Crimes Against My Brother (38 page)

“Come on,” he said, “that’s enough—we don’t do that to a boy—leave him alone.”

It wasn’t until much later that night Ian discovered something wrong. Seeing the boy’s hands, he asked calmly who had done this. But Liam, fearing his father might get into trouble, would not say.

“Tell me!” Ian smashed a mirror and cut his own hand.

He rushed his child to the hospital, his own hands covered in blood because of the mirror.

It was when there, having his hand bandaged, he got a call about what was happening at his store.

An hour or so after dark, the boys who had torn the posters down went along the sidewalks. Rueben Sores told his two accomplices what he would do. Hatred was exactly that—an exquisite feeling. So it did not matter at this moment who he hated. In fact, with memories of his tormented youth plaguing his budding manhood, he hated the world.

Harold wanted him to burn the store of Harold’s old enemy. But Rueben would not be able to get inside easily, so he went around to the back where the old shed was, saw the little election headquarters of Ian Preston closed up and a picture of Ian in the door window.

“Come on,” he said to his friends. “Come on.”

In this shed there was only a dusty desk with some staple guns and posters, a telephone and an unwrapped computer. Rueben busted the window.

“Who has matches?” he asked.

But strangely, none of them did. They had wasted the last of them on burning Liam’s posters.

“Christ, no matches!” he said. Then suddenly he laughed. “Look.”

He picked up the small Bic lighter that had been left there by Corky Thorn the morning he died. Rueben stood a moment watching the flame, amazed that he had fire in his hand.

“The gods,” he said, and he sniffed. “Hand me some posters,” he said to the boys.

He lit the posters they handed to him, and tossed them here and there. Soon the shed was ablaze, and so was the back wall of the store. Everything was going to burn.

Then Rueben, Spenser and Kyle ran. Ran away.

Ian, at the moment his store was afire, was driving Liam to emergency. Liam, whose hair was singed and whose hands were burned. This was to cause the greatest calamity in Ian’s life.

He lost somewhere close to $185,000. He was also sued for smoke damage to three other stores and paid restitution of thirty-four thousand. Ian’s insurance company contested the claim, and only made partial payment. So angered were people that Ian received many death threats.

Annette kept looking out the window, terrified of a mob. “If the mob comes, I am sure it will be a big mob—for it is a big mob that probably hates you,” she said, lighting one cigarette off another and peeking from behind the curtains.

A Social Services lady, Melissa Sapp, visited the house on four occasions and took statements from Liam, which she recorded. People recoiled when they saw Ian. The one young girl who was walking with Liam—Sherry Mittens—said she had not seen any boys doing things,
for she had gone home, and she thought Liam had gone home too. Sherry said this very politely, always thankful at being able to help.

Liam remembered there was someone else walking past the armoury. The police made some effort to locate this man but could not. So most people assumed the story was a fabrication concocted to protect his father.

They were suddenly, Ian and Annette, poor. In fact, very poor.

He lost the election by four thousand votes.

Six hundred men and women went to work because of the mill. Six hundred families had a new lease on life. Ten thousand people ignored him and never darkened the door of his shattered business again.

PART SEVEN

A
NNETTE KEPT THINKING OF THE MONEY
I
AN HAD LOST BY
not doing what she said—by not listening to her. She spent days staring at her photo albums—the pictures she had taken when she was going to be a model—she had photos of herself in various poses and dress. She had taken a modelling course two years after she’d had the child. The whole atmosphere of this modelling course held on Wednesday nights in the back room on the bottom floor of Saint Michael’s was so much fun. So many people picked her out as being someone to watch.

“You will go places,” Madam Leslie said.

And everyone seemed to agree. She got a gold star on her certificate.

The certificate read Qualified With Distinction

And it was signed by Madam Viola Leslie.

Annette had paid $457 for the course and to get the photos done—and she’d had an offer to model clothes for a store in Moncton one afternoon, but it had snowed and she did not go down.

Where were those days now? she thought. Where had they gone? She was so sad now. Why did life seem to matter? Nothing mattered anymore.

“He is poor now!” she said to DD. “He is really poor!”

“Oh my God, I know,” DD would say, trying to comfort while hiding a slight beguiling smile. So then after the thousands he’d given her from his store; after the parties he tried to throw for her; after the cottage, the house, the car—now was the time. To leave.

In some way, she still did not want to leave him. In some way, she wanted to remain married—whether because of Sara or because of him she did not really know. This gave her tremendous beauty a vulnerability. And people advised her. She found she had many advisers now.
They told her she had done her level best to be faithful, but now he had hurt her desperately. Burned his own store and injured his child.

“You can’t be a doormat for him,” someone she hardly knew told her one day. And others told her that too. She was frightened all the time.

Another woman took Annette’s hands in her own, and blinking back tears nodded, as if recognizing a compatriot.

“I know how it is!” she said.

Annette had always disliked this woman, but suddenly she too had tears in her own eyes.

