Crimes Against My Brother (22 page)

So he went trapping and guiding, and even prospecting, up on Good Friday.

Trapping was dangerous work, for Evan was in deep wood alone in winter and without a vehicle. He carried his traps on his back and sometimes broke ice against the brooks to lay them down in a pattern near the water’s edge. He worked as his great body was meant to, and that was all there was to it.

Still, if anything happened Molly would have no way to find him, and her nerves were bad. They became worse as the days bled away. She did not know why Evan was so consumed with money, or why he hated Ian, who now had it. Often she lay in bed alone and Evan would sleep on the cot in the kitchen—and sometimes, exhausted, he would sleep on the floor.

Every Sunday she went to church. To her, taking the Host—that piece of bread that Evan and millions laughed at, and millions upon millions never heard of—was the most significant event in her day. To Evan it was more than just a silly superstition; it was deeply offensive and hypocritical. Did she not know how he felt? Yes, she must know—so then, it was an offence against him that she perpetrated. He showed her an article that a nun who had left the convent had written, who talked about the greed, hypocrisy and sexual frustration of the women there—and how finally she and a priest had an affair.

“What do you think of that?”

“We all know sex is not a bad thing,” Molly replied. “Nor can everyone keep the vow of chastity. Yet if there are those who wish to and fail, it doesn’t mean their wish was absurd or the church wrong in asking it. It is asked freely and accepted freely—and not everyone can do so. It seems everyone nowadays talks about sex not being a big thing—and a private matter, until someone else falters and they hoot and laugh as if they are schoolboys seeing their first titty.”

But her answer, given while she looked at him straightforwardly, only frustrated Evan enough that he threw the article across the room.

Sometimes he would naïvely bait her: “Is there gold in heaven? I mean, not everywhere—but in the streets?”

He disliked it when she spoke of the Virgin or saints. To him, the Virgin could not have remained a virgin. This is what he told her.

“How could she remain a virgin?”

“Because she did.”

“How?”

“Because of God.”

“In what way?”

“In a way God decided.”

“Well, that’s a pretty neat trick.”

“It was no trick.”

“I wish I could discover his method.”

“His method is as beyond you as heaven is to earth,” Molly said, hopefully, because she had been taught to say this. And she smiled at her own cleverness. “Mr. Fitzroy always prayed to the Virgin Mary,” she reminded him.

“Ya, look what good it did—he gave his money to a cheat who stole from us!”

“We can’t be sure—”

“I can be sure. I can be sure. Maybe the Virgin told him to give his money to a cheat—so, my my, sweetie-pie, your Virgin is a robber. Going out and about robbing people. That’s what she is—a bandit!”

“No—but I am sure she told Fitzroy to go in the right direction when he found and saved Sara and Ethel that day.”

“And how do you know?”

“Because that is who Sara was praying to at the time!”

Again he told her the story of Ethel—the little one who believed she had found the Virgin Mary in an icicle and tried to take it home, and it melted in her hands. He laughed loudly at this. But what he did not say was how he himself had taken the icicle and had tried to keep it intact for the child because she seemed in such wonder. And afterwards Ethel had said, “Never mind—I got to see her for a moment—and that’s what she wanted and allowed.”

He did not tell Molly that.

If anything, it pleased him to hate—it was a superb way to be intellectually, and even morally, superior to his wife, without committing to anything, and it gave him an aura of instant mockery, which he knew troubled her terribly. But in order to have this state of instantaneous mockery, he had to in some way live with it, and prove its rightness to her and to himself.

Once he crossed a lake in a thaw—just to prove to her that man was his own animal and there was no other animal than man! Goddamn—where had his life got to if he could not do what he had set out to do? This is what he insisted to himself as he crossed toward Darling Shore on the far side of the inlet.

“Someday you will cross and be frightened—I am sure of it,” she said to him when he bragged to her about it.

And he answered, “I will go out for two days along the north branch and I will be back for supper on Wednesday—you can pray or not, it will not matter a good goddamn!”

“I will pray for you,” Molly said.

“Why?”

“I have to, now that you’ve mentioned it.”

“Do as you do,” he said, “and I will do as I do! I need to do it, not that you seem to care—but I need to do it. If even one of my traps is sprung, we lose one hundred dollars we can’t afford.”

“I wish I could help more.” Molly looked up. “But I do get twenty-five a week cleaning the altar.”

“You should join that cult. That Sydney Henderson lad—he believes in all of that, and look where it got him now. Rumour says he murdered a kid on the bridge that collapsed out there—that will never be said about me.”

“But I do not think Sydney would do that,” she said.

“Well, what does it matter? He probably didn’t, but most think he did—and why shouldn’t they? He never was right in the head.”

“But what if people said that about you—about your child?”

“I guarantee they never will!”

Molly kept telling him she wanted to move away—he might even try finding work at the warehouse in Moncton where her uncle worked. She wanted him to forget about Ian and the money, forget about how humiliated he was. And she herself wanted to forget about how Annette had married Ian.

“Life is no different than it should be,” Evan told her. “I’d bet one million dollars that Corky would have been a drunk no matter what.”

“Why?”

“Because you are driving me to being one. But Corky is weak and I’m not.”

She came home with the job offer from Moncton, worth thirty thousand dollars a year. It wasn’t bad, she said, and if she worked too, they would be fine. They could, after some time, buy a house and settle there. “Please?” she asked. “Think it over!”

Evan thought they were better off staying where they were. He would not be able to take Moncton. And he made fun of the Moncton boys who came up here in the summer to fly-fish, and of how poorly they cast a line. Did she want him to look like that?

