Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  Later that same day the man with the walnut-shaped head went downriver, and a whoop of approval came from him—a strange little foreign man in high knee socks and flannel trousers, who nonetheless could whoop in delight. Some snowy rain began to fall and a trace of fog lay over the tops of all the great trees in the distance, which were to be cut.

  Then, exactly a month after Annette had met Wally Bickle, construction on the road started and Ian Preston’s old house on Swill Road, with its windows busted and its steps sunken, was simply bulldozed under.

  Ian got into his truck and drove down, passed eight graders and dozers and twelve dump trucks, sluicing all along the dirt road right up the side lane until he crashed into a backhoe. “This is my land—get off my land!”

  He had cut his head on the steering wheel and looked dazed. He began to stumble forward, and picked up a marker and tossed it aside. But everyone there ignored him, as if he had become a painful joke. Fension was on-site that moment and passed him a surveyor’s clip and a certificate of ownership.

  “You should have taken the money,” Fension said, his high green boots tied up tight and his heavy pants bulging at both pockets, and the air so fresh it was like an insult in his nose. “All that money could have been yours.” He said this very sorrowfully, as if he was on Ian’s side.

  Not knowing what Ian had been offered, Harold had sold the land to Helinkiscor for a quick twenty-five thousand dollars. Putting the road on this side of Good Friday Mountain would save the company some fourteen million dollars.

  Annette was throwing up in the bathroom when Ian entered the house. Harold Dew had phoned her and told her what he had done.

  The land had been taken away from Ian and he got nothing at all. He went into the small den and sat down, surrounded by magazines.

  She came to see him, opened her mouth to speak, but no words came.

  He looked up to see her standing in the door. She had not dressed all day, and her robe was open—she had nothing on underneath, and her naked body was still too beautiful for him to gaze at long because he had never deserved it, and he now knew this.

  “Oh God, Ian,” she said, “what have you done? Dear Ian, what have you done to us all!”

  She stood in her nakedness before him, in her beautiful nakedness, her face flushed, her eyes closed, tears running down her cheeks.

  In fact, Annette Brideau’s tragedy would begin now.

  A month or more passed.

  In Clare’s Longing, Harold Dew sat up late. Yes, he had been forgotten by Ian and Annette. They had thought he was far in their past—a shadow, a ghost no longer noticeable in their lives. But now they were beginning to wake up. Now they were beginning to see things for the way they were!

  Now, though he in his lucid moments knew he wasn’t Liam’s father, in some way known only to himself he was the father, and Annette had cheated him out of a son. Long ago he had secretly plotted to take Evan’s traps, and look what had happened; now he had Ian’s land—so he should let it go.

  But he thought: One more thing and I’ll be done with them for good. One more thing—and then Liam will come to live with me.

  So that night, cold with shadows on the ground from the glimmering roadway light, a man walked toward the old grey farmhouse with its tattered shed and barn, those frameworks bent and twisted down, gone hollow even before the Korean War.

  The young man was dressed in a sheepskin coat with a woollen collar pulled up, and his blond hair wavy and combed back. His eyes were dark and his face chiselled in a kind of youthful toughness. He had dark workboots on his feet, the heels of which heightened him by almost two inches to just under six feet four. He was Rueben Sores, Evan Young’s half-brother. He believed in nothing and therefore he was free.

  He had been called to come to this house by Harold Dew.

  He walked onto the soft and dark veranda, where a thought of riches once had been, and even here it drifted in the stifled cold and boredom of a place lonely and faraway. He knocked on the heavy door. A muffled voice was heard inside. He entered to the tinkle of a doorbell.

  There in the kitchen, abiding the time by an out-of-date calendar, Harold sat, with his feet in a pail of hot grey water and a woollen blanket draped over his shoulders.

  He waved Rueben forward and shifted the table light to look at him. He spoke to Rueben Sores about a clandestine campaign against the one who had taken his money and his fiancée.

