He turned and left.
“Do you want to know? I been nice to you—I coulda got a lot more. Ha! I coulda got more—I’m being nice!”
Lonnie turned and shrugged and put the envelope with all that money in the back drawer and went inside the shed, opened the desk drawer, took out a bottle and poured a drink. He had another young girl coming in to clean the place for him. Someday he would tell her about Annette and how she broke his heart. How she robbed him. And he would warn that young girl not to be like Annette.
Now he thought that with this money all the property on both sides of Bonny would be his, and the houses he bought would be sold for a hundred thousand and bulldozed into a road for the mill, and he would get the biggest lump sum he had ever had—after sixty-eight years of life. He stretched suddenly and smiled at the thought of Ian trying to protect that woman.
Must be a point of honour or pride—something like that, he decided, spitting sideways onto the office floor and clearing his throat. God, he himself didn’t remember if she was really pregnant or not. Yes, he had her believe she was something special to that man in Truro. Was that right—or what? He wasn’t sure. But he’d never done anything to harm anyone. Really, he couldn’t think of one instance when he had.
At that moment Lonnie Sullivan had twenty-four minutes to live.
A disaster was about to befall Ian Preston. He did not know this, nor could he have foreseen it in any way—nor contemplate the fight that he was about to be immersed in. He had no idea that the next day when he woke and went to his store and locked himself inside, that when he came out, he would become embroiled in the fight of his life.
By this time it was certain that Bonny Joyce was to be given up to a Helinkiscor cut that would include all the tracts of land everyone was concerned about—and more besides. By 1992, people were being offered money for their old properties at five times their price because a large new road had to be made—so many people were simply selling out and moving away. They understood they could not fight both the company and the government. Most were looking into what Helinkiscor would offer them—and these were the same properties Lonnie had been determined to pull out from under the feet of the rightful owners. But he had died in a queer accident at his office. So as I say, people were selling off and moving away, and the world had once again caught up with those on the fringe of it.
To most, Ian appeared to have forgotten all about it.
The little group he had organized in the late 1970s to protect the Bonny Joyce had long since disbanded. Now he never seemed to have a word to say on anything in the world. He wandered out at night alone, preoccupied and friendless. Men shouted insults at him because of the dealings they had had with him. Many things said about him were untrue, yet he had no one on his side. He was able to quell the pain in his back with pills and cocaine, and he was for the most part left alone. He did not drink himself into a stupor as Evan and Harold had—but the pills and cocaine offered the same stupor at a different rate of exchange.
Sometimes wags would come and ask him for money, or his uncles would phone him about a bill, and he would fuss and worry over this. And everyone knew it. Yes, he had been too stingy, even with Annette and his child. Then suddenly his uncles died, within two months of each other, and he was preoccupied with paying for their funerals, and trying to find enough people to act as pallbearers.
His wife no longer had anything to do with him. She went out at night alone. So no one paid the least bit of attention to him. That is, how could a man like this—dispossessed, attacked and ridiculed mount a campaign to save anything?
Yet just when everything seemed to be settled, a month or two before the mill started operation, Ian spoke up. No one had expected this from him at all—least of all Annette. Now and again Annette woke with a terrible hangover, and she would wander downstairs to look for him. He would have left a note with some money—informing her that he was going to see Liam after school, and he was working at the store and might stay there over supper. And she would not see him again that day. DD, in fact, began to plant the idea that Annette had more to live for and should seek a divorce.
Yet in spite of it all Ian looked almost venerable, as if his temperament and pain had changed his very nature. As he walked along the street, his face was strengthened by resolution. He used a cane because of his back, and waited at stoplights even when no traffic was coming.
He appeared at the town council one cold February night the next year. He was august, as if knowing supreme knowledge was bestowed from within. Suddenly the old suit and tie, the derelict face, revealed the contours of fascination and brilliance, a moment on the world stage with his hands shaking slightly as if palsied. His rubbers were covered in salt. His face was strained with worry. He had not spoken to Annette in a week—he had not been home once in that time. He had been making a plan, slowly but surely, to fight for Bonny Joyce.
“The woods won’t last five years,” he said at this meeting. He held a black briefcase filled with documents. He passed them around, and each councillor looked at them in turn and then passed them to the next councillor and then back to him.
“What is it?” one of the young men asked. A new, brash, understanding, liberal-thinking man—liberal in the sense that as a Maritimer the main concern must be money.
“Well,” Ian said, “this is what Helinkiscor has done in Quebec. This is the track on the west side of the Gaspé—it is unrecognizable from this picture taken three years before! They have cut north of that too, and into the river. They have cut right up to the Caribou herd. That is why they have come here—and they have come for Bonny Joyce, which was considered by the Heritage Foundation to be untouchable and sacrosanct just ten years ago.”
Ian, coming home from the town council through a dreary drizzle, realized he would be alone. Annette had told him that it was a losing cause, and was waiting for him to agree and to go back to being him. People had long talked about him as being what she’d thought he was when she was a girl—a complete fool. The one thing that stung her was this: many people spoke to her about him as if she should be as amused by him as they were.
