“Stop gossiping now. All those stories are nonsense! You don’t think I know?” Ian said. “Fifty-three hundred dollars—what nonsense. Lonnie is her friend—and I guess he is my friend too. I never thought I’d hear a girl like you talk like that. For God’s sake—go away if you are going to talk like that in front of my customers. I have a business to run.”
And as he said this, Sara knew she would never marry him, that she could not; that whatever it was between them was destroyed; that he was who he was, and she was who she was. And that he had made a desperate mistake, and she had not.
He looked away from her and then he said something he never forgave himself for: “Don’t worry, I’ll still give Corky the job he wants even if I don’t marry you! So Molly and Evan should be happy. We’ll get them in business too, so Evan won’t be going around talking about me behind my back just like you are doing behind Annette’s. Hell, I thought I had friends, but I guess real friends are hard to come by. It’s best to remain unaffiliated.”
Sara looked startled, and then she turned and walked away, dragging her left leg as she did, like a little girl.
The next night Corky came to the store. He said he couldn’t take the job with the siding, that he could not help repair the relationship between Ian and Evan that they had spoken about because he’d decided he might go out west to work. He apologized.
Ian nodded and didn’t answer. He felt ashamed.
Corky went toward the door and opened it. Standing outside, under the awning, he said, “I wouldn’t have minded working here, though. I could have helped you real good! You and Evan would have been best buds again. If you don’t watch it—well, you have to expand or lose. That’s what I was hoping to help you with.”
“Well, why don’t you still?” Ian said, smiling weakly.
“You know she gave up her scholarship,” Corky answered, tears in his eyes. “Now, I don’t know what a scholarship is—but I know that is what she gave up!”
Ian had not known. That is, he had not known about the scholarship at all.
After this, Annette stopped calling him. So he telephoned her. She said she had heard the wedding was called off. He said he did not know one way or the other.
“Is it me?” she asked. “People better not think that!”
She asked him to write a letter to her, explaining that he was the instigator of their relationship and affair, that it was he who had wanted to leave Sara, and that she, Annette, had tried to prevent it, that she was the one who had arranged the engagement party.
So he was struck dumb.
Then Lonnie Sullivan telephoned him, saying he worried about Annette’s overall health—that she might kill herself. She might jump from a bridge; that’s what he was most fearful of. “Do you know she was ill as a little girl? I got her to Moncton when she was thirteen. Probably saved her life, knowing me. So there you go. Something with her blood in her fingers or something. Now she falls in love—but thinks you only took what you wanted and don’t love her. She is really desperate. I’m afraid of what might happen. That bridge looks awful enticing when you are depressed. You couldn’t act like that, could you, Ian?”
“Act like what?”
“You know, hurt that little girl,” Lonnie said. “I look upon her as my own!”
Now Ian was plagued by the residual effects of his duplicity—and he was burdened by phone calls telling him his unfaithfulness had created a victim not only of Sara but of Annette. So now he was pressured toward something—some masterful untruth, some golden lie like the veins of fool’s gold he’d seen that night up on Good Friday Mountain.
That evening he decided to do what Annette wanted. He wrote the letter. Now more than ever he was plagued with the idea that Annette and he had been destined to meet again, and that meeting Sara had only allowed this destiny.
He was still torn about what he should do when Lonnie came to his house and stood inside the foyer. His face pensive and somehow sad, he looked at an old painting on the wall that Ian had bought in support of the Heritage Foundation. He could only stay for a minute. It was raining; his hat was spotted with grease, his white shirt open, a cigar in his pocket. He was out of breath too and had to wait a moment before he spoke. He looked at Ian with great sorrow, and within the bones of this sorrow was a kind of historical dislike for Ian and his family.
Ian looked beyond him, into the yard, and saw Ripp VanderTipp sitting in his truck. And as Ian was looking at that person he detested, Lonnie told him that Annette was pregnant. Lonnie and VanderTipp were at his house because it was a terrible thing, and she needed all of them now more than ever. They had come as a reckoning. Ripp was especially upset, Lonnie said.
“That poor little girl got herself in some fix. If you just go off marrying someone else, what will become of her? That’s what Ripp is so worried about—a man has to do the honourable thing. That’s all Ripp talked about on the way up here.”
Lonnie stood there for another ten minutes speaking, but Ian did not hear what he said. Then Lonnie gave him a note from Annette.
She asked to meet Ian downriver and so he went. She was in DD’s car at the end of the old road that led to her cottage. When she saw him, she flicked the lights. He ran up to her and saw she was crying; desperation and self-pity had overwhelmed her. At this moment he knew he must—had to—choose her or Sara.
The next day he went to see Annette at work, with a dozen roses. As he entered, a few of her friends were tittering. Annette, not knowing he was there, was imitating how Sara walked across the beauty shop floor.
