Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  This is what we spoke about in my class just a few years ago, before I retired to my house in Burnt Church. If Harold paid, what would that do to Ethel and Liam, who’d had no one in their lives until Harold? If Evan remained certain he had killed, what would that do to Sara?

  A fair country—that is what they often said on CBC Radio.

  Did my students, living in such a fair country, have any answer for such things?

  Harold and Liam worked on the old drifter together in August and gave it the new name Ethel’s Hope. And Harold and Ethel took the boy to mass on Sunday, and they all played horseshoes, and Harold taught Liam firearm safety and showed him how to work the shotgun.

  Then one morning Harold and Liam got up and went fishing together. It was a beautiful day and the sun was on the water by ten o’clock. Harold showed Liam how to cast behind the half-covered rock on Arron Brook, where the famous Lyle Henderson used to fish. He taught him how to follow his fly, and how to cast up against the current with a White Wulff dry fly or a big bug—and that day they came home with seven trout, all over two pounds and two over five pounds.

  “I have never caught a fish before,” Liam said.

  “Well, with me, Glen, you will catch many.”

  “Who is Glen?” Liam asked, smiling.

  “Oh well,” Harold said, hugging him gently. “Oh well, my boy, oh well!”

  Yet there remained the matter of Lonnie Sullivan’s inventory.

  What inventory? Even my students laughed. Who would think a hardscrabble shop at the end of the world could have something called inventory? A shop that had sat through thirty-seven years of summer and winter, spring and fall where Lonnie Sullivan plotted his empire out of scrap metal and copper wire; his empire of leftover bits of the past, built using boys who had nothing, to work for next to nothing for him. A place such as this, a shed torn down a year after the funeral, to have anything called inventory?

  And yet, of course, it did. And one piece of this inventory was something both John and Markus were certain existed, from magnifying the pictures of the crime scene on a wall at the back of the RCMP office in July of 1998. It was not there, but its outline was obscure yet visible, and so they published this photo in the local paper in August. It was a long shot, certainly silly and perhaps meaningless in the ragtag drift of years, this partial outline of a huge industrial wrench.

  It appeared in the paper, with a small caption: “Outline of industrial wrench quite possibly used as weapon in the murder of Lonnie Fitzgerald Sullivan, March 5, 1992. Persons with any information contact the RCMP or Sergeant John Delano, cell: 506-476-4746.”

  There were no callers, of course, but people spoke about it. “Look,” they said, “it’s perfectly visible—so clear!”

  “No, it’s not,” others said, “what a joke.” And the local paper drifted here and there with this outline on the front page some few weeks.

  For Harold, when everything else in his life was going well, it seemed like a trick played upon him by the heavens.

  It was worse for Sara. She became the target of a personal scrutiny. Engaged for the second time—the first man deserted her, the second accused of murder that even he says he may have committed.

  Both these men sitting side by side in jail.

  Cruelty, hilarity, laughter, kick in the cunt—nothing but.

  Once in a while, far up in the office on the sixth floor of the main building, a light would burn. Sometimes Wally would open the doors and go into rooms where the laughter of years gone by still lingered, the sexual tensions between men and women in offices near the edge of the world. Sometimes he found things that spoke to him only in sadness for a past that was wasted. He was trying to do his job, and waited for obscure orders at obscure times. Sometimes the phone would ring, and a voice with a French accent would tell him that only two trucks had made it through the new Good Friday Road that afternoon, and what was he doing about it? And Wally, his hair receding, his moustache bushy and his eyes bewildered, would try to look up work orders and invoices and general directives, only to be hung up on. Sometimes he would look out of the window and see men milling about in front of the barred gates. He was alone and scared—Fension and the rest had left him and gone back to their own country. One night, someone threw a rock at his car.

  All the great wood was being sent to Quebec—and Wally, without fully knowing he had done so, had seen to it. Now that he realized this, he too was to be laid off in two or three weeks. This came suddenly to him, in a thunderbolt—that is, he too had been left behind. Then about a week after the calls from the Quebec mill stopped, he began getting other phone calls.

  “Leave the building for your own good.” Then the caller would hang up.

  The corridors were empty, like spokes running into a hub—the plaster cracked and the calendars two years behind. Some afternoons when he was checking the rooms, his keys on his belt, the phone would ring somewhere—and keep ringing, and he would rush from one corridor to another, trying to find which phone it was.

  “Get out now!”

  Late one afternoon the sun disappeared beyond the clouds and rain started. He heard men at the gate yelling. Terrified, he thought he should find a place to hide.

  He took his briefcase and his jacket, and walked along the long second corridor that led down the metal stairs, toward the small side door. He thought he’d be safe going out the back way.

  It happened that this was the day Rueben and his brother had planned to enter that very door. So a crowd of men, led now by Rueben Sores, who had busted the gate down with his old truck, which had once belonged to Lonnie Sullivan, stood before him.

  Wally smiled at them timidly, took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth. He stood there, with his heavy gut, in a cheap ochre suit. All the pain he had been ordered to cause over the last three years was now on the faces before him.

