Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  Because she knew so much about him and could tell; and could help him. Yes, she was the only one who could. For her father was a professor of sociology.

  The only trouble in all of this was Liam himself—Liam thought Sherry was his one and only friend.

  And then one day, one grey afternoon, he walked behind her after she said his father was in jail; she shook her pretty head and said such horrible things about this boy Liam that for a little while he did not know that sweet middle-class Sherry Mittens, who loved kindness to animals and wrote an essay on equality for everyone in the whole world, was speaking—speaking, speaking—about him.

  That night she waited to walk home with him, tremendously anxious to tell him something she had heard, but he turned down the back stairs and sat in the gloom by the garbage bin until the school was empty and everyone had gone away.

  Sara was taking care of Spenser Rogue’s grandfather Mange as he lay dying. She was pleased to do so; she even talked to him about the old days when the pulp was piled up behind the house and the chips looked like pieces of gold in the sun. And that seemed to help him get by. Then one evening as she walked into the room—D48—where he lay, his body so shrunken that his large hands looked like paddles, his face white and severe, she suddenly—as if it had all been recorded someplace and she was seeing it for the first time—realized that he was the man who long ago had given her and Ethel the hermit wine when her parents were away. She remembered him in the back porch by the box of old bottles, with the flour sacks nailed up over the window. She had been reading to Ethel about a prince in a castle, and he said—yes, he could show them a prince, and give them a special honey, and if they drank it, they would see the prince. It was suddenly his Humphrey pants and the gold clasp on his suspenders that came to her—almost like a violent intrusion—when he turned his head toward her as he lay there now, and raised his hand—

  She suddenly remembered the smell of pulpwood, and her standing in between him and Ethel and saying, “No, don’t hurt Ethel. She’s my sister.” She remembered, even worse, Ethel standing watching, not knowing what to do.

  And how much he had hurt her, hurt her and hurt her, when she was a little girl, when her mother had cut her bangs so short she didn’t like them at all and she hid a little bottle of perfume in her room. She had nothing more than one dress, and they had run down to the pulp yard because she and Ethel were going to see a prince.

  He looked over at her now, a sack of urine at the side of the bed and the veins in his arms punctured. He did not know her, did not even know that she was his doctor.

  “I’m in pain, Nurse,” he whispered. “I’m in pain.”

  She felt his pulse, ordered as much morphine as he could handle and made sure he drank the orange juice. For the next few weeks she did what she could to allow him peace at the end.

  The notes we have about Sara from the time she and Ian broke up are both scattered and somewhat elliptical: Sara, whose average grade in high school was ninety-seven, left for the university on the hill. She lived in an apartment with three other girls, just off Head Hall, and then moved to Dalhousie University, where she rented a small room with the toilet two floors above.

  “Medicine,” Ethel said, when Sara came home. “I bet that has an ingredient or two.”

  She fell in love with another young woman when in university, and they were constantly together. Had a serious affair. It was something she had tried not to have, so it was said, and couldn’t help herself, so it was said.

  That was the rumour, nor did she once deny it. She would stay in touch with this woman most of her life.

  Still, nothing is certain in life. Sara came home, and people threw parties for her and had many kind things to say about her in the paper. People could not help liking her and wanting to be seen with her—for she had met Desmond Tutu, she had met Nelson Mandela. So then, in this dreary little backwater, she was a blessing. People could not help but ask her to join with them. Her paper on medical and military inadequacy during the genocide in Rwanda had been read at a UN subcommittee and its findings were endorsed by the Secretary-General and mentioned on CNN.

  So at first, everyone paled compared with her.

  The initial idea—that Sara was a modern woman and a renegade—certainly helped her; all the book clubs wanted her to join theirs—and there were four serious ones on the river that studied all the favourite Canadian authors (but not the author from their own town, who, they decided, wrote such troublesome things and did not really truly understand or represent their values, which were progressive and modern ones best explained by fashionable women or by books from Oprah’s Book Club). So everyone thought Sara was heroic and wanted her on their side.

  Yet little by little by little, this attitude changed and then dissipated. Sara over the last year or so had damaged this early beneficence and managed to become embroiled in a terrible controversy herself, because after coming home from working with Doctors Without Borders, from working with the poor in many places in Africa, from being a witness to the inexcusable lapses by the United Nations in Rwanda—in short, from being considered a hero—some part of her, wherever it was, had declined to do abortions. So after a time, this cancelled out many progressive people’s ideas of who she was.

  “What a cripple,” some sniffed.

  She was no longer invited to the book clubs to read books written by substantial and progressive ladies.

  It had started simply enough—people had asked her to support a petition that would help Dr. Morgentaler set up an abortion clinic in the province, saying his human rights were being violated. She not only said she couldn’t—she tried to dissuade these people from their idea, and said she believed human rights started before one was born. So a group of women who played bridge and did yoga, and had once been ecstatic that she had returned, were now trying to sue her. It was a frivolous lawsuit started by Patsy Mittens, but nonetheless it deeply hurt her.

