Crimes Against My Brother (35 page)

She turned and rushed away from the store, dropping the new boots she was going to buy, with DD running after her.

But when she told Ian what the man—someone so respectable—at the mall had said, he said it did not matter.

The same reaction manifested itself the next day and the day after. And no matter what she said in protest, Ian said it did not matter.

“I am saying this for your own good,” she would tell him.

“But it does not matter at all!” he would say.

And this is what else he told her: Together they had betrayed Sara, and because of that he had tried to change, for Annette’s sake—and now he would do so no longer. He had worn what she asked him to wear, made the friends she wanted, and now he would no longer do so.

“Betrayed Sara?” she said, deeply confused. “But don’t you remember Sara betrayed me? It was the other way around—you know that, Ian, it was the other way around!”

She looked startled, then bit her bottom lip and tried to think. Tears came to her eyes.

She became worried. But for a few weeks nothing happened at all. And Ian did not go back to the town council—he waited at home. But he refused to take the pain pills for his back. He no longer took the
cocaine that would free him from pain. No, he would not do it. He needed to think. And at times he lay on his back in the hallway, trying to sleep. He told her the concessions the government was willing to give Helinkiscor were abysmal and would ruin them all.

“Don’t people see it?” he asked. He had lost weight, and his clothes seemed to hang off him. Sometimes he would try to speak and the words would not come.

“You are in despair,” Annette said. “Yes, I have heard of men falling into that—despair.”

Annette was taking yoga and had her own mat, and was doing jigsaw puzzles like she had done when she was a child. She had Liam help her. For the first time in years she seemed herself again.

Still to Ian, who had long wanted her to be this way, it no longer mattered. The days to him were meaningless and dark. He was focused only on one thing.

So one night after supper when they were all alone, he simply said, “I am about to take on Helinkiscor, and perhaps lose everything doing so.”

“What do you mean?” Annette asked, putting down her romance novel,
Love’s Desperate Flight
.

He answered her quite quietly and sincerely: “It means the destruction of a hundred thousand acres of land, and maybe all of the great Arron timber track—all the way to Clare’s Longing,” he said, trying to impress her, as a downriver girl. “There will be nothing left,” he said, after a moment, “and if there is, it will never belong to us. It will belong to some Dutchman or Finlander. Everyone sees it, but no one seems to be strong enough to stand up to it—it is our entire downriver heritage.”

She looked stunned, and rustled the page of the book as she turned it.

“Well, what does that have to do with you?” she asked sharply. “DD says so what about the stupid old wood! You live in town.”

By now Helinkiscor knew who Ian was and what he was trying to accomplish—and had consulted the highest levels of the provincial government because, as they said, they wanted no worrisome spectacle. They didn’t want trucks or dozers sabotaged. And the source they had consulted told them that Ian was a drug addict.

The deputy minister of forestry, who had actually grown up in the very area they were going to clear-cut, and was Helinkiscor’s most enthusiastic champion, said, “He’s a total disgrace—no one pays any attention to him. He cheated a dozen people around here.”

But there was one thing Ian was waiting for.

The Helinkiscor road would cut along his property line on the Swill, and finally they had to approach him about it. The best way to approach anyone for something like this is to make little of it—that is, to make it seem very standard, and as if they could appropriate his land at any time. Two men came to the house one afternoon unexpectedly, when Ian was down at the store, and offered Annette fifteen thousand for the right of way. She was beside herself—fifteen thousand for a bit of dirt on the Swill way out at Bonny Joyce! She telephoned Ian and asked him to come home. He came to the house, and saw the two foreign men in business suits sitting in the living room, both wearing overshoes with snaps. They smiled at him when he entered and warmly stood and shook his hand, as if they had come to a great meeting of minds already.

When he said no to the fifteen thousand, they offered him twenty thousand.

One was a small fellow with a limp, and the other had a bald head, the surface of which looked like a walnut. Both of them were from the Quebec office. What was it about, money? Well then, they were prepared to offer twenty-five thousand, but no more.

“Twenty-five thousand!” Annette said.

Ian again said no.

They picked up their briefcases—each had one, beautiful briefcases with nice brass snaps—and left.

“Are you nuts!” Annette said. “We can’t possibly get more!”

“I don’t want more.”

“Then why don’t you take what they offered?”

“My place downriver is not for sale.”

In fact he had been told three days before that an offer would come. His land was ten acres—simply ten acres that had rarely been walked on and had a small brook called Preston Creek that ran into the south branch of Little Hackett, which in turn ran into Arron Brook at Glidden’s Pool. Yes, it was up there she had sent him running one time to seek her out—and he did—run.

Ian had not been down to see it himself in three years. It had been his old homestead (which in the papers drawn up in the offer was called a shack), the place where he had made all his plans to be a businessman. The place where he’d sat on the porch waiting for Annette to come up through Bonny Joyce Road, to watch her just as she walked by him. (He and a dozen other young men.)

Still, the idea of taking on the whole province—holding up everyone over a sliver of land, which Annette couldn’t even remember—enthralled her. Suddenly it comforted her to think he was like the great Lonnie Sullivan himself. Even though Lonnie had tormented her, she still missed him. So she began to talk not like her innocent self but like her ruthless self, the self that Lonnie himself had helped create; a side of her nature that for Ian was unnatural, and that Liam noticed and seemed ashamed of.

“Everyone said you were cagey!” Annette proclaimed the next day, her beautiful and dreamy eyes suddenly more cunning than before. “Now I know it!” she said with deep enthusiasm. “Now I see it. Ripp? Ha! You have it all over Ripp. Wait until I tell him. He’ll change his tune.”

