Crimes Against My Brother (24 page)

“I spent the money on Jamie,” Molly would say so softly on the phone to Wally Bickle that he could hardly hear her, and it was as if her breath was more constant and louder than her voice.

And how had the animals suffered in those traps? Molly asked this of Evan one night after he returned home. “Is that why the child died, because we got money in such a cruel way? Is that why God is paying us back—paying us back for killing animals in a trap?”

“No, that is not why,” Evan said. But he couldn’t convince her and she peevishly turned away from him. Then she did something he really worried about. She refused to go to church.

“You have to go,” he told her.

“Why?”

“Because it isn’t like you not to!”

She turned to him, smiled unnaturally and said, “Oh, I don’t need church either. No one needs church—church is a lie, just like everything else. And you don’t really know what I am like.”

“Sure I do.”

“Men don’t know what women are like or can be like. You don’t think I like other men. I like other men a lot. So, why are you special? I could go out and get gangbanged tonight—at any tavern on the river!”

“Most women who look as fine as you, could anytime at all.” He smiled.

But he tried not to look at her, for her sake, for the talk humiliated him. She wore a pretty white blouse—one of two she owned—and a pair of pure white sneakers on her feet with little pink socks that she had gone to town to buy. She had come home excited about her trip, and then turned again to depression.

“You don’t think I like other men and that you are the only one. There was a man I met at the church picnic you wouldn’t go to—and I liked him. We played horseshoes together—did you know that? He was kind, and when I go to church, I see him too.”

Evan was angry at her for saying all this. For why was she saying it now that people were saying that he killed the child because the child was not his? An hour later he smashed his fist into the wall. And that too had a consequence. It broke his hand.

Then Molly said she wanted to go to a movie—even though they had to walk most of the way in the rain. She kept asking him what a movie was like. And he realized that she had never been to one, and that he, who didn’t care for movies, had never taken her to one. She was dressed in her white blouse and new sneakers and her new pink socks, and they made it to the movie just in time.

Next morning he woke and she was not beside him in the bed. He got up and searched for her here and there. By afternoon he became worried. He called on the priest, who hadn’t seen her either. They went all along the road, and into people’s houses to ask. No one had seen her at all.

At ten that night, just as he was going to telephone the police, the door opened and she came in. She was dressed in her second-hand blue suit and had her suitcase with her. “Hi,” she said.

She sat down at the kitchen table but did not look his way. That in itself was heartrending. But he was too confused to react to anything. For there was a man with her. The man who’d brought her home was named Leonard; he was the man she had played horseshoes with at the picnic. He was a bus driver for S.M.T. He told Evan he had found her in the bus terminal in Fredericton. She had said she was going to New York. He’d told her she should go home, that Evan would be out of his mind with worry and she didn’t have enough money for the ticket.

Evan did not know what to do or say. He offered Leonard money for bringing her home.

“Don’t be ridiculous—she is my friend,” Leonard said.

Molly sat at the table, not looking at either of them.

For a few days after that—perhaps a week or so—she seemed fine. Evan asked her once about Leonard, but she wouldn’t talk about him. She kept phoning Social Services to get their child’s blanket back.

“This is Molly,” she would say, and she would be put on hold. At
night she would look at Evan and say, “I think tomorrow they are going to give me Jamie’s blanket back.”

Then, one afternoon, Hanna Stone came for a visit and breastfed her own child in the small parlour wearing a look of startling motherhood.

Molly stopped speaking. She took her life on May 25.

“I will never treat my wife as you treat yours,” Evan remembered telling Sydney Henderson all those miserable days ago.

Evan was investigated until late September that year by the police and by the social worker.

All sorts of people were interviewed—even his old math teacher from high school. Yes, they all said, he must have done something; there was no reason
not
to suppose a man from Bonny Joyce couldn’t, in a moment of anger, decide to kill.

So Evan decided to leave his torment, just as Sara Robb had done.

He went north to work. People said he was crazy, and the other men complained about him and how dangerous he was—how he was prone to arguing, how he was dangerous to himself and others. He was called into the head office twice, and was told the company had him under watch. Still he worked as he always had and listened to no one else. For instance, anyone who did not wish to work above six metres could simply say he would not. But Young worked far above ten metres every day. Yet another man’s mistake almost proved fatal for him.

No one was supposed to leave tools lying anywhere. But someone left a huge industrial wrench on the staging where Young was working. When he accidentally stepped on the wrench, it slipped out from under him and he fell almost thirty feet. He hit the ground on his right side.

He was unconscious for almost two weeks and in hospital for six.

When he regained his senses, a surgical pad on his head and a bandage collecting a spongy ooze from his right ear, he started his fight for compensation. He began his fight when he was still wearing a hospital
johnny and walking about with an IV pole. But he hadn’t been belted the day he fell, and in the end the courts went against him, and he spent his few savings on the lawyer’s fee. And when the company found out he had previously broken his hand and had hidden the fact, they were ruthless in protecting themselves from litigation. He should never have been climbing a scaffold with that hand—even though climbing the scaffold had nothing to do with his fall.