  Yet, with all of these having deserted her and questioned her competence, she found solace in duty and obligation. So that is why she was in the ICU and happened to be Mange Rogue’s doctor.

  “Some terrible thing has happened,” she told her mother, “to all of us, something that even you did not foresee!”

  She wanted to tell her mother of the thing the man had done to her when she was young, and that she was now barren because of it. But she could not. And if it ever got out now, she thought, many from those progressive groups would think she was making it up.

  They kept at her—her enemies. So Sara, after many months of stoic silence, finally answered letters in the paper and said yes, she had given it much thought, debated it with herself and had been under much pressure, but she had decided she could not personally perform this procedure, that there were others who would. So she worked with infants, both those who were premature and those with fetal alcohol syndrome, and to her these lives were sacred.

  She became known as Sacred Sara, the Immaculate Conception. And people said, “She doesn’t have children, does she? Well, what would she do if she was raped and got pregnant? People like this never think of abuse happening to them!”

  “No.”

  “You see.”

  So she looked, with her limp and her short hair and her small dark eyes, bundled up in winter in her jacket and boots, to some of the women she looked to be an enemy of the people. This in fact is how she was thought of by everyone in Annette’s crew. And they did lessen her worth whenever they could. Yet it seemed none of them had written about the genocide in Rwanda, had spoken to Nelson Mandela or had hidden men women and children under her medical hut in the mountainous gorilla region of the north, when men with machetes roamed the area and at certain intervals in the nighttime one could hear them as they wandered about with steel blades and clubs, singing in French as a Beatles song played on a boom box in the dark. DD told Annette that some people said Sara was medieval and should join a convent.

  “You see what an outcast she is—ha!” A
nnette said to Liam with grave triumph, leaning against the counter. She was drinking and slurring her words. “You see! I knew it, I knew it—I knew what she was like—you see! She’ll have no friends now. No one invites her out—she is all alone, you see! I knew she was all alone. I knew she would have no friends, and look at the friends I have—see!”

  PART EIGHT

  THERE ARE VIGNETTES WE HAVE ABOUT LIAM—MY students have found them over the course of years, here and there, by interviewing those who knew him, or now say they did. There are, I suppose, a thousand moments in childhood that might register if looked at in photos as being moments both elliptical and profound—and Liam had those moments too—and now after it is all over they are thrust upon us, deliberate, ordinary and accusatorial, in complete and utter silence, from small memories of his life.

  There is a scene when Liam is ten years of age. It is late at night, and he is trying to get his father to stand up. His father has cut his face. How, we never found out. Liam was looking for him. He must have woken, found his father gone and searched the snowed-over streets. His father had tried to get some documents that would save the Bonny and had been attacked by members of Union 187.

  There is one day when Liam is performing a magic trick at school. The girl Sherry Mittens remembered it distinctly. It is before he has his braces. Suddenly the auditorium goes silent. The young boy everyone tormented is now rising behind a desk, into the air. And they begin to clap and shout and holler and even say, “Bravo.”

  There is a moment when he and Sherry Mittens are together on a bus and it is late. He is staring down at her and she is speaking. Her eyes are downcast—and at this point he is thinking how wonderful it was to confide in her. The next day was the day she nodded spitefully when she spoke, the small crinkles of hair sticking up, like bent pins, from her little oval head, and amid all the hope and dreams he had for friendship—the one she was speaking so cruelly about was him.

  There is a moment when he and Ethel are walking home after going to a movie. Liam had phoned her and asked to take her on a date—for he wanted to see the movie and had no one else to go with.

  He is running downstairs. It is noon hour. He is waiting for the mail. He is trading Pokémon cards with someone somewhere in Alberta.

  He is sitting on the steps outside, wearing his hockey helmet and knee pads, asking people if they know who killed his pet pigeon. Of everyone who comes and goes he asks, “Do you know who would do such a thing? Who could? Does anyone know who could—it was Joey, my pet.”

  He wears his helmet and knee pads to tackle anyone who would—to tackle the evildoers.

  His mother begs him to come inside. It is almost one in the morning. But she sees how stubborn he can be—stubbornness burned into him by ridicule. So that even those youths who took his pigeon—Kyle and Spenser, who broke its neck as a joke—even they do not go by his house, worried that he will know it was them.

  He is all alone. It is night and he is coming home. He has no one anymore in the world. The memory of his father shutting the door on him at the store that long-ago day has shaken his heart.

  Trees wave in the warm July breeze over his head, and he whispers into the soft trees, “Someday I am going to go away.”

  He buries the pigeon near the back fence, in the shade.

  Sara once told Ethel that people are fascinated with what is bad because they believe bad can actually hide the good that is underneath. That this is the true reason for the attraction to bad, and that people never really like the bad, but love when bad or feared people act with a degree of kindness and spontaneous generosity. This is a defining idea, and the idea that bad men are misunderstood because of this hidden goodness allows many of them to play the con of being good underneath. They often do this in spite of good intentions, and do this to and with themselves, because the con is in so many ways and for so many reasons self-beguiling.