  “He lost the land—the road has started—all as he has left is his quest to be MLA. So tear down his posters, kill his campaign!” he said in a hoarse whisper, the way he had spoken now for a number of months.

  “I don’t know if I want to do that. Besides, his campaign is done for anyhow,” Rueben said, for Rueben had in some respects always clung to a sense of honour.

  Harold took out some money—two hundred dollars.

  “Why not? It has to be done when he is down—that’s when to kick his nuts off.”

  Rueben looked at the money, hesitated, and picked it up. Harold licked his large White Owl cigar and lit it.

  “If you disrupt him enough, I will get you a truck to haul wood from the Bonny Joyce.”

  Then Harold went to the door, his wet feet marking a trail, as Rueben was walking away; and holding the door open, so the kitchen light shone on both his bare wet feet and a patch of snow, whispered thus: “Light a fire—we’ll see what happens to him without his store.”

  Rueben nodded, and said nothing. He set out to meet two young friends, Spenser and Kyle, both reliant upon him for drugs (for that is the bond that glued so many). They went to the tavern across the river in Chatham and planned what they might do to disrupt the campaign.

  “The campaign is wrong for the whole river,” Rueben said. “It’s a shame. Is your brother trying to get work up there?”

  “Yes,” Spenser said.

  “Well then, it’s awful. So is mine. You see, he stole his money to buy the store from Harold.”

  “He did?”

  Rueben nodded.

  It became a solemn and moral moment occasioned by the town’s revulsion of Ian Preston.

  “Get his boy,” Kyle said, as if this was a brave thing. “Give him a whack or two.”

  Spenser nodded at this: “Yes, get the boy.”

  Rueben was silent.

  They wore their woods vests, their eyes glassy. Each of them had steel-toed boots and a good luck charm in his pocket.

  “Tomorrow, then!”

  Liam continued to protect his father’s posters: VOTE FOR IAN PRESTON. STOP THE THEFT OF BONNY JOYCE—FOR OUR FUTURE.

  After school on March 26, Liam had climbed a snowbank and on to the pole nearest the lane that led to his house, to try to protect one of them. And he had other posters in his hand, which had been torn down by other schoolchildren.

  “What future?” Kyle asked, walking toward him.

  “Ya, what future if there is no work now?” Spenser said. “How much yer daddy pay you?”

  He did not know who they were.

  Rueben needed to say nothing, and stood behind a shed smoking, with the light of afternoon still strong on the sidewalks and the snow. He only needed to feel justified. And since he believed Ian Preston had cheated both Harold and his own half-brother, Evan, he did.

  “The mill will ruin the river. It’s what my dad said …” Liam answered.

  “Yer dad—yer dad is a criminal,” Spenser scoffed, and not a tooth showed in his head while his stringy hair fell in front of his eyes.

  “He’s a gutless puke, yer daddy. He run from my dad down at the piles.”

  Liam was asked three times to give up his signs. But he refused and turned to go home. The street was darkening. And the houses were silent. And then, so sudden it took the wind from him, he was thrown to the road by Kyle and slapped by young Spenser Rogue. They kicked him twice in the side, but he still hung on to his posters. Then they grabbed him by the hood and hauled him backward across the street, as the day orbed toward dar
kness. Still he would not let go.

  “Get some matches and burn them out of his hands,” Kyle said. He lit the last three matches he had, and held them until the glassy posters caught afire. It smelled of evening now, of some vague kindle and spark, the sky solemn and whitening to dark.

  “Singe his hair!” And Kyle lit the boy’s hair until it crinkled and a patch of it whispered and blackened.

  With the posters burning, Liam held on to them, until his hands started to burn.

  “Kick his face.”

  So Spenser kicked his face. Finally Rueben came over and threw them off—anxious about what they had done to the child.

  “Come on,” he said, “that’s enough—we don’t do that to a boy—leave him alone.”

