Just over four months later, Ian’s great-uncle died, and the loan was moot. Suddenly Ian had an extra $125,000 in his pocket. In fact, Fitzroy had left him the money unconditionally.
He thought of giving the money to charity—to the local Salvation Army—but now that he was in the midst of buying his own house, he felt he couldn’t. He also thought he really should give some of it to Evan, and was kept awake late at night thinking this: He needs it. He is married with a child. I have it. I can loan it—and he will pay me back. But Evan had not spoken to him since the night at the camp. No one spoke to him unless they were in the store asking for something. In fact, he was known to refuse service to people if he discovered they had gone to another store first.
“You should have come here first,” he would say. “You better go somewhere else.”
“But I thought we were friends.”
“Friends? No, I have no friends,” Ian would say matter-of-factly.
So now no one would ever know he had not offered Evan the money he’d thought of offering—no one but himself.
And by now it was clear that Evan blamed him in some way that made Ian feel terrible. So he became, in his own way, as resentful of Evan as Evan was of him.
There was one other important rationale for not giving the money to Evan. Giving the money would only allow people to believe they were right, that he was trying to salve his conscience. More than this, he knew Evan would refuse the money outright, and perhaps tell people he had. Besides, he could not think of parting with it. His family had had so little; there had been many days when there’d been nothing at all to eat in the house and he was told to drink water to fill his stomach before he went to bed.
Now that he had money, why should he give it away?
And Evan, the man who had said they were friends, had proven one thing: that he, Ian Preston, would have no one.
Ian tried to elaborate on this train of thought one night but was not able to—he was not able to call to mind what the poet said, that “too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart.”
So, thinking of what to do with the extra money, he bought an older three-storey house on Pleasant Street—because he had loved those houses when he was a boy and his father used to deliver stove wood to them. He had never forgotten the smell of apples in the yards, the old carts filled with pumpkins from the garden, the soft mellow look of leaves on the trees, the backyards surrounded by well-kept fences. He himself took to rewiring it, brought in breaker switches instead of fuses, got rid of much of the drywall, had the driveway paved, and repainted the exterior then rebuilt the veranda. The first summer there he spent by himself, putting on a new roof, jumping from the staging to the roof with a seventy-five-pound bag of asphalt shingles over each shoulder.
That is, he did the work on the house himself once he discovered how much a contractor was going to charge. He figured that if he’d spent money on the house, he’d saved on the renovation by being able to do the work with his own hands—and being alone and doing work never bothered him. But again people saw him as a miser—and he reinforced that by arguing at the bottle exchange over the bottle count. But why should people be so upset about that? It was an extra six cents, and it was not their six cents—nor would he allow them to have it. If he allowed them to take six cents, it might as well be six dollars. And so, putting the extra six cents in the change pouch of his wallet and zipping it up, he never noticed how many eyes were looking at him. But he heard the words: “That’s him—Ian Preston—that’s him.”
He ignored what he decided he could not change—although he did tell the people at the bottle exchange again that the six cents was his money, not theirs.
One night some months after he had bought his house, Ian was passing by the jail on his way home and heard his name called in a harsh whisper. He almost never bothered with people now—and he never bothered with them because they had hurt him, and they had hurt him because he had trusted. So he was sure that as long as he did not trust, he would not only be happy—he would be safe. It was his main objective, in fact—not to be happy but to be safe. The baseball bat under the counter was insurance for that.
The harsh whisper annoyed him, and he didn’t look back. Yet the voice beckoned again, this time with his name. And it was a voice he knew. So he went over to the jail and looked through the mesh over the window, and saw the face of a man staring out at him with a kind of peculiar glee.
Harold was inside—Ian could make out only part of his face. They tried as best they could to shake hands.
Harold had come to town and got into a fight with a policeman. He said he was searching for Annette. He had less than four dollars to his name. “If you see her, don’t tell Annette I’m in here,” he said. “I’ll make it all up to her—I will. Tell her that she has to come back—she promised me. She is hanging around with people that she thinks care for her, but they don’t—she just doesn’t know. In this life, you know or you don’t. She doesn’t KNOW—tell her I will make it up to her.”
“I will. I will tell her,” Ian said. But Ian had also heard this about Annette—that Lonnie Sullivan was taking care of her. And he too had thought: She cannot know what he will demand.
Harold, in all his confusion, knew this too. “Do you think you bear some of this responsibility?” he asked suddenly.
“How?”
“How?” Harold laughed sardonically. “Boy, you are something. You robbed us, you did. Annette and I. You robbed Evan too.”
“I didn’t know about the money,” Ian said. “I promise you—I never knew about the money until that day!” He gave Harold his cigarettes and wished him well.
What Ian did not know was why Harold had come to town.
Furious that his life had taken such a harsh and irredeemable turn, Harold had arrived the night before and watched as Ian closed the store and went home. Then he’d waited until it was completely dark and the snowbanks hid him, and he went behind the building. But though he had two rags in his pocket soaked in gas, and though there was no one in the world near him, he couldn’t get his old Bic lighter to light in the cold wind. He cursed it, and after a while, seeing some people (he did not recognize that they were Ian’s old troubled uncles) coming through the alley, his resilience failed. He begged off and went to the tavern.