  Sara did not say this about anyone in particular, but she did see how many, many people were attracted to Harold Dew, and how even she was fascinated by him. For he had been a rough and a bad man many times; he had done things most men would not do, and yet people—even some he’d cheated—were fascinated and attracted by him.

  There were still some very kind things about him, things that Sara herself saw and liked. He could give you the shirt off his back—many said he had done this, many times. It was true that he had a good deal of charisma, especially with the young, and the young flocked to him and did his bidding, just as in years gone by they had done for Lonnie Sullivan. For instance, he gave a five-tonne truck to Rueben to haul wood—just as he said he would do.

  Still, he always wanted and needed something in return. So therefore, like Lonnie Sullivan, he did not know that he had to con himself in order to con others, and to gain the confidence of youngsters he had to believe that he would do them no harm. But in ways he did not know or consider, in ways he did not comprehend, the very conditions of their friendships led to harm.

  And this had happened all his life—first with Rueben Sores, who sold drugs for him, and in a way with Corky Thorn, and now with others like Kyle and Spenser, who ran and did his bidding and who both were doing things for him to work off loans, and who, in fact, if they did not watch out, would go to jail for him.

  So the courting of Liam Preston was a natural phenomenon. Liam was alone now, and so was Harold, and Liam needed a father figure, and Harold believed—even though, when he thought rationally, he knew it couldn’t possibly be—that Liam was his own son. Liam had, in a way, lost both his father and his mother. Harold realized this and tried to be nice to him. When Harold was nice to anyone, he was like his uncle Lonnie—he could be exceedingly nice without even knowing it. And he felt sorry for the little boy too. He told Kyle and Spenser never to bother this boy again, and he told others as well that if they ever in their lives were anything less than respectful to this boy, he would hear about it.

  So, though Liam did not know why, he only knew that it had happened and that no one bothered him anymore. And Liam began dropping into Harold’s happy pawnshop after school every day. For there was no one home, and there were no friends either. One day he came to pawn his Thomas The Train set. Harold looked at it, realized it was not much good but offered Liam twenty dollars. He also said that Liam could have a job at the shop, cleaning up.

  Harold was Ethel’s husband—and of all the people who had been kind to him, the one who had been kind to him the most was Ethel.

  Liam’s teeth hurt and he needed money. He did not talk to Annette anymore. He had waited for her to come home for supper too many times. And she had her own life again, and it was a life where she excluded him, because she was once again youthful and beautiful and single.

  So Liam would cook beans and wieners for them both and sit there waiting in silence. Sometimes, on occasion, when he saw her walking along the street and she did not notice him, his heart would go weak with love. Once he called out “Mom!” but she didn’t hear.

  Where would Liam go? This was one of the main questions my students asked.

  A few years before he met Harold Dew, Liam had a fort he had built by himself. He worked on building his own computer and putting his own bicycle together. He would send away for parts for his bicycle or seek them at second-hand shops, spending afternoons alone, and he would find computer parts in the dump, which he would carry home through the streets on sunny afternoons in summer. And after a while he had friends—Jack and Dan and Brad and Gordy and Fraser and Pint McGraw. They were all much younger than he was, for no one Liam’s age bothered with him.

  So he told the children stories about how he wanted his computer to work and how he would take them for a trip to the pond. Someday when the day was hot, he said, they would all go back across the tracks to the pond. He just had to wait for the right day. And he knew the situations of all those boys; he knew when Gordy’s father was out of town or when Pint was teased; and he would say, “In my fort no one is teased, and no one’s fa
ther is out of town,” and he would smile at Pint and sit Fraser on his knee. Pint had weak eyes and wore thick glasses. So he gave Pint twenty of his Pokémon cards. Pint McGraw often came to the fort and sat on the bench in the corner, and folded his hands on his lap and looked up at you and smiled. Sometimes he came there at seven in the morning, just to wait for the others.

  Pint was so skinny his socks would fall off his feet, so Liam made small pins to hang from his shorts, and attached thread from these pins to his socks. Pint and Frazer were five, Gordon was six, and Dan and Brad were eight. These were his friends from those summers long, long ago. Brad and Dan were the ones who helped him search the dump for old computers, and Brad was the boy who helped him with his bicycle. He would tear the backs off the computers and look for the right chip and bring it back. Or sometimes he would carry the entire hard drive back to his fort and take it apart. So computer parts lay all over the back lawn, and bicycle parts did as well. Liam’s eyes at this time were deep grey and beautiful. He had read books on computers and showed the older boys how to win the computer games everyone was playing. And the one thing about these children from Injun Town and beyond—from near the old sawmill and on those lanes that ran toward the water—was this: all of them were in one way or the other as orphaned or as alone as he was.

  It was easy for them to be alone that summer around the back of the house, beyond the garden, near the wall of elm trees where the sun came through. When Brad and Dan wanted to do something without the other kids, who were too young, Liam would say, “In my fort everyone does things together.”