Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  Missy had ’99 on her jacket. So, Annette thought, she would graduate next year—and then she and Wally would be married.

  Annette watched the somewhat homely pouting child plod along, all the way to the river.

  She suddenly shivered, and rubbed her nose like a little girl.

  Then, shrugging at the immense folly of her own life, its bewildered journey toward the dark, took a last brazen drag on her cigarette, looked at the red polish on her manicured nails, and started the car.

  Ian was called on by Markus Paul, and for a few hours spoke to him. But Ian, being a gentleman, never once tried to sway the opinion of the officer.

  “Did I kill Mr. Sullivan?” he said. “No, I did not. I did not know he was dead until after he was buried—it was the strangest thing. I was speaking to him, yes, about a private matter—and then four days later someone tells me they had just been at his funeral. So I must have been on a hunt for information about what Helinkiscor was doing—or I might have just not opened the door to my store for those days.”

  “What were you and Sullivan speaking about?”

  “A private matter—nothing important.”

  “There was a rumour you took money to him, but no money was found—did you take money?”

  Ian did not answer. He did not answer because he felt Evan had killed Lonnie in a fit of rage and had taken the money—and he wanted to say nothing about it. The money had destroyed them all, become hubris unleashed. It had destroyed his wife, who in some way he still loved. And he had harmed her enough. He remembered her terrified childlike eyes when he’d raised his fist to strike her. That was not what a man should ever do.

  Markus closed his notebook and asked Ian if he thought the mill would remain solvent. All the pain he had gone through, was it worth it?

  “I thought Helinkiscor would be gone by now” was all Ian said.

  Markus Paul left. The day was bright, and Ian thought of Evan—and thought about how he had caused it all, all of it. He finished his cigarette and lay in his bunk.

  Ian had predicted the mill would close in 1996. He was dead wrong. It closed in 1998. But that was because our little provincial government reinvested another twelve and a half million in the mill. This was called “Wally’s reprieve”—though Wally had nothing to do with it, and the money was already spent by the time he was made boss. But suddenly, because he was made boss, this was his reprieve, one he had organized—he had, rumour had it, walked into the office, cleared those people out who did not want to co-operate, and took things over.

  So Wally was called a “take charge kind of guy!” People wanted him in politics; they wanted him to settle things.

  At this time Helinkiscor was loading their yard with timber. It was piled so high some people thought the mill would last another fifteen years.

  J. P. Hogg himself was unmoved by the town’s plight. He knew the mill would go in a matter of months. He had no intention of staying either; he had no interest in staying someplace so removed from what he felt he was. He was in the process of selling the Zanzibar, his percentage of the prefab-home business and three other ventures. In fact, he was moving to a law firm in Fredericton. He’d been offered a partnership and couldn’t say no. The firm had bought him a house and he was trucking his sailboat down. There was a going-away ceremony for him at the town hall, a dinner and dance at our curling club, and the unveiling of the street sign in his name.

  Annette herself attended this. She thought Wally would have to be present and perhaps, just perhaps, she could corner him.

  Hogg Street would intersect the main highway just before the mall. Everyone clapped. But Wally was not there.

  Certain things Hogg decided to sell. Sara Robb had half a day free and took a walk over. She spoke to him as if he was an old friend, because she spoke to everyone like that. Besides, Hogg was only a year or so older than them all.

  Hogg told her he didn’t want the teakwood chest anymore, because of what had happened. “Ian,” he said. “Yes, a hard case you know. It breaks my heart.”

  So she bought the chest for a thousand dollars and decided someday she would give it to Liam. She did not understand why it was so significant in Ian’s life.

  The good news, she told JP, was that she was engaged again, this time to Evan Young. JP put his great arms about her, hugging her and brushing his lips to her hair.

  “You can’t imagine how happy that makes me,” JP said. And he told her he agreed with all she said about, you know, the rights of the unborn and stuff like that—“But please don’t tell anyone I said that.” And he added, “Tell me, do you think I look better with or without the beard?”

  Evan had left the priest that night years ago and walked up the lane, across to the old back lots of the pulp yard, and then along the road for four miles. He cut through the woods. He stopped walking at Grey’s Turn, for he heard someone—or something—moving toward him.

  He breathed silently in the cold air and waited. He listened for a while and whoever or whatever it was trailed off toward the Ski-Doo trails near Arron Brook. He thought it might have been a young moose walking the cold off, though it sounded more like a man. He continued on his journey, hoping to meet Sullivan at the shed. He planned to tell Sullivan he would pay him twofold to let him out of his commitment. He blamed much on Sullivan. Even the death of Molly and his son. This was the state of mind he was in.

  But when he got to the shed, the door was open and Sullivan was lying face down in his blood. There was a strange silence about the place, with snow beginning to wisp about the open doorway. There was an extraordinary feeling of being watched, and for a split second Evan did not know whether or not he was witnessing a glimpse into what he himself had done. The sudden sight made him think that he had in fact committed the very crime he had often thought about, and was standing at the door afterwards. Perhaps now he was just coming to from committing it. He began to get dizzy, and he fell sideways and bruised his eye. He stumbled away in the night.

