Crimes Against My Brother (2 page)

Annette was an only child and from the age of fourteen a strutting beauty—and she could not help this. She could no more help commanding attention than a meteor bursting out of the dark air, or a metaphor so beautiful you put it in a song. Lonnie Sullivan had many youngsters hanging about him, but she was his favourite, and she designed to be his favourite from the first—just as she designed to be everyone’s favourite as much as she could. Nothing exemplifies rural
life more than those who with longing and hope want, in one fashion or another, to escape it.

No matter how he spoke about helping others, Sullivan committed offences against these people, almost clandestine, almost whimsical and almost unnoticed—a dollar here, a quart of oil there, a mistake in numbers that lessened your pay or a bill you paid back in agony and destitution that was not counted in your favour. Sullivan would sniff and shrug when you tried to plead your case. Or look hurt when you happened to catch him in a lie. But this was true: it could happen in any life, urban or rural. And Sullivan from the first moment he spoke to someone—as he stood in his office with a cigar in his mouth—never really hid his intention. We must, in some way, give him that.

I discovered this next part of the story almost by accident—and have no reason to disbelieve or discount it. It starts out one early spring long ago, with a thousand board feet of lumber that Sullivan told Ceril Palmer he could have to redo the back of his house. But when it came time for Ceril to take it, Sullivan demanded the price be deducted from his pay. A pay that had been withheld since April 15.

“I have had enough of your lies,” Palmer said.

“I have never told a lie,” he answered, and went in and closed the office door with a quick snap of the lock.

The quick snap of the lock allowed some to think Sullivan was frightened. It was a careless assumption.

Over the next month or so certain of those men came together and plotted their revenge like you would an assassination. Where to do it, who would be involved and how to get it done consumed many people for a long time. Sullivan had six men who worked for him full-time, and at least four of them were included in this conspiracy.

In mid-May a Barryville man attacked him, punching him off his milk box at a horse haul at the community centre. Wearing a white shirt and tie, and heavy old suit jacket and frayed suit pants as part of his obligation as president of the Bonny Joyce Community Centre, Sullivan stood and fought back with two quick punches to the ribs
and a left hook, delivered so fast and hard that he left his opponent prone on the ground. And the two others waiting to attack, seeing their biggest ally stunned, left off and moved away. In fact, they snuck away in the confusion of the crowd and loitered together behind the tents.

This was always remembered by us as a strange and pivotal moment in Lonnie Sullivan’s life.

There was a sickening pause as the man lay there, beaten, his blood on the dirt, unconscious, like a sleeping child, with Lonnie Sullivan standing above him in triumph. But
how
in triumph—in what way was it a triumph? It was the triumph of a great man burdened by sudden betrayal, and looking from side to side to see who he might or might not implicate, and wondering about those who now stood together behind the dinner tent. The look in his eyes, and on his brooding, callous face, was almost depraved, and everyone spoke of it later.

Few ever bothered Big Lonnie again. Yet he was hurt by this incident, deep in his soul. He smoked his cigars in the dark by his work shed. He accepted no offers of copper or tin roofing, but whiled away his time playing crazy eights with a boy who came by. And it was then, while talking to this boy, Harold Dew, that he decided he would hire boys instead of men. That he would reorganize his little empire, and it would be “done right this time.”

And a week later he sent Harold Dew to find out who had set up this attack on him.

“You come back with that information and I will be in your debt—and it is a debt I will carry,” he said. He said this most solemnly, and with great feeling.

So Harold left the shed. I saw him as he walked away, seemingly almost stunned by a certain obligation, incurious and detached as he looked at me and passed by, nodding only at the last moment in recognition that I had come home from my college courses. He disappeared down the road, a youth conditioned already to be who he was and nothing else, already blunt, brutal and brave.

Harold went back to see his mentor in the rain three days later, as drizzle was falling off the porch roof. He had one name to offer—a name he had heard while playing horseshoes, and that he’d carried with him until he found out the other names.

Hank Robb. Hank Robb and two others had set up this attack.

“Ahhh,” was all Lonnie Sullivan said, “ahhh”—as if spellbound, as if he had known it even before he sent the boy to find out. As if he believed he had done so much good, and so much injury had come to him because of it.

But for some long time—some many excruciating days and weeks—Lonnie Sullivan seemed to do nothing. Hank Robb and the other men came and went from work, and the endless days tagged onto one another, filling the void with agitation and worry, until Sullivan had settled not only on who might have done it but on how he might gain retribution. And so when he had blackballed the men from any opportunity for a job or other employment—from the piles to the wharf, from Neguac to Doaktown—he called them to come see him. The first he called into the office on October 27; the second, on the twenty-eighth. Then he waited a day, to let the last one suffer and not know.

On October 30 he called Hank Robb into the shed, into the back room, where he looked over the receipts he kept in the drawer and threw Robb’s severance at him: eighty-nine dollars. The other two fared better than Hank Robb: both had jobs offered to them within a month, and nothing Lonnie said about them stuck. But with Hank Robb it was different. He was considered a disgrace to begin with. I know, for he was my uncle; and in that way, I am connected. Robb went into a grave depression, and three times he brought his daughters with him to the shed and asked for his job back, using the daughters as leverage without a voice, their presence more conspicuous than their little bodies could imagine.

“Ahhh. If I got up from this here seat at this here moment, on this here afternoon with this here cigar in my mouth—you would run hind yer daughters and let them be beat for you,” Lonnie said the third time Hank came begging him.

“I wouldn’t,” Hank said. But he was trembling and alone. He was scared and sad and defeated.

