Crimes Against My Brother (32 page)

For months and months after the attempted robbery, Ian was trying to decide something—trying to understand why things happened, why Annette had been at Sara Robb’s house so long ago, having her tea leaves read. And why, just when he’d no longer had a thought of her, did he return to his obsession so fully.

Then one night he simply looked at her putting on her earrings in the hallway and decided that if he remained married to her, he would probably kill her.

So the idea that he would kill for her seemed, in a strange way, to be true. He abused his pills and began to see two doctors at once. And what they said was in fact true: pill addiction was far worse than alcohol. Five times he tried to stop and five times he could neither eat nor sleep—and the nausea and the pain in his back was even more intense. So he would go back to the pills, shaking and angry, only to find that he always took more than before. He also did something else: he began to go out at night, alone, to find cocaine. Then, for a while, he would feel free: free of pain, of his marriage—of his guilt.

Once he was found in an alley, curled up as the rain fell over him, by his little son.

But the pain in his back was worse whenever he came to.

And he was plagued by one idea. “Give me one clue as to what Annette is really doing”—did he ask this of God? I am not sure; but he was plagued by the idea of falsehood acting as truth. And the truth was, the store was suffering and he was down to his last few thousand.

Then one afternoon, coming out of the store and locking it with his large key, he was thinking these morbid things and saw something glinting in the window box below him. He turned and picked it up. It was the buck knife Evan had tossed away in the storm the day Corky had been hit. The knife they had used to draw blood when they were boys. He picked it up and absentmindedly put it into his right jacket pocket.

He spent the next two days scrubbing it and cleaning it, using oil to make it shine. In fact, he became obsessed with having it pristine, as it once was—and although he did not know how it came to be where it
was, he was certain it had been sent to him for a reason. But who would send it to him and for what reason?

He was afraid, in fact, that he would use it on his greatest tormentor—Ripp VanderTipp, who still slept at his cottage. He remembered Ripp in a bar, making fun of a woman one night—some poor soul whose welfare payment he took, who waited for him to phone. But worse was that others laughed as well.

Ian became morbid—thinking of betrayal and thinking he should leave before he did something desperate. Thinking he would kill. Then one afternoon, late on a February day, he saw Lonnie Sullivan coming out of Nick’s barbershop, pausing to put some bills in his pocket while the wind scowled about his feet. It was at that moment something became very clear: that nothing in his or Annette’s life had yet happened that Lonnie Sullivan did not know about. So then, Lonnie Sullivan knew—must have known—everything. And Ian became wide-eyed with shame. For who had been with Annette when he’d met her at Sara’s? Who had informed him of Annette’s pregnancy? Who visited her when she was ill, and who told Ian that he was delusional to think she would rob his store?

This, then, was the clue he had asked for.

A month after he found the knife, Ian went to his store in the early morning and phoned Sullivan. He was startled when Lonnie answered. But he was able to say, “She told me everything, confessed, and I am coming to see you about it tomorrow night.” His eyes were watery and his hand holding the phone was trembling. There was a long pause.

“See me about what?”

He said nothing, because he did not know exactly what it was. And worse, what Sullivan next said made him think he was wrong: “See me about what—what in hell are you talking about!”

Again Ian said nothing. His eyes continued to water. He could hear Lonnie breathing. He could hear him reaching for something and unwrapping it. It must be a cigar. A match was then struck.

“The pregnancy test?” Lonnie asked.

Ian tried to breathe. He felt himself break into a sweat.

“Yes—I am coming to get it,” Ian said.

“Get it why?” asked Lonnie.

“Buy it, then!” And Ian hung up.

So after all this time—after seven years—Ian knew. He was sure he would kill Annette if he got to the house before she got home that day, so he left the store and went for a walk along the cold streets.

The only thing he must not do, he told himself, is harm the child. Yet he had already harmed his child—he had become a laughingstock while his fights had caused his business to deteriorate so that almost no one entered the store now. Also, he believed no one knew about his cocaine use. But he was wrong. People knew and talked about it all the time.

So he went back to the house, and sat in the back room.

That night, as they ate supper, Annette spoke about DD and her new boyfriend, who she hoped would work out—and how she might get a job again at Cut and Curl if one of the girls went on maternity. He stared at her a moment, went to speak, and then became silent. He remembered her saying, “You didn’t know I had that ace up my sleeve, did you—now you all have jam on your faces!”

“Don’t worry,” she said suddenly, “things will work out.”

“I’m sure of it,” he said.

After dinner he went to his store, took his money out and put it into an envelope. He sat in the office and shined his shoes, then put on his freshly pressed suit.

He sealed the envelope and held it in his hand. Then he took the knife out and looked at it.

Finally, he turned off the store lights and headed into the dark.

It was March of 1992.

By March of 1992, Evan Young was broke again.

And now people were saying he had forced Corky to his death, that
he wasn’t satisfied with killing just Molly or the boy. But the police, though they did not relent in their treatment of him, finally said it was hearsay. Hearsay in whispers for three years or more.

The previous week Lonnie had said he had only one job for him.

“What job?” he’d asked.

“I am tearing down the old Jameson sawmill for scrap to be sold over at Jemseg. You can do that and we’ll give you six hundred—you owe me two hundred dollars already—so that’s eight hundred and you don’t have to thank me. It is for you I’m doing it. I don’t want Ian Preston to get his greedy little mittens on it! He’s angry as a bear because he was outmanoeuvred on the siding, and he is hanging around me again. He has nothing and wants what you wanted. He’ll destroy it even more—so I have an offer to sell the land to Helinkiscor when they come. You know I wanted to sell it to you—I waited for two years for you, but it just didn’t happen. It was you I was hoping for all along!”