Suddenly and quietly, Ian and Annette married.
Molly went to Sara’s to let her know that this was about to take place—to prepare her. Molly tried to say something positive, and to be spiteful toward Annette—but she had no more real ability to do so than Sara.
“We are all in trouble,” Molly said. “I do not know why—but life now is upside down, and will remain so for years. My husband is a changed man, and Harold is changed too. What has become of them?”
Corky Thorn paced the room, and finally, seeing the expensive set of screwdrivers that Mrs. Robb and Ethel had saved for and picked out for Ian Preston, broke down and cried.
But there was one reason for this marriage happening, beyond all other reasons: Ian’s self-will demanding that he do it, and telling him if he did not do it, he would lose out on the person he had loved since high school—and that it was inevitable, because he had loved her in high school. And since he had been waiting for her to love him, he could not let this pass him by. He had been spurred on when she rejected him, and this became the spur that proved his worth to her—and Sara was but the route that determined how she, Annette, who he truly loved, would come into his life again.
In fact, feeling guilty, this is what he tried to explain to his old friends Corky and Molly, and he became stern with them as he did so—even self-righteous, telling them they had better understand that Annette was not at fault.
Annette tried to smile for photos and make her wedding day the best of all days. She wore white with blue sequins and Diane was her maid of honour. And because the wedding was so rushed and there was no time to consider anyone else, Lonnie Sullivan was Ian’s best man.
Before the marriage, Sara wrote Ian a letter where she returned the diamond ring (though he had never asked her to). He had bought Annette her own—she had picked it out with Diane.
Sara wrote: My dear, dear Ian (my love). Ethel and I were sitting out in the back yesterday talking of all the good times and how much fun it all has been.
Sara left town because of the very scandal, and delight in scandal, her wound had created. People could not help looking at her and showing this mirth even in their true sympathy, especially with Annette pregnant and showing.
Nor did Sara want such sympathy. For a long time she could not stand to see people who knew what had happened. That is, she was now plagued by this as never before. Whereas before, even when rebuffed in high school, she had alway
s thought: Someday, someone will come along. And she had believed what her mother had told her in a reading when she was fifteen: “Someday you will meet someone who will love you for who you are!”
At the time Sara, of course, had said this did not matter to her, and nothing like marriage interested her at all. “Unlike Jane Austen,” and she had laughed, “I don’t think marriageability is the most important thing in the world to women!”
Now it seemed that both the tea leaves and what she had said were proven false.
Ian learned one day, when he asked after her months later, just before Annette was due, that she had borrowed some money and had gone to university.
“University?” he said, mystified that she had taken this step. It was a world neither he nor Annette would ever know. He now realized he was married to a woman who had no use for anything like that, and though she read a dozen books a month, each of these romance books were ones that told her she was right, she was acceptable, she was the one person entitled to love.
The rumour that had started earlier was even worse after he married: the unquenchable rumour that the child was not his. He went to Lonnie to talk to him about this, as a confidant, as his friend and his best man. “What do you think, Lonnie—who would spread such talk?”
Lonnie said only the cheapest of people would bother saying that, and shrugged, and looked away. Ripp VanderTipp was there that day, looking at Ian with incurious self-serving eyes.
Ian stared back at him and Ripp smiled, the gentle aloof smile of a thug.
There were other rumours as well. Ian heard these rumours—he could not help but hear.
Once, coming home late from work, seeing the house once again empty and his supper cold, Ian lifted a quarter out of his pocket and in a heavy moment, leaning against the iron rail, he said, “If it comes up tails, she has been unfaithful.”
Their only son was born that December, well over twenty years ago now.
On that same night, Evan Young was trying desperately to save the life of his only boy.
PART FOUR
FROM THE TIME HE WAS ELEVEN YEARS OF AGE, EVAN “Lucky” Young had the kind of fortune that would seem to be everything to others and nothing to him. He swam the river when he was twelve; climbed out on the high tower at fifteen to clean up bird nests. He took dares to prove people’s faith in him. He believed he must do this to have honour, and so he was honour-bound to do so. He joined the cadets, and he was knowledgeable and tough.
He thought of Ian as a brother, and protected him like one. He also got along with Harold, and considered him a brother as well. He believed to have honour he must not believe in God—for no honour-bound person would fall back on God. And he realized when he came up against many people who believed in God or the Divine that he shocked them, not only by his great strength and his great dares but his willingness to die without the security of what they themselves believed in, while they were not willing to die at all. He played the bagpipes in a sorrow-filled way at night among the dark shanties of Bonny Joyce. He had a feared reputation in a fight, and on more than one occasion thought of joining the military. He hitchhiked to town to see a recruiting officer, yet he did not join. Two days after this, Joyce Fitzroy asked him to take his money, and he did not do that either.