And from what I have heard, as soon as Lonnie stood up, Hank ran and hid behind his daughters; and what is more, little Sara Robb tried to protect him.

Hank Robb’s torment was exacerbated by the deliberate taunts of others, some of whom had said they would stand with him if he took up the cause. And when he left the cold shed at night, holding his daughters by the hand, his former compatriots not only ignored him but enjoyed doing so. With the dwindling of the money, with the absence of work and with the idea, constant and unremitting, of his own shame, he began his drinking again, after seven years away from the bottle.

Before Christmas that year, Hank Robb drove his car off the Portage Bridge with his family still inside. The incident didn’t make many papers. My mother phoned me when I was in Boston, and asked me to please, whatever I did, stay away from the funeral.

One child, Ethel Robb, lived because of the courage of her sister Sara, who, shattering her left leg with the effort, kept Ethel’s head above water in the submerged car. Joyce Fitzroy happened by, and was able to rescue them both. Hank Robb was dead on impact.

“Why I came this way—why I walked down toward the river—for the life of God I do not know,” Joyce Fitzroy was heard saying later, wrapped in a blanket and drinking a cup of tea.

After that, Sara went from one doctor’s office to the other, in her one print dress, to try to repair her shortened leg, but it could not be done. She went to Dr. Mackenzie many times in the days just before Mackenzie retired. But except for the doctor taking off her sock, and tickling her foot on the bottom until she giggled, nothing more was done.

Then these visits to the doctor’s stopped and a kind of whimsical tragedy set into her lively little face and features. Soon she rarely went out at all—or only at night. For she was teased about her leg and how she walked—never by the majority, yet we all know the world is not made up of the majority and never has been.

Neither Harold, Evan nor Ian teased her.

But others did, and would.

I will skip ahead now by a few years.

Annette Brideau was Sara Robb’s friend, and liked to tell people that she was. It showed her to be kind and thoughtful, and she liked this too—that is, she liked that with Sara tagging along, limping behind her, she would be thought of as kind and thoughtful. And indeed, she could be both kind and thoughtful when she wanted to be, or had to be.

Annette Brideau was the same age as those three boys, and she was also beautiful. At fifteen she scraped together what she could to dress like twenty. Her heritage came from the very earth and trees around her, from where she was born. The trouble was, and it was not entirely her fault, she was often enticed to do mischief, and to be mischievous against her better nature, or in contest with someone else, to prove that she, Annette Brideau, did not have to follow rules. Then she would go to church and pretend to pray and look at the statues and declare she would do better.

Many times her mother took a belt to her. Many times people could hear her screeching as she was whacked. Then the house would go silent and the beaten child would remain inside, upstairs in her small room, where the roof angled over the porch. Many times I have heard that her mother, pious and respectable, was jealous of Annette’s beauty and of how so many youngsters loved her.

But her willful nature would overcome her, and Annette would find herself once again doing something she should not. And this led to a pivotal moment in our story. It happened in a small room at the convent on a spring day when she was in grade eleven. Annette was caught cheating on exams. (I sometimes wonder, did it matter that it happened at this moment in her life—that she was not caught cheating on her English exam the day before, or her mathematics exam the day after? Is there any answer to these things?)

She had cheated at school many times since grade eight, and many times her marks showed how competent her cheating was. She had the answers to questions about the Carthaginians written on some pieces of paper and was busy saying the rosary as she wrote, praying seriously while peeking into her sleeve. Mother Saint Silvia realized Annette had never prayed so ferociously before; she made her stand in front of the others, between two rows of old black grade-school desks, and searched her roughly, patting her breasts and hips while the child squirmed and others watched.

“Give—me those—notes, Annette! You behave! Those notes—where are they? I will—take—a ruler to your—fingers!”

Finally the small pathetic crib notes fell to the floor, and Annette was pushed to the door.

“Leave,” Sister Silvia shrieked. “Down the hall to Mother Saint Beatrice—NOW!”

“Go to hell,” Annette called back, “go to hell—all of you,” as she ran, the two books in her arms falling as she herself fell against the corridor wall.

“Go to Mother Saint Beatrice!”

But Annette did not go. She ran down the long hallway, down the back stairs and onto the side lane. There, her face filled with hot and furious tears, she took the apple from her lunch bag and threw it at the door.

She did not want to go home; she wanted to run—away.

She crossed the street at exactly ten in the morning and stood with her thumb out, hitching a ride. And in fact, this ride changed her life. But of course, like so much else, this would not be known for some years to come.

Hitchhiking back downriver she was given a drive by Lonnie Sullivan himself, who had just come from getting his hair cut at Nick’s.

Annette began to tell him about Sister Silvia, and how awful she was. And then she played with the dial of his truck radio. And then she took a cigarette when he offered her one. And then she took a drink of wine. And then Lonnie said, “Never mind nuns—nuns are worthless creatures most of the time. I have a job for you.”

“I will have to ask my mom and dad.”

“Well, you can if you want—but in fact you don’t have to ask no one. I will tell them, so you won’t have to. I’ll pay you good and treat you right—and that will be the end of the convent and Sister Silvia. Let your parents say what they want—I think you should do what I say.”

So Annette Brideau took a job at Lonnie Sullivan’s, filing certain papers in his big cabinet, answering the phone, cleaning up at the end of each week, both the bathroom and the office, and being at his beck and call to make him a sandwich or find him a drink of pop. She learned to type a letter or two, and to put his to-do lists in order. And he seemed to be appreciative and like her a good deal.