Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  Evan waited, solitary and alone, more alone now than he ever had been, to get his two small black pelts back. He looked at his dark hands with the big wide thumbs and dragged on his smoke in silence, knowing he and Harold might come to blows and Harold was a tough man. But Evan was a tough man as well.

  However, he saw no one come along that blank stretch of black icy road, and eventually he went home. He went home and sat for supper of homemade macaroni and cheese. And he rolled himself a cigarette and put the child on his knee. He knew Harold had seen him first and gone in another direction. Part of him said: Let this go—it is Harold and you used to be his friend, and he is desperate. But part of him would not or could not allow this. Being betrayed by a former friend before, he chose not to be betrayed again, no matter what Harold thought he had done.

  After supper he went out and tried to fix the radiator in his car, the lantern hanging over the hood in accordance with a particular kind of destitution. There was a smell of raw metallic evening, a kind of tininess in the hollow frozen air around him now.

  But the theft of the pelts bothered him. He could not let it go.

  Perhaps he might have let it go in earlier days, before his luck went bad and before Ian had cheated him. But he knew that this would never have happened had his luck not deserted him.

  He breathed in his cigarette’s languid smoke then exhaled, watching it dissipate in the cold frost air. Putting the antifreeze on the kitchen counter with his tools, he told Molly he had to go out. He decided he would walk to Clare’s Longing and take his pelts back—that is, if they were where he thought they would be: in Harold Dew’s shed. And this is where he was sure they would be.

  But that night of all nights, Molly herself had to go out. She couldn’t take the child because she would not get out of planning the church’s Christmas pageant until late, and then she’d go to her great-aunt’s to sleep. So she told Evan he would have to be at home. She told him she had mentioned this to him many times over the last two weeks, but he had not heard. Before he could argue with her, the priest’s grey comfortable Pontiac drove up to the door, and she waved to him and ran to catch the drive.

  He always comes at the wrong time, and whatever time he comes is wrong. Evan thought. Goddamn old woman—what a way to spend a man’s existence. Who knows what he does with them altar boys too!

  He rolled himself a cigarette and had a beer. He stared across the small dining room, where a biography of General Montgomery sat. He had loved the military and he should have joined it—now his life was in tatters, and the love Molly and he had for each other had been stretched to the breaking point. He was afraid she would leave him, but he could not stop tormenting her because he himself was so tormented, and once he had pushed her down when she insisted he go to the church picnic. He’d told her he wouldn’t go to any goddamn picnic, and was furious when he saw his clothes lying ready across the bed.

  “There.” She had smiled. “All your best clothes!”

  “Goddamn it, I won’t go,” he’d said and pushed her down.

  He had told her it was an accident—but they both knew it was not.

  The pelts would be gone if he did not get them. Besides, the child was asleep and he would be back long before dawn. And if Molly must pray, why didn’t she pray for the pelts?

  He waited, and wondered what to do, and then decided that wondering had made him hesitate too long. That is, he wondered what had become of him. Had this marriage racket made him so soft that he could not go for a walk at night? He stared at the biography across the room of the man who had defeated Rommel at El Alamein. He, Evan, was not as great as Zhukov or even Rommel—but by God, he was much greater than a lot of people said.

  He made sure the boy, Jamie, was sleeping. He would be gone only a few hours. He made sure the boy had his favourite blanket near, and closed the door silently. Then he set out for Clare’s Longing in the cold, carrying an old muskrat pelt as a joke. He would take his pelts and give Harold the muskrat, so he would know who had changed them up but not be able to prove it.

  He got to Harold Dew’s past midnight, and waited for the light to go out at the top of the house. Then he went to the small low barn, crawling on his belly across the snow, still lit warmly by the moon. The barn itself was dark and cramped but had the wondrous scent of lost years embedded in its flat rough board.

  He went in among the stalls that still retained the last feeble scent of horse, though Harold had never owned any, and found the three pelts he was looking for. He gasped at how pristine they actually were. He took his buck knife, the one he had cut the blood-brother bond with, and gently removed the pelts from the drying tacks. Taking them and nothing else, not the beaver that he knew was not from his Conibear, and after placing the muskrat on the wall nail, he made it out, with the moon high. And holding the fine glossy pelts in his hand said, as if to the moon, “No one takes advantage of Evan Young.”

  Who was he talking to as he strode back to the road and made his way along, between the ragged spruce and iced-over streams? To what deity that he no longer believed in was he exulting?

  Evan got home sometime before dawn, re-tacked the pelts to his own broad boards and fell asleep with his boots still on.

  The next morning Jamie was sick, and Evan was cradling him when Molly got home. She gave the child aspirin, and that seemed to take his fever away, so Evan went down the road and sold the pelts to the buyer, Mr. Doyle. But by the time he got back home the child was worse, and Molly was bathing him in tepid water to bring down the fever. Only, that did not help, and sometime near supper convulsions started and the boy threw up blood.

  “Call the priest,” Molly said, “to come to our aid.”

  But Evan said no, they would take the child to the hospital. “We don’t need him,” he said brashly. “It is nothing to worry about—just a little fever.”

  “But the priest could drive us. Please!”