  “It’s not my fault,” he said. But Rueben Sores simply picked him up, and tossed him aside.

  They ran over him, breaking his jaw as they came inside.

  They jammed the paper machines with plywood and straw until they smouldered. They laughed and roared and used the forklifts to damage the walls, used the fire extinguishers with glee. They shit on the floor and wiped their arses on the executive towels.

  Then they all of a sudden realized what they had done and ran—ran away.

  Rueben had a gold necklace he had stolen from Wally’s car. He carried it in his pocket, then gave it as a present to his girl, Diane. She wore it to Cut and Curl.

  Later he was arrested for sabotage, and the workers turned on him. He was not true union, they said, not a brother. So it was Rueben who did the eighteen months’ jail time for that.

  “Animals!” Fension said to his demure beautiful wife. “Canadians are animals. My father knew that much fighting the fuckers in the war.”

  Liam sat in the home he had come to, after running errands and helping out at the woodlot—helping Harold as they trucked away the remains of the pawnshop and put them in the shed that lay sunken and deformed at the back of the house.

  Harold was waiting for the bay to freeze so he could walk straight out toward the icebreaker’s path and toss the wrench away, under the ice in the middle of the bay—never to be found, for this was to be the last year the icebreaker came into our bay.

  But the days passed. And November came and went, and the month of Advent, when Ethel was busying for Christmas and waiting for the third Sunday so she could light the pink candle—to her, the most joyful and solemn candle. The bay had not yet frozen enough for Harold to walk on the ice, and Ethel and Liam had gone to the woodlot and got a lovely fir tree, and put it up near the mantel with the manger.

  It had started to snow the day they got the tree, and they had hauled the boat up on logs, near the back shed, and made a cover of tarp and wood for it.

  Sara too lit the third Advent candle on Sunday, December 16. Then she went to the jail and asked Evan what she should do. “Is it your blood?�
� she asked.

  “To tell the truth, I don’t know.”

  On December 17, Sara gave the vial to the RCMP, and they sent it to Moncton for testing. It would take two to three weeks before an answer came back. Still, it might never be used, John Delano told her, for as much as he personally believed her story about collecting the blood, it hadn’t been secured at the time of the murder.

  On December 17, Liam woke to an argument in the house. He lay listening to it, thinking it might be about the Christmas tree. Wind rattled his window and a pale crust of snow lay on the tin porch roof. He sat up finally and said, “What is it?”

  But no one answered him, so after a time he came downstairs in his underwear, shivering.

  Ethel was sitting in her old knitting chair. She had been knitting Liam and Harold socks for winter, and the night before had both of them try them on so she could finish the toes, and her pile of yarn was piled around her feet.

  The phone was upset in the middle of the room and there was a bruise on her eye. There was a patch of mean snow outside. One window was frosted and an icicle hung against the window.

  The night before, Harold had taken the wrench down to the shore and started out on the thin ice, but the ice had cracked.

  Tomorrow I will get rid of it for sure, he thought.

  He put the wrench back under the same small board in the shed—the old board with the nail that had once, years gone by, held the two marten pelts he had taken from Evan’s traps.

  Ethel had got up the next morning when Harold had yelled at her to go across to the old shed and get his jigsaw. He wanted to finish the cover for the boat, and he was in the midst of putting on the name: Ethel’s Hope.

  So she went. She hated this dark spooky shed. She stood by the door for five minutes, and Harold yelled, “Come on now, Ethel—I has to get this here done. Then I’ll take you and Liam to the Pudding Lounge for dinner—how about that!”

  She took a deep breath, opened the shed, picked up the saw and started to leave, when her face brushed the old muskrat pelt that had been brought there by Evan years ago, and hung from a beam over the stall. In the darkness it frightened her. She tumbled backward and fell on a board, and a nail punctured her leg. She dug at the board to get the nail away and picked up a handful of dirt as she did.

  She wouldn’t have looked at the wrench if she hadn’t touched it, buried as it was under the plywood board she’d fallen on. Late last night, coming back from the shore, Harold hadn’t buried it properly at all.

  Ethel sat down on a little wobbly sawhorse and looked at it as if inspecting a new piece of equipment.

  There was the smell of straw. She could smell snow too, and remembered how she had once said she hated wrenches. She kept staring at the wrench and then her eyes widened, and she began praying to herself in a whisper, as if she was trying to answer all the questions she was asking herself. She hid the wrench in the same place, put the dirt over it again and put the plywood back. But she could not stop looking at where she hid it. So she dug it up again.

  She walked toward the house, stopping every few feet to try to think why this was important. When she got to the boat, Harold was waiting for her. She hadn’t even put on a coat and only wore her blue jeans, a sweater and short winter boots.

  “Come here and see your name on this here boat, love,” Harold said.

  But she simply turned and started walking up toward the road that led away from Clare’s Longing, with the wrench in one hand and the jigsaw in the other.

  “What are you doing—bag o’ bones!” Harold said.

  “I’ll be back in a while,” she said. “I think I will go to church.”

  “Church—are you nuts? You’ll freeze yer arse off!”

