Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  Then Young hovered in and out of consciousness. When he was able to speak, he said that a wrench had been where it was not supposed to be and he had slipped before he had a chance to hook on. The company said that there had been no wrench found. They maintained—especially Petrie, who disliked him—that Evan was rash and too bold, and unmindful of the conditions. Evan was also known to drink late into the night. In fact, Petrie seemed unapologetic about his feelings because he too was a New Brunswicker and had heard about Molly and the boy, and he had the idea that Evan might have poisoned his child and driven his wife to suicide.

  This bothered Corky as well, for an animosity had formed against Evan within the company that now protected him. One hundred times or more, he wanted to explain what had happened so that the man could get his compensation. But each day he woke to the idea that it was another day and still no one had blamed him. And no one was treating him kinder now than Petrie himself. Evan had been warned, and now people were pleased by this. That is, like all people, they were always pleased when people not like them were shown up. And Corky listened to the talk now rising against Evan Young. The idea that he had committed a crime and was now being paid back by some higher authority was on many people’s minds. So Corky listened and said nothing. And had he planned for this? No, he had not. Worse, the fact that he had not told the truth made each day more a part of the penalty if he did tell. So he would be in far worse trouble now.

  Then there was another aspect, one more thing. This, in fact, was the real danger: he was the brother of the wife who had killed herself—wouldn’t that in itself come into play and cause people to say all of it was intentional, that he had planned and caused the fall, or maybe even pushed his brother-in-law? As Evan lingered between life and death, all these thoughts plagued Corky Thorn. He had an ugly little face with ears that turned inward, and a blunt nose, puffy cheeks and a mouth with most of his teeth missing. Yet it was, for this very reason, an endearing face to almost everyone. But now he could not look in the mirror when he washed this face, because it accused him.

  During inventory late that month, the man in the tool shop, who liked Evan very much, asked Corky where his wrench was.

  “I brought it back weeks ago,” Corky said.

  “Are you sure? I don’t have it marked.”

  “Brought it back!”

  The company couldn’t prove he hadn’t. The man then had the foreman come to the tool bay and look over the inventory in the great big warehouse, where Corky looked like an insect among the tires of giant machines. Petrie looked at Corky with piercing eyes, nodded and told the clerk to forget it. That small moment, that darting look, changed Evan’s life as much as anything else that had happened. Corky Thorn knew unless he spoke up now, immediately, Evan, who had cared for him for years, would not get his compensation, for the company had warned him, and had threatened to ticket and suspend him twice before.

  How had Corky wanted his life to go? He had wanted to be married to Ethel and work in Ian’s store; he’d wanted to help Evan and Molly; he’d wanted to take Jamie fishing. That is all he had wanted when Ian was engaged to Sara. Now he sat out on a pile of sludge and looked down at the great expanse in front of him, the huge, huge trucks, the belted dozers, the great slags of tarp and tar, the miles of grey muddy tracks across the iron ground, and longed for home.

  And something else bothered him. Is this part of the main or secondary story? I have not decided. Perhaps it is part of both—but it fits with a logic that is beyond us all, or at least beyond poor Corky Thorn. It was the reason he’d gone out west in the first place: the very fact that Evan’s car had needed a new radiator was his fault.

  To understand this, we have to go back to that time before Jamie’s death.

  Angered at Ian’s betrayal of Sara, one cloudy Saturday afternoon Corky went to town. He wanted to see Sara to cheer her up. But that was the very day Sara left for university. Despondent at what had happened to the woman, furious that this act of betrayal was taken as a joke by so many, Corky bought forty ounces of wine. Then he went to Bonny Joyce Ridge to see Evan and Molly. Neither was home. But their car was sitting in the yard with the keys in the ignition.

  So he had taken Evan’s car without permission, ostensibly to go hunting but more just to find a place to drink and worry. He’d thought nothing bad in the world would happen.