  It wasn’t until much later that night Ian discovered something wrong. Seeing the boy’s hands, he asked calmly who had done this. But Liam, fearing his father might get into trouble, would not say.

  “Tell me!” Ian smashed a mirror and cut his own hand.

  He rushed his child to the hospital, his own hands covered in blood because of the mirror.

  It was when there, having his hand bandaged, he got a call about what was happening at his store.

  An hour or so after dark, the boys who had torn the posters down went along the sidewalks. Rueben Sores told his two accomplices what he would do. Hatred was exactly that—an exquisite feeling. So it did not matter at this moment who he hated. In fact, with memories of his tormented youth plaguing his budding manhood, he hated the world.

  Harold wanted him to burn the store of Harold’s old enemy. But Rueben would not be able to get inside easily, so he went around to the back where the old shed was, saw the little election headquarters of Ian Preston closed up and a picture of Ian in the door window.

  “Come on,” he said to his friends. “Come on.”

  In this shed there was only a dusty desk with some staple guns and posters, a telephone and an unwrapped computer. Rueben busted the window.

  “Who has matches?” he asked.

  But strangely, none of them did. They had wasted the last of them on burning Liam’s posters.

  “Christ, no matches!” he said. Then suddenly he laughed. “Look.”

  He picked up the small Bic lighter that had been left there by Corky Thorn the morning he died. Rueben stood a moment watching the flame, amazed that he had fire in his hand.

  “The gods,” he said, and he sniffed. “Hand me some posters,” he said to the boys.

  He lit the posters they handed to him, and tossed them here and there. Soon the shed was ablaze, and so was the back wall of the store. Everything was going to burn.

  Then Rueben, Spenser and Kyle ran. Ran away.

  Ian, at the moment his store was afire, was driving Liam to emergency. Liam, whose hair was singed and whose hands were burned. This was to cause the greatest calamity in Ian’s life.

  He lost somewhere close to $185,000. He was also sued for smoke damage to three other stores and paid restitution of thirty-four thousand. Ian’s insurance company contested the claim, and only made partial payment. So angered were people that Ian received many death threats.

  Annette kept looking out the window, terrified of a mob. “If the mob comes, I am sure it will be a big mob—for it is a big mob that probably hates you,” she said, lighting one cigarette off another and peeking from behind the curtains.

  A Social Services lady, Melissa Sapp, visited the house on four occasions and took statements from Liam, which she recorded. People recoiled when they saw Ian. The one young girl who was walking with Liam—Sherry Mittens—said she had not seen any boys doing things, for she had gone home, and she thought Liam had gone home too. Sherry said this very politely, always thankful at being able to help.

  Liam remembered there was someone else walking past the armoury. The police made some effort to locate this man but could not. So most people assumed the story was a fabrication concocted to protect his father.

  They were suddenly, Ian and Annette, poor. In fact, very poor.

  He lost the election by four thousand votes.

  Six hundred men and women went to work because of the mill. Six hundred families had a new lease on life. Ten thousand people ignored him and never darkened the door of his shattered business again.

  PART SEVEN

  ANNETTE KEPT THINKING OF THE MONEY IAN HAD LOST BY not doing what she said—by not listening to her. She spent days staring at her photo albums—the pictures she had taken when she was going to be a model—she had photos of herself in various poses and dress. She had taken a modelling course two years after she’d had the child. The whole atmosphere of this modelling course held on Wednesday nights in the back room on the bottom floor of Saint Michael’s was so much fun. So many people picked her out as being someone to watch.

  “You will go places,” Madam Leslie said.

  And everyone seemed to agree. She got a gold star on her certificate.

  The certificate read Qualified With Distinction

  And it was signed by Madam Viola Leslie.

  Annette had paid $457 for the course and to get the photos done—and she’d had an offer to model clothes for a store in Moncton one afternoon, but it had snowed and she did not go down.