For eighteen months Evan Young refused to give up, and tried to get a union disposition against the company and the Workers’ Compensation Board. This finally failed. In desperation, he took the beautiful shotgun he had loaned Ian to hunt birds that fateful day and decided to go to the Workers’ Compensation Board and hold a hostage until he got a hearing.

And what happened?

He got to town at the same moment that Ethel Robb was hauling a sleigh with Ian’s little boy in front of the doors of the WCB building and was kneeling to wipe his nose. Remembering how he’d talked to Molly of the Virgin Mary melting away in Ethel’s hand when she was a child, Evan became ashamed, and turned and walked away with the shotgun well hidden.

He remembered too how he had won this gun in a toss of a horseshoe against Harold Dew. All of this played on his mind as he walked away.

Harold had bet the shotgun for the Chevrolet. Evan had won the toss by less than a centimetre. The shoe he threw had caught his fingers and that slowed its trajectory, and then it seemed to pivot and stand on end for a second before falling in the direction of the spike. It could have just as easily fallen the other way, or if it hadn’t caught the tips of his fingers, it might well have gone past the spike. He would have lost his car to Harold, and he would have had no radiator to fix, and his child would still be alive.

So it was winning the shotgun that had caused so much pain—caused everything. And he had been about to use that shotgun in a crime. And what would that prove to those who suspected him?

He sold the shotgun the next week for a hundred dollars to Hanna
Stone’s husband. And he looked at their boy, Terry—the one Hanna had ruthlessly breastfed the day before Molly’s death.

Evan went back to trapping along Arron Brook and living in his small shed. He still had the coverlet that had belonged to his child, which had been returned sometime after Molly’s death. Some nights he would sit in a spell, holding the coverlet, looking out at the snow as it came down over the black trees or as the wind whipped down from the hills.

‘Why?” was the question he continued to ask in those years. And the only answer was “Because.”

Evan applied for a job to operate the plow in town and had an interview, but because of his known temperament and his eighteen-month-long dispute with the WCB, he was turned down.

So then, close to Christmas, five years after his child’s death, he made his way in a gale toward town to do some work for a wholesaler moving boxes. Six dollars an hour was not much, but to Evan at this moment, it was all the world.

It was snowing. The small garages were covered with snow and ice; icicles hung from the old buildings around the square. The Christmas lights shone from the tree in the park, and the holly and candles glowed down from poles along the streets.

Just after noon, Evan passed the large house of Ian Preston.

When he got to Victory Warehouse, there was only one forlorn light shining from a mesh window, and the garage doors were blocked in snow. The office itself was closed because of the storm, and a note said it would not open until the morning.

He had come to town for nothing at all. Furious, he turned toward Ian’s store with the idea of robbing it and going away. This had been in his mind since Molly had died. He had been offered a job on the ice roads up north by a Casey man he had worked with—all he needed was twenty thousand dollars to buy into a rig and start his life anew. How did he know there was money in Ian’s store? Because everyone said that
nine-tenths of the money Ian had, he kept in a safe in the office of the store—a safe that could be carried away in a storm on a strong man’s back. Like old Joyce Fitzroy before him, Ian distrusted banks.

Harold Dew spent these same five years overwhelmed in one way or the other by the fact that because he’d lost this inheritance, his girl had left him.

Annette would not return his calls, although he’d tried many times to see her after he came back to town—a fact that Ian did not know. He knew she did not love Ian but was content to spend his money. No, he did not think she’d planned all this; he believed it had just happened. How could she love a pipsqueak like that?

Some nights he passed Ian’s store with one thought in mind: to burn it to the ground.

“Burn the fucker out. He had it all figured,” Lonnie would say to him.

Then, one February night, it all came out. Harold and Lonnie had been drinking most of the day, burning old cedar shingles as the snow came down and blurred the lane. Lonnie went out and got one bottle and then another. Harold brought over a salmon and poached it on the stove, and they drank and ate. All day Lonnie had been giving away tidbits of information, first about this widow and then about that—first about this married woman and then about that. How he drove the snowplow, how he kept information on people—how widows were frightened of him. How he disowned one of his own children. He told Harold many terrible things. First about this mill worker and then about that miner. And the one thing Lonnie believed was this: he was better than them all.

Then he told Harold that he had set up the marriage between Annette and Ian from the start, and that Ian knew nothing about anything. He said he would destroy Ian, because he wanted to. And he smiled in the self-infatuated, calculated way he had. It didn’t matter
why he wanted to, he said; he’d simply decided he would do it. Then his thoughts returned to Annette.

“But how could she get him? That was the big thing,” he began. “How could she get him away from that little Robb cunt? Well, she came to me, asked my advice—I set the thing up.” He laughed. “Go ask her if you don’t believe me. She had a pregnancy test and gave it to me—she was scared to death she was knocked up by a guy in Truro. I looked at it, kept it and told her to get married. Now, was she knocked up or was she not? I could tell her now, but I won’t—she handed the test to me to look at. She was real scared, and I simply said, ‘You better get married—it’s Ian or no one.’ And that was that!” Then he laughed again. “She actually thought that the man in Truro would marry her. She went back to Truro to see him—but nothing came of that.”