Crimes Against My Brother (12 page)

Joyce said this with sudden glee, as if he had just played a joke on someone.

“Ian! When did he come here?”

Fitzroy saw the crushed look on Young’s usually buoyant face and said, “Why, now what’s the problem? Did I do something wrong?”

People along Bonny Joyce Ridge believed Ian Preston had indeed done something wrong, that he was so desperate to get something for himself that he had betrayed his friend. They all knew how he had scrimped and gone without—but in their eyes, this simply showed him to be what they’d always thought he was.

Evan married Molly three weeks later. The room where the reception was held was cold. Molly did not know why her husband seemed so bothered, nor that the wedding present he’d wanted to give her was not possible. Molly was already pregnant—so people said Evan married her because he had to. Harold and Annette were invited but stayed away, for Annette had suddenly stopped speaking to everyone, Harold included.

In fact, Harold too had arrived at Fitzroy’s the very Monday Evan had—but late, when it was almost eight o’clock. Lonnie had decided to get the old man drunk, make him sign a will, and take the money. He’d convinced Harold and Annette to do this for him. The scheme, as they say, was hare-brained, but Lonnie was desperate. He felt if they got Fitzroy drunk enough, they could convince him to sign. He would use his two friends to help him. If anything went wrong, he would say he’d had nothing to do with it.

When Harold and Annette arrived, it was dark and very windy, with the smell of dried and dead leaves on the walkway. It was three hours after Evan had left. The old man was sitting in a stupor; he was already dead drunk. There was no light on, and the stove was cold. There was a statue of the Madonna on the shelf, a statue that seemed to glow in the dark. Annette, who was frightened of what Harold and Lonnie had got her into, saw the statue and froze.

Harold kept moving into the room.

“Come back, Harold—never mind,” Annette said.

Harold and Lonnie had told her what to wear, and her hair was teased, her skirt was short, her blouse half-unbuttoned, and her face was covered in makeup. But she could not look at the statue of the Madonna without closing her eyes.

Music was playing: some long-ago country tune, some Hank Williams song about loss and sorrow and regret. And Annette was the first to see it: that is, the tin on the kitchen table, emptied of whatever had been inside, while old newspapers lay on the floor. She pointed at it. “Look,” she whispered. “Is that it? What is that? Shhh, Harold,” she said. “Let’s go—please!”

At first Harold did not understand. He picked up the tin and looked back at her. He shook the old man and yelled at him, and told him they had brought him over a bottle.

Fitzroy kept waving him away. He was crying and asking who was there.

Harold realized then what had happened. “The money!” he said. “Where is the money?”

Fitzroy could only wave his hand and tell him to go away.

“It must have been Evan,” Harold said. “That bastard got the poor old lad drunk.” He grabbed the old man’s shoulder. “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey—what did you do with my money? What did you do with my money!”

He knocked the tin off the table and watched Annette run out the door. The door banged in the wind.

“ ‘Leave me be!” she said.

A cold mean snow had started to fall.

“Wait—” Harold said. But Annette would not.

No one saw her for the next three weeks. And in fact, she almost escaped. She was packing to leave when Lonnie phoned and told her it had not been his plan to get Fitzroy’s money that way. He had never wanted a nice girl like her to act like that.

“What did I tell you when you were sixteen? Come on, now, what did I say?”

“You said I would be rich—”

“Well, do you want to be or not?”

Annette did not answer.

“Well, you and I are going to be.”

“Who—who got it?” Annette asked, finally. “Who got that damn money?”

“Ian Preston—can you imagine? The most underhanded of them all. He deceived us all. He deceived me, dear, and he deceived you. We made that wrong choice in picking Harold.”

Lonnie would never get over losing that money—and he was determined to make everyone pay. And for some reason, he wanted Ian and Annette to pay more than anyone else.

Since this comes into the story now, I will mention it. That is, the discussion of God. People always said I wasn’t cut out for academia—and, well, I suppose this is part of the reason.

Some of my students over the years have asked me, do I believe in God? I am not sure, really, one way or the other. I will only say the concept obsesses us all. By this time, none of the three blood brothers believed in God. God was an absurdity, hocus-pocus concocted to disable the weak and control the poor. They believed everyone knew this—especially the priests, who clung to their fallacy out of fear, and justified their malevolent and even sadistic behaviour with penance. And there was good cause to say this was true. At times I too have said that the College of Cardinals is filled with dupes and whores.

And just as Sydney Henderson had made a pact to honour God, the blood brothers made a pact not to. But now all three not only suspected one another of betrayal but hated one another.

Over time, Molly began to realize that Evan might have been abused by a priest when he was young. And if that was the case, she knew his rage was justified. But she could not join him in it. That is, she could join in his rage, but not his lack of belief—and all his anger directed toward her belief made her belief more important.

So Evan was filled with jokes in bad taste, thinking them very witty—and then told her she was skewered by his wit when she did not laugh. That is, Evan did not only want to mock the church; he seemed, like so many modern thinkers, academics and film stars, to want to be in direct competition with it. And he loved to compete against Molly—the last person who ever wanted to compete with him. He never abused her, but little did he know how much he scarred her soul.

