All sorts of people were interviewed—even his old math teacher from high school. Yes, they all said, he must have done something; there was no reason not to suppose a man from Bonny Joyce couldn’t, in a moment of anger, decide to kill.
So Evan decided to leave his torment, just as Sara Robb had done.
He went north to work. People said he was crazy, and the other men complained about him and how dangerous he was—how he was prone to arguing, how he was dangerous to himself and others. He was called into the head office twice, and was told the company had him under watch. Still he worked as he always had and listened to no one else. For instance, anyone who did not wish to work above six metres could simply say he would not. But Young worked far above ten metres every day. Yet another man’s mistake almost proved fatal for him.
No one was supposed to leave tools lying anywhere. But someone left a huge industrial wrench on the staging where Young was working. When he accidentally stepped on the wrench, it slipped out from under him and he fell almost thirty feet. He hit the ground on his right side.
He was unconscious for almost two weeks and in hospital for six.
When he regained his senses, a surgical pad on his head and a bandage collecting a spongy ooze from his right ear, he started his fight for compensation. He began his fight when he was still wearing a hospital johnny and walking about with an IV pole. But he hadn’t been belted the day he fell, and in the end the courts went against him, and he spent his few savings on the lawyer’s fee. And when the company found out he had previously broken his hand and had hidden the fact, they were ruthless in protecting themselves from litigation. He should never have been climbing a scaffold with that hand—even though climbing the scaffold had nothing to do with his fall.
For eighteen months Evan Young refused to give up, and tried to get a union disposition against the company and the Workers’ Compensation Board. This finally failed. In desperation, he took the beautiful shotgun he had loaned Ian to hunt birds that fateful day and decided to go to the Workers’ Compensation Board and hold a hostage until he got a hearing.
And what happened?
He got to town at the same moment that Ethel Robb was hauling a sleigh with Ian’s little boy in front of the doors of the WCB building and was kneeling to wipe his nose. Remembering how he’d talked to Molly of the Virgin Mary melting away in Ethel’s hand when she was a child, Evan became ashamed, and turned and walked away with the shotgun well hidden.
He remembered too how he had won this gun in a toss of a horseshoe against Harold Dew. All of this played on his mind as he walked away.
Harold had bet the shotgun for the Chevrolet. Evan had won the toss by less than a centimetre. The shoe he threw had caught his fingers and that slowed its trajectory, and then it seemed to pivot and stand on end for a second before falling in the direction of the spike. It could have just as easily fallen the other way, or if it hadn’t caught the tips of his fingers, it might well have gone past the spike. He would have lost his car to Harold, and he would have had no radiator to fix, and his child would still be alive.
So it was winning the shotgun that had caused so much pain—caused everything. And he had been about to use that shotgun in a crime. And what would that prove to those who suspected him?
He sold the shotgun the next week for a hundred dollars to Hanna Stone’s husband. And he looked at their boy, Terry—the one Hanna had ruthlessly breastfed the day before Molly’s death.
Evan went back to trapping along Arron Brook and living in his small shed. He still had the coverlet that had belonged to his child, which had been returned sometime after Molly’s death. Some nights he would sit in a spell, holding the coverlet, looking out at the snow as it came down over the black trees or as the wind whipped down from the hills.
‘Why?” was the question he continued to ask in those years. And the only answer was “Because.”
Evan applied for a job to operate the plow in town and had an interview, but because of his known temperament and his eighteen-month-long dispute with the WCB, he was turned down.
So then, close to Christmas, five years after his child’s death, he made his way in a gale toward town to do some work for a wholesaler moving boxes. Six dollars an hour was not much, but to Evan at this moment, it was all the world.
It was snowing. The small garages were covered with snow and ice; icicles hung from the old buildings around the square. The Christmas lights shone from the tree in the park, and the holly and candles glowed down from poles along the streets.
Just after noon, Evan passed the large house of Ian Preston.
When he got to Victory Warehouse, there was only one forlorn light shining from a mesh window, and the garage doors were blocked in snow. The office itself was closed because of the storm, and a note said it would not open until the morning.
He had come to town for nothing at all. Furious, he turned toward Ian’s store with the idea of robbing it and going away. This had been in his mind since Molly had died. He had been offered a job on the ice roads up north by a Casey man he had worked with—all he needed was twenty thousand dollars to buy into a rig and start his life anew. How did he know there was money in Ian’s store? Because everyone said that nine-tenths of the money Ian had, he kept in a safe in the office of the store—a safe that could be carried away in a storm on a strong man’s back. Like old Joyce Fitzroy before him, Ian distrusted banks.
Harold Dew spent these same five years overwhelmed in one way or the other by the fact that because he’d lost this inheritance, his girl had left him.
Annette would not return his calls, although he’d tried many times to see her after he came back to town—a fact that Ian did not know. He knew she did not love Ian but was content to spend his money. No, he did not think she’d planned all this; he believed it had just happened. How could she love a pipsqueak like that?
Some nights he passed Ian’s store with one thought in mind: to burn it to the ground.
“Burn the fucker out. He had it all figured,” Lonnie would say to him.
