Crimes Against My Brother (31 page)

Sara sat on the couch unable to say much about anything. She had just returned from university and looked like a woman now—that is, a woman who did not rely on beauty tips from Cut and Curl. A woman who had been on her own and did not need to remember him. She had no real need of the town. She was aloof without being condescending, which made him feel his betrayal even more.

That is, somehow he was ashamed of the very things that had once made him seem so special to her. While at the same time, Sara, with her plainness and her lack of makeup and her poor left leg, seemed more than special, almost beatific.

Ethel looked exactly the same. Her big ears poked through her blond hair, and her sad eyes looked up at him. Her sticklike little legs and
knobby knees, now not in pink stockings but in black ones, made her scarecrow figure even more endearing.

He tried not to look at Sara, because every time he did the same feeling of betraying her overcame him, and a horrible sensation of waste and loss plagued him. He did not know why, but for a second he believed that everything had happened because of him.

She came up, took his hand and thanked him for coming. Annette had not come with him. It was not a cruel or malicious decision. Annette had always been a coward when it came to death, and she could not accompany her husband now. So they did not speak about her.

Ian went home, and worried a great deal about his wife and his marriage. Yet he could not leave Annette. Why was that? Simply this: with Sara back in town now, he felt he had to stay. He could not prove others right. That is, both he and Annette knew they had made a disastrous decision and were unhappy. And life, such as it was, would have to go on.

“You should leave him,” DD started to say at certain times. And Annette would stare through her, as only Annette could do.

“No, that is not possible,” Annette would say. “For better or for worse!” Because she knew Sara was back in town as well.

Evan Young started back to his house after the accident, after the police had spoken to him, and after the reporter’s interview. He only told them what had happened: The more he had yelled for Corky to stop, the more frightened Corky had become, and the more he had backed away, and Young did not know why. But he couldn’t have seen the plow, and the wind was blowing ferociously. They questioned him about this, of course, perplexed, for Evan Young, once so lucky, now had a bad reputation. Everyone remembered things about him, and recalled who had said what about his wife and child. So now perhaps he had got Corky too! Perhaps in some diabolical way he wanted the whole family; who would not think that? The cops actually did think
this—and in all the fantastic coincidences of life, this one seemed particularly interesting to them. Though they could not prove it, they believed he had done something with this Thorn family, and noted to each other that although they had no proof now, someday he would do something to implicate himself forever. Evan, however, did not know they were thinking this. Or more to the point, he believed that even if they thought this, they would realize soon enough that he himself could not harm anyone.

“I tried to get him to stop” was all he said, and he seemed dazed.

They had no reason to hold him longer than they did and let him go.

For two days Lucky sat in silence, staring at the snow and his cannibalized automobiles. He kept thinking of what he might sell to get himself out of this financial mess. But he didn’t know.

He phoned about, asking who wanted a radiator for a Chevy, or a water pump. But no one did. He kept looking into the old chest where the child’s belongings were kept, remembering Jamie in the ambulance, his wife sitting beside him. That, he decided, was when his wife died—when she fell to her knees and prayed to God. He thought long enough about the brash and ignorant statement he had made to Sydney Henderson, about taking care of one’s family—and how he would never let his family down.

He lay down on the cot and tried to sleep, and wind battered the house.

On the second night he went to the wake and saw Ethel, and her older sister, Sara. Yes, he said, he remembered them. And he said he was sorry he had not been able to stop Corky from walking backward across the street.

Then he hiked back home. It was minus twenty-seven, and he got a drive with an old man from Bonny Joyce, who told him that Ian was in for it: no one trusted him, he’d lost much of his money and he had hurt his back. And the old man said only what Evan himself had heard: that Ian had overextended himself investing in some real estate and even the business he’d bought had liens on it. That he was, in fact, a very good electrician and a very poor businessman who others took advantage of.
And one of the people who had taken advantage of him was his own lawyer, J. P. Hogg, who did not inform him that the warehouse he was buying had a lien of eighteen thousand dollars on it.

“It was done just for spite—I heard the mayor wanted to get back at him—or something—what I heard!” the old fellow bragged.

“I am sorry about that,” Evan said.

“That’s what comes from stealing—that’s what God does to ya if ya steals!” the old man said. There was a sudden hope in his eyes that he was right. He talked too about Harold. The old man had owned a snow blower and had come home to find it gone. He said Harold had stolen it.

“I can’t see Harold doing that,” Evan said. But of course he knew Harold had.

“Did you know he hurt his back in a fight, and now and again wears a brace himself?”

“I heard as much.”

“What do you think of that?” the old man asked. “Both he and Ian? It’s like they have to carry their crosses from now on.”

“Ah yes,” Evan said, “and me too. But you know what?”

“What?”

“The brace—it doesn’t do much good.”

Evan was let out at the road to Bonny Joyce, and walked the last three miles in the cold.

