Crimes Against My Brother (3 page)

She would go home at night, and for the first time she was allowed out after nine o’clock. That is when she began to wear makeup and perfume. That is when the Annette we all know began to emerge. By this time, those three boys were often at the work shed as well, and for the most part she ignored them. That is, she seemed much older than they. But all of them looked at her and spoke to one another about her—for they could not help it. Of the three, Evan seemed far less interested in her than the other two. But the other two could not, for the life of them, take their eyes off her when she walked. And for the life of her, she could not help but notice this as well.

One day Lonnie asked Annette, as they played their third game of checkers, to watch those three boys and pick who she thought would succeed. Would it be Ian Preston, Evan Young or Harold Dew? Whoever she picked, he said, he would be kinder to and help more. That is, whoever she picked he would pick too, to be his favourite around the shop. “Can you pick the one who will succeed?”

“It is Harold,” she said. “He is the one who I would put money on.”

“If you had any money, Annette,” Lonnie said, biting away at his cigar.

“Yes, if I had any money, it would be him I put me money on!” she said wistfully and with a kind of adolescent regret as she moved a checker, which Lonnie quickly jumped. “But I never have any money—and Daddy doesn’t even give me an allowance like the other kids.”

Lonnie laughed, looked at his cigar philosophically and shrugged. “You might be right about Harold—you might be indeed right!” Then he stretched and said he did not wish to play anymore.

Lonnie was a philosopher. He spoke endlessly about the plight of others—determined not only to look wise, with his cigar, and seem wise with his cigar smoke, but in fact to
be
wise, with and without the cigar.

At that time, the three boys worked in very dangerous places for measly wages, and did so with the exuberance of youth. Sometimes they worked up on Good Friday Mountain in the blinding and terrifying snow. They earned about twenty-eight dollars a week working after school and on holidays from the last of November until December 23, cutting and hauling Christmas trees and piling them on Lonnie’s two trucks to sell in the lots in town. Then, during the Christmas holidays, they would stand in the lot from seven in the morning until eleven at night, selling trees at two dollars a foot.

But there was a pivotal moment on the ridge near Good Friday summit. They got caught up in the terrible ice storm of 1974 and stayed together in a small shelter they had constructed. This storm happened late in the winter of that year, in March, when many people were known to have died from the cold.

Lonnie had sent the boys up to the ridge—and people later said it was on purpose, knowing they might die, and to see if they would or wouldn’t. But that wasn’t the case. Lonnie simply had an abundance of ignorance about what he put his workers through. He may have been selfish and vain, but he wanted no one dead.

He went home and ate dinner, and simply didn’t think about where his boys were.

They were stuck for three days, and no one went to find them because Lonnie did not report that they were missing, and their families, thinking they were sleeping safe in Lonnie’s bunkhouse, made no inquiry.
They almost froze and had almost nothing to eat—for they were supposed to have returned at noon two days before.

It was then and there that they became blood brothers. They challenged one another to be heroic and loyal. Then they each cut a finger with Evan’s buck knife and drew out a spot of blood, that bright sheen of life, and mixed it together. They spoke of Sydney Henderson, who had made a pact with God not to injure, and how others on the flats below, like Mat Pit and the Sheppard boys, tormented him now because this pact made him weak, and they wondered how long he would carry on, and if he would snap out of it and go back to being himself. That is, they thought Sydney’s pact was a desperate sham, just as everyone on the road and along Arron Brook did. Oh, they would never be so careless as to make a pact with a Catholic God they did not know or believe in—and all of them were tough enough not to be bothered by the likes of Mat Pit. Ian, the smallest, was as tough as nails, and an ordinary boy would never want to try him. He had slept in the cold, been alone at nights, walked for miles to earn a dollar—and was known to have thrown a man down an embankment who once made fun of his torn jacket. Ian joined the others in becoming a blood brother that night and mocking Henderson as well.

But it was strange, and I might say even otherworldly, how this Sydney Henderson bothered them, not only that night but for years to come. And this Henderson, I would come to find out, bothered many—at the university and even within the church. So these boys were no different when it came to Henderson than most others in society. Henderson would bother them for the rest of his life, for they would see in him a virtue they would by times try to match and by times undermine. In a certain way, this became their quest.

The darkness pulsed around them, and they saw a vein of fool’s gold that ran in the rocks nearby; and sometimes in the midst of the snowfall thunder rolled and lightning bolted down. And once, when lightning bolted, Harold stood up, his face contorted in wonder, and yelled out, “Kill me now if you will, or forever leave me be.”

He waited, hanging on his own words, his body slightly weaving; if it wove too much, he would tumble two hundred feet into the Arron Brook below. But he not only seemed unworried, he seemed not even aware of the great danger he was in. And he only laughed when the others told him to come back in. They said, with youthful eagerness, “Please watch yourself, boy.”

Harold said he would never fall. And he added, “I challenge God of the weak liar Sydney Henderson, and say it is impossible to kill me without a gun!”

The idea of those who don’t believe in God (or say they don’t) is always to challenge God to prove himself. And this was in fact the mantra of those three that night, as the dark sky produced thunder and lightning in great swirls of angry snow. “God will never bother me—there is not one thing he will do to me. If he couldn’t make me fall, then he won’t make no one else fall either.” And Harold spit his certainty over the side of the cliff.

The other two laughed, not at his statement so much as at his antics. Then they each made a cut and mixed their blood, and the mixed blood dropped into the snow.