Then, one February night, it all came out. Harold and Lonnie had been drinking most of the day, burning old cedar shingles as the snow came down and blurred the lane. Lonnie went out and got one bottle and then another. Harold brought over a salmon and poached it on the stove, and they drank and ate. All day Lonnie had been giving away tidbits of information, first about this widow and then about that—first about this married woman and then about that. How he drove the snowplow, how he kept information on people—how widows were frightened of him. How he disowned one of his own children. He told Harold many terrible things. First about this mill worker and then about that miner. And the one thing Lonnie believed was this: he was better than them all.
Then he told Harold that he had set up the marriage between Annette and Ian from the start, and that Ian knew nothing about anything. He said he would destroy Ian, because he wanted to. And he smiled in the self-infatuated, calculated way he had. It didn’t matter why he wanted to, he said; he’d simply decided he would do it. Then his thoughts returned to Annette.
“But how could she get him? That was the big thing,” he began. “How could she get him away from that little Robb cunt? Well, she came to me, asked my advice—I set the thing up.” He laughed. “Go ask her if you don’t believe me. She had a pregnancy test and gave it to me—she was scared to death she was knocked up by a guy in Truro. I looked at it, kept it and told her to get married. Now, was she knocked up or was she not? I could tell her now, but I won’t—she handed the test to me to look at. She was real scared, and I simply said, ‘You better get married—it’s Ian or no one.’ And that was that!” Then he laughed again. “She actually thought that the man in Truro would marry her. She went back to Truro to see him—but nothing came of that.”
“She was pregnant and the child is mine,” Harold said. He muttered this as he looked at his large hands.
Lonnie gave a start. He looked at his young friend, saw utter delu
sion, and shrugged. “Think what you will,” he said. “But I tell you this—she had only a few weeks to snare Ian, only a few weeks. Or she was going to go back to you. And so I planned it all very meticulously. So someday she will have to pay me. And she will pay me twenty thousand and that will be it. I need the twenty thousand pretty damn soon—so she had better realize it. If she thinks she can get off scot-free, she should go ask some of them widows I had. Then she’d know. Once I get my teeth in, I keep them in—and who can blame me? Life has done me no favours.”
But Harold was no longer listening. He was in a daze. “I want to see the pregnancy test!” he said.
“I can’t get it for you right now—but I will,” Lonnie said.
“But where is it?” Harold asked.
“Can’t say. I am looking for a good payment—I can buy up three places here for back taxes and sell them to the government. You know why the government is buying? Because a new pulp mill is coming to cut.”
But Harold was no longer listening. His heart had turned sick. He looked only at his hands, and mumbled incoherently to himself.
The one secret Lonnie should have kept his entire life he couldn’t keep. In fact, he woke the next morning in a stupor, wondering if he had actually said it. But Harold was long gone, the stove cold.
“I hope I didn’t go too far,” he said. “Oh, he’ll get over it—he’ll realize the child isn’t his. He’d be a fool to think the child his, wouldn’t he?”
But Lonnie was wrong about Harold getting over it. It was such a whimsical deception that Harold was crushed by it. And the boy … The insane question was planted in Harold’s lost mind: what if the boy was his?
It was as the poet said in a brief moment of clarity: too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart. Harold asked to see the pregnancy test three more times. But Lonnie told him he couldn’t show it to him. Finally he told Harold that the man who’d knocked Annette up was now dead—and that was that, and not to bother him about it, and not to come around if he was going to talk about it.
Then Lonnie did not see him for months.
Harold knew (though he pretended he didn’t) that he would rob Lonnie Sullivan to find the pregnancy test and get his own child back. He began phoning Annette when he knew Ian was at work, and talking about old times. And from time to time he would ask how her son, Liam, was.
Ian and Annette went to Jamaica for their honeymoon because she had heard so-and-so had done so. Then Annette came home and got sick. She cried a lot over nothing. People were frightened she would lose the child. Ian himself was plagued by the idea that she would lose it and blamed himself. What would the marriage be without the child?
Days would go by and she would not speak. When she did speak, she said he had tricked her.
He would stand at the door of their bedroom, in the dark, looking at her lying there with a facecloth over her beautiful forehead. Now and again he would whisper, “Is there anything I can do?”
They went to other doctors in other cities.
Her face was pale and her blond hair fell about her white cheeks. She began to take advice from a foreign woman about natural healing and went to classes. One snowy afternoon her fortune teller told her that many things would happen to her that were strange and wonderful and that she was extraordinarily gifted. And had she ever thought of writing a novel? That is, everything she wanted to hear from that woman she heard. And everything she heard was about herself, and everything about herself was extraordinary.
Ian found himself arguing over nothing with customers. Then, after a while, the few friends he had in town seemed to drift away—like Little Corky Thorn, and the man Ian played chess with, from the furniture store.
Still his pride told him he did not need friends, and if they left him because of Annette, so be it! That was the price he would pay.