“So,” he said to her once, “Christ walks into a hotel with three spikes and says to the manager, ‘Can you put me up for the night?’ ”

Molly knew something had happened that had scarred Evan deeply. When, as a boy, he had gone home to tell his old drunk father about the priest, his father had turned and punched him hard in the face—blackened both eyes and broke a tooth. “You don’t talk about Fadder like dat,” his father said.

Besides, Evan had long ago realized you determined your own life, and if you did not, you were doomed. This is why Evan needed the old
Jameson sawmill. And it is also why Harold, some months after he discovered Fitzroy’s empty money tin, was doing jobs for Lonnie Sullivan, and repossessing furniture and cars, and sometimes took things out of people’s back sheds that were worth almost nothing because Lonnie sent him to do so. He also had pushed weaker men down when they were trying to protect their houses and their wives and children. He was compelled to repossess and steal because he felt others had stolen from him. He knew that if he did not do it, someone else would, and he would be out of a job. And if Harold began to be called heartless and mean, so what? And he told Evan this, and Evan said, “Do what you have to, I suppose!”

So this was what the blood-brother pact came to in the end—three men injured by one another and inoculating themselves from the consequences of what each had done.

Yet Evan, for the first time, saw how this determination worked when applied without scruples.
He
would never have cheated and betrayed his friend. He could never, ever have done so. He sat in a stupor for many days before his wedding, staring out into the back trees on his small property, overcome by a kind of shame. He couldn’t look at anyone and he could not mention Ian’s name. He felt so slighted, and yet believed this slight was deserved. He felt conned by his only friend—for by this time he did not consider Harold a friend as much as Ian. Yet Ian had turned on him without a qualm, taken money he must have known Evan needed, and then gone back to town without so much as a goodbye.

But in point of fact, if there was no God, had Ian done wrong? And if he had done wrong—as Evan now believed—how did one demand retribution? For retribution was needed, and yet would not come in a court of law; a court of law would not, and could not, deal with this. This had just been proven to him by a lawyer named J. P. Hogg, who for a while was interested in helping Harold with a lawsuit against both Fitzroy and Ian but realized soon enough that it was fantasy, and so begged off before his reputation was tarnished.

This to Evan proved not the existence of God but the absence of God—or at the very least, the uncaring nature of what we chose to call “God.” Even this was not the main issue, however. The main issue was to haunt him for a long while: how to deal with this fracture between him and a man he had once considered closer than a brother. It was a fracture that had happened so instantaneously, and yet seemingly with so much guile. And Evan had another, more secret feeling about this kind of cunning—that is, to take action against it was to admit you had been duped and that you had trusted someone whom you should never have trusted. And Evan could not do this. He simply could not admit this betrayal to himself.

Soon after the wedding, Evan was berating Molly for going to church. He berated her, and all Catholics, in a way that was sanctimonious. But, because it was also comic, he believed the sanctimony was hidden; in fact, Evan liked to think that his observations were not sanctimonious if they were against religion.

“If God really saves,” he would start off at dinner when Molly was blessing herself, “why can’t Father Tom afford to fix his roof?”

Molly would try to defuse the tension by speaking in a straightforward way about things happening at the church. “I told Father Tom you might be over to fix it, or look at it, someday soon.”

“Me? Don’t pick on me! I have used up all my goodwill. I was filled with goodness and will, and goodwill, for a while. It ruined me!”

“I don’t know why you are so angry. Is it me—did I make you angry?”

“No, you did not—at all. But someone else did.”

Evan believed Ian had committed the greatest sin: betrayal. And he was right to think betrayal was the greatest of sins. The problem was, he was unsure of why he thought this, nor did he ever think that he himself betrayed others. Yet every time he berated Molly, in a way he did so.

“What in Christ has Christ ever done for us!” Evan bellowed once during grace, slamming down his fist so forcefully he frightened Molly and spilled the tea.

She was at that moment seven months’ pregnant with a child both of them would adore.

Harold, meanwhile, knew he had nothing to hold Annette. The end came unceremoniously and suddenly. She gave him back the diamond ring. She was shaking when she did so. But when he began to curse, she became spiteful—her dark eyes flared and her lips curled into a small sneer. She would never be beholden to him again.

This left Harold broken, and he blamed one person: Ian Preston.

After this, Harold would arrive at Lonnie’s worksite at seven in the morning, sit on the old bench in the shed and wait it out, his leather mittens in his hand, his breath sharp and his eyes anxious. He was a big, brooding man now, with black hair and a swollen face. His shoulders were broad and his chest large, and yet he held his leather mittens like a little boy.

Finally Lonnie, coming into the room, preoccupied with the day’s activities, chomping on his cigar, would shake his head, pull a fistful of dollars from his back pocket and hand them, crumpled, to the man and say, “Two weeks’ work, and where I want you to go.”

Then he would lecture Harold about getting out from under him as Harold eagerly counted the money.

“Do more with yourself than Evan is going to do. You know I had high hopes for you!” Lonnie would say, blowing cigar smoke. “Ian was the only one to have everything figured out. There was no one slyer than a Preston when I was growing up—I could have told you and Evan not to cut for blood with a bastard like him. They are bluebloods from way back, turned to peasants by Canada. But there you have it—all of them are scoundrels.”

And the smoke would curl away, like an unobtrusive shackling of the world.