“Oh,” Ian said. “So Ripp has a tune.”

“Well, you know Ripp,” she said clumsily. “Wait until I tell DD,” she said.

He had never seen her so happy with him. It was the first time he remembered her being pleased she was his wife. He smiled at her tenderly, and touched her cheek. He never answered.

The next day a man came to the store. He walked in and came over to Ian, who was waiting on a customer, and held out his hand.

“Ian,” he said. “God it’s been a while, lad. How are you?”

For a moment Ian tried to decide who this fellow was, this fellow who was so friendly. And then he realized: oh yes, older, more obsequious, more wrinkled, but with the same pleasant smile, the same admirable way in which to bring men to his side—yes, the man who had interviewed Ian for a job at the mill years before. Now not so proud to come into the store—a place he had not been in before—and now not so proud to take Ian’s hand in friendship. Yes, a former mayor, with his dark ring on his little finger and the strap of a gold watch just visible.

“Go away,” Ian said.

Then Ian simply turned and continued to work.

There was someone else with him at that moment as well—a small rotund man, waiting and carefully watching. His name was Wally Bickle. Ian knew him from long ago. Bickle was the man who had been called to work at the mill, and had just sized up the person he had come with to Ian’s store. Yes, Bickle decided, the man, a former personal manager, was a lightweight—incapable of anything. Ian wouldn’t even speak to him. So Wally would distance himself from this fellow in the next week, and begin to assassinate Ian’s character wherever he was, tell people about Ian’s youth, something so well known in Bicklesfield and Bonny Joyce.

Ian worked until dark, then locked the store and went home. It was bitter and cold and yet some light flared way out in the sky, and he heard the thud of a snow shovel in someone’s yard.

A sudden thought came to him: I will lose Annette. And part of him realized he did not want to—that he was desperate not to. I am deceiving her by not telling her what is going to happen—when she realizes it, it will be too late—too late! Poor Annette, she does not know.

And suddenly he felt that everything in his life was over.

At ten that very night a call came—it wasn’t either of those two men with the briefcases or the former personal manager but another man, named Mr. Ilwal Fension. He was prepared to offer 27,500 for Ian’s land and the right to tear down the old shack that was on it.

“We are putting a road through, you see—we plan to start hauling out of there sometime in the next few months. We will put your whole town to work! It is a very depressed area, and we could have gone to many other places—but we want to put people to work, we want people to be self-sufficient.”

Fension told Ian to call him Ilwal.

“No,” Ian said.

“No? You won’t call me Ilwal?”

“No, I won’t take the twenty-seven five,” Ian answered.

“You are just trying for more, aren’t you?” Annette said, asking a question, yet her voice pleading. “I told DD you would soon settle. So—I want to know when you will, so I can tell my friends, okay?”

He looked at her for a long moment. She was scared now, and frightened of him.

“I will allow them the land if they promise not to cut Bonny.”

He knew that all these discussions about what they would offer him were done in consultation with the province, and that he was ostracized for holding them to ransom. But Ian, as much of a failure as he was, would still always be the brightest one in the room.

That night, shadows played off the wall as traffic went by, and the blinds were drawn, and the magazine with the Arborite display was open on the carpet. And the air was still. And the rooms were quiet in a clinging pedestrian way, and the mahogany banister shone with new polish. Annette was smoking and the smoke lingered in the shadows as well. She didn’t speak to him; she watched him. She was like a brilliant beautiful cat. And she too had nine lives. She watched him, and butted her cigarette. There was something terrible about him, officious and unlikeable—and she was worried. Couldn’t they have some kind of a life together with that money—and a life for Liam as well? She felt he was doing this to spite her, because she had hurt him by some of the frivolous things she had done. She knew now how others disrespected him because of her. Well then, if she’d hurt him she was sorry—but she did not know how to say it.

If she had known, it might have changed everything for the better.

“What will I tell DD about what our plans are, and when we will get the money?” she asked, hopefully, like one asking a favour. “They all want to know—you should see how jealous they are of us now. All of them are jealous of you—and I just say, ‘That’s my man.’ ”

He looked at her a long moment.

“Tell DD … well, tell DD to go to hell.”

She stood and went to bed.

The next afternoon a man, Whitaker, from town council came to see him.

“What they are offering you is pretty good. Mr. Conner and I were saying this last night—that they should offer you something comparable to what others in Quebec got—and I said, ‘Ian deserves more than the froggies.’ So I’m telling you they went way over that—and that’s what we wanted them to do!” He smiled as if this was a secret and Ian should be overjoyed. But Ian seemed unmoved. He asked why they needed his land—there must be another way in to the cut.

“Yes, of course there is,” Whitaker said.

“Then they should plow that.”

Whitaker said he did not know why they did not do so. Maybe they felt they should give the people of Bonny something.

“Nonsense—there is another reason. They would offer me nothing if they could get around dealing with me. No, the government is hiding how weak they are in dealing with this company.”

“The government will just confiscate the land.”

“I will make sure the legal ramifications will hold it up for two years,” Ian said calmly. “By that time we will know what is going on.”

For a few days they were silent. Then the man with a fez on his walnut-shaped head came to see him. He tried to look dignified but was obsequious and startled whenever Ian said anything kind or sensible: “Yes, yes, yes,” he would say.

They offered Ian a hundred thousand dollars. Annette sat open-mouthed—one hundred thousand! No one would laugh at them now, she
said. Lonnie never did a deal so good, she said. She laughed so hard she had to lean against the counter—just as she had done when she was sick all those years ago. She began to dance in her slippers all around the room, telling him what they could buy—and where they could go for vacation.