Crimes Against My Brother (36 page)

“I am not taking it,” he told her.

But Mr. Fension came with another offer that very night—he said it would be the last offer: $210,000. He was fit and young-looking and had a tailor-made suit and soft leather gloves, and he spoke, as Annette told DD the next day, like such a gentleman. And she had flirted with him to make him like Ian.

But Ian did not take that offer either.

Lawyers then called Ian, asking if he needed their help. There were two messages left on the phone by J. P. Hogg himself. One said: “If you want to look at the legal aspect of this—I am always here for you.”

Then, for four or five days, no one said a thing about the money or the company or the wood. And in the midst of all his Ian started to go to the rec centre and play badminton like he had many years ago, after he and Annette were first married. He was silent to her and refused to speak to the mayor when he phoned.

“I have a badminton match,” he said. And lo and behold, the mayor turned up at the recreation centre that night with a badminton racket and squeaky new sneakers.

Annette felt what everyone else did: that Ian was trying to make a name for himself and get on the news, and bring shame to the town. This is what people hinted at, and they said they were not going to stand for it! This, in fact, is what Annette now decided to think as well. Because in order to protect herself, she too had to agree and belong. If she did not, she would be accused of being like Ian. So she was desperate, and Ian knew this is how it would happen. And he felt deeply sorry for her and his child.

But you see, now even if Ian had wanted to take the money—even if he could see what it might do to have this money for his son (and he was only human—he did think of this, and he did think of taking the offer), he could not take it, for he had placed his reputation on the line, had
said that the Bonny should not be cut by foreigners who wanted to destroy Arron Brook. If he did take it, everyone would simply look at him as dishonest—an accusation he had been fighting all of his life.

DD told Annette people were saying she was orchestrating it all because she wanted money—that is why she had married Ian in the first place.

“You know that’s not true, DD—we loved each other. You said—remember you said!”

Annette could not look at him; she was now like a little ghost—she sat by the wood fireplace and trembled. Her face more than ever reminded him of a porcelain doll’s—a woman whose youth was fading. You may have seen her in any court in Europe in the last four hundred years, sitting off to the side in a room of splendid strangers. And she was an innocent too in all this—that is, in her heart of hearts she could never understand why they shouldn’t take the money for Liam.

But Ian could not explain it. He could only say he had gone too far to back down now. So this new offer compelled him to be more reckless and more driven, and less conscious about the enemies he now made. The town itself wanted an explanation, wanted him to answer to them. He was invited to the town council to explain his reasoning. He told the town in an interview to “go to hell.” They had never cared for him; why then should he care for them? And in fact, he hadn’t seen many of them visit him on the Swill Road when he was a boy. So why should they take such an interest in the Swill Road now?

“You have called me stingy and miserly. That is not at all true,” he told the paper, and added rashly, “in a week the town will see who I am.”

Annette broke down and cried, and begged Ian to realize what he was doing to them. How they would be ruined.

She was right—he knew it. All of his life he’d wanted her to be right, and now she was, for she was trying to save them.

He wrote her a note, which she held in her hand for an hour:
You wanted me to destroy myself—from the time I was a boy. Well, you’ve got your wish, love
.

On a Saturday during a thaw, just when the cold case involving Lonnie Sullivan was about to reopen, Ian Preston began to hand out pamphlets about Bonny Joyce, and show a painting done by a local woman of the devastation done in the 1970s. He also printed assurances from the same government two years ago that said the Bonny Joyce tract would never be negotiated because of the damage it might cause to two river systems. He stood in the cold for three hours, with Liam by his side. Most people were polite but uncaring, for too many jobs were at stake. Some young boys mocked him, and men came from the tavern and laughed.

One yelled, “You’d better watch your store, Mr. Preston!”

“Never mind them, Liam,” he said. “There are enough men like that—and no one like you.”

On that same evening, Annette was introduced to Wally Bickle at the curling club. He wore a new curling sweater with one pin. He shook her hand briefly; said, “Oh, the wife of Mr. Preston, the man who is holding us all hostage!” Then he turned his back, and left her embarrassed, the smile still on her face.

As an outsider in town this seemed just the right thing for him to do.

Bickle no longer worked for the finance company and was no longer with the compensation board but was now working with Mr. Ticks, the new senior manager; some said he might be a supervisor himself someday. All his life, Bickle had been able to size up who might be able to help him. The old personnel manager had got him in the door, but now it was Mr. Ticks who was his mentor—someone who knew the ropes. People said Wally Bickle was religious (so you had to be careful how you spoke) and went to the Baptist church.

The next afternoon, when Ian came home, she looked like a different woman. His intransigence had changed her. Her eyes were red and raw, her hair dishevelled, and she was trembling.

She pleaded, but he did not answer. He simply stared out the window at the dusk coming across the street and night falling. When he looked back, she had fallen to her knees. Shaken, he turned away.

She threw some of his pamphlets at him and screamed, “Everyone knows you’re insane—as soon as you got at me, you started to show your other side—that’s what DD says! All my friends say it too—even though I don’t want to admit it! That’s my money as much as it is yours—and I want my money!”

“I am not at all insane,” he said, “so there is no use in hysterics. You never even stepped on Swill Road when I was a boy—and I remember—”

“What—what do you remember?”

“I remember how you tormented me because I came from there,” he said.