  He’d tried to drive to the camp at Sevogle, the same hunting camp where Evan and Ian had gone some years before. Halfway along the camp road, the car lurched into a huge rut, and he punctured the radiator. He worked to close the hole, walked down to the brook, got a jug of water, and managed to get the car back out to Evan’s by supper.

  Evan was waiting for him and was very angry, but decided to let it go. Corky told Evan he would pay him for it, that he was sorry but that what was happening to everyone had confused him. Evan told him not to mind it; he would get it fixed himself.

  The next day Corky went to Canadian Tire and bought some new antifreeze, and gave it to Evan to use. “Here,” he said. “I can at least give you this!”

  So the antifreeze had come into Evan’s house because of Corky’s good intentions.

  Now his nephew was dead, so too was his sister, and he had severely injured Evan—all, Corky felt, because Sara had been abandoned.

  Six weeks after the accident on the staging, while Evan was still in hospital, Corky packed his belongings and came home, bringing the wrench with him.

  He took the wrench one day and sold it for twenty dollars to Lonnie Sullivan.

  And this is when Corky began to obsess about the radiator, and how his act of borrowing the old Chevrolet had caused the leak.

  Some months after he came back home, a letter arrived saying that a lawyer had been hired to investigate the accident on the staging. They were asking everyone to write a statement. The lawyer was Jeremy Hogg. Corky tried to write a statement and couldn’t. Then he asked Ethel to help him write it, but Ethel did not know how to write letters any more than he did, and simply sat in the corner of her house worried and biting her fingernails.

  “Well then,” she said, with a big sigh. “What we have to figure out is what happened to that wrench. I know what wrench, Corky—I saw it a dozen times. It was the one you sold to Mr. Sullivan.”

  “No, it was not,” he whispered, and banging his fist on his knee, he protested wildly.

  And then Ethel started to cry and wring her hands. “I hate wrenches—I will go to my grave hating wrenches.”

  Twice during this time Corky went to Ian and spoke to him. He told Ian that he was going to go live in the woods, and snare rabbit and hunt—though Corky wasn’t much of a hunter at all. He said he was fed up with people and would live off the land. He saw how Ian walked, how he was in pain, and Corky trembled. If only he’d been at the store like he was supposed to have been, Ian would not have fallen.

  He tried to impress on Ian that Ian’s sudden and impulsive decision about Sara had caused much unhappiness, and that he was coming to understand how the world was created by such numerous untold events, formed in the vast air about us on a daily basis. “Maybe even in another dimension!” he shouted, to make himself understood.

  Ian told him he might need a psychiatrist and not to be ashamed if he did—Ian would help him pay for it.

  “I do not need a psychiatrist,” Corky said. “I need only to forgive and in turn be forgiven. And if that was the case, none of us would ever need a psychiatrist—would we?”

  Corky then went home and asked Ethel to marry him—to marry him right away.

  She said she would marry him when, and only when, he stopped drinking. Of course, he said; he would stop immediately. Then he bought a bottle of rum. He was on his way to talk to Ian at the store but saw that Ian was there with his little boy. So he didn’t want to bother him. He took the bottle of rum and hid it in Ethel’s attic for some future day when he would tell Ian about the wrench and ask him to intercede with Evan on his behalf. Then they could all
begin to reconcile, the way they should. This was his plan and he tried to stay sober so that it could work.

  Time passed, and Corky received two more letters saying that he still might need to testify in open court. “Open court,” he would say to Ethel. “What in hell is open court? I have never been to court and now they want me to go to open court. It’s diabolical—that’s what it is.”

  But after a time, Evan gave it up. Jeremy Hogg was no longer retained and went on to other things, for it was no longer to his benefit to seek what he’d said he wanted to seek: the absolute truth and nothing but the absolute truth. In fact, in the end the absolute truth never mattered. And Corky, knowing how it had all transpired, realized there was probably no truth in the world at all.