  Where were those days now? she thought. Where had they gone? She was so sad now. Why did life seem to matter? Nothing mattered anymore.

  “He is poor now!” she said to DD. “He is really poor!”

  “Oh my God, I know,” DD would say, trying to comfort while hiding a slight beguiling smile. So then after the thousands he’d given her from his store; after the parties he tried to throw for her; after the cottage, the house, the car—now was the time. To leave.

  In some way, she still did not want to leave him. In some way, she wanted to remain married—whether because of Sara or because of him she did not really know. This gave her tremendous beauty a vulnerability. And people advised her. She found she had many advisers now. They told her she had done her level best to be faithful, but now he had hurt her desperately. Burned his own store and injured his child.

  “You can’t be a doormat for him,” someone she hardly knew told her one day. And others told her that too. She was frightened all the time.

  Another woman took Annette’s hands in her own, and blinking back tears nodded, as if recognizing a compatriot.

  “I know how it is!” she said.

  Annette had always disliked this woman, but suddenly she too had tears in her own eyes.

  Belief is emphatic. That is, did Annette believe what they said about him? If she did not believe, she could not leave, so her willingness to believe, even if it was false—that is, her willingness to believe in falseness—promoted the illusion of freedom. And all those around her promoted this at will. When she brought up his name at a card game at the curling club one night (because someone was talking about their uncle having an operation on his back), no one responded. And she kept her eyes hidden behind her cards. So little by little she became convinced that her friends were right.

  It is dangerous not to think of your friends as your greatest enemies. It is dangerous not to think that those who have conformed in their views all their lives will not conform when thinking of you, and not want you to enliven their boredom or affirm their belief in how they were told the world works by revelling in your destruction.

  Annette did not know that what her friends most wanted from her was not her inclusion but her performance.

  A month or so after the store burned down, Fension danced with her and flirted with her, putting his hand down the small of her back when they waltzed. He knew she was married to a hopeless idiot, and he had the grace to exploit it at a dance. He told her stories and pretended he didn’t even know Ian. One whole evening they sat side by side, while the snow shone under the lights outside and the avenues were deep and dark and mysterious in the vales of snow. He suddenly felt her eyes were as secretive as dark melting ice that he’d seen as a boy in Norway.
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br />   She smoked cigarettes in the quiet maze of romance, and spoke to Fension about her terrible childhood—how she’d had very little, how she’d been used. He took her hand the moment she caught her breath before tears came. Then she smiled when he told a joke in his thick accent, and he kissed her cheek.

  But the next afternoon, a Sunday, Mr. Fension arrived at the club with his utterly beautiful wife, who had come from Oslo to surprise him. So Fension walked by her tersely and nodded. She sat alone that day at the back near the kitchen, with its pale smell of soup and crackers, and looked longingly out at the stale air enveloping the icy parking lot. A look of seductive tragedy that she herself did not understand. But it seemed now that everyone else did.

  On the way home, she fell and cut her hand. She lay in bed for days. She dialed Fension’s phone number and hung up. She thought once or twice of killing herself.

  She thought of her cousin Doris Branch, who almost ate herself to death after her husband began to run around on her.

  I don’t want to eat myself to death, she thought one night as she lay in bed, but I could go for a pizza.

  The house was quiet. DD told Annette that she must go to see her the very next day—and decide everything. So anxiousness kept her awake tossing and turning; going over again and again the idea of lost money, and the idea—deep within her—that she had helped destroy Ian’s life.

  But amid all of these fantastic and fleeting thoughts a sudden strange presence seemed to invade her consciousness. This presence became pronounced for the most fleeting of seconds. Was it even there—could she ever believe in it? It aggravated her that she had even thought of Molly Thorn—beautiful, wise little Molly Thorn. And what did this “idea” of Molly Thorn say in the middle of the night, so softly and lovingly: something that had nothing to do with money or divorce or being important. The voice said: