Harold snapped his fingers in front of her face again, and lifted her chin.
“No, he didn’t make no mistake. Listen! What would it matter to you,” he said. “You want to pay Ian back for all the bad things he did. We will do this—take this money, have a good time. I will adopt the boy and give him my name!”
Here he took out seven more pills and placed them in her hand—enough to kill her if she took them all at once. “You can have these pills if you say yes.”
She began to shiver and look behind her.
“No,” she whispered, “no, I won’t. Well, you know—remember—Liam—you see it’s—a bicycle—once as a young girl I tried to ride one—I was just a little girl.”
Tears flooded her eyes, and her porcelain face and dyed blond hair seemed to quiver slightly at the insult.
“Who does a bitch like you love?” he shouted, grabbing her face for a second and glaring at her. “I loved you all my life—but then, who does a cunt like you love!”
“Everyone.” She trembled, smoothed her hair, and tried, in the end, to sound dignified, like those people like Patsy Mittens she once wanted to be might have sounded. But yes, at this moment she loved them too.
“Everyone—I love everyone. And I am …”
He snapped his fingers once again in front of her face to wake her. “What—what are you? What are you?”
“Don’t you understand?” she whispered. “Shhhh—please, please forgive me—I am sorry.”
Love in fact was the only secret irony could not understand. The one condition of irony those I knew who mocked and used irony never really understood. And Harold took the money and went away, confused, and breaking down on the street, sorry he had called her those names. And wanted to ask forgiveness too.
Helinkiscor’s idea after they fired Mr. Ticks was this: you could do a rip-out job—hire Doan or some other company to come in and take the paper machines out. But then everyone would find out what your intention was to begin with. It would also make the provincial government look corruptly inept. It would also show that Ian Preston was actually right and justified in saying what he had said. Why? Because weak, soft men in provincial power had given their word. And they had—and this went to the highest provincial office—poured money into Helinkiscor and worked very hard—and this too went to the highest government seats—to destroy Ian Preston’s reputation. They had leaked one-sided and bogus information about his dealings to the press and had—this also came from the cabinet—made a point out of offering his wife, Annette, a job to show him up. The resulting disaster in her life, as well as his, however much appreciated, had not been foreseen.
This government had ignored all the warnings about the mill from both Ian Preston and Mr. Ticks, and in fact had helped Helinkiscor draft a statement against their own government bailout when Ticks went to the press, in order to allow another, huger, bailout to happen. So if a rip-out was to come, which it was, how could Helinkiscor do it to make themselves and the government look good? In fact, this was the only thing the government wanted: an assurance that they wouldn’t be seen as complicit. Because if they were too complicit, Ian Preston might, after all this time, have a legitimate case for legal action—and especially so if certain documents were published.
Helinkiscor knew this, and so gave their word. That is, they knew very well Ian Preston and his wife had been manipulated and used by the very company that had called him mad; and the government was so hoping it would not come out that they had asked Helinkiscor if Mr. Ticks had any information about a file numbered 0991563.
In May of that year, Helinkiscor claimed that they would not do a rip-out job as long as the men did not strike. But from the moment they said this, they also indicated the world of softwood and pulp products was such that men could not be kept working.
And Helinkiscor was actually hoping the men themselves would destroy the machines. The mill would be useless and Helinkiscor would say it had been betrayed by the men, and leave. The government, of course, had paid for these machines in the first place. But, you see, the government needed the men to destroy these machines as well because they did not want to be accused of putting their faith in a company that would take their millions and then destroy the very mill they had spent millions in good faith upgrading.
So both the government and Helinkiscor pressed Wally to lay off more and more men, and he did so with the certainty that he was a company man and had his duty to perform. And both the government and Helinkiscor knew the layoffs that Wally Bickle was hired to make would sooner or later force a strike. It would only take a few more weeks; the discontent was so great that Helinkiscor would refuse to negotiate, and lock the men out. Sooner or later these men would break down the gates and come in and destroy the paper machines themselves. Then Helinkiscor would say they were forced to go, even though they’d had a new two-year contract drawn up, ready to be signed, between them and the union. They had no intention, of course, of showing this contract to anyone until the machines the province had paid for were destroyed. Then they would say, “Look at the contract drawn up in good faith!” The mill would be useless, and Helinkiscor would have no competition when they moved into Quebec—and all the wood on the ground would still be theirs, ready to truck away.
And this is exactly how it happened.
In July, the men walked out because of layoffs in June. Annette was simply one of almost two hundred workers who were let go. It all happened within a week. And Wally simply put a large padlock on the steel mesh gate to keep them out. Because he was ordered to do so.
“You men are doing it to yourselves!” Wally warned, his round soft face fraught with duty.
But the strike needed a leader—so Mr. Fension inquired about Rueben Sores early one morning.
“He’s in jail for assault,” someone in the office who knew him said.