“What’s that husband of yours up to this time?” the ignorant man who ran the big clothing store in the mall asked her so loudly one day everyone turned to listen. “You’d better smarten him up. I hear he now wants to stop a hundred million dollars from coming to the river.”
She turned and rushed away from the store, dropping the new boots she was going to buy, with DD running after her.
But when she told Ian what the man—someone so respectable—at the mall had said, he said it did not matter.
The same reaction manifested itself the next day and the day after. And no matter what she said in protest, Ian said it did not matter.
“I am saying this for your own good,” she would tell him.
“But it does not matter at all!” he would say.
And this is what else he told her: Together they had betrayed Sara, and because of that he had tried to change, for Annette’s sake—and now he would do so no longer. He had worn what she asked him to wear, made the friends she wanted, and now he would no longer do so.
“Betrayed Sara?” she said, deeply confused. “But don’t you remember Sara betrayed me? It was the other way around—you know that, Ian, it was the other way around!”
She looked startled, then bit her bottom lip and tried to think. Tears came to her eyes.
She became worried. But for a few weeks nothing happened at all. And Ian did not go back to the town council—he waited at home. But he refused to take the pain pills for his back. He no longer took the cocaine that would free him from pain. No, he would not do it. He needed to think. And at times he lay on his back in the hallway, trying to sleep. He told her the concessions the government was willing to give Helinkiscor were abysmal and would ruin them all.
“Don’t people see it?” he asked. He had lost weight, and his clothes seemed to hang off him. Sometimes he would try t
o speak and the words would not come.
“You are in despair,” Annette said. “Yes, I have heard of men falling into that—despair.”
Annette was taking yoga and had her own mat, and was doing jigsaw puzzles like she had done when she was a child. She had Liam help her. For the first time in years she seemed herself again.
Still to Ian, who had long wanted her to be this way, it no longer mattered. The days to him were meaningless and dark. He was focused only on one thing.
So one night after supper when they were all alone, he simply said, “I am about to take on Helinkiscor, and perhaps lose everything doing so.”
“What do you mean?” Annette asked, putting down her romance novel, Love’s Desperate Flight.
He answered her quite quietly and sincerely: “It means the destruction of a hundred thousand acres of land, and maybe all of the great Arron timber track—all the way to Clare’s Longing,” he said, trying to impress her, as a downriver girl. “There will be nothing left,” he said, after a moment, “and if there is, it will never belong to us. It will belong to some Dutchman or Finlander. Everyone sees it, but no one seems to be strong enough to stand up to it—it is our entire downriver heritage.”
She looked stunned, and rustled the page of the book as she turned it.
“Well, what does that have to do with you?” she asked sharply. “DD says so what about the stupid old wood! You live in town.”
By now Helinkiscor knew who Ian was and what he was trying to accomplish—and had consulted the highest levels of the provincial government because, as they said, they wanted no worrisome spectacle. They didn’t want trucks or dozers sabotaged. And the source they had consulted told them that Ian was a drug addict.
The deputy minister of forestry, who had actually grown up in the very area they were going to clear-cut, and was Helinkiscor’s most enthusiastic champion, said, “He’s a total disgrace—no one pays any attention to him. He cheated a dozen people around here.”
But there was one thing Ian was waiting for.
The Helinkiscor road would cut along his property line on the Swill, and finally they had to approach him about it. The best way to approach anyone for something like this is to make little of it—that is, to make it seem very standard, and as if they could appropriate his land at any time. Two men came to the house one afternoon unexpectedly, when Ian was down at the store, and offered Annette fifteen thousand for the right of way. She was beside herself—fifteen thousand for a bit of dirt on the Swill way out at Bonny Joyce! She telephoned Ian and asked him to come home. He came to the house, and saw the two foreign men in business suits sitting in the living room, both wearing overshoes with snaps. They smiled at him when he entered and warmly stood and shook his hand, as if they had come to a great meeting of minds already.
When he said no to the fifteen thousand, they offered him twenty thousand.
One was a small fellow with a limp, and the other had a bald head, the surface of which looked like a walnut. Both of them were from the Quebec office. What was it about, money? Well then, they were prepared to offer twenty-five thousand, but no more.
“Twenty-five thousand!” Annette said.
Ian again said no.
They picked up their briefcases—each had one, beautiful briefcases with nice brass snaps—and left.
“Are you nuts!” Annette said. “We can’t possibly get more!”
“I don’t want more.”
“Then why don’t you take what they offered?”
“My place downriver is not for sale.”
In fact he had been told three days before that an offer would come. His land was ten acres—simply ten acres that had rarely been walked on and had a small brook called Preston Creek that ran into the south branch of Little Hackett, which in turn ran into Arron Brook at Glidden’s Pool. Yes, it was up there she had sent him running one time to seek her out—and he did—run.
