Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  Onlookers may think this is a story where people are always thinking the same thing—and as I told my students, they would be right, except for the fact that, even now, Evan had taken years to decide to do something he was still, in his heart, against doing.

  The damp soaked through his torn boots. The small houses looked shuttered up in the storm, and the bridge was closed.

  The lights along the streets in the centre of the town were out. And wires glistened and rubbed against one another in the wind.

  What was true, then, was what the money caused.

  “If only Lonnie Sullivan would leave me be,” Annette had confessed to Ian two years before, when he was with her at the hospital and the reason for the cramps in her stomach could not be determined. But he had not caught on to what she was saying. He’d looked puzzled and nodded. Then she had realized that he didn’t understand what she’d said, so she had touched his face as if he was a little boy and smiled.

  Now, on this winter afternoon, she helped their son, Liam, dress in his blue suit with a red bow tie and new black shoes.

  She knelt beside the boy and kissed him quickly. Her mascara sparkled in the light of the upstairs Christmas tree. The carpet was soft, and the window behind her head was adorned, and seemed to illuminate her. She was, Ian realized again, beautiful. And he had been frightened of her beauty. Perhaps, he thought, that was the reason she was unhappy.

  “You are like a saint, Mommy,” Liam said suddenly. “That’s what I will always remember. Isn’t she, Daddy—she is a saint?”

  “Yes,” Ian said, “yes, Liam. Mommy is like a saint.”

  Annette smiled strangely, a smile that would be affixed for all time in Liam’s mind. He would carry that smile with him forever, and one day on a golden windblown stretch of Australian beach, he would remember it like yesterday, and be sad.

  Ian had heard by now that Annette and her friends were planning to rob him—and though Ian did not know the particulars, he was certain that sometime today, or at the very latest within the next week, she would attempt to remove funds from his store. His uncles had come to tell him this, wanting a thousand dollars apiece for the information—but they had settled on a hundred between them.

  “I don’t believe it,” he’d said. But in fact, the very way she and he had acted toward Sara, that very betrayal, was to be re-enacted with him.

  His uncles had told him he had one friend in town who’d informed them it would happen the day of his party, when the store was closed. Ian knew no other details. (My student Terra Matheson found out later that this friend most likely was Harold Dew, who had discovered what was happening from Ripp himself.) So Ian had had two weeks to do something to stop her, to pick up the telephone and inform the police.

  But he had not. At first he did not think the story was true. Then he began to suspect it might be but was not sure. Now he was certain that she would leave at some point if the robbery was going to take place. And he felt she would leave with Ripp and Dickie. However, he still did not phone the police.

  If Ripp comes first, I will know, he thought that morning. He was nervous, and shook so badly he could not shave. Even as he dressed, he was in a state of numbness. Worse, the pain in his back increased as the day went on, so by four in the afternoon he could barely move his shoulders.

  Ripp came to the house early, bringing a man named Fleeger. Dickie arrived later.

  Ripp was now wearing his blond hair long, and sported a gold chain. Ian did not pay attention to what Ripp and Fleeger said or did. However, sometime during the afternoon, after some provocation, Ripp threw the Fleeger fellow across the room, to show his strength and moral character, and then let Dickie kick him—to show his fury. The man was left bloodied and dazed for no reason—or the reason was that he had said something unkind to Annette and they were protecting her honour. Of course this was not true—that is, it was not true that Fleeger had said anything unkind. But her friends took enormous pride and pleasure in thinking he did, and they had to act. All of this, to Ian, was bogus—but he had been silent in her presence too long to say anything. In fact, he knew many people did not even consider him her husband. Perhaps she no longer did either.

  After a short time, many other people left, until by mid-afternoon (and this usually happened when they came over) only Ripp and DD and Tab and Dickie and a few others remained. They apologized to Ian for the fight. It had been inexcusable to act like that, Ripp said, with the kind of mock sincerity violent men have after a violent act.