“Ah,” Fension said. And he went into his own office and closed the door—and the door remained closed for most of the afternoon. You see, the company did not need the president of the local, or the secretary treasurer, to do this; they didn’t need the political hacks who ran the union and spoke of brotherhood and honour. They needed a man who could take over a huge crowd and decide for that crowd what must be done. They needed an actual leader—a tough charismatic man, who as Fension said, in his thick accent, “Don’t give a hell’s bells.”
When Rueben Sores got out of jail late that day, the streets were empty. Even the tracks leading out of town were bare. The church bells weren’t ringing and the schoolchildren weren’t on the playground. The great mill was shut down, so there was no smoke. There were no cars, and most of the stores were closed. Downtown he went to buy a paper, but the papers were sold out. He went to a tavern and sat in the same chair where he had sat the night he stole Corky’s hat. Today he was the only one there.
Sometimes he wondered about that fur hat, and what had happened to it, and whose life it influenced. But then he forgot about it once again.
“Yer mill has betrayed you!” young Spenser Rogue said when he came into the tavern later, after his grandfather’s funeral.
“We’ll see about that,” Rueben answered.
In the next five to ten days, as more layoffs came, strikers arrived and milled about in increasing numbers and frustration. The men called for support from other mills across the province, then set up a barricade and started a protest.
And as Fension would tell his wife, Linky, who was packing to go back to her summer villa in Norway, Rueben Sores did not “give a hell’s bells” and “all those idiots will follow him.”
Harold Dew made sure the boy Liam made his confirmation—and his good qualities in fact supported his claim that he was concerned for the child and his welfare. That is, he wanted to do better and so he did. And “the poor little fella” whose mom was sick and whose dad had abandoned him was the object of his greatest concern. And it was a great concern—more than just what I might call a pawnshop concern. For Harold still believed t
he child was his son.
So on one certain evening when Liam went to Harold to get pills for his mom, Harold reminded him about his confirmation.
“Aw, come on—I don’t want to do that,” Liam said. He was trying to act like the man who was now influencing him, Harold Dew, just as Harold himself had been influenced by Lonnie Sullivan thirty years before.
But Harold said this wouldn’t do. He was astonished that Liam did not understand how important this was. “Your mom is sick and you are going to be confirmed if I have to take you by the scruff of the neck and haul you up there myself.”
“But you don’t believe in that superstitious stuff!”
“Believe in it? Why, I stake my life on it—on Jesus Christ—so don’t you think for one minute you are getting out of this.”
So Liam had to attend confirmation classes and write a letter to the priest explaining why he wished to confirm his faith within the church. Harold helped him draft a letter to the very angels who would protect him. Read the final draft, hummed and hawed over it a bit—said it needed some punctuation or the archangel Michael might have a bone to pick—and finally said it was ready.
“Is your mom coming to the confirmation?”
“I don’t know,” Liam answered.
“Well, poor thing—that is really too bad.” And Harold for those next few days spoke very highly of the church, of confirmation and of going to mass, and of all the saints who had lived a life of denial and trust in God. He began to take stock of himself and the world around him. He wondered if all things, down to the minutest detail, were happening in some ethereal transmutation of human consciousness. Well, you might think he did not think this way, but Harold did, in this one question: why—and with why he asked, why was there water, why was there earth—why day and night and why the sun, why stars, galaxies, and why beyond that the void? Why did the void exist—and what was beyond the void? What measure defined the millions and billions? He, like Ian and Evan, who since their moment of blood brotherhood had all asked the same questions, came to no conclusion, but then Harold became fascinated about this transformation in the other direction—that is, why plants and photosynthesis and then animals and bone, and blood and molecules and atoms crashing crazily inside the wicker chairs that he wanted to sell, in a way in a universe of their own that was perhaps exactly like the universe we ourselves lived in? Yet still he could come to no conclusion. So taking the Host, saying the Our Father, was a way to structure this dynamic, and to see the dynamic in terms of spiritual nobility that overcame all powers and portents.
But more foreboding was this: he had just found out that Evan was the main suspect in the death of Lonnie Sullivan.
Now Harold could tell himself he did not want this—but how in the world could he stop it, for just as Annette and Ian had progressed from innocence to destruction, so he himself had done the same. And he could not go back now to say he had done what he had done, for he would lose Liam and Ethel if he confessed. Nor did he mean harm to Sullivan—he was only protecting himself. But no one would believe this if he told them, so he must be silent about it. Also, the reason he had been at Sullivan’s was to steal a pregnancy test in order to blackmail Liam’s mother about Liam himself.
So then he too, Harold, had begun to pray—like millions and billions of others who say they do not believe.
“Perhaps Evan will not do any time and the case will be forgotten,” he decided. “Or perhaps this has come to pass because he allowed Glen to climb with him that day! I did not ask anyone to be arrested. So it’s not my fault.”
This is what he told both Ethel and Liam one night while staring at them both mysteriously so they did not know exactly what it was he was saying.
“I did not mean to do the crimes I did—like most people,” That is, like everyone else he was not a moralist; he was a humanist. He did not crave or hypocritically assume his moral stance until he saw the disaster of his actions. Then he tried to cling to something else in his soul.
