Crimes Against My Brother (33 page)

“If Lonnie Sullivan won’t let me out of my contract, I will have to work for him until mid-July. If he lets me go, I will start on it later this month or when the weather gets a bit better—there is no use doing it in snow. But the staging I rent has to be good and I have to oversee it being setup. I will need three tiers for the roof and four tiers for the steeple. It rents at about thirty-five a tier per week. I set my own hours. I come and I go, but I get it done!”

“That will be fine,” the priest said. “But you have to start before July—and the pay here will be better—that is, you won’t have to worry about having to pay money back.”

“Well, I am honour-bound,” Evan said. “I will have to see Lonnie tonight or tomorrow and ask him to let me out of it.”

“So if Sullivan allows it, you could do it?”

“Yes, I could do it,” Evan said. “I could do the exact same kind of work. But I tell you this, I’ve had my full of falling and do not wish to again!”

“Then pray,” the priest said, “that you do not.”

Evan shrugged. Praying was for women and children and he told the priest this. So the priest said, “Well, maybe—but then again you could light one candle for Molly and Jamie.”

“I don’t know about that,” Evan said.

“Well, they were the reason I thought of you on the way to Doan’s—because tonight there was a mass said in their honour.”

“In their honour—who requested that?” Evan asked.

The priest looked at him, and mentioned the man, Leonard, whom Molly had played horseshoes with all those years ago—the man Molly had seen at the church picnics Evan did not go to; the man who had liked her, and who she too had liked, and who’d brought her home to Evan when she was not in her right mind.

“He often requests a mass for Molly and your son. Leonard Savoy—do you know him? He did so tonight on the anniversary of your child’s birthday. He will do one on Molly’s birthday as well.”

Evan said nothing. He went down the aisle and did not look at the saints assembled, or the quiet face of the Virgin, as he put a coin in the box and lit a wick.

He left in the dark and began to walk toward Lonnie Sullivan’s. He travelled toward the highway, wearing his old torn parka. He himself had ridiculed church every chance he got before. He did so until after the child died.

Now it was snowing, and as he thought about the steeple and how to right it, and what he might use to support it, he forgot completely about the antifreeze and about how he’d believed he wanted to die.

Harold Dew was at Clare’s Longing, some seven miles to the south, looking at the same stars before the mist drowned them and the sleet started. He had stayed out of Evan’s way for years. But that did not relieve him from pain. Nor did it stop him from inflicting pain on himself. Why was this? For if he took revenge on Evan’s family—though he said he did not take revenge intentionally—why then did he cringe each time he thought of little James and Molly and the death of the two? Why did he get drunk when he was forced to think of it coming unto Christmas, and get into a fight where he fought, and couldn’t win against, both Mat Pit and the Sheppard boys? And why had he done so—because they had made light of Sydney Henderson? He did not know Sydney that well, and so it was not rational—and though he had called on Ripp VanderTipp, who he had been drinking with, to help him, Ripp left by the back door, for he was terrified of Mat Pit, and so Harold fought the three men by himself. And why was that?

Now he too had to experience the bane of men who worked with their strength: an injured back that bothered him when the damp weather came. Like Ian and Evan, he believed Lonnie Sullivan was the cause of his trouble. But if truth be known, Lonnie had really done nothing to them; for each of them in their own way had had many opportunities to escape, to say no. And yet, now each of them was plagued by this man—and each of them, while disbelieving in the Divine, had in fact attributed much divinity to this man who they all secretly feared.

In fact, Harold was planning to rob Lonnie Sullivan that night. He had worked on the idea for ten months. To get the pregnancy test—and get his child back. Why this particular night he did not know, but it suddenly came to him, when he woke that day, that this must be the night.

If it was true, the pregnancy test must be hidden there somewhere. For every paper Lonnie had, he kept. And Harold believed he knew where it was: in the workbench drawer, which had a hidden back and where Lonnie kept the notes in which he skewered people’s lives. Lonnie had something on everyone—on widows he impregnated thirty years before. So the pregnancy test would be there too. At some points in his
reveries Harold thought he would take it—and he would demand thirty thousand from Annette. At times he believed he would demand a blood test and take the boy from them, and rename the child Glen!

But at other times he believed in his heart he would take the pregnancy test and hand it to her and say: “Burn this and be done with it. I knows how yer friends have used you—and they aren’t your friends.” And he would turn and walk away, and start a new life in the north—the same dream Evan had had, and one that Ian too had entertained.

The same night, and at about the same time Young met the priest, Harold left his house and walked over old Ski-Doo trails that he had helped open, and through the dark of Arron Brook, where the wind always whistled like a mournful cow in heat, toward where the old Jameson mill still half stood, a conglomeration of rusted half walls and withered sluices jammed and bolted and empty.

On the way he passed Lonnie’s house, and it was dark, the old truck in the yard—a small yard with a fence. So Lonnie was asleep.

He would confront Annette—in fact, he could not help thinking that this would make him even. Only then would he be happy.

But would he be? That is, happy? For even if he did this, he would still in some way love her—and need her to love him.