This, to Evan, proved his greatness of feeling and temperament. He had amassed a good deal of knowledge about heroes, from Marshal Zhukov to Churchill, and realized a terrible truth: that he was, or could be, as great as any of them. He was a brilliant marksman, and in a fight he never cowered but became resolute.
Certainly he had a command and a presence about him that other men recognized and other people followed. So he knew he could prove himself to be as great as other men he had read about, men on a battlefield or stranded in a desert. And he knew he was as great as the Jameson brothers, Will and Owen—both legends here. And in each moment of imagining this, he saw his little brother, Ian, with him. Because he saw in Ian a spirit not unlike his own.
Molly was, of course, perceptive enough to understand what may have occurred far back in his childhood, and why he now hated the church, but Evan would not admit that anything had happened—he only wished to denigrate that which he found both odious and absurd.
“There is, and never has been, a thing in Catholicism worth saving,” he said.
This was his view before he and Molly were married, and became much more pronounced than she ever thought it would be afterwards. On the day of the marriage he did not speak to the priest except to say his vows, and to her shame refused communion at his own wedding—the only one in the church to do so.
The truth was, she was far more tolerant of his denial than he ever was of her acceptance.
Men who are fortunate enough to have size and charisma at their fingertips are often unaware that they possess anything special, and waste what they have before they realize it can be wasted. They see the world through a gaze that is blessed, and from a point where others look at them in awe, and they see nothing strange about this. But each one of these men and women find, sooner or later, a wall in their soul they cannot climb.
The fact is, Evan proved to be limited—and he was limited in a fatal way, which he did not know for some time. That is, all his life Evan would try to escape Lonnie Sullivan, just like those others who worked for Lonnie, but he could not seem to do so. And he believed after a while that it was the oath of loyalty to his blood brothers that caused this. For what had happened to his blood brothers? Where were they now?
Somewhere along the line Evan’s reputation stopped growing, and he became less than people thought he might; his bagpipes put away and his kilt soiled against the rain. And this decline started when he believed Ian Preston cheated him.
The one thing Evan “Lucky” Young wanted was the Will Jameson land—that land that had once belonged to the Jamesons in the 1940s.
Yet, as we know, when Young went that late Monday afternoon to ask old man Fitzroy for the money for the land, the money had already been given away.
“Who did you give it to, then?” Lucky asked.
“Yer buddy Ian Preston—you know him, he just was here yesterday. I didn’t know what to do—he pressured me—he came in and pressed me down for it,” the old man said. He said this because he suddenly felt both guilty and cheated, and didn’t want to be blamed for being a sucker.
Initially Young did not blame Preston so much as himself. He felt his friend would not cheat him.
But then he heard that Ian had deliberately gone to get the money, and had taken it home in a large bag and sat with it, staring at it open-mouthed. He heard Ian had phoned the banks and told them of his triumph, and gloated about it. That Ian had done this to him was so contrary to what they had spoken about when they had been stranded on the mountain that long-ago night, it was impossible for Evan to reconcile one act with the other. Soon after, he could not stand to hear Ian’s name—in fact, just as he cringed or guffawed when he heard God’s name or the name of a saint, now he had the exact same feeling about Ian.
What was very strange was an event that happened soon after this.
Remembering how Sydney Henderson had worked with them on the log cut, Evan took some of the deer chop from his recent hunt with Ian down to Henderson’s house. He did this because he wanted to see the man and how he lived; now more than ever, he could not believe any man would live in such a deliberate state of denial. Yet when he saw that it was true, he couldn’t help but be even angrier.
“Syd, I will never hurt my wife like you hurt yours—living here in the worst place on the river and trying to bring up kids while everyone takes advantage—no one will hurt my wife or kids, and no one will take advantage of me. It’s a poor man who has to trust in God as much as you! There is no fun in your life—you have been repressed by that which you now cling to.” Evan looked determined as he said this, and stared straight at the man, hoping for a bad reaction.
Why he was so furious at this man, Sydney Henderson, who ha
d done him no wrong, he did not know—nor could he be rational about it. He even wanted Sydney, who had given up all violence, to take a swing at him, just to prove that he could provoke him. But he could not get him to. So he said again, “The church has repressed you, and made your children slaves to dickless priests!”
“My only caution is that blood brothers are not to be relied upon,” Sydney said. “And,” he continued, “high seriousness is always out of fashion until fashion changes, and I have as much fun as you. Still, if you can advance a theory that is greater than that advanced by Christ, I will believe what you have just said. If not, you should be wary. You might make promises to yourself about your own wife and child that you cannot keep.”
“You know nothing about it—nothing about us. Go back to your stupid church!” Evan yelled. And he felt desperate and went home and brooded in the back shed. He thought of Sydney’s children listening to his outburst—the young boy, Lyle, looking at him in silence and consternation—and he felt terribly ashamed
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