  “No!” Evan ran to the two nearest neighbours to find a car, but no one was home. He phoned Lonnie’s office, but Lonnie was closed down for the holiday. And so on a dark Christmas Eve, he and his wife bundled the child up and took him in a pack on Evan’s back to the hospital. Halfway there, they flagged down a half-tonne truck and got in.

  As soon as they got to the hospital, a nurse grabbed the child and disappeared.

  Evan and Molly sat alone in the corner waiting room on stiff auditorium chairs with snow melting off their heavy boots, while Christmas music played from somewhere down the hall and an artificial Christmas tree glowed, cardboard boxes wrapped in Christmas paper acting as presents underneath. Evan stared at them, somehow ashamed of having nothing. They heard “Ave Maria” playing faintly, and it filled him with a sudden unexplainable dread. The child was hooked up to all the machines that monitored the beat of life, as that song played in the corridor.

  After a while the doctor, abrupt, in a white coat open to show his grey flannel pants and a shiny belt, came and sat beside them. “Poison,” he said, showing them a swab. The swab itself he jutted toward them like an indictment. The air in the room was stale and enclosed, and yet now had the distinct but subtle scent of peppermint.

  “Poison,” the doctor said again, allowing himself a quick scratch of his left cheek with his right hand, and then becoming very still for a second as he stared at them.

  It had taken some time for the doctors to realize the boy was sick from drinking antifreeze. The doctor asked where the child could have got it, and Evan realized it must have been the antifreeze he had left on the kitchen counter when he had gone to take back his pelts. He reasoned that the child must have woken up, seen the container and, thinking it was Kool-Aid, drunk from it while sitting at the table waiting for his dad. Then, after an hour or so, he must have crawled back to his bed.

  “Oh” was all Molly managed, in the most plaintive way she could. “You were out of the house, Evan.” She did not ask this; she stated it, as an affirmative.

  The doctors decided to transf
er the boy to Moncton, and Evan and Molly got into the ambulance. It was storming heavily and a plow was sent in front of them to open the road. The driver of both the plow and the ambulance were heroic in attempting this, in the worst blizzard of the year, as Evan and his wife sat beside the child in their heavy winter clothes, making their pilgrimage in stunned and muted silence, the child bundled on the gurney and still wearing his best white shirt. Their progress was reported on the local radio, and people sat mesmerized listening to it. Molly knelt and asked God for help, tears in her eyes. But before they could reach Moncton, the child died.

  Money came in to help them pay for the child’s funeral, and Evan was ashamed when he received it from people as poor as he. His wife did nothing but stare out the window at the barren little yard, holding the baby’s blanket. He set out to kill Harold—with his bare hands if need be. He took the beautiful silver-barrelled .410 he had won from Harold himself. But when he got to Harold’s house, Harold was gone; he would not be seen here for months.

  But even so, nothing would take Evan’s own guilt away.

  He felt Molly’s pain for months. He couldn’t leave her side. He begged her to eat. Two junked automobiles lay in his yard, soundless and cannibalized, the new radiator he had bought for the Chev nestled in the snow. So finally, getting himself together, he put it in. Then he tried to find a flywheel for his old car and travelled the roads to buy a used water pump.

  Sullivan allowed him to go back to work. He would sit in his office, shake his head and speak about how troublesome Harold had become. “Yer right to suspect him—I suspect him too,” Lonnie would say in an astonished tone of voice.

  As spring came, they moved to cut bush along the Tabusintac. Evan lived in an old squatter’s cabin behind Legaceville, alone. At night he thought of one thing: revenge against Harold Dew. He would plan it. They would have to be alone—but someday they would be. He might let it go for a year or so—but someday he wouldn’t. This is all he thought about when he was by himself, and all he planned for three months.

  He was away from home, and asked people to sit with Molly, and women took turns doing this for days and nights. They would gather and play auction or cribbage. But there were rumours too, started at the tavern and other places where men whiled away time and charity. The child had not been his, the rumour stated, and he had set the antifreeze out to get even with Molly when he found this out and she was out of the house. Molly was nothing but a Bonny Joyce twat, some who had never even met her said, so what do you expect? She had been screwing a man she had met at the church picnic, these people said, and they knew this man well.

  But if Evan wasn’t the child’s father, they said, whose would the child have been, then? Harold Dew’s people said. That is why Evan wanted to kill Harold. That is why he’d set out that very night to do his dirty work—and, they said, after all Harold had done for him! Then they said it was a pattern—yes, it was: Glen and others too.

  The young social worker, Melissa Sapp, hearing about all of this, and being as committed as most social workers are—young, entirely earnest and forthright, and almost soulless in her devotion—reported all of this to the authorities immediately.

  Soon Evan and Molly came under great suspicion of the police and the Crown.

  One night out of the blue, three months after the child had died, Molly said, as if to herself, “The priest could have driven us to the hospital—and Jamie would still be alive.”

  Her form was in shadow, only one side of her face visible, and she did not look Evan’s way when she spoke, her hands folded on her lap.

  Not a day went by that he didn’t think of the little child and how he couldn’t afford to pay for the funeral. If only he had taken the time, like he usually did, to put the antifreeze in the box behind the pit props, out of sight and locked away.