But Harold had made one mistake.
Amazingly, after all this time, the wrench was still in his possession. And up until this time he had thought no one would ever know it existed. He had at first taken the wrench and hidden it upstairs in the attic. Now and again he would even use it out on his tractor or to tighten or loosen the big bolts on the high end of the shed. But then he hid it again. Forgot about it really.
One day just recently, Ethel went into the attic to find some clothes. So he took it again into the shed, and near where the old muskrat pelt hung like a ghost on a nail, he buried it in the dirt under a board.
He had never known what to do with it. That is, Harold, like all of us, simply wanted the past to go away.
The priest had come forward after the rekindled investigation into Lonnie Sullivan’s death to speak of his concerns and his guilt that he may have spurred Evan on to committing the crime.
So the police could do nothing less than take Evan in.
The problem was this: Evan had no memory of that night—except seeing the body.
He had a black bruise on his head close to that time. This was remembered by five or six people. So this too seemed to indicate that he had been in a struggle. That is, out of all the snow and sleet and darkness of that long-ago night the bruise was remembered by people who saw him walking along the road toward home. In fact, two youngsters had asked him if he had been in a fight.
How would any jury in the world believe he had gone to Lonnie Sullivan’s without intending to do what had actually happened? Like a man dropping back to walk with his fiancée’s best friend.
“Is that when you became religious?” John Delano asked.
“It is,” Evan said bluntly. “Yes, it is, was, or whatever. I go to communion now four or five times a month. Maybe I am trying to atone for everything, for wanting that money so bad—that Joyce Fitzroy gave to Ian Preston—that I couldn’t handle life.”
But then he told the police how he had been seconds away from taking his own life. Could he then have taken someone else’s?
“Is that what happened?”
It became common knowledge all over town that the murder of Lonnie Sullivan so long, long ago had been solved. Reporters took pictures of him in his cell, and because of the case, the idea that it had not been resolved before, he was refused bail.
Sara had come back from Rwanda and had found love—or so she thought. Worse, Evan did not deny the charge against him. He could not because he did not know. And this is what he continued to tell her: “I cannot deny it because I do not know.”
“A human tragedy,” Harold would say to Ethel, and Ethel would start to cry. Harold would weep as well—that is, have tears rushing down his cheeks.
For Sara, it meant ruin. Harold knew this as well.
“Yes,” he said. “That poor little woman—that bodice of human dearity, who tried to be nice to an old curmudgeon like me.”
More peculiar is what was now being discussed. Lonnie had told the Wizard boy, the night before the boy found him dead, that he was keeping something grand and that Ian was going to pay him a large amount of money to get it back.
“Tonight I will get my UI” is how he had said it.
The Wizard boy had, in fact, told this to the town police five years before. The Wizard boy, now in his late thirties, became very well known for a little while. People reflected that he had no reason to lie, and he was a Wizard boy, and he was going bald.
Annette Brideau was called into police headquarters and asked about her past. Not only was this terrifying to her—not only did she not know Ian had done this magnanimous act on her behalf—but she herself swore it was not the reason she had married Ian.
The hilarity over all of this, and about all of them, was unending that summer. All of it seemed frozen in time, and their faces became the faces of those intertwined in disgrace.
Here was Sara Robb’s choice: to hand the blood sample she had kept for years preserved in her fridge to the detectives,
or to throw it away. For if it was Evan’s blood, she was in fact condemning her own fiancé. Perhaps she could convince herself it was too corrupted to be of use. Perhaps she could convince herself that it had nothing to do with anything. But worse, if it was the blood of someone else—say, one of her patients—then she would be laughed at, called a conniver who was trying to frame someone else for the murder her fiancé had committed. And she had every man from Bonny Joyce as her patient—she had her hand on every man’s chest and every man’s penis, had taken every man’s blood. Who would now believe anything she had to say about a blood sample that might exonerate her fiancé that came from her own office, or condemn the one who had betrayed her? That is, if it was not Evan who had murdered Sullivan, then it must be Ian.
If Evan had nothing to do with Lonnie Sullivan’s death, this blood sample would exonerate him. And she held this little sample in her hand many nights thinking this. But if it was him—if it was—then she would have been twice fooled by two former friends. Worse was her plight—that is, her moral plight. It could not be Ian’s blood—it could not be!—but what if it was? How she would be looked upon!
Sara Robb was silent. In this silence her whole life seemed a great trick played out against her.
For many days she did not know what to do at all.
Then one night, just after the report came out that Evan was to be charged, she sat straight up in bed, long after midnight, listening to the tick of the clock down the hall. In a half-slumbering state she was thinking of three years before, parting Harold Dew’s hair.
So there was one other scenario now, one that was equally bad. That is, what if it was the blood of Harold Dew? She had in fact drawn his blood four times in the last two years.
Sara went to work, depressed and gloomy. She stared at the vial and began to write a note to the chief provincial coroner.
Crimes Against My Brother Page 38