  He made his way back home, feeling his body shake violently. He was to have flashbacks for years.

  The next weekend, Evan reported for work at the church. He was sure the priest suspected him. He began to go to mass. The reason he went to mass again was fairly complicated. But he saw a death that night—Lonnie Sullivan’s—and realized that something somehow had protected him from being found the same way. After a time when he began to go to AA, he met a man who was to become his best friend, Leonard Savoy.

  Now, after some years, he was in fact wealthy. He had built a new house. His income was established and he gave five to eight thousand a year to charity and helped people who needed to go to Moncton or Halifax for cancer treatment. Doan and he had branched out, and operated in three cities. He was going to marry Sara. They had come together at a small group of singles who went to the same church. He felt silly going there to find a date. His life had brought him back to faith; the church had not. Those who did not see the difference could never know Evan. But finally he was cajoled into going, and there was Sara Robb, the woman Ian had once been engaged to. He hadn’t at all followed what she had done. He didn’t even know that she was a doctor. He found that out because he helped transport three prostate-cancer patients to Moncton one afternoon, and this little woman stepped from the shadows and got into an ambulance with a patient. Then she simply disappeared again.

  She had been working for months in East Africa with Doctors Without Borders. She had come back just that week—had decided to come here to the church social because Ethel had kept telling her to. That was some months ago. They sat together at picnics and went for walks along the lane down to the bay, and sometimes sat for hours far off near Arron Brook. And one day when all the others were going to wade over to the island and she said she would stay where she was, he picked her up and carried her across the inlet. Far away stood Annette’s dilapidated worn little cottage—the place where Ian had lifted Annette on his shoulders to help her through the window so long ago. N
ow little remained—a broken window, a pane of shattered glass, and a feeling of dreary sadness and isolation.

  It was that night when he waded to the island with little Sara Robb on his shoulders that Evan knew he would ask her to marry him.

  So, everything would work out.

  He did not know, and nor did she, that he was soon to be arrested for the murder of Lonnie Sullivan. And it was the mistaken profile I had given the police that might have led to this.

  Ripp at first thought he would show the boy. He stood up and took his stance. But in four punches he found out.

  He fell back out the door, and ran from the tavern as fast as his muscle-bound legs could carry him. He ran across the street and tried to get away. Rueben grabbed him, hit him again on the back of the head, and he fell across the hood of the car. Rueben beat him until he was barely conscious, and said, “That’ll teach ya, ya big-feeling son of a whore, ta make fun of no one like Diane.”

  Liam travelled back and forth to Harold, and did odd jobs for his friend to get money. Even though Harold offered him money, he didn’t take it without working. He cleaned and swept and made Harold lunches, and now and again shined his cowboy boots. Then he would get a pill or two and take it home to Annette.

  Harold was his only friend, and told him jokes as Liam worked in the solitary way he always had now. Harold was mad at Quebec because of the mill. “So, Liam, what do you call a bra in Quebec?” Harold would ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sepper tits,” and Harold would laugh.

  Then he would set one boot up on a stool for Liam to polish.

  “What is the difference between a Presbyterian bra and a Baptist one?”

  “How should I know?”

  “A Presbyterian bra keeps them stiff and upright and a Baptist one makes mountains out of molehills.”

  Then he would smack his gum, and grin, and put the other boot up. There was one moment when Harold fell in love with Liam—when he thought of him as his own son. He did not know exactly when it was. Perhaps it was because Liam reminded him so, so much of his younger brother, Glen. Perhaps he began to realize that everything in the world sooner or later comes back.

  The lost life in Harold’s small dark room held diamonds and pins and necklaces, and half of Ian’s wardrobe, and small mementoes, and children’s boots and hats. Annette’s diamond was there, and so too were many others.

  Liam was working to get the diamond back. Every day he wondered what he could do to earn the money. Then one day Hanna Stone’s son—the one she breastfed in front of Molly Young—came in with a shotgun. It was the shotgun with the beautiful silver barrel and hand-carved stock that Harold had lost years before playing horseshoes. He would do anything to get it back. And he traded the shotgun for the diamond, which Stone planned to give to his girlfriend, Ines Drillion’s daughter Penny.

  Liam stood by the town clock. People walked by in the dark. and they didn’t know what he was going through. Not at all. He looked into the faint store windows, and threw his Pokémon cards into the fountain. He watched them disappear like his youth. He remembered his mom taking him to Steadman’s store in the early afternoon long ago. They went and had pie and ice cream at the counter. Afterwards they sat in the park, and for a while she even held his hand a little. Would she remember?

  He left the park now and walked blindly toward the pond, where he and the boys once had a picnic. He remembered Pint McGraw and Fraser. He smiled, remembering how they were all going to go to the moon.

  But there was no picnic anymore. Maybe there was no more moon. He had come here to throw himself into the pond and go to the bottom and take all the pain away. He sat for a long while, thinking. But he could not do it. For if he did, who would be there to help his mom? He took the buck knife his father had used to cut for blood and tossed it into the air. It fell into Liam’s secret pond, and he watched it disappear.