  Ian had hardly spoken all day. He simply stared at Annette until she became uncomfortable. But he was shaking. His hands were trembling.

  “What’s wrong, Ian?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “You’re staring at her beauty, aren’t you?” someone else said.

  “Yes, I am, in a way.” Ian smiled. “And at what beauty does.”

  He waited for them to go. But for a long while they made no motion to go anywhere. Annette kept looking at him and then walking to the landing on the stairs to watch the storm through the window. Then she would turn and pace across the foyer and look through the living-room curtains.

  “Ahhh—it is really coming down,” she said.

  The phone rang, and Annette went white. She clutched her glass of gin, and looked at Ian. “Ta-da,” she said, lifting her glass.

  The phone stopped ringing. But then, shortly after, it started to ring again. Annette went into the den and answered it.

  “God, she is beautiful,” Dickie said.

  “Yes,” Ian agreed, “she is beautiful.”

  “She’s the most beautiful woman on the river,” Dickie said, while Ripp maintained that a McIntyre girl from downriver, the first girl he’d ever kissed, was every bit as beautiful. And then there was Molly Thorn, he said.

  “Yes,” Ian said, and tears started to his eyes. “Then there was Molly Thorn.”

  “And Elly Henderson too,” someone added.

  It was at this moment that Ian remembered what Sydney had said to him all those years ago: “Your wife will be accused of theft.”

  “By who?” he had asked.

  “By you.”

  Evan puffed on a cigarette as he kept his huge hands in his pockets. Like Ian, he too was thinking of his wife. Remembering the note she had left him caused his eyes to swell with tears: Thank you for taking me to the movie—it was the only movie I ever went to. Remember how the old police car skidded out of control? Ha! I was so proud to go! Thank you for everything, but I want to see Jamie now.

  He walked by the theatre, remembering how she had timidly gone to the theatre door with him as if the manager in his old worn suit was somehow a person of great distinction.

  Evan now thought that the condition he most wanted to win back was his luck. It had been a condition of such easy lightness when he’d had it. How had it gone from him? Who had taken it away? And how could one describe it? Perhaps only one word could possibly describe it: faith. When he’d had luck or faith, he hadn’t had to think about it because it just was. Once he’d lost it, or it fled from him, in a thousand small and piteous ways he could no longer celebrate it or gain access to what it had been. He couldn’t even react to its loss without naming it—something he’d never had to do before. And so with each passing day he decided that this was the day he would get it back. But when he’d had it, he hadn’t even been aware of what it was. Now, as a man of luck, he had certainly fallen in all ways. He knew the world as others did, and it no longer sat lightly on his shoulders.

  At Ian’s house the men were still talking about the fight, and how Ripp was right to do what he did, when Ian made his way downstairs to where Ethel had taken Liam.

  Ethel had closed the pressed-board door and the two were sitting together, hiding from all the noise and confusion upstairs, with three or four of Liam’s toys, a small piece of birthday cake and a candle that he was going to light by himself. Ian came in and sat down on an old wicker rocking chair, holding his cane and t
rying to think above the commotion, but nonetheless listening to Annette’s feet as they moved to and from the back door, and looking up at the cross beams. Now and again he smiled at his son.

  Ethel had been telling a story to Liam about a miracle that had happened to her when she was very little, younger than Liam himself. Annette had told her not to tell this story because it was superstitious. Yet the story involved Sara’s heroic action, and this is what Annette secretly deplored. And so Ethel had stopped telling it when Ian came into the room.

  The only friend Liam had was Ethel. He told her he was going to a party next week, and this party was for Sherry Mittens. No one talked to Ethel more about Sherry Mittens than Liam did. He had saved $7.32 for a present for Sherry Mittens, and wanted Ethel to help him buy it.

  The huge basement was unfinished and smelled of oil and pressed wallboard. Ian had had great hopes of finishing it but never had. Other obligations always got in the way. The cottage was being redone, and he had spent close to twenty-five thousand dollars on that although he never went there—and Ripp lived in it half the time, and the bills for the phone and electric heat came to the house for Ian to pay.