Back home he burned some boards and wood in the stove, and got the old oil K-Mack going again. He made Kraft macaroni and cheese for the sixth straight day. He was in a bad way, unrecognized by millions of citizens in Canada and just as recognized by millions of others. He was in the throes of poverty. And he was paralyzed with a feeling of unseen forces allied against him. And this was not a phenomenon that was unusual, for in many ways he was correct. Once this luck of his had failed, once he was perceived to be in trouble, gossip and rumour and hearsay had abounded, and in their abounding had separated him from others and accorded him a difference that heightened the initial difference of his luck, and caused hilarity and scorn that he could not extricate himself
from and made him subject to the curse of this scandal and the contagion it afforded, until he was as bereft of friends as he was of family. So friends fleeing, he was alone and desperate for recompense. And people knew he was desperate for recompense and did not help.

Because they thought gleefully: Well, look at where his luck got him.

The problem was, he owed nine hundred dollars to his lawyer, J. P. Hogg, and there was no way Hogg would let it go. And Evan knew that anything he did, any problem he had, would be exacerbated by this debt. The office had sent him two reminders. Jeremy Hogg was Jeremy Hogg, and he would go after a penny.

Evan sat in the gloom, stuffing old plank boards into the stove far after it got dark, and now and again lifting the lid to spit, just as men had done for generations. Nor did he want to hurt anyone; nor did he want to take from people. Had he willed Ian to be cheated too—had he willed him to have a bad back? He only knew that Fitzroy’s money had been something all of them, at one time, had had a chance at—and look what it had done.

He tried to think of what to do. He realized that Corky had owed him money from the time they were both up north, some four hundred dollars. Perhaps he could go to Ethel or Sara to collect it.

After Molly died, a neighbour had come over and said Molly hadn’t paid for embroidering the blue-green sash on the child’s crib.

“When did she get it done?” Evan, who was still in a daze, asked.

“After the boy died.”

“How much?”

“Forty-four dollars and ninety-eight cents,” the woman said, and then looked out into the muddy dooryard, with the long May evening, the smell of lilac condemning him.

So he had sat at the table shaking, and counted out his pennies.

He could not do the same to that family—just as he refused on his honour to take welfare, even if he starved.

The day of Corky’s funeral, Evan Young picked up the beautiful teakwood chest and took it to Mr. Hogg. The chest had belonged to Joyce Fitzroy but had been given to Evan’s family after his grandmother’s funeral some years ago. (This was, ironically enough, the same chest Ian had wanted to buy from Fitzroy as a present for Evan and Molly years before. That is, what had set everything in motion had been in Evan’s possession all along.)

Evan was certain it was worth some money, but he was uncertain of how much. He only knew that Hogg collected these things. Last year, when Hogg was at the house, he’d spied the chest and asked if Evan would like to sell it.

“So, do you want to sell that? I’ll give you six hundred dollars!”

“No, that was our boy’s chest,” Lucky had said then. “It’s what I remember him by.”

Hogg looked disappointed and said nothing else.

Today Evan was hoping on that look of disappointment, and he carried the chest on his back through town. Up along Castle Street at that same time, the hearse with its own chest moved, and people, a few cars at most, followed Corky’s coffin toward the great dark Catholic church on the hill, with red sunlight fiery in the new stained-glass windows, which seemed to bleed on the edifices there. Behind the church the gravestones white with snow, and the light lilted on their blessings and names. The light was desolate—that is, the idea of Christ’s cry at being forsaken seemed to emanate from those granite surfaces of black and grey.

At that very moment, Evan was at the door of
HOGG & HOGG, ATTORNEYS AT LAW
.

He set the chest on its side and rested it on his right boot, and waited for his back to stop hurting and knocked on the glass door. He waited, and the wind blew against him, and the snow glided down off the roof in slow motion and surrounded him in light, almost ethereal ways. He knocked again, and then, getting no answer, he opened the door and carried the trunk inside.

There was a reception desk beside a potted plant—a brittle
tubular-leafed plant that hung toward the floor in almost penitentiary sadness. There was a strange darkness in the room as well. A silver Christmas tree was strung with lights that didn’t glow. The lawyers were all rich, and some had ruined lives. He’d heard this about Hogg himself.

Seeing the bell on the reception desk, he punched it.

Hogg appeared. “Yes?”

“You asked about this trunk—said you would like it.”

Hogg looked confused. “What?”

“The 1840 chest. You asked about it. If you want it, I am willing to sell it—or more to the point, to make clear my debt to you with it.”

He waited for Hogg to recognize who he was. A few seconds went by.

“Oh—yes. But that was so long ago—do you have a debt? With us?”

Evan said nothing.

“Well, what are you selling it for?”

“Nine hundred dollars.”

“I did not mean the amount—I meant, why are you selling it?”

But when he’d said nine hundred, Mr. Hogg didn’t flinch. “Nine hundred?” Hogg asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“But you said you put your child’s things in it. It was what you remembered him by.”

“Child’s dead.”

There was a pause. Hogg rubbed his fingers together and said nothing for a moment.

“I can’t take less than nine hundred—people told me it was worth twenty-five hundred.” This was not true, but it is what Evan said.

Hogg asked his secretary to see how much Evan owed. And waited. When he found out it was nine hundred dollars, he agreed. “Leave it, and we will be even.”

Hogg looked pleasant in his white shirt and knitted sweater, with its happy childlike design of a Christmas sleigh.