  Then suddenly he could make out what she carried. “Hey!” he shouted.

  He ran across the snowy yard and grabbed her.

  Now, as Liam appeared, she was sitting in the room and was asking Harold about the wrench.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I got it a long time ago—I won it at bingo.”

  “No, this big wrench has caused so many problems,” Ethel said, tears in her eyes.

  “Give me the wrench and I will toss it in the sea, and it won’t be seen no more,” Harold said.

  “No. It was Lonnie Sullivan’s—Corky sold it to him, and you know how it got here. So—well, so it was Lonnie’s.”

  “It weren’t ever, but so what if it were?”

  “I don’t know, but it might get Evan off—it just might be a valuable piece of evidence, about how Lonnie died. And I think you hit your head that same night—because of the mark on your head—and this is what I think about this valuable piece of evidence.”

  “A valuable piece of evidence—you brain-dead idiot!”

  They argued for five or ten more minutes. Liam said nothing; he just listened to it all.

  Harold then told her the truth. But, he said, he had changed completely—his life was new. He would not do anything to put the new life in peril. To turn him in now, when he had a new life, was not fair.

  “I know, love, I know” was all she said, and she sounded far wiser than he or Ian or Evan. “But I will be here for you, and they will say it was self-defence!”

  “But if they don’t?” he said, his voice almost hysterical. “It’s no longer fair for me to go to jail.”

  “But you might only do three years,” Liam said, for some reason, and he touched Harold’s shoulder and smiled.

  “No—they will turn on me and I’ll do twenty-five!” Harold roared.

  Harold tried to take the wrench away from her. Liam told him to leave her alone. Ethel broke free and Harold began to chase her, first around the living room then across the hall, then into the kitchen and then outside. The day was snowy but still. There wasn’t a sound, not even that of a bird, now that the wind had stopped.

  Ethel would not give the wrench back. She made marks in the snow as she tried to crawl to the culvert to hide.

  “No, Harold—I have to show them! It might be important for Evan.”

  Every time he picked the wrench up, her whole body came with it, and he would toss her down on her back.

  “Don’t!” Liam yelled. “You are going to kill her!”

  Liam ran into the house and found the shotgun in the spare bedroom near an old box mattress. The shells were on the dresser, covered in dust. He snapped the gun together and came into the yard. Harold, in a blind rage, had the wrench in his hand.

  When he lifted the wrench, Liam yelled for Harold to stop. Then he simply closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

  The blast blew Harold forward into the ditch and peeled away the back of his head. He lived close to four more minutes.

  John and Markus were called a little later. When they drove up to the house, Harold was lying in the ditch, face down, with his feet sticking up over the culvert. Ethel was sitting on the culvert, holding the wrench. Many other people were standing around.

  Liam sat alone in the house.

  When John Delano called Liam into the RCMP office, he offered him a pop and chips. He asked him how he was feeling. He asked him if he’d heard from his dad.

  “What do you plan to do?” he asked.

  “I am going away,” Liam said.

  “Did your mother suffer a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am sorry that your mother suffered. I don’t want you to suffer anymore. Is that why you went to get the pills for your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we don’t want you doing things like that anymore.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Was Harold good to you?”

  “Yes—he was very kind.”

  John didn’t tell him about Pint McGraw. Liam was to find out the next day; Pint left him his harmonica.

  He visited his mom’s grave no more. On the day he heard his dad was getting out of jail, he boarded the train. He did not wait to say goodbye.

  In the last le
tter he ever wrote to us, he left instructions about how he’d done his magic trick and risen above the ground.

  Wally gave testimony against the men who had destroyed the mill, and Rueben was sentenced to two years in jail, which meant eighteen months with time served. Then our Wally went back to the collection agency in Bicklesfield to work and phoned people about arrears.

  Missy worked for the same agency and called people on another phone down the hall.

  She had a nice picture of Wally and a few hand puppets she liked to play with. But she did not have her own office window. Missy wore purple and had a wide face. In five years, she and Wally looked exactly alike: rotund and self-righteous and, like Verna, a party to gossip.

  Missy and Wally weren’t planning on having children. They were too noble for children—you know, in this day and age. No, they wouldn’t think of adoption. It wasn’t really for them. They would sacrifice the need for children and be forward-thinking instead. Wally Bickle would never would have to suffer the torment, worry and love of bringing up a child. And that was nice for him.

  However, they both snapped to it whenever Verna was around. She was terrible with Missy, some did say, and gave the girl a nervous breakdown in 2003, which was hushed up—you know, the time Missy heard all about Wally at the bible camp with that young seventeen-year-old girl named Ju Jube Malone, and tried to swallow pills and take her life.

  “I’m not on no diet,” she would say later, you know, at the church suppers—until she got so large you could hardly recognize her anymore. Both, it was said, were interested in politics, and once had dinner with a Member of Parliment.

  On September 11, 2001, Evan and Sara were married at the church in Clare’s Longing by the priest who had hired him to fix the steeple. It was a clear and beautiful day all down the eastern seaboard. Leonard Savoy was Evan’s best man.