Crimes Against My Brother (21 page)

At the time Sara, of course, had said this did not matter to her, and nothing like marriage interested her at all. “Unlike Jane Austen,” and she had laughed, “I don’t think marriageability is the most important thing in the world to women!”

Now it seemed that both the tea leaves and what she had said were proven false.

Ian learned one day, when he asked after her months later, just before Annette was due, that she had borrowed some money and had gone to university.

“University?” he said, mystified that she had taken this step. It was a world neither he nor Annette would ever know. He now realized he was married to a woman who had no use for anything like that, and though she read a dozen books a month, each of these romance books were ones that told her she was right, she was acceptable, she was the one person entitled to love.

The rumour that had started earlier was even worse after he married: the unquenchable rumour that the child was not his. He went to Lonnie
to talk to him about this, as a confidant, as his friend and his best man. “What do you think, Lonnie—who would spread such talk?”

Lonnie said only the cheapest of people would bother saying that, and shrugged, and looked away. Ripp VanderTipp was there that day, looking at Ian with incurious self-serving eyes.

Ian stared back at him and Ripp smiled, the gentle aloof smile of a thug.

There were other rumours as well. Ian heard these rumours—he could not help but hear.

Once, coming home late from work, seeing the house once again empty and his supper cold, Ian lifted a quarter out of his pocket and in a heavy moment, leaning against the iron rail, he said, “If it comes up tails, she has been unfaithful.”

Their only son was born that December, well over twenty years ago now.

On that same night, Evan Young was trying desperately to save the life of his only boy.

PART FOUR

F
ROM THE TIME HE WAS ELEVEN YEARS OF AGE
, E
VAN
“Lucky” Young had the kind of fortune that would seem to be everything to others and nothing to him. He swam the river when he was twelve; climbed out on the high tower at fifteen to clean up bird nests. He took dares to prove people’s faith in him. He believed he must do this to have honour, and so he was honour-bound to do so. He joined the cadets, and he was knowledgeable and tough.

He thought of Ian as a brother, and protected him like one. He also got along with Harold, and considered him a brother as well. He believed to have honour he must not believe in God—for no honour-bound person would fall back on God. And he realized when he came up against many people who believed in God or the Divine that he shocked them, not only by his great strength and his great dares but his willingness to die without the security of what they themselves believed in, while they were not willing to die at all. He played the bagpipes in a sorrow-filled way at night among the dark shanties of Bonny Joyce. He had a feared reputation in a fight, and on more than one occasion thought of joining the military. He hitchhiked to town to see a recruiting officer, yet he did not join. Two days after this, Joyce Fitzroy asked him to take his money, and he did not do that either.

This, to Evan, proved his greatness of feeling and temperament. He had amassed a good deal of knowledge about heroes, from Marshal Zhukov to Churchill, and realized a terrible truth: that he was, or could be, as great as any of them. He was a brilliant marksman, and in a fight he never cowered but became resolute.

Certainly he had a command and a presence about him that other men recognized and other people followed. So he knew he could prove himself to be as great as other men he had read about, men on a battlefield or stranded in a desert. And he knew he was as great as the Jameson brothers, Will and Owen—both legends here. And in each moment of imagining this, he saw his little brother, Ian, with him. Because he saw in Ian a spirit not unlike his own.

Molly was, of course, perceptive enough to understand what may have occurred far back in his childhood, and why he now hated the church, but Evan would not admit that anything had happened—he only wished to denigrate that which he found both odious and absurd.

“There is, and never has been, a thing in Catholicism worth saving,” he said.

This was his view before he and Molly were married, and became much more pronounced than she ever thought it would be afterwards. On the day of the marriage he did not speak to the priest except to say his vows, and to her shame refused communion at his own wedding—the only one in the church to do so.

The truth was, she was far more tolerant of his denial than he ever was of her acceptance.

Men who are fortunate enough to have size and charisma at their fingertips are often unaware that they possess anything special, and waste what they have before they realize it can be wasted. They see the world through a gaze that is blessed, and from a point where others look at them in awe, and they see nothing strange about this. But each one of these men and women find, sooner or later, a wall in their soul they cannot climb.

The fact is, Evan proved to be limited—and he was limited in a fatal way, which he did not know for some time. That is, all his life Evan would try to escape Lonnie Sullivan, just like those others who worked for Lonnie, but he could not seem to do so. And he believed after a while that it was the oath of loyalty to his blood brothers that caused this. For what had happened to his blood brothers? Where were they now?

Somewhere along the line Evan’s reputation stopped growing, and he became less than people thought he might; his bagpipes put away and his kilt soiled against the rain. And this decline started when he believed Ian Preston cheated him.

The one thing Evan “Lucky” Young wanted was the Will Jameson land—that land that had once belonged to the Jamesons in the 1940s.

Yet, as we know, when Young went that late Monday afternoon to ask old man Fitzroy for the money for the land, the money had already been given away.

“Who did you give it to, then?” Lucky asked.

“Yer buddy Ian Preston—you know him, he just was here yesterday. I didn’t know what to do—he pressured me—he came in and pressed me down for it,” the old man said. He said this because he suddenly felt both guilty and cheated, and didn’t want to be blamed for being a sucker.

Initially Young did not blame Preston so much as himself. He felt his friend would not cheat him.

But then he heard that Ian had deliberately gone to get the money, and had taken it home in a large bag and sat with it, staring at it open-mouthed. He heard Ian had phoned the banks and told them of his triumph, and gloated about it. That Ian had done this to him was so contrary to what they had spoken about when they had been stranded on the mountain that long-ago night, it was impossible for Evan to reconcile one act with the other. Soon after, he could not stand to hear Ian’s name—in fact, just as he cringed or guffawed when he heard God’s name or the name of a saint, now he had the exact same feeling about Ian.