Still, robbing the shed would be easy. First, because no one would suspect he’d walked nine miles to do it; and second, even if the back was locked he knew how to get in, since he had been there a thousand times since he was a child. Third, he felt this was his due for how Lonnie had treated him. After Lonnie bragged to him about the test and how he had used the woman, he’d recanted and said that what he told him wasn’t really true. That there was no pregnancy test at all.

Harold remembered he’d kept staring at Lonnie as he ate a poached egg—and Lonnie wouldn’t look his way, but mumbled something, and sighed as he looked at his egg.

Therefore he decided Liam was his child.

He finally came to Glidden’s Hill and moved along the alder bushes at the side of the field, with the hail and snow falling down upon him,
and saw one light on at the shed’s back entrance. He opened the back door and went inside. When he went inside, the room was dark. There was no sound and so he snapped on the light.

He began to open small drawers, not caring much about the noise, for Lonnie’s house was far on the other side of the road, well over a mile away. He knew there were two false compartments at the rear of the drawers and he was trying to find them. But as he took out the drawers, nothing was there except an old pay sheet from 1982 and a bulletin from the Catholic Church, which said: “At this time of Lent please fast, give up worldly desires in order to come closer to God.”

Ten minutes passed.

Then twelve minutes.

It was snowing; the little light was still on. Harold left very much the same way, but very quickly.

Then there was silence.

The door was left opened—a light shone on the snow.

Lonnie Sullivan lay on the floor of the shed with his skull bashed in.

Harold was holding the large industrial wrench in his right hand. He had returned everything to its place, and carried well over fifteen thousand dollars in his pocket.

Dawn came slowly over the black trees. The snowstorm stopped. All was quiet in Clare’s Longing.

Harold hid the wrench under a plank in his attic, where it would remain for some time. He had found fifteen thousand dollars in a manila envelope stuffed at the back of that drawer, along with fifty-three hundred more dollars tucked under it in loose twenties, fifties and tens. It all seemed surreal.

Still, the money was real, and since no one knew it was there, or that it was gone, Sullivan’s death was initially considered an accident: the man, a vicious alcoholic, had slipped while drunk and cracked his skull on the large workbench.

It would be some months—yes, even years—before the investigation would open once again because of all the treacherous finagling Lonnie
Sullivan was known for. The corrupt documents he kept on people in order to blackmail them would someday come to light. By that time, Harold’s whole life would have changed for the better, while Ian’s life would be a disaster.

Luck, luck, and nothing but.

Ian believed in gentlemanliness—or at least, some good part of him did—and above all, a sense of duty. He had married Annette for better or worse. So he must continue on. He went and bought the pregnancy test from Lonnie. And he carried a buck knife in his pocket because he did not trust Lonnie—and he held it in his hand, in case. Yes, he had been parsimonious and thrifty—and he could not understand why he shouldn’t be, for a man who grew up with nothing and made his own way should not be laughed at for saving a quarter. Yet now, this was for his son. But it was also to save his own reputation, and out of the fear of being called a joke by Sara (even though she never would). He did not want Sara to know. He knew this was part of his reasoning as well.

There was just one thing: if Ian had not gone down to visit him, Lonnie would have locked up long before and gone home; Harold would have come to an empty shed. But Lonnie was imbibing after Ian left, for the money he’d wanted to get to pay the back taxes on properties he had researched he now had—and this would make him wealthy if he played his cards right. Part of the property he wanted to claim belonged to Ian Preston himself, and was situated on the lowest end of Bonny Joyce, at the Swill Road turnoff. Ian had completely forgotten about this property—but it alone would command thirty-five thousand dollars in a sale to Helinkiscor, Sullivan thought. Ian had no knowledge that Lonnie was about to get it all—that is, five properties, including Evan Young’s, for twenty-three thousand dollars in back taxes. He felt he could make thirty-five thousand on Ian’s property alone. On the rest he might make forty or fifty thousand more.

So Lonnie thought he would go to town in the morning, pay the property tax with the money Ian had given him, wait until Evan helped him tear the mill down, then put Evan and old Mrs. Thorn out of their places, buy Ian’s place, and turn about and sell their properties to the pulp and paper mill that wanted to clear a road right through Bonny Joyce. His profit would be more than eighty-thousand dollars in all. He could make a great deal of money out of this—and the money to pay everyone’s back taxes had just come into his possession as if by complete chance that very night. (He had fifty-three hundred more in his drawer that Annette had given him over the last few years.)

He was, for those few minutes before his death, delighted by everything he had done in his life.

So then Ian had arrived first.

Lonnie took out a cigar and lit it, looking at him as the smoke billowed. Then he shook the match out and placed it on the table.

“I’ve come to give you money,” Ian said. “But I want the test.”

“What test?” Lonnie said, his eyes streaked with yellow. His mouth was round and playful on the cigar, his eyes suspicious.

“Annette’s pregnancy test. I have money for you, but I want it back—and I will destroy it.” He clutched the knife in his pocket and stood before the man who had betrayed his wife and his child. But then he let go of it and felt for the envelope. And he took the manila envelope out from under his coat.

“How much is in the envelope?”

“I am not saying,” Ian answered.

“Is there anything in it?”

“Yes, but I am not saying how much. I think you should do the honourable thing and give it back, never mention Annette to anyone again, and I will hand you this envelope.”