Crimes Against My Brother (13 page)

By the third year of owning his own store, Ian was making a very good profit, and he had all but forgotten about his great-uncle. And some who were envious of him realized this. That is, they realized that it did not matter if he was truly unkind or unfair to his uncle; the appearance of impropriety was enough to cast doubt on him.

Ian was very strict with himself, parsimonious even, and yet he demanded respect—and people did respect him. But they did not like him. He would not spend a nickel on anything or anyone; never gave to the March of Dimes, never to the Cancer Society; would pass by kids on the street selling apples for hockey and wore the same poppy three years in a row. He was tough too, and kept something in his store that guided him through any dark night of the soul: a baseball bat near the front counter. His parsimony was much spoken about in the houses of the middle class, and his store, now prosperous, became a target among those who heard what was spoken against him. And since he was not protected by connections in the town, he was an easy target. Yet one night, he dealt with the toughs of the town in this way: he grabbed the bat and chased three men out. He was wearing a shirt and tie, and his body and his face trembled with rage. This only increased the talk about him and his reputation, and even more than before his position as an outsider was sealed.

Men from the mill and the mines laughed about him (behind his back) and spoke against him (behind his back). They were all great men crowded together in a union hall and as priggish as schoolmasters or civil servants, without the suits or ties.

So Ian’s trip to Evan’s camp was retold many times by people in those union halls until the story became that Evan’s plea to Ian was unquestionably about the money—that Evan had told Ian about this money and his plan to ask Fitzroy and had begged him to keep it secret. And soon Fitzroy himself believed this story. That is, Fitzroy believed Ian had duped him, that he himself had always planned to give the money to Evan, and that Ian had not only talked him out of loaning it to Evan, he had talked him out of giving it to Harold in his will.

Not only this, but the rumour surfaced that the banks had warned old Joyce not to let Ian visit him because he, Ian, was a thief. And this was said so often that Joyce himself believed it too, and believed that all the banks on the river had been worried about his fortune, worried that Ian would steal it.

“I should have trusted them banks to do right by me, like I knew they would,” Fitzroy said. He said all of this because he was a lonely old man and knew he would entertain people if he told this tale.

Hearing of the old man’s suspicions, Ian Preston felt guilty, though he had been innocent. He went down in a snowstorm one night to visit his great-uncle, bringing him coffee cake and a box of tea.

But his uncle seemed less than aware of who he was—and almost afraid to make a mistake about who he wasn’t.

“Harold,” the old man said. “Harold—is that you? Is you back in here?”

“No, it is Ian.”

“Who—?”

“Ian.”

Harold no longer came. That is, now that the old man truly needed someone, and might need a warm meal, no one came to visit but Molly Thorn.

The storm had crept up to the doors and back shed; it had covered the dark windows; and all of those so content to say Ian had stolen the money were not there to help he who had supposedly been robbed. The old man had not been taking his pills, and pill bottles lay on the table, empty—and people said he did not have insurance and could not afford to refill them. Ian had not known this, and all of it was put onto his shoulders now.

Ian Preston saw the old fellow was ill and made preparations instantly to take him to the Mount. He did not like to spend the money—that was his problem, and always would be—but he went to the Mount and found a room, fussed over every detail, and made a deal based on how long he believed the old man might live.

Yet this act was now viewed with the same suspicion as all his other acts. That is, people said that he was preparing to settle the old man’s affairs in the best possible way for himself so he wouldn’t have to bother with him again or pay a thing back. At this point, his reputation as a thief was sealed, and would be going forward for years to come. Worse, others suspected him precisely because he did not drink. That is, they believed that parsimonious people like Ian who did not drink could not enjoy themselves and thought only of money.

Just over four months later, Ian’s great-uncle died, and the loan was moot. Suddenly Ian had an extra $125,000 in his pocket. In fact, Fitzroy had left him the money unconditionally.

He thought of giving the money to charity—to the local Salvation Army—but now that he was in the midst of buying his own house, he felt he couldn’t. He also thought he really should give some of it to Evan, and was kept awake late at night thinking this: He needs it. He is married with a child. I have it. I can loan it—and he will pay me back. But Evan had not spoken to him since the night at the camp. No one spoke to him unless they were in the store asking for something. In fact, he was known to refuse service to people if he discovered they had gone to another store first.

“You should have come here first,” he would say. “You better go somewhere else.”

“But I thought we were friends.”

“Friends? No, I have no friends,” Ian would say matter-of-factly.

So now no one would ever know he had not offered Evan the money he’d thought of offering—no one but himself.

And by now it was clear that Evan blamed him in some way that made Ian feel terrible. So he became, in his own way, as resentful of Evan as Evan was of him.

There was one other important rationale for not giving the money to Evan. Giving the money would only allow people to believe they were right, that he was trying to salve his conscience. More than this, he knew Evan would refuse the money outright, and perhaps tell people
he had. Besides, he could not think of parting with it. His family had had so little; there had been many days when there’d been nothing at all to eat in the house and he was told to drink water to fill his stomach before he went to bed.

Now that he had money, why should he give it away?

And Evan, the man who had said they were friends, had proven one thing: that he, Ian Preston, would have no one.

Ian tried to elaborate on this train of thought one night but was not able to—he was not able to call to mind what the poet said, that “too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart.”