Ian had not been down to see it himself in three years. It had been his old homestead (which in the papers drawn up in the offer was called a shack), the place where he had made all his plans to be a businessman. The place where he’d sat on the porch waiting for Annette to come up through Bonny Joyce Road, to watch her just as she walked by him. (He and a dozen other young men.)
Still, the idea of taking on the whole province—holding up everyone over a sliver of land, which Annette couldn’t even remember—enthralled her. Suddenly it comforted her to think he was like the great Lonnie Sullivan himself. Even though Lonnie had tormented her, she still missed him. So she began to talk not like her innocent self but like her ruthless self, the self that Lonnie himself had helped create; a side of her nature that for Ian was unnatural, and that Liam noticed and seemed ashamed of.
“Everyone said you were cagey!” Annette proclaimed the next day, her beautiful and dreamy eyes suddenly more cunning than before. “Now I know it!” she said with deep enthusiasm. “Now I see it. Ripp? Ha! You have it all over Ripp. Wait until I tell him. He’ll change his tune.”
“Oh,” Ian said. “So Ripp has a tune.”
“Well, you know Ripp,” she said clumsily. “Wait until I tell DD,” she said.
He had never seen her so happy with him. It was the first time he remembered her being pleased she was his wife. He smiled at her tenderly, and touched her cheek. He never answered.
The next day a man came to the store. He walked in and came over to Ian, who was waiting on a customer, and held out his hand.
“Ian,” he said. “God it’s been a while, lad. How are you?”
For a moment Ian tried to decide who this fellow was, this fellow who was so friendly. And then he realized: oh yes, older, more obsequious, more wrinkled, but with the same pleasant smile, the same admirable way in which to bring men to his side—yes, the man who had interviewed Ian for a job at the mill years before. Now not so proud to come into the store—a place he had not been in before—and now not so proud to take Ian’s hand in friendship. Yes, a former mayor, with his dark ring on his little finger and the strap of a gold watch just visible.
“Go away,” Ian said.
Then Ian simply turned and continued to work.
There was someone else with him at that moment as well—a small rotund man, waiting and carefully watching. His name was Wally Bickle. Ian knew him from long ago. Bickle was the man who had been called to work at the mill, and had just sized up the person he had come with to Ian’s store. Yes, Bickle decided, the man, a former personal manager, was a lightweight—incapable of anything. Ian wouldn’t even speak to him. So Wally would distance himself from this fellow in the next week, and begin to assassinate Ian’s character wherever he was, tell people about Ian’s youth, something so well known in Bicklesfield and Bonny Joyce.
Ian worked until dark, then locked the store and went home. It was bitter and cold and yet some light flared way out in the sky, and he heard the thud of a snow shovel in someone’s yard.
A sudden thought came to him: I will lose Annette. And part of him realized he did not want to—that he was desperate not to. I am deceiving her by not telling her what is going to happen—when she realizes it, it will be too late—too late! Poor Annette, she does not know.
And suddenly he felt that everything in his life was over.
At ten that very night a call came—it wasn’t either of those two men with the briefcases or the former personal manager but another man, named Mr. Ilwal Fension. He was prepared to offer 27,500 for Ian’s land and the right to tear down the old shack that was on it.
“We are putting a road through, you see—we plan to start hauling out of there sometime in the next few months. We will put your whole town to work! It is a very depressed area, and we could have gone to many other places—but we want to put people to work, we want people to be self-sufficient.”
Fension told Ian to call him Ilwal.
“No,” Ian said.
“No? You won’t call me Ilwal?”
“No, I won’t take the twenty-
seven five,” Ian answered.
“You are just trying for more, aren’t you?” Annette said, asking a question, yet her voice pleading. “I told DD you would soon settle. So—I want to know when you will, so I can tell my friends, okay?”
He looked at her for a long moment. She was scared now, and frightened of him.
“I will allow them the land if they promise not to cut Bonny.”
He knew that all these discussions about what they would offer him were done in consultation with the province, and that he was ostracized for holding them to ransom. But Ian, as much of a failure as he was, would still always be the brightest one in the room.
That night, shadows played off the wall as traffic went by, and the blinds were drawn, and the magazine with the Arborite display was open on the carpet. And the air was still. And the rooms were quiet in a clinging pedestrian way, and the mahogany banister shone with new polish. Annette was smoking and the smoke lingered in the shadows as well. She didn’t speak to him; she watched him. She was like a brilliant beautiful cat. And she too had nine lives. She watched him, and butted her cigarette. There was something terrible about him, officious and unlikeable—and she was worried. Couldn’t they have some kind of a life together with that money—and a life for Liam as well? She felt he was doing this to spite her, because she had hurt him by some of the frivolous things she had done. She knew now how others disrespected him because of her. Well then, if she’d hurt him she was sorry—but she did not know how to say it.
If she had known, it might have changed everything for the better.
“What will I tell DD about what our plans are, and when we will get the money?” she asked, hopefully, like one asking a favour. “They all want to know—you should see how jealous they are of us now. All of them are jealous of you—and I just say, ‘That’s my man.’ ”
He looked at her a long moment.
Crimes Against My Brother Page 25