A few days later he heard that his store was to be boycotted until such time as he allowed the road to open.

When he told Annette, she said, “So, what do you think they should do? I have to live in this town, you know—and everyone at Cut and Curl just calls you a big jerk! Everyone wants the mill, and you are calling everyone down. I thought we were going to have a good life. If you sell the land and then write a letter to the paper—that’s what my friends say—and admit you were wrong, there won’t be any boycott. So do that, if you care about me!”

“I do care about you very much—because both of us were young and foolish. You no more no less than I.”

“Well then, please write them.” She bit her bottom lip and waited for his reply.

He looked at her seriously for a moment. “No—I won’t do that,” he said calmly.

“Then I will move out and I will take Liam.”

“Then move out—but you will not take Liam! I will kill you first.”

And after that, he moved into the basement apartment and lived there.

Ian now more than ever before began to see the ramifications of being alone. He began to see what it was like, and realized the one thing the world wanted him to feel was shame.

He would wait for his son after school. He relied upon the boy to help him, spacing the old and new product in the showroom, moving the hundreds of sheets of gyprock into the shelves on the lower floor. But the boy was just a child, and was being bullied and tormented about his father at school. His father was being called a traitor.

The girl Sherry Mittens didn’t look at Liam—but later had some other boys and girls catcall behind him as he walked home.

Then the boycott of Ian’s store started in earnest.

“It does not matter,” Ian told Annette.

“You are crazy—everyone says you are crazy. Ripp says so too.”

“I do not know or care. I can only tell you he is a coward!”

The next morning she came to the basement, opened the door carefully, woke him, sat beside him and held his hand: “Okay, I know we haven’t been getting along and I will be better, but—well, come on—you know you have to give it up. Sell the land. I was thinking—they are offering two hundred—well, what if you went and asked for three hundred thousand or even four hundred thousand? Well, we can be a family again, and you will be respected.”

“How can I respect myself if I change now? I may as well be dead.”

“But I—I will respect you. I promise.”

He got up, walked her to the door and closed it on her.

Conner, the MLA, retired a week later. He said he supported the government’s decision concerning Helinkiscor, but many knew he’d retired because he did not—because of what was given up and because of the government’s broken promise about Bonny Joyce, which he himself had stood for in the previous two elections.

“Yes, it’s bad what they did to us!” people would say, reading about his retirement in the paper, and then shrug as if they suspected and even approved of what the government was doing—so that Ian informing them of the truth was an unnecessary burden, and his holding up the work was still unconscionable. This, then, became the idea about Ian: that he was waiting for an offer of one
million dollars—and the newspaper phoned him and asked him if this was true.

“Is it a million—is it?” they asked, the way newspapers so often do, in the gleeful suspicious manner they wish to inform the public.

Finally Helinkiscor began to make arrangements to cut on the far side of Bonny Joyce, which meant they would have to make the road into Quebec from a far more difficult place (it would cost them many more millions, which is why they were willing to offer Ian so much). Yet the reason for all of this—the reason being that they wanted to use the Quebec mill and not the New Brunswick one to process the New Brunswick wood, and put New Brunswick men and women out of work not for a year or two but for good—would only come out in five years.

Once Conner resigned, however, there was to be a by-election, and Ian Preston decided to run for MLA.

Hearing from others what he was about to do, Annette told him she worried about the money he would have to spend.

“Ripp makes fun of you,” she said, staring at him with a look of lonely caution, the sad face of a confused girl, “and we don’t want that!”

“We don’t want Ripp making fun of me? Why not? When didn’t he? When didn’t he, with your tacit approval? It doesn’t matter! I told you that Ripp and DD and Dickie are cowards!”

“I don’t know what that means—‘tacit’! How much will you spend?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But maybe we will end up with nothing.”

“I had nothing to begin with. It doesn’t matter. I already spent my last dime.” And he looked at her strangely.

“When?”

“When I bought you an ice cream at Bobbi’s Dairy Bar that day—remember? It was my last dime—you didn’t mind me spending it then.”

“You want to kill me.” She smiled. “Is that right? You want to kill me, or have me kill myself. That’s what this is about—to drive me to kill myself. I should have known.”

The only way Annette could cope now was to drink, and he knew this. But he couldn’t help her anymore. When drinking and slurring her words, she began to berate him: Why did he come home to meet the men from the company when she called him that day if he did not want the money?

Why was he so greedy that he wanted a million, as everyone said?

Why did he think people hadn’t caught on to him?

Why did he think he could fool people?

He did not answer—he was plagued by other concerns.

Why the company wanted a road into Quebec he wasn’t sure—but he knew that was why Conner had resigned, he told her calmly. That was the day she threw a glass of gin at him.

So he began to campaign, and he got the reputation of being an environmentalist who was trying to ruin their livelihood.

He was also leaving himself universally vulnerable to those men who always looked self-congratulatory when they capitulated to the will and ideas of the mob. And that was almost everyone who had ever worked for the mill.

And he did not know this: the real reason Conner resigned—that is file 0991563. It was in Fension’s office and drawn up with the approval of the minister of forestry. So furious were they with Ian Preston they decided that at a certain opportune time they would offer his troubled and innocent wife, Annette Brideau, a very good job. That is, they would bide their time, but someday they would pay him back.