s behalf to Molly Thorn. But, as bad as he felt, this is what he was prepared to do. That is, he was prepared for Evan’s and Molly’s sakes to be as joyous and as celebratory as he could be.

  And then, while there in Bonny Joyce, Ian suddenly secured his loan from a man he’d never thought had any money—an old man who was just enough of a relative to say yes to the $125,000 he needed. The man wanted only to be a partner until he died.

  This man, Joyce Fitzroy, lived another four years.

  People later said Ian had cheated the old man, who had Alzheimer’s disease. Everyone said it; it did not matter if it was true or not. And it was true that the old man had Alzheimer’s—but not when Ian got the loan. Still, he had used an illiterate old man for gain—and if any of that was true, then he was a conniver. And more to the point, a Bonny Joyce conniver, which meant that he’d always been that way—that was the interpretation. It was said that he had got Joyce Fitzroy drunk and had stolen the money—though Ian himself did not drink. That fact was really the mark of Cain—it showed the calculation involved in this conniving.

  Soon people became very righteous in speaking against Ian Preston. Someone so crooked shouldn’t be allowed to swagger into town with money and set himself up in business, they said. He was in a way like the robber baron they hated, or like Lord Beaverbrook himself—one day broke, and looked upon as having a trade in town; the next buying out people and reinventing himself. So Ian was distrusted after this. Especially when those who knew Joyce Fitzroy—and knew him to be a stubborn man who lived alone in a house with three rooms—saw the old man out in the winter in a frayed sweater, chopping his own wood for the wood stove that was his only source of heat.

  Evan and Harold heard the rumours in the town swirling against Ian and believed them all. Evan distrusted Ian ever afterwards, and so too did Harold. Both of them became bitter in ways that were to cause enormous difficulty. Both felt betrayed in equal measure, and both felt more injured because they were Ian’s blood brothers.

  “I will ruin him one day,” Harold boasted. “I will.” He said this to Annette as if she too should relish the idea of ruining Ian. But after listening to Harold rant, she would whisper to herself: He is crazy as a bag of hammers. And her knees would begin to shake. Then Har
old would begin to break things around the house—once he threw an armchair down the stairs. He said he might cut Annette’s ears off; and then he said he was just fooling about cutting her ears off. “I must have been drunk when I said it—don’t believe what I say when I’m drunk!”

  He’s a lunatic, Annette thought. I am going to marry a man who is a raving lunatic. Already a lunatic and he is only young. And he is poor besides. I am going to marry a poor young lunatic. What happens when he gets old? I will be married to an old lunatic. In her little life, she had no one else to turn to. So, scared and defenceless, she went to speak to Lonnie.

  Lonnie said nothing for the longest time. But he thought about how his plan—the plan he had to use Annette—had come to nothing. And now he was disappointed in her.

  “Well, where then is the money?” Lonnie asked Annette. “Look what you got yourself into. I told you not to—I told you, didn’t I? He’s a madman. From what I heard, manic depression runs in his family.”

  “Runs in his family?”

  “The whole lot of them, manic-depressives. Might kill someone, that Harold. I told you one hundred times to stay away from him.”

  “I don’t remember,” Annette said, leaning forward with her forehead in her hand. “But I am engaged to him, and I will see it through.”

  “See it through—good for you. But I am often worried about you.”

  “Worried about me?”

  “Well, how will you cope down at Clare’s Longing? You think you can cope down there? Living where four generations of fuckin’ Dews have lived and died and fought over every morsel of food? That’s no way for my favourite girl to live.”