So, thinking of what to do with the extra money, he bought an older three-storey house on Pleasant Street—because he had loved those houses when he was a boy and his father used to deliver stove wood to them. He had never forgotten the smell of apples in the yards, the old carts filled with pumpkins from the garden, the soft mellow look of leaves on the trees, the backyards surrounded by well-kept fences. He himself took to rewiring it, brought in breaker switches instead of fuses, got rid of much of the drywall, had the driveway paved, and repainted the exterior then rebuilt the veranda. The first summer there he spent by himself, putting on a new roof, jumping from the staging to the roof with a seventy-five-pound bag of asphalt shingles over each shoulder.

That is, he did the work on the house himself once he discovered how much a contractor was going to charge. He figured that if he’d spent money on the house, he’d saved on the renovation by being able to do the work with his own hands—and being alone and doing work never bothered him. But again people saw him as a miser—and he reinforced that by arguing at the bottle exchange over the bottle count. But why should people be so upset about that? It was an extra six cents, and it was not their six cents—nor would he allow them to have it. If he allowed them to take six cents, it might as well be six dollars. And so, putting the extra six cents in the change pouch of his wallet and zipping it up, he never noticed how many eyes were looking at him. But he heard the words: “That’s him—Ian Preston—that’s him.”

He ignored what he decided he could not change—although he did tell the people at the bottle exchange again that the six cents was his money, not theirs.

One night some months after he had bought his house, Ian was passing by the jail on his way home and heard his name called in a harsh whisper. He almost never bothered with people now—and he never bothered with them because they had hurt him, and they had hurt him because he had trusted. So he was sure that as long as he did not trust, he would not only be happy—he would be safe. It was his main objective, in fact—not to be happy but to be safe. The baseball bat under the counter was insurance for that.

The harsh whisper annoyed him, and he didn’t look back. Yet the voice beckoned again, this time with his name. And it was a voice he knew. So he went over to the jail and looked through the mesh over the window, and saw the face of a man staring out at him with a kind of peculiar glee.

Harold was inside—Ian could make out only part of his face. They tried as best they could to shake hands.

Harold had come to town and got into a fight with a policeman. He said he was searching for Annette. He had less than four dollars to his name. “If you see her, don’t tell Annette I’m in here,” he said. “I’ll make it all up to her—I will. Tell her that she has to come back—she promised me. She is hanging around with people that she thinks care for her, but they don’t—she just doesn’t know. In this life, you know or you don’t. She doesn’t KNOW—tell her I will make it up to her.”

“I will. I will tell her,” Ian said. But Ian had also heard this about Annette—that Lonnie Sullivan was taking care of her. And he too had thought: She cannot know what he will demand.

Harold, in all his confusion, knew this too. “Do you think you bear some of this responsibility?” he asked suddenly.

“How?”

“How?” Harold laughed sardonically. “Boy, you are something. You robbed us, you did. Annette and I. You robbed Evan too.”

“I didn’t know about the money,” Ian said. “I promise you
—I never knew about the money until that day!
” He gave Harold his cigarettes and wished him well.

What Ian did not know was why Harold had come to town.

Furious that his life had taken such a harsh and irredeemable turn, Harold had arrived the night before and watched as Ian closed the store and went home. Then he’d waited until it was completely dark and the snowbanks hid him, and he went behind the building. But though he had two rags in his pocket soaked in gas, and though there was no one in the world near him, he couldn’t get his old Bic lighter to light in the cold wind. He cursed it, and after a while, seeing some people (he did not recognize that they were Ian’s old troubled uncles) coming through the alley, his resilience failed. He begged off and went to the tavern.

There he drank the last of his little fortune down. As fate would have it, at the tavern he tried to light the rags once more. This time the Bic lighter worked, the rags caught fire, and the waiter finally called the police. He was fined and spent twenty-eight days in jail.

Annette was told by Lonnie that Harold was in jail because he went exceedingly berserk and wanted to cut her head off with a pair of grass clippers. “I put a stop to it,” Lonnie said. “You do not need no Harold Dew—not now.”

“No, I will never need him again,” Annette said. “Nor any other man.”

PART THREE

W
E HAD NOT SEEN
A
NNETTE IN ALMOST THREE YEARS
. She had been involved, with Lonnie, in four scams in two different cities. She was afraid of him, and always felt a certain kind of relief whenever she pleased him.

One day, he said she owed him $5,300 for clothes and jewellery and transportation. And he asked her to help him out in some way, just once more.

“How?”

“I don’t know, Annette dear, I don’t have all the answers—maybe a trip someday.”

She stood off to the side in Lonnie’s shed. You could still tell it was Annette—no one could ever deny that. But now, though she was still lovely and seeking love, her eyes had the look that would distinguish her to those who observed closely enough—the look of a predator.

Like all true victims she had been trained for this role since she was a child, since she had run away from the convent school that day. And now she was part of the con that would eventually destroy her.

It was later that month that Ian met Sara Robb—that is, the oldest daughter of the man he and his friends had put out of work years ago.

On Thursday nights Ian would go for walks. He owed no one and had no friends.

To meet young women he had joined a dance club, called the Bright Up ’N’ Comers; he shined his shoes and wore his best suit.
But because he did not drink, and could never see the day when he would, he was less fun than the other men. And this is how most women viewed him. Nor did he spend money on them or even offer to buy them a drink. So he most often arrived and left by himself.

Then his life changed. He met a woman who couldn’t dance and did not go to dances.

He literally bumped into his future, and the tragedy that was to come, three weeks after he gave Harold his packet of smokes at the jail. He turned the corner one Thursday night on lower Pleasant Street, well after ten o’clock, and bumped into a young woman on her way home from the Heritage Foundation. She fell backward as her blue tam came off, and dropped all her brochures. He helped her to her feet and helped her pick the brochures up.