What was very strange was an event that happened soon after this.

Remembering how Sydney Henderson had worked with them on the log cut, Evan took some of the deer chop from his recent hunt with Ian down to Henderson’s house. He did this because he wanted to see the man and how he lived; now more than ever, he could not believe any man would live in such a deliberate state of denial. Yet when he saw that it was true, he couldn’t help but be even angrier.

“Syd, I will never hurt my wife like you hurt yours—living here in the worst place on the river and trying to bring up kids while everyone takes advantage—no one will hurt my wife or kids, and no one will take advantage of me. It’s a poor man who has to trust in God as much as you! There is no fun in your life—you have been repressed by that which you now cling to.” Evan looked determined as he said this, and stared straight at the man, hoping for a bad reaction.

Why he was so furious at this man, Sydney Henderson, who had done him no wrong, he did not know—nor could he be rational about it. He even wanted Sydney, who had given up all violence, to take a swing at him, just to prove that he could provoke him. But he could not get him to. So he said again, “The church has repressed you, and made your children slaves to dickless priests!”

“My only caution is that blood brothers are not to be relied upon,” Sydney said. “And,” he continued, “high seriousness is always out of fashion until fashion changes, and I have as much fun as you. Still, if you can advance a theory that is greater than that advanced by Christ, I will believe what you have just said. If not, you should be wary. You might make promises to yourself about your own wife and child that you cannot keep.”

“You know nothing about it—nothing about us. Go back to your stupid church!” Evan yelled. And he felt desperate and went home and brooded in the back shed. He thought of Sydney’s children listening to his outburst—the young boy, Lyle, looking at him in silence and consternation—and he felt terribly ashamed

And that moment was the beginning of his ill-luck. Because he could no longer think of the majesty of his friend but saw only what others saw: his small-mindedness and tight-fistedness. If he wants money that bad, let him swallow it, Evan thought.

Evan travelled the river to find a bank that would help him, and he sat in their offices, from Doaktown to Neguac. But as with Ian, no bank would offer money to him. Here he sat in his workboots. Here he sat in
his blue shirt. Here he sat with his ragged tie askew, and here he sat in work pants pressed to look new.

He married Molly Thorn without his dream of a lumberyard or contracts, or any other thing he’d promised himself he would have when he proposed. The one thing he had counted on had not come to pass. He had spent half his life dreaming about something that was not going to happen—and he was exactly like Harold in that regard, yet he felt he had been far more honourable than Harold to all concerned. Evan and Molly married, and he was obligated to work hard and to earn little, and there was no money for the land. He’d had no money for a diamond either.

They lived in the small house that was surrounded by its share of spruce and birch trees. In winter the snow lit on the back shed, and sunlight struck the panes of glass. He spent the summer fishing and trying to save money—desperate never to work for Sullivan again. But coming unto a year after Ian had bought his store, Evan’s fortunes had sunk to nothing.

And so Evan had to go back and wait in the office, near the huge red box of tools that Sullivan kept, as Sullivan had his lunch of tea and tomato sandwiches. Sullivan said nothing to him as he ate, and downed his food with hot tea, and looked at the racing form from Charlottetown.

Mr. Sullivan said work was slow and didn’t give him back his job. He looked at Evan as if Evan had done a great wrong, and this great wrong was simple: he was now no longer the boy he had been, no longer Lucky. And Sullivan looked as if Evan had personally injured him, and sighed whenever he saw him coming.

Evan tried to insulate his place, and made sure his wife was taken care of as best he could. But the winter was hard. Each piece of insulation he put in by hand between the beams of his little house ripped at his heart. Worse, people who didn’t know of their falling-out spoke to Evan about how well Ian Preston was now doing. He went into the woods so as not to hear about his former friend and how successful he was. And in the
woods, to be away from Ian’s fortune, he began again to take up trapping. But there was another dimension to this agony. Molly was happy—content with so little; having him and the boy, Jamie, was all she wanted in the world—and this simple happiness plagued him, because it seemed to him a betrayal. Why didn’t she feel like he did? And so he took to being angered with her so she would feel like he did. Sometimes, knowing she was only trying to be kind, she would try to tease him out of his bad mood. Once he came close to striking her he was so upset. Another time he threw a beer against the wall and left the house.

“How could Ian have done this!”

Yes, I will kill him, he thought one night. And that seemed to settle it.

One day he said this: “I will get the money back—I promise you that.”

“What money?” she asked.

“Money—DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND! The money that your God seems to delight in keeping from me.”

“Why are you talking so silly?”

“We will see how silly. No one will cheat me—not Ian and not you.”

“How did I cheat you?”

“You cheated me too!” he yelled, exasperated. And this was overheard, and people became aware that they were an unhappy man and wife.

But he was determined to get back every cent that he felt Ian had taken from him. He began to work himself to exhaustion, doing whatever he could for Sullivan, whenever Sullivan did decide to call on him. Then, to make ends meet, over the next two years he trapped beaver and marten along the left bank of Arron all the way to upper Little Hackett Brook, and used Leg Hold and Conibear.

There, he spent his days off alone, trying to get enough pelts to do him. A good marten pelt would bring him two hundred dollars, a mink one-hundred and twenty, beaver, though more abundant, much less. He kept imagining how much money he would make if he could just find the right method—that someday he would be rich and Ian would be poor—and that is what he wanted most of all. That is, not just for him to be rich, but for Ian to be poor.