Belief is emphatic. That is, did Annette believe what they said about him? If she did not believe, she could not leave, so her willingness to believe, even if it was false—that is, her willingness to believe in falseness—promoted the illusion of freedom. And all those around her promoted this at will. When she brought up his name at a card game at the curling club one night (because someone was talking about their uncle having an operation on his back), no one responded. And she kept her eyes hidden behind her cards. So little by little she became convinced that her friends were right.

It is dangerous not to think of your friends as your greatest enemies. It is dangerous not to think that those who have conformed in their views all their lives will not conform when thinking of you, and not want you to enliven their boredom or affirm their belief in how they were told the world works by revelling in your destruction.

Annette did not know that what her friends most wanted from her was not her inclusion but her performance.

A month or so after the store burned down, Fension danced with her and flirted with her, putting his hand down the small of her back when they waltzed. He knew she was married to a hopeless idiot, and he had the grace to exploit it at a dance. He told her stories and pretended he didn’t even know Ian. One whole evening they sat side by side, while the snow shone under the lights outside and the avenues were deep and dark and mysterious in the vales of snow. He suddenly felt her eyes were as secretive as dark melting ice that he’d seen as a boy in Norway.

She smoked cigarettes in the quiet maze of romance, and spoke to Fension about her terrible childhood—how she’d had very little, how she’d been used. He took her hand the moment she caught her breath before tears came. Then she smiled when he told a joke in his thick accent, and he kissed her cheek.

But the next afternoon, a Sunday, Mr. Fension arrived at the club with his utterly beautiful wife, who had come from Oslo to surprise him. So Fension walked by her tersely and nodded. She sat alone that day at the back near the kitchen, with its pale smell of soup and crackers, and looked longingly out at the stale air enveloping the icy parking lot. A look of seductive tragedy that she herself did not understand. But it seemed now that everyone else did.

On the way home, she fell and cut her hand. She lay in bed for days. She dialed Fension’s phone number and hung up. She thought once or twice of killing herself.

She thought of her cousin Doris Branch, who almost ate herself to death after her husband began to run around on her.

I don’t want to eat myself to death, she thought one night as she lay in bed, but I could go for a pizza.

The house was quiet. DD told Annette that she must go to see her the very next day—and decide everything. So anxiousness kept her awake tossing and turning; going over again and again the idea of lost money, and the idea—deep within her—that she had helped destroy Ian’s life.

But amid all of these fantastic and fleeting thoughts a sudden strange presence seemed to invade her consciousness. This presence became pronounced for the most fleeting of seconds. Was it even there—could she ever believe in it? It aggravated her that she had even thought of Molly Thorn—beautiful, wise little Molly Thorn. And what did this “idea” of Molly Thorn say in the middle of the night, so softly and lovingly: something that had nothing to do with money or divorce or being important. The voice said:

“Annette—please—stop—love and you will be loved.”

But the secret was: if she did so, it meant giving up her new position, a position where everyone was waiting to see what she, Annette Brideau would do. And she realized she valued this new position too much to let it go.

The next day DD told her she must get a divorce. There was no way to live with a man like that, and DD said she would not allow it. “For God’s sake, have some self-respect!” she said.

Annette told DD she was not even sure what lawyer to see, for she had nobody to help her. But DD was willing to help and to supply her with the name of a lawyer. That proved she was serious. In fact, she would recommend no other but him, the one Diane herself had when divorcing Clive: J. P. Hogg.

Annette went home determined to phone him. She picked up the receiver half a dozen times, stared at it in a daze, and placed it back.

Then one day, about two weeks after she had talked so privately to Mr. Fension, young Wally Bickle, the man from Bicklesfield, met her on the street and suddenly took her hand.

He looked with his new moustache, like most of the junior managers at the mill. He had a great ability to be arrogant to those who were lower than he was, and obsequious to those above him.

“I don’t know if you remember me,” he said. “We were introduced at the curling club.”

“My God,” she said, trembling slightly, “remember you! Of course.”

He moved closer and said, with great emotion, “But never mind him—how are you?”

His boyish face suddenly amazed her with its appearance of trained diligence and corporate virtue.

“Oh, I’m okay,” she said, smiling, and tears started in her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said, and he squeezed the hand he held. His puffy white coat rustled. “He must have gone through a breakdown—handing out pamphlets and all that. But you must have never seen it coming.”

“A breakdown, yes, that’s what it was,” Annette said, wholly convinced of it. “A complete one too!”

To have Wally Bickle’s approval meant that she was included in town society, for Wally wouldn’t approve of anyone until they were. Yes, he was unaffiliated except toward those who could help him out. This was her assurance.

Some years before, our young Wally Bickle was in the student police, where he wore a flashlight and had an armband. But after high school he didn’t get into the RCMP, which he so wanted. He then tried to enlist in the Bicklefield town police but failed an aptitude test.

Still dedicated to public responsibility, he worked as a collection officer, and Molly Thorn was in his register. Then he was hired at the Workers’ Compensation Board, where he had to deal harshly with Evan Young (he liked to mention how harsh he had to be). Then, when the Workers’ Compensation Board relocated, he was suddenly adrift, looking for another job, and was almost ready to leave the province, when he got a call from the mill. He got this call because of his mother, who knew Mr. Conner.