There he drank the last of his little fortune down. As fate would have it, at the tavern he tried to light the rags once more. This time the Bic lighter worked, the rags caught fire, and the waiter finally called the police. He was fined and spent twenty-eight days in jail.
Annette was told by Lonnie that Harold was in jail because he went exceedingly berserk and wanted to cut her head off with a pair of grass clippers. “I put a stop to it,” Lonnie said. “You do not need no Harold Dew—not now.”
“No, I will never need him again,” Annette said. “Nor any other man.”
PART THREE
WE HAD NOT SEEN ANNETTE IN ALMOST THREE YEARS. She had been involved, with Lonnie, in four scams in two different cities. She was afraid of him, and always felt a certain kind of relief whenever she pleased him.
One day, he said she owed him $5,300 for clothes and jewellery and transportation. And he asked her to help him out in some way, just once more.
“How?”
“I don’t know, Annette dear, I don’t have all the answers—maybe a trip someday.”
She stood off to the side in Lonnie’s shed. You could still tell it was Annette—no one could ever deny that. But now, though she was still lovely and seeking love, her eyes had the look that would distinguish her to those who observed closely enough—the look of a predator.
Like all true victims she had been trained for this role since she was a child, since she had run away from the convent school that day. And now she was part of the con that would eventually destroy her.
It was later that month that Ian met Sara Robb—that is, the oldest daughter of the man he and his friends had put out of work years ago.
On Thursday nights Ian would go for walks. He owed no one and had no friends.
To meet young women he had joined a dance club, called the Bright Up ’N’ Comers; he shined his shoes and wore his best suit. But because he did not drink, and could never see the day when he would, he was less fun than the other men. And this is how most women viewed him. Nor did he spend money on them or even offer to buy them a drink. So he most often arrived and left by himself.
Then his life changed. He met a woman who couldn’t dance and did not go to dances.
He literally bumped into his future, and the tragedy that was to come, three weeks after he gave Harold his packet of smokes at the jail. He turned the corner one Thursday night on lower Pleasant Street, well after ten o’clock, and bumped into a young woman on her way home from the Heritage Foundation. She fell backward as her blue tam came off, and dropped all her brochures. He helped her to her feet and helped her pick the brochures up.
“Oh, I’m okay,” she said, gathering the papers back, now covered in snow. When she pulled her tam on, it fell almost over her eyes and pinned her ears down. But as she turned away, he saw that her left leg was injured; she dragged it slightly.
“What happened—did you hurt yourself?”
“Pardon?”
“To your leg—what happened?”
“Oh, I got that years ago—everyone knows.” She glanced at him and shrugged. But her eyes shone with a peculiar brightness that told him she knew all the ways this could be used against her and wondered if he would.
Ian, holding one of her brochures, watched her go along the street with streetlights shining down on the pale snow at intermittent spots. He followed her at a distance. She turned from one street to another and entered a small house at the back of a lumberyard.
He did not know what to do after that, but he felt very sorry for her. Eventually he went home and put the brochure on his fridge. “Richie’s Wharf must become a historic site!” it read.
He went to the young woman’s house the next day and knocked on the heavy door. The house was so low to the ground its windows were only inches above the snow, and a snow angel left from Christmas still clung to one of the faded crinoline curtains.
She lived with her mother and her younger sister, Ethel. Ethel reminded him of a dozen young women in these forlorn places. She was incredibly thin, with milky skin and big scared eyes, and sat near the stove in the damp hallway, bearing witness. Her face was covered in shy, almost invisible freckles.
“I didn’t get your name,” he said to the young woman he had knocked over.
She stared at him for a second without recognizing who he was, as heavy wind rattled the window and blew snow across the street.
“Oh! Ian. I’m Sara Robb—you must remember me!” Sara had heard most of the rumours about Ian but did not care to believe them.
“I know you—we were in school together back at Bonny Joyce!” Ian said. It seemed a hoax by God—the God he and his friend Evan detested and had decided not to believe in when they were sixteen—that this most beautiful one in the household was, because of an accident, burdened and deformed.
So Ian started going back to that little smoky house, which in so many ways reminded him of his childhood house, every few days after that. After a time he told people about Sara. Perhaps even too soon, and perhaps wanting to be married now that he had moved into his house, he told his staff he loved her. He even bought the family groceries and paid their oil bills.
There was one other eventuality—something else—one more thing. Here is where he ran into two other people: his old boss Lonnie Sullivan, who teased him mercilessly about stealing Fitzroy’s money; and Sara’s best friend in the world, Annette Brideau. They both would come to the Robb house, sometimes together and sometimes separately, to have tea-leaf readings done. Annette would say little to him, but now and again he would see her glancing his way with her black, beautiful eyes.
Sara was very bright and she certainly soon loved “Mr. Ian,” as her mother called him. Mrs. Robb seemed frightened to call him anything less. “Sara,” she would sing when she picked up the phone, “it’s Mr. Ian.”