  The woman from Social Services almost drove Molly to distraction with her questions about how she’d treated the child. But behind her eyes was not concern for the boy so much as surreptitious self-anointment, a kind of distinctive arrogance found in people who believe that in the future people like Evan and Molly will be eradicated by some form of education or advancement.

  Melissa Sapp, along with young Constable Michaels, soon decided to take the baby’s blanket away, along with many other of the boy’s things, to check and see if a timeline could be established that might engulf the parents in homicide. Also around this same time, a bright young man named Wally Bickle from the collection agency was phoning Molly three times a week about a two-hundred-dollar debt. She would listen to him bemoan the fact her debt was overdue. He’d once thought of her, he said, as a friend, but now he believed she was a woman who thought she could steal.

  “Hey, Molly—now you’ve had five months. You can’t steal, you know.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And what did you blow the money on?”

  There was a long silence. It was as if the phone itself went dead.

  “Come on, tell me!”

  “I bought things—things for Jamie.”

  “Now, who is Jamie—a boyfriend?”

  “Jamie is my son.”

  “Oh, come on, dear. I bet you don’t even have a son—do you?”

  “I have Jamie.”

  “Do you now!”

  “No.”

  “You see how I can get the truth out of people? Now, you better pay up, fair is fair.”

  “I am going to get the money.”

  “Well, you had better not forget.”

  Evan did not know of this loan that Molly had taken out last Christmas—had never known she was being phoned by a Household Finance collection officer.

  “I spent the money on Jamie,” Molly would say so softly on the phone to Wally Bickle that he could hardly hear her, and it was as if her breath was more constant and louder than her voice.

  And how had the animals suffered in those traps? Molly asked this of Evan one night after he returned home. “Is that why the child died, because we got money in such a cruel way? Is that why God is paying us back—paying us back for killing animals in a trap?”

  “No, that is not why,” Evan said. But he couldn’t convince her and she peevishly turned away from him. Then she did something he really worried about. She refused to go to church.

  “You have to go,” he told her.

  “Why?”

  “Because it isn’t like you not to!”

  She turned to him, smiled unnaturally and said, “Oh, I don’t need church either. No one needs church—church is a lie, just like everything else. And you don’t really know what I am like.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Men don’t know what women are like or can be like. You don’t think I like other men. I like other men a lot. So, why are you special? I could go out and get gangbanged tonight—at any tavern on the river!”

  “Most women who look as fine as you, could anytime at all.” He smiled.

  But he tried not to look at her, for her sake, for the talk humiliated him. She wore a pretty white blouse—one of two she owned—and a pair of pure white sneakers on her feet with little pink socks that she had gone to town to buy. She had come home excited about her trip, and then turned again to depression.

  “You don’t think I like other men and that you are the only one. There was a man I met at the church picnic you wouldn’t go to—and I liked him. We played horseshoes together—did you know that? He was kind, and when I go to church, I see him too.”

  Evan was angry at her for saying all this. For why was she saying it now that people were saying that he killed the child because the child was not his? An hour later he smashed his fist into the wall. And that too had a consequence. It broke his hand.

  Then Molly said she wanted to go to a movie—even though they had to walk most of the way in the rain. She kept asking him what a movie was like. And he realized that she had never been to one, and that he, who didn’t care for movies, had never taken her to one. She was dressed in her white blou
se and new sneakers and her new pink socks, and they made it to the movie just in time.

  Next morning he woke and she was not beside him in the bed. He got up and searched for her here and there. By afternoon he became worried. He called on the priest, who hadn’t seen her either. They went all along the road, and into people’s houses to ask. No one had seen her at all.

  At ten that night, just as he was going to telephone the police, the door opened and she came in. She was dressed in her second-hand blue suit and had her suitcase with her. “Hi,” she said.

  She sat down at the kitchen table but did not look his way. That in itself was heartrending. But he was too confused to react to anything. For there was a man with her. The man who’d brought her home was named Leonard; he was the man she had played horseshoes with at the picnic. He was a bus driver for S.M.T. He told Evan he had found her in the bus terminal in Fredericton. She had said she was going to New York. He’d told her she should go home, that Evan would be out of his mind with worry and she didn’t have enough money for the ticket.

  Evan did not know what to do or say. He offered Leonard money for bringing her home.

  “Don’t be ridiculous—she is my friend,” Leonard said.

  Molly sat at the table, not looking at either of them.

  For a few days after that—perhaps a week or so—she seemed fine. Evan asked her once about Leonard, but she wouldn’t talk about him. She kept phoning Social Services to get their child’s blanket back.

  “This is Molly,” she would say, and she would be put on hold. At night she would look at Evan and say, “I think tomorrow they are going to give me Jamie’s blanket back.”

  Then, one afternoon, Hanna Stone came for a visit and breastfed her own child in the small parlour wearing a look of startling motherhood.

  Molly stopped speaking. She took her life on May 25.

  “I will never treat my wife as you treat yours,” Evan remembered telling Sydney Henderson all those miserable days ago.

  Evan was investigated until late September that year by the police and by the social worker.