And so the blood brothers’ bond came to be without God, and they all of them swore to that as well. They all spit, at the moment of the bond, in the direction of the church.

Let Syd do as he would; they would do as they did, and they would see who triumphed in the end. The challenge seemed worst for Syd: people used to fear him, but now he was mocked and scorned. He had become little and littler in the eyes of the community. Yet not one of the boys thought, in that moment, that their youthful celebration against Syd was in the least convenient. (This is what I much later told my cousin Sara Robb, and my students, those sometime young firebrands at Saint Michael’s University, who longed for truth in a perfect world, a world so perfect it would make us shudder.)

“We won’t be mean to him, or impolite—but we will see. Let’s just see how this will play out from here on in,” Evan said.

The boys looked at one another with carefree exuberance, knowing it was so cold that they might die in that moment. They were thrilled by this thought of their brotherhood. The idea of their pact without God not only enthused but enthralled them. It allowed them the freedom to do what they must—or in time, perhaps, to do what they wanted. They had seen little enough piety in the priest’s weary look to ever think anything could come of religion that wasn’t false and contrived. God: what a way to live; better to die.

So they agreed, although they might face death right here, this terrible night, or they might come out of it—whatever happened, life or death, pitiless or free, they would rely upon one another and no one else.

The night became cold and then colder still, and the small half-cliff they sat on became their universe. The vein of fool’s gold captivated them, shining against the blackness of the cliff with inordinate force, sometimes wrapped in a resplendent gauze of snow. They whiled away the hours, listening to the storm, sharing remnants of stale bread and hamburger almost burned black, and speaking of two things: women they wanted to bed and riches they felt they would someday have. Both Harold and Ian spoke of Annette, but Evan did not; he spoke only of Molly Thorn.

The snow swirled in the great sky above them, covering up all the paths along the great hills. It was as white as the purest soul, and as scattering as gossip.

Yet to those boys stranded halfway up Good Friday Mountain, the meaning of riches was less than what you might imagine. They huddled into one another in the storm. They stared at one another’s boots and hands in the thick darkness and felt the sting of cold and the taste of metal. But they spoke of a future as bright and alive as that of anyone who, at that very moment, was preparing to attend Harvard or Yale in the fall. They thought that if they worked hard, maybe they could earn twenty thousand dollars a year. All of them decided that twenty thousand dollars a year would be the most anyone could want—and to ever want more would be greed. And they agreed they would share all of
these riches if they got them. Twenty thousand dollars to these boys was like a million to others. And they had seen one another’s loneliness and poverty through the years.

It was a great thought, and in that moment Shakespeare was right: love did feed on itself.

Evan Young said he would someday have the Jameson sawmill, the mill the Jameson family had owned in the 1920s and ’30s. He would refit it and dedicate his life to making it work. Not only would he bring industry back to Bonny Joyce but a sense of community as well.

Ian Preston said he didn’t know what he wanted to do. Perhaps he would work in town because he was good at fixing appliances and was a fine electrician. Yes, he often thought he would move upriver and work there. This was a town of six thousand people then, a town that was very large compared with what Ian had known.

Harold Dew said he would inherit some money and open up a pawnshop. He had seen the pawnshop Lonnie Sullivan had opened in the late 1960s and he was intrigued by that kind of enterprise. That is, people live according to their own level, and perhaps, even if he made a million, Harold would still need to have the pawnshop to satisfy himself. For in the pawnshop he saw the whole town, and the people in it, and the rise and fall of fortunes, and those who he felt he could know and help. They would all come to him someday, as they did to Lonnie now. And those long, warm, summer days in town with the pawnshop door open, and a breeze blowing the curtains slightly or a fan ticking in the corner, was for Harold the emblem not of success but of peace—something he had never had. He remembered Lonnie’s pawnshop just like that—the items all catalogued, and people coming in with little trinkets or wares to trade—and his feeling was one of calm and fulfillment.

“But do not worry yourselves, I will share it with you all—I will make sure nothing I have will be mine alone,” he said.

“And I will too,” Ian said.

“And so will I,” said Evan.

In mixing their blood that night on the hill in the storm the three truly felt they were united in a way that nothing could pull asunder, and that the boy Sydney Henderson who had made a pact with a Catholic God was nothing more than someone who challenged them to do better and to prove themselves. In a circuitous way, then, all of them by this challenge were trying to prove themselves to Sydney’s God by disproving that He was ever needed at all.

Then the three of them spoke of the church, and how they had been forced to go to it when small. How the priests were like old women, how the sacraments were false. They now hated the idea of charity and nuns and the church—they were smarter and understood more. And because the priests wore collars and the nuns wore widow peaks, these boys could say that the hypocrisy and untruths of the nuns and priests was greater than that of others. But they ignored this fact: by committing to be blood brothers, they were exercising the same hope as a priest with a collar or a nun with a cap, and the road was a long one yet.

“Sydney’s a fool,” Evan said, spitting over the side of the drop. “I never thought I would say that about that man—but there, I did say it about him.”

And the others complied. And to a boy they nodded in disdain. Then, though they were supposed to take turns keeping one another awake, they fell asleep, all of them. And if the wind had continued, they would all have died—but for some reason, the wind changed within an hour after sleep came, and by morning the temperature had risen substantially, and all of them woke up in the sun to the smell of melting ice and the first sweet tinge of spring.

Harold looked over the cliff the next morning—and realized how close he had been to it, and smiled. “No, I didn’t fall.”