  He now heard Annette laugh upstairs like a little girl. He said he wanted to hear Ethel’s story—although in fact what he wanted was to hear about Sara.

  So Ethel continued on: “How did it happen that old Mr. Fitzroy just happened to come around the corner at that time? If he had not, my sister and I would have drowned—and he wasn’t supposed to come that way for another week. He told us this later. Yet he had decided to go into the woods at just that time. Out of the blue he got up from his table and started walking—for no apparent reason! And Sara, in spite of her leg being twisted and in pain, kept holding my head above water. If she had let go of me, she could have saved herself—but even though the pain was unbearable, and remains unbearable even now at times, she did not let my head go. She would not. Besides that, neither of us froze when freezing would have been easy. And so even the doctors—and she went to dozens—asked how in the world she managed. And she could not say, except that it was the help of the Virgin.” Ethel finished, while loud and long laughter could be heard from the stairs and the snow fell over the green window.

  “But what about all of those who aren’t saved, and who do die in accidents day in and day out?” Ian asked. “Like Evan’s little boy?”

  “Well, perhaps those are miracles in another way,” Ethel said. “Perhaps there are miracles in tragedy as well.”

  Ian, who always felt he was far brighter than Ethel, could never seem to win an argument with her. So he said nothing more. Down here in the far corner were his books—he had dozens of novels and histories that he read in his spare time. In fact, each time he heard of a certain book and thought that Sara might like it, he bought it.

  A bang came from above, and a thud when something fell. He heard shouting.

  He went back upstairs slowly. He looked at Annette, and was about to plead with her not to go—it was on the tip of his tongue—but talk suddenly turned to Evan Young, who someone had seen pass by when Ian was downstairs, and how his child had died on this date. “Didn’t he die on this date? He did, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did! But then, sometimes there are miracles where people are saved,” Ian said, for some reason, out of the blue.

  “What are you talking about—miracles!” Diane asked. “What do you mean by miracles?” And she stirred her drink and looked at the others, wanting them to acknowledge what a provocative question she had asked.

  Ian suddenly felt hot and confused, and spoke hurriedly: “Well, think of Ethel being alive today—because of Sara,” he said, and he looked here and there.

  “Yes.” DD laughed. “That’s quite a miracle—anything to do with Sara. Right, Annette? Quite a miracle indeed!”

  “Shut up, all of you—please, for Christ’s sake,” Annette said. “Please, let’s all just shut up about Sara and about everyone else.”

  And so no one said anything more for a while.

  Evan stood at the side of Ian’s store in miserable weather, with no one at all around. Far down the street white snow fell over someone’s troubled aluminum shovel in a yard. It was Ian, he thought, that he and Harold must seek revenge from. Why should they fight each other? Harold had spoken about this as a way to keep the bond of their own brotherhood together—that is, they must relinquish the one brother and make a new pact. And this had been in the back of Evan’s mind all the way to town.

  Sooner or later a man must act against he who has cursed him; the pact they had made on the mountaintop all those years ago said as much. What did the pact say? It said they would not be sheep and abide in a Lord who did not believe in them. And yes, Evan had had no money to pay for his child’s funeral, and people as poor as he had come with money and food to help. The night before Jamie was buried a man had come up the drive holding an envelope in his large dark hand. Evan had not gone to the door, although Sydney knocked twice. So Sydney just left the envelope on the porch steps. In that envelope—from a man Evan had ridiculed, just because everyone else had—was forty-five dollars. This from a man who had nothing.

  What Evan had to do now was put out of his mind the faces of all kind people and the thoughts of any redemption, and he had to say: “It’s because of what Ian did to me!” And this was easy to do, except for one thing—it was exactly what Henderson had told them would happen, because a pact between men was a pact with the wind. This angered Evan even more.