  Corky tried to stay sober, but there was terrible pressure on him to continue drinking. If he did not continue drinking, he would have to change all his habits and everything he had once thought about life. And so in order to cut back on drinking and to please Ethel, he began to buy pills from Rueben Sores. Everyone knew these were supplied through Harold Dew. And soon Corky was not only drinking but using pills to try to stop drinking. So in the end he was using both, and becoming more and more erratic, and saying more and more things he should not say. His body, small to begin with, now looked frail and delicate, especially when he started to shake.

  Soon Corky owed Rueben Sores money and Rueben was banging on Ethel’s door asking where he was. Then he did something else—he stole one hundred dollars from Ethel’s mother’s social assistance cheque and went on a three-day bender. This too was not unusual for a person who has told himself that drinking like he did was not unusual and it was people like Ethel who, because of their nagging, were driving him to drink.

  “I want you to go to AA, Corky,” Ethel pleaded with him after a terrible night at her house where he had nightmares and sweats, began to punch walls and said he would shoot himself.

  “Well, Ethel dear, there you go!” was all he could say, hanging his head and mashing his hands together. “I haven’t been much of a human being. I am an idiot. There was someone Sara told me about who wrote a book called The Idiot and I’d certainly like to read it because it must be all about me.”

  “But I still love you,” Ethel whispered. “I always will love you.”

  “Even if I die?”

  “Even if you did die—which you will not—but even if you did, I will always love you.”

  “The day you meet someone else I will look over your shoulder and I will sing ‘There Goes My Baby’—’cause it’s the song that always makes me think of you and cry.”

  “Ha—that will not happen!” Ethel proclaimed. “I will only love you.”

  When Corky Thorn received his last unemployment cheque that Christmas, he spent most of the day wandering about the shops, hoping to find a present for Ethel to make everything up to her. He decided he would not drink. But decisions like this are often fleeting.

  Finally he walked up the cold highway toward Frenchies second-hand store. There on the back shelf, among some other garments, some silk scarves and woollen mitts, he spied a little fur hat he thought his girlfriend would like. He would never know it was from the marten pelts that had been the start of so much trouble.

  The hat cost Corky almost every penny he had, everything except five dollars.

  On the way to Ethel’s he decided to go to the tavern. He decided he would have his last beer. He carried the hat in a big coloured bag, and sat down near Rueben Sores. Rueben trained his dark unhappy eyes on the little man and asked where his money was. And suddenly Corky began to tell him about the wrench and what he had done to Evan, and asked him to intercede.

  “You have to help me,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it, but you have to help me—please! I know I owe you some money—I will get it to you.”

  One must remember that in the world Corky lived in, owing money was a very desperate thing—even two hundred dollars, which is what he owed, meant he had a grave problem and could get himself killed if Rueben felt he was being disrespected or cheated. So Corky said he had the money, but he’d had to buy Ethel a present, and this was not his fault—it was her fault.

  “She’s always after me for presents and things for Christmas,” he said, forgetting his love for her. He had never in his life felt so badly saying anything, but there you have it: to save himself, this is what he said about the hat he had just bought for the woman he loved.

  He went to the urinal, and when he came veering back, his hat was gone. He went out into the street, running from one spot to the other, and after another hour stood dejectedly under the clock in the square. Rueben Sores had taken his hat as payment—and that was that.

  A freezing rain pelted down out of the black sky. He hobbled to Ethel’s home along a back street, smelling woodsmoke in the air, but the doors to the house were locked. The family was out at midnight mass. He tried the bottom windows, but Ethel’s mother had hammered them shut with nails. He now wanted to get the rum that he had hidden in the attic—the rum he was to drink when he spoke to Ian about Sara—but he couldn’t get in to reach it. So he staggered off, went into the back of the old derelict shed that belonged to Ian Preston, just behind and attached to the store—and stayed there the night.