Sara sat out in the sun reading on spring days when the wind blew sulphur smoke across the backyard fences. But for Ian, she would have been off to university that fall—for him, she put her studies aside.
“I am well off,” Ian told her one night, “and my wealth will grow.”
“But that’s for you—what about for me?” Sara smiled.
He told her he loved her, and he did. Ethel was ecstatic, because of Sara’s predicament—the fear that, being lame, she wouldn’t find a man. And she was the gifted one! Ethel had been terrified that Sara would be marked as deficient because of her heroic act long ago.
But Ian, though he said he was well off to Sara, did not speak of money to anyone else. He was more guarded about money than anyone Sara had ever met, and she soon realized this when she mentioned his money in front of her family.
“I don’t talk about money to anyone,” he said to her later, and as sternly as he could.
And so she did not mention it again. But her family loved him in spite of his taciturn ways.
An effusive attention was given to Ian that might have seemed calculated if it had not come from such innocent, kindly and simple people. They were kindly in the way they talked about everyone, from their neighbours to Sara’s friend Annette, who often borrowed money from them when in fact she was supposed to pay for her tea-leaf readings. This, of course, was the same Annette Brideau Ian had been enamoured by, and who was now a hairdresser at Cut and Curl up near the highway. Annette had allowed her benefactor, Lonnie, to pay for this course some months before.
Now, Annette at Cut and Curl had been hearing about the boy she had so rebuffed in high school. And hearing about his success felt akin to a stab in the back. She had come a long way from those early days. Lonnie had taught her that she must do something with her beauty—she must take the world by storm. In fact, he was planning a trip for her to meet a man in Truro, a trip that would help him absolve a seven-thousand-dollar debt he owed. Recently one evening, before setting out to town, Lonnie had again told her that she had picked the wrong man when she picked Harold. But Annette had long ago given up on Harold.
“Picks can change,” she said, lighting a cigarette in the dark. To look at her now was to see not the young girl who had hoped to be someone special but a woman provocative, beautiful and susceptible.
“Ian’s already taken,” Lonnie said to her.
“I don’t mean Ian—I am not interested in stealing someone’s man.”
“Though you could if you wanted—with one look,” Lonnie said. He said this in a husky suggestive voice, but she was nonchalant in her agreement.
“Sure—in a New York second.”
The air was as cold in the shed as out when he said this; the smell of cigar permeated the grey room. All of which caused a sadness within her, sadness that her life might be no better—and that others she had never thought could do anything were moving ahead. Not that she needed a man to get ahead, or even thought of it in that way. She was too bright for that! Still and all, to think that Sara, who she liked to pity, would have something she herself would not.
Lonnie was commiserating and his cigar smoke seemed to indicate this in the aluminum air, with the sweet smell of ice and falling snow. He wore an old worn jacket, with a battered fur hood. And he had a bundle of money that he hauled out and flipped through before tucking fifty dollars into her blouse.
Her eyes looked at him, steady, without emotion, as he tucked the money down.
“In a second,” she said, almost to herself.
A week later Ian was in the small foyer of Sara’s house, while Annette was in the awkward position of asking Mrs. Robb to throw down the tea and tell her if she would ever find a man, a man she could trust. A man who was sensitive, said Annette. She leaned forward in her chair, wiggling her beautiful bum, her legs entwined about the
chair legs and her face almost beatific with interest in those squelched and squalid tea leaves that held so much more romance for her than the confessions or masses that Sara still attended.
“I have been broken-hearted many times,” she said, smiling at everyone with a kind of summer whimsy (even though it was not summer). “I probably will not be able to find true love, or take much more of bad love!”
“Yes, of course you will,” Mrs. Robb said.
“You see, Annette, we all told you so—didn’t we tell you so!” Sara exclaimed.
“Well, it’s been my fault—I have not been as good a friend to some as I should.” And she glanced quickly at Ian and then glanced away.
“Of course you have,” Ethel said.
“Well there!” Annette said. “Thank you, Ethel. If I ever get a house, you can come work for me.”
Ian stared at her, slightly open-mouthed; here she was in front of him. The woman he would have killed for. The woman who’d had that awful relationship with Harold—who, she said, had broken her heart. My God almighty, Ian thought, she is even more beautiful than before.
In a strange childlike way, Annette believed herself to be the most progressive person in town. For she had read all the magazines that told her she was, and held all the opinions they told her to. But now she exhibited a trait to Ian she did not know she revealed: self-absorbed naïveté, with her sweet vulnerable hope in a tea-leaf reading. He found this in its own way brilliant. For the first time since entering Sara Robb’s house, he felt weak with old autumnal desire—of sunlight flashing on a late-October afternoon against the side of a house, or the smell of auburn hair at dusk—for as any rural man knows, it is autumn, not spring, for breeding.
Annette did not want Ian and she did not want to hurt Sara—but she realized Lonnie was right: she saw Ian’s infatuation with her, and she smiled and winked.
So she set her sights on Ian. And there was no one she had ever set her sights on that she could not have.
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