So this is the way things stood with Evan a few years after Ian got Joyce Fitzroy’s money. He could not have the name Ian mentioned in his house—and once he threw a man up against a camp wall because the man had asked him if Ian was doing well.

So the idea of being blood brothers had unravelled, it seemed, without Ian or Harold or Evan doing anything to unravel it. Not an ill intent had been formed to make ill intent blossom. Not a hard feeling existed before hard feelings swept them all—and none of them believed in anything but themselves.

With Harold Dew it was much worse than for the others. He still had to go to work each day for Lonnie Sullivan, who had many things on him and his family over the years. So his tie to Sullivan was even more binding
than it was for the others, and he would wake in the cold at 6:20 in the morning and make his way, getting a drive to Grey’s Turn with Jimmy Chapman’s grader operator Sam Patch, and walk to the work pit of Lonnie Sullivan, who would sit in the office pondering over what to have him do. Mostly he acted as a repossesser of engines, and at times cars, which Lonnie took from people who could never pay what they owed him.

When Harold became depressed, Lonnie would commiserate. “They both did you wrong …”

“I know they both did me wrong. Of course they did—from the time I was in grade school!” Harold would shout. “You don’t have to tell me!”

“Well, then, get even,” Lonnie said, “rob the store and get even. I’d love to have some of that money back here.” Then he would wink as if he was joking.

And this would scorch him—and sometimes, sitting in Lonnie Sullivan’s office, tears would run down his cheeks.

So one day a few months after this, as he was sitting outside on an old half-burned couch listening to the snow and sleet fall on the porch roof above him, he too thought of Syd Henderson, who still clung after all this time to a God who could not care and did not know. Then he thought of how in their youth he and Evan and Ian had cut their fingers and proclaimed their state of honour against everything Syd believed, so as not to become like him. And then he thought: What had happened? What had happened in their own lives? He looked around him, and saw how little he had, and remembered everything: he and his blood brothers had planned nothing, but still Glen was dead; Annette was gone; and where was he compared with Syd at this moment? In fact, the truth was that Sydney was being looked upon as more and more heroic, and many now said he may not have been guilty of a thing, even though people had accused him of terrible things his whole life.

Whereas all of them—Ian, Harold and Evan—had wronged each other, and were certainly guilty.

Harold decided that he would wait, and strike Ian at another time. Then he thought of the other man who had betrayed him—his other
blood brother, Evan, the one who had allowed Glen on the tower. He would do something to get even—just one more thing.

So it was at this time that someone began lifting Evan’s traps. For some time Evan couldn’t find out who was doing so. Then he realized it must be Harold Dew. Evan said this was childish, even for Harold, and fretted about what to do.

“All this has happened because Ian got some stupid money!” Molly said when Evan told her of his suspicions. “Harold was never like that before!”

“Oh, Harold would have acted this way anyway, wouldn’t he?”

“No, your friendship kept him in check. But now things are terrible, and I am sure it’s all because of Ian’s trip to see Joyce Fitzroy.”

“Yes, but you don’t believe Ian is a cheat, do you? You’re too Catholic and pure.”

“I think he did cheat, but not over the money. I think he didn’t even know about the money. I think he cheated Sara—and that came because of the money.”

“Shut up,” Evan said. “Shut up, shut up. He cheated us all—he wouldn’t even have got off Good Friday Mountain if it weren’t for me. I mean that and he knows it. He knows it—HE KNOWS IT!”

Still, the lifting of the traps continued into the next month, in the belligerent unthinking way cruelty has of showing one up, and Evan knew that this act of Harold’s was about Glen. And though Harold believed him at fault, Evan knew he was innocent. He had done nothing but try to help (though he could not imagine or think this about Ian’s actions toward him). Yet in all of this, he saw the peculiar limitations of revenge itself. That is, revenge was a false and vainglorious moral template that people fed on. And in his mind, here is how it worked: Evan could be angry at Ian—and rightfully so. But because of what had happened to Glen, he could not be angry with Harold—even though he, Evan, had tried to keep Glen alive. So Harold, seared by betrayal, needed revenge more than the other two. Evan too believed he needed revenge in a grand way—but against Ian.

Molly did not see this clearly; she only knew as Corky did, that nothing was now like it was supposed to be. Corky visited her and Evan often—upset that Ian had married Annette Brideau; upset that some people were saying it was a great coup, a victory. How in God’s name, even if you did not believe in God, could that be a victory? Yet millions of people in the most diverse circumstances believe that cheating a friend is a victory.

Evan tried to forget about Harold’s theft, and even moved both his mink and otter traps and put them high up toward Buckler Stream, though it took an extra half-day’s walk.

On a particular morning twenty years ago, when it was snowing grey on the spruce, and the roads and paths were blurred, and the sky looked like late afternoon, Evan saw even from a distance that two of his traps had been sprung, close to Boiling Brook, near upper Hackett. He had moved them thirteen miles for nothing. This, I think, is what infuriated him.

That is, he had his mink and marten traps close to the water, and had laid them along a line over twenty yards, beside poplar shafts, and had lost the martens in them.

At first he thought it just might have been a coyote that had followed his line, until he saw in what direction the thief went.

He crossed the brook as ice broke around him, and moved into the trees above Little Hackett. It was strange how every part of the woods carried its own scent, its own history—even a bog of a hundred feet had an inestimable life. The bog here was dried by snow, and frozen and soundless.

He climbed the great hills to the south of Good Friday Mountain, and looked down at the small country road that stretches back from Arron Falls. And he could see distant houses, ramshackle dwellings in the middle of nowhere. The place was called Clare’s Longing.

Evan decided it was better to get out of the woods and go down to the road and wait for the thief, who would probably appear within the next hour.