  When he woke, he realized that Ian Preston was having a great party at his house and Ethel would be working at it. He knew Ethel’s mother was out today too. No one would be at Ethel’s home. So instead of leaving the old shed, he waited out the storm, smoking cigarettes. Then he put his Bic lighter down on the plywood and forgot it. He stayed in the shed until he could hear the plows on the streets above, over the sound of the snow swishing against the thin tin roof.

  He thought about what he had said at the tavern. He had spoken about the wrench! He’d even blamed Ethel for wanting a present at Christmas. He was now wretchedly sick. And he realized, as most of us do sooner or later, that the inner man was where the real struggle was, and in everyone’s life there is at least one wrench. Finally Corky walked out of the little shed, and decided to make it to the AA hall. Perhaps someone there could help him stop drinking, stop him from lessening himself as a human being.

  But when he got to the sidewalk, Evan Young was standing directly across the street, with snow on his shoulders and an open buck knife in his hand, the blade visible.

  Evan must have heard about the wrench and was coming to take his revenge.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Corky said, backing away.

  “Pardon?”

  “Evan, I didn’t!”

  Corky kept backing up, even when Evan was yelling at him to get out of the way of the large yellow snowplow, the very plow Evan had once applied to the town to operate. If Lucky had been in the plow instead of running toward him, yelling, Corky would not have been backing into a twelve-tonne machine.

  But Lucky was not driving the plow—and in some strange, turbulent way, this was because of a wrench.

  Corky’s old friend Ian—a boy he had grown up with far away, on Bonny Joyce Ridge, and now a man standing in a huge house, a man still worth, after all his hard luck, thousands upon thousands of dollars—heard that someone had been killed downtown on the main street by a snowplow in the blinding storm.

  It was twelve minutes later that Ian heard it was Corky—that is, Mr. Charles Thorn, age thirty-three. The plow had hit him as he was backing across the street. A policeman came to Ian’s door to find Ethel Robb and tell her.

  “Oh my” was all she was able to say. “Oh my. Could someone look after Liam for a bit?”

  Ian went and sat with his son. He sat with the boy on his knee and looked out over the snowy street.

  Ethel had fled with the policeman and the party had broken up—even though many of the guests didn’t know the man killed. He was a friend, Ian told them. Annette had left with the others. He’d seen her putting on her coat and boots, as if she herself was a guest, while Ripp looked back over his shoulder to see where Ian was. Ian could h
ave stopped them. He maybe could have demanded that he go along. But he would not.

  He heard the door shut and waited for the outside door to open. She won’t do it, he thought and prayed. It will mean the end of everything if she does.

  The outside door opened and then closed, and he was alone with his son.

  “Are you happy that all the people came?” Liam asked.

  “Oh for sure,” he said. “For sure!”

  “They don’t seem like your friends. They seem like Mom’s,” Liam said. Then he said, “Maybe Ethel and you will someday have the same house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But Liam said nothing more. He only smiled shyly and said that he wanted to buy a birthday present for a girl in his grade one class.

  “And what’s her name?” Ian said.

  “Sherry Mittens.”

  There was another house that night where people were having a party. They were all sitting in the grand living room. The house was modern, with furniture that often looked austere and artificial. There were many books, and many discussions about life, and many practical solutions to the world’s problems. The father was a professor at the university. His name was Jonathan Mittens and someday I would be a colleague of his. I would work in the same department, and we would learn, over time, to dislike each other intensely.

  Jonathan Mittens was clean-shaven except for a practised goatee, and had many good qualities. He had a daughter named Sherry Mittens. She had very good qualities too. In fact, the whole family had good qualities. This was the little girl Liam liked—loved—and thought about at night as the trees waved and made shadows in his room. She was so clean and precious and sweet-looking. And Liam thought of saving her from forest fires, or maybe a drowning or two. Still, Liam did not know this: the topic of conversation that day at the Mittens house was how wild and noisy those parties were two blocks over, and how you could hear the partygoers up and down the street, and how those people were devoid of any culture at all. And how Jonathan’s wife, Patsy Mittens, had been invited to the party and tore up the invitation and placed it on a log in the fire.