Lonnie wanted him to start work March 6—that is, tear down his dream and be paid at the rate of a hundred dollars a week.

During the first days of March a change came over Evan. He had always believed that the greatest thing in the world was to seek honour and be honourable (this is why he refused welfare, though many thought him crazy)—but it may be just as honourable to seek an end to it. Soldiers did this—they honourably rushed a defensive position they could not in any way surmount; perhaps that was how he should end. And he kept thinking this as the days passed along.

Evan looked up at the stars on the night of March 5, but after a while they disappeared and a mist blew in from the salt bay, still frozen. He thought for a long while about what he must do and what had happened from that moment on Good Friday Mountain with Ian and Harold when they had become blood brothers.

He went outside, and the mist had stopped, the clouds were low, and he could feel spring in the wet snowstorm that would come. In the back of the shed, locked away, was what the police had returned long
ago—the container of antifreeze. Why had he not destroyed it? In some strange pathetic way it may have been kept as a memory. Whatever reason, it was still there.

He wondered if he should drink it outside. Then he decided he would drink it exactly where the child had drunk it. For it was the child’s birthday this very day.

But first he had to find the container, and he went into the small shed, with its four shelves, and looked for fifteen minutes. He finally saw it, behind the paint cans, hidden away, its form attesting to the very suffering and misery it had caused them all—and yet without conscience or consideration itself. The price tag was still on it, halfway up the container side, just as Corky had spied it and elected to buy it for Evan all those years ago.
SALE
, it had read on a separate red sticker.

He picked up this container and went out, calmly closing the shed door carefully and thinking even now how he must re-shingle the shed roof. The mist had turned to spitting rain, and soon a snow would come down.

He took off the cap to drink. He had it to his lips. If he had found it the moment he began to search, he would have already ingested its contents. But at the moment—that very moment—a car pulled into his yard. Yes, he thought, the cops have come to question me about Corky. Just as I knew they would, just as people said.

The car made it up the hill, skidding sideways twice. The lights seemed to toss against the harsh dark sky; the fellow rolled down the passenger window and said, “How are you, now, at fixing roofs?”

For more than a few moments Evan was silent. “I’m okay at doing it,” he finally answered.

“Then will you be so kind as to look at mine,” the man said, “or will I go along downriver to Doan’s Roofing and Construction? I can give you a job maybe, but it’s up to you.”

“It depends,” Evan said, “on how big a job you need.”

“It’s a big job—but you will be paid for every hour.”

By now Evan had stopped walking and was standing beside the car.
He stared at the container of green antifreeze and set it in the snow. He shrugged and got into the car. He had no love of priests; in fact, he hated them—more now than when his wife was alive—but this man had been kind to him during Jamie’s and Molly’s deaths. So he was beholden, and he knew Molly would request that he at least be polite. But why were such men priests? He did not know. He once, in his hopelessness, went to Sydney Henderson to ask him about it all. Sydney said, “It is not the priest but the faith—the faith is miraculous, the priests are only men.”

And now the priest was to tell him something that as a man he did not understand. It seemed the priest had started down to Doan’s to see about the work, but a sleet started to fall, and he thought of Molly’s husband—might he possibly be able to do this work? So he turned and came back to Bonny Joyce Ridge. This is what he told Evan as he drove, and Evan was silent, staring straight ahead.

Then Evan said, “How long did it take you to get here from the time you turned around?”

“Fifteen minutes,” the priest said.

The church was in almost complete darkness.

Inside the foyer, which smelled of stale holy water and oak and some requisite half-dead flowers, the priest paced back and forth with his hands behind his back. Suddenly it was as if he was not asking a favour but conducting an interview. And this is why Evan hated priests: they suddenly, at the most advantageous time to themselves, became something else. He thought of how often Molly had entered these doors—walked by this font and placed her hand in to bless herself, took the sacraments, distilled her whole life in this world, only to sit by the window at the end and refuse to go to mass. He stared at the holy water, bleak and stale, and trembled.

“Yer dad fixed steeples,” the priest said.

“By times,” Evan said, holding back near the door.

“Come in, come in. Could you do the same kind of work?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come, take a look—what do you think?” And he waited for Young to follow him and they went up the stairs together, then beyond the balcony into the old bell tower, cramped together on the ladder.

“It’s in terrible shape. You can see the last work on it was done in 1937,” the priest said.

Evan looked at it, lit a match, held it to the structure a moment and then blew it out.

“You need new supports. I would have to put some staging up outside. I would put some steel braces along here … put steel rods through here—that would help it. But there is a lot of rot—I could replace it here with maple. It is off a degree or two already. You’re losing a lot of heat—I would insulate it again. I do not know if I can straighten it and by the look of outside you need a new roof. I can do that too—tear off the shingles you have, put down some new flash and make it leak-proof, anyway. It’s leaking now right down the necks of your holy people, I bet!” he said.

They came down the ladder and stood in the attic.

Evan looked at the dapper little priest with sharp eyes. The sharpness of the eyes came because of worrying over money and his church day to day, because of him and Father MacIlvoy being the only two priests in this whole section of the river and having between them six parishes. The sharp eyes glittered and the wind blew. It was as if the priest had divined what Evan was intending to do just a half hour before, and they both of them were caught up in this mysterious intercession.