  He took five steps toward the store, and opened his buck knife to flip the latch at the back door. He knew it was easy, and knew he could carry the safe along the river where the snow scuttling across the ice would blur his tracks—in fact, crossing to the landing the day before was how he had tested this. He would open the safe at the old smelt shed where he kept some tools, take the money, push the safe down under the ice and leave before the store opened after Christmas. He thought of being in the north and living there for good (yes, and how happy he would be), but suddenly he couldn’t go any farther. No, he would not do it. It was not in his nature to do it; something prevented him. In fact, he had not thought it through at all. It was the day of his son’s death, he told himself—so plan it and do it! But he could not.

  Why did you cross the inlet yesterday if not to practise for this danger and prove you could carry the safe on your back! But he could not do what he had come to do; no matter what had happened, he could not lessen himself. So coming to the store at this moment gave his life a sudden and terrible clarity—a clarity that, for the first time, made him hate what he had become.

  Clarity was such a big word for a lost man in the snow. But soon something else would happen, something that would turn his life, and all their lives, in another direction.

  Corky Thorn, Ethel’s boyfriend and the half-brother of Evan’s wife, Molly, had woken two hours before in Ian Preston’s small back shed, where he had gone to get out of the wind and the terrible wet cold.

  The shed rested just behind Preston’s store. For what strange reason was he there—what had propelled him to enter this old back shed, with the wisps of white snow on the hardwood floor?

  He had almost frozen the night before, piling up rags and old newspapers to sleep under in the vacant building. He had been home from up north for almost the same amount of time as Evan Young. And he had made out very poorly.

  The truth is, four years ago he had been working on the big staging that Evan had fallen from, but he had climbed down for a break at ten that morning. (He was not supposed to be on break until 10:45 but had gone down earlier than he was supposed to.) And he had left his wrench on the side of the catwalk. He had not even thought of it until he heard, very late in the afternoon when he was back in the trailer, that a man from his own province of New Brunswick had fallen. No one was sure how. But they said management was upset because the man wasn’t belted.

  He’d heard they had airlifted the man to Edmonton. People waited and li
stened for news of his death, which they’d heard would come at any time. The man was in a coma and was struggling, and every hour that passed, people said would be his last. So these moments were painfully long. That night, when no one was near the staging, Corky went out and found the big wrench lying in some frozen sand. At first he thought he must turn it in, must let the company know it was his wrench the man had slipped on. Yet he hesitated a second, and then two. No one had seen it, for they went to look up on the staging for any tool that may have caused the man’s fall, and of course the wrench had fallen and landed yards away and was hidden. He knew the man had stepped on it and it had slipped out from under him and made him fall the three and a half storeys. But he decided he couldn’t admit this to anyone. So he put this large wrench in the canvas sack behind his bed.

  The foreman, Arnie Petrie—also from New Brunswick—came to the trailer and asked him if he had taken an early break. Corky swore he had not.

  “So you saw Evan fall?”

  It was at that moment he realized it was Evan Young, his brother-in-law, who had fallen. Corky knew Evan was working here, but it was a camp with two thousand men and they had only spoken a few times—once when he had asked Evan for some money. But now that he had lied once, he continued to lie.

  “See him fall? No, not really—I was at the west section.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Bolting down.”

  “You weren’t supposed to be bolting down. What were you doing? You had that sheet metal here to work on.”

  “I got the worksheet wrong—and when I found out, I come back.”

  Corky tried to convince himself that it wasn’t his wrench that had been left on the staging, and the next day he tried to find his wrench in the tool bay—but in his heart he knew that it was in fact his wrench, and he had found it, and that Evan, his own brother-in-law, had slipped on it. He would be fired if people found out, and disgraced as well. He was an honest man, so why was this happening to him? He’d spoken to Ethel that night by phone, and told her about Evan, and never mentioned the wrench—yet Ethel instinctively felt (and Corky knew this too) something was wrong. And later he lay on his bunk with his face to the wall and wouldn’t speak to anyone.