  He went home with the morphine pills in his pocket. Now his mom waited for them, expectantly like a child.

  “Do you have any pills?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Well, when I get better, I want to know everything—but now, well, I don’t feel good. It’s just if I can get over this little rough spot, I will be fine. I don’t know why Wally hasn’t phoned. I put a phone call into him about my job—he is supposed to phone back. I went to Mr. Hogg’s party—you know JP. Has a street named after him—anyway, I was there.”

  “I will take you to the hospital.”

  “No! I have to wait for Wally to phone now—I just told you that! He has a job and can hire me again …”

  “Mom—please, you have to go to Sara. She’s nice. She likes us and she will help.”

  “Please, dear, you have to help me get my nightgown on.”

  Annette couldn’t go to Sara. She had perverted their friendship, and that now prevented her. Sara and she had gone in different directions, in different worlds. Also, she was afraid. Sometimes she would remember looking at the statue of the Virgin in her little room when she was deciding what to do the day Lonnie had called her. And she remembered the voice came, saying: Go to Sara, for she loves you more than anyone. If she had only done so, how different and better all their lives might have been. And again, what if she had said: No, Wally, I must not do this, for I do not really want to—Sara will know what I must do.

  But no—always she had been too afraid. And yet now she realized something more deeply than ever: Sara, lame and left all alone, had never been afraid of anything.

  “I wish I was more like your friend Ethel was to you,” she said to Liam one night. “She was so good to you. I would give anything to go back and change things. Do you know—shhh—I tried to rob your dad’s store—shhhhh.” Here she sat up and looked at him with such terror he almost looked away. “It was the worst thing I did. And then I went with Wally—oh God, why did I? Liam, I got mixed up—with bad people. It started when I was so little—Ripp and all those people Lonnie introduced me to. Who can love me now?”

  “I do!”

  “Shhh—I do not deserve love.”

  “Maybe none of us do—and that is why love is so … blessed.”

  “I am still loved,” she whispered, looking around again in terror.

  “Forever—” He smiled.

  “By who?”

  “By me. And by Dad.”

  “But I beat you with a belt,” she said. “Shhh—I hit you with a belt!” She reached up and touched his face.

  “Yes—and it hurt,” Liam said. Then he laughed. In his laugh was the sound of more pain than she’d ever imagined.

  And then she said, reaching out to hold his hand, “I wish Ian and I were still together. Do you think we could be a family once more—do you think he would want me?”

  And then she whispered, as if to some dark certainty in the corner of the room, “No—not anymore. It’s too late now, I think, for that!”

  Then she smiled bravely and said, “Oh well.”

  The morphine pill would soon put her to sleep. But in her daze, complete with a pleasant irrepressible numbness and gentle fatigue that would increase moment by moment, she would realize how little she had shown her son love, and how much she should have. Staring at the door of his bedroom, she would become frozen in a kind of melancholy she could not control. Once or twice she would cry, thinking of him as a little boy standing in the backyard all alone.

  Diane had been so important to her. They had held hands and promised never would they divulge each other’s secrets. Never! Diane had been more than a sister to her. So what had happened? Time and disillusion, and Diane’s sudden realization that Annette wasn’t part of the group, and to be a part of the group DD would have to forgo the friendship.

  She often tried to find Diane, to ask her what was wrong. To ask her what she had done.

  “Remember,” she said, suddenly trying to sit up, “when I took you for ice cream
and pie at Steadman’s?”

  “Yes, Mom.” He smiled. “Yes, I do and—”

  “Boy,” Annette said, “did I ever look fuckin’ good that day!”

  Harold had everything he wanted—almost. He had made a little fortune—little to be sure, but his cigars and pawnshop and gold rings and pompous stare and affected concern were the same as Lonnie’s had been, and Lonnie had ruled a backwater for thirty-three years. The one thing Harold did not have was Liam. Not officially. And more than anything else, this is what he longed for.

  He did not tell Liam anything about this, but he made two phone calls to Annette.

  Then he went to see her. He went on a rainy afternoon, and held the same envelope Ian had taken to Lonnie years before, with the exact same money in it—the very same bills.

  She let him in the back way, thinking he was bringing her diamond back—that he wouldn’t be so cruel as to keep it. They sat in the kitchen at the granite counter—the last new thing she had bought—glinting under the stove light. She seemed at times to be hardly awake, drifting in and out of time and space, and looking at him startled when he spoke. She sat in a kitchen chair with her arms at her sides, her legs straight out and her body limp.

  And once he snapped his fingers in front of her. “I want to offer you something,” he said. He whispered it kindly, and he took the envelope out and pushed it across to her with a clandestine gesture.

  “I want Liam to take my name—Dew—and I will offer this for it.”

  She looked at him, now like a porcelain doll upon whose surface years have left bruises and darkness, and she tried to speak but couldn’t. Her mouth opened and closed and her lips trembled. She looked to the right and left as if to find a friend. And as she turned her head to the left, she smiled at nothing.

  “Ian,” she whispered, “shhh—I loved him. You did not know—that Lonnie made a mistake—shhhh. He thought I wouldn’t lov-love Ian—but I did. He made a mistake.”