People saw him driving around in Ripp VanderTipp’s truck. Lonnie was often at the door. Then Ripp and others came to the house. In fact, Ian wanted them there to cheer her. But she was still ill. They all worried—Lonnie even more than the others—that she would lose the child. It seemed to Ian that she wanted to. Once, she was put on an intravenous drip and DD came to the hospital.
Time passed, and the child was born. Annette was in labour for hours and hours. Ian was told to leave the delivery room, and sat alone in the waiting room with his hat in his right hand. It was storming, and he heard that someone had come into the hospital with a poisoned child.
“If Annette dies,” her mother said peevishly, “if Annette dies—you’ll be sorry.”
He was shaken, and went to a window and stared out at two attendants loading a child into an ambulance. “God, please let them live,” he said.
The next morning he heard that the child was Evan’s little boy. He looked at his own infant and thought: What kind of a friend was he to own a large house when that little boy had lived his entire life in two rooms?
A few months later, he and Annette hired Ethel. A few months after that, Annette wrecked the Mustang. She rarely came home. And then the money began to disappear.
“I would have been much better off without the money—I would have been much better off if Evan had got it. He would have been better off as well, and perhaps Molly would still be here with us,” Ian told Lonnie one night—for he spoke to no one else now, and trusted no one else. Lonnie had told him that the man Ian used to play chess with had said terrible things about Annette.
“I don’t know about you—but, well, I wouldn’t trust him,” Lonnie said about Ian’s only friend a year and a half after Ian was married.
“But I have done nothing to him,” Ian said. “And now I have no friends.”
“Never mind—things will turn out,” Lonnie said. “Don’t you worry about no one else but yerself! And what do you mean you have no friends? Ha!”
When I related all this to my class, my brightest student, Terra Matheson, did say, “Who the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” And she may have been right.
PART FIVE
ONE DAY, IAN WAS TAKING A FRIDGE DOWN THE BACK STAIRS by himself. Suddenly, thinking of Sara—as if she was right before him again at that moment—and thinking too of how she had walked way from the store, dragging her leg, he fell sideways against a rack of standard parts, lost his balance and tumbled downstairs, with the fridge crashing into him. But he knew in his most secret heart that some part of him had wanted to fall—for why had he done such a reckless thing?
He lay in pain and blood for over an hour before he was found, coming in and out of consciousness. The rumour started that he had been pushed by friends of old Joyce Fitzroy—and yes, he must have deserved it.
But as my student Terra Matheson would write about small-town betrayal and gossip, nothing ever really had to be true. And so Ian woke up in the hospital, the same as Evan had, and at almost the same time. His operation was performed in Halifax on a snowy evening in March. He was surrounded by his new friends: Dickie and Ripp and DD and Annette.
Everyone said the operation was a success. The doctor said he would have only mild to medium pain from now on but prescribed him a heavy painkiller, Dilaudid. He came home and went to sleep, certain everything would be fine. Yet he woke in the middle of the night with the same tinge in his back and a sudden feeling of terrible foreboding. So what the doctor had said turned out not to be true—within three weeks the pain was twice what it had been, and the doctors felt that another operation at this point would not solve things. If he didn’t take twice as many pills as prescribed he would find himself in agony.
It was at this time, when Liam was about two years old, that Clive and Diane were going through their divorce. The divorce was very public, and everyone was gossiping.
Annette would wait for Ian to come home and would try to fill him in on the sordid, terrible details—details of abuse and misconduct he knew but kept to himself.
“Whose side are you on,” she demanded one day, “if you are not on DD’s?”
&
nbsp; “Clive is a bastard, but DD is a fraud who will betray anyone,” he said.
“Well, I knew you didn’t like my friends—you think you are way too good for them,” she said. “DD a fraud who will betray—shows how much you know about women. Shows how much. DD will never betray me!”
One night, walking home from work after an argument with a customer, Ian suddenly thought: What if I had not walked back to her car that night? What if I had not walked along that wood road to her cottage? Yet that was a foolish thought—he had done what he had done and no one sympathized with him now.
Phone calls started to come to Ian when Liam was four years old—phone calls where people would ask for Annette and then hang up. And even though he did not pay attention to them, he could not put them out of his mind. That is, Annette had made dozens of enemies in the town, and this was the result. It was the result of her arguments at the store—with one woman named Julia, and another named Bernice, and a third named Sherrie, whose husband Ripp VanderTipp and his friends had beaten up. These were things that Ian could not imagine or comprehend a wife of his being involved in, things that seemed to be happening now every month or two. Ian paid fifteen hundred dollars to Sherrie’s husband, who came to him with his arm in a sling, saying Annette herself was involved in the assault and he would contact the police.
The phone calls came late at night, always when Annette was out and Ian was getting ready for bed.
Do you know what Annette is doing now?
He would hear laughter and tittering before the line went dead. What infuriated him was how innocent he was, and how mocking the laughter seemed.
Annette must have been aware of these calls because she began to question him about them. She sometimes came home late and would sit by the phone in the upstairs hallway.
He questioned her—just once.
“They are just jealous of me,” she told him about certain people she’d had run-ins with. “And don’t dare you believe what Sherrie Tatter says about me.”
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