Crimes Against My Brother (4 page)

The three went along this road of mocking for well over a year, and made so many jokes about religion that people called them the “devil’s advocates”—which they all enjoyed immensely. And some said they
were “the wickedest three in Northumberland,” which they also liked to hear. They loved to hear this because of two things: it made them seem and feel like renegades—and the world never had enough of those; and it made them believe that all others about them were pious and meek, and not so witty or brilliant or daring as themselves. So they walked past many others in the night with a satirical sniff.

Some people, in fact, thought they would burn the church—old women especially, who went to the Catholic Women’s League, and worried much about it. It did not help that Harold told a young woman that he would put firecrackers in the holy water.

“Boo!” Harold would yell to various old ladies, and they would look at him with great trepidation and alarm. The other two, of course, did not do this, but as Harold said, he “booed” for all three. And all three would laugh in hilarity. Yet once or twice, in a state of euphoria brought on by widening vocal swipes against the pious and the meek, a draft would sweep across their eyes and make them blink.

“Nothing will come between us now!” Harold said one spring night when there were warm pebbles under the ice and the smell of old barn straw in the wind. He took out his last three cigarettes and shared them about. God, that was such a night, with golden stars and warm trees in the moonlit forest.

No one touched them during this time—neither Mat Pit nor the Sheppard brothers, who they sometimes saw along the road, nor any of the Delaney men—for everyone knew: go against one, and you had one hell of a time on your hands.

But the boys remained fascinated with Sydney Henderson on the one hand, who took any job he could find from anyone, and Lonnie Sullivan on the other, who gave and took jobs like fate took lives. (Though, in truth, Lonnie Sullivan was the least exceptional of men, and much like thirty others on our river.)

Sydney had to find work, and would take almost any job that was offered. People said he was brilliant, but he certainly did not seem so. And he would at times find himself at Lonnie Sullivan’s looking for a day or
two employment. And so it came to pass that Sydney did work with the three boys at Spine’s Grey Landing in early April the next year, when the ice broke and roared and piled ten-men high in the woods. The four of them had to cut ten cord of wood for Lonnie’s furnace for next year. Lonnie demanded it be done and laid out this early because he could; and he wanted the boys to have to do it, and then to have to do more for him.

It took the boys a good while to get it done, for the saws kept breaking—the old Husqvarna was fifteen years old, the great Massey Ferguson had a bad spark. All the while, determined to do his work, Sydney kept their spirits up with jokes and songs—songs of a Miramichi and a world now gone, of men of the bogs and woods now gone, of traces and sleds and poles now gone. And not only did the others realize that his jokes were hilarious, but they heard that his voice was pristine. And they knew as well that he had been shot as a youngster—and had once, and probably still was, able to fight like a wild animal. They had called him one when he was thirteen, and in fact, all of them had once been terrified of him. But now so many others said so many lesser things about him, they joined those others in saying the same.

On the night of April 9, they finished. They brought the wood out, and in the great field behind Sullivan’s it stretched back and away, and they said to themselves: Lonnie must be happy with us now. None of them had escaped a cut or bruise, and all of them, in spite of what they said, and how they said it, admired Sydney Henderson in that moment. But it irked the three that Sydney might think that he was their friend when he wasn’t, and they made that clear by ignoring him as soon as they were done with the work. And so he stood alone. For they were bonded by blood; not he.

Nor would they ever forget that Lonnie, in a foul mood, buttressed by rum and a loss at bingo—as well as the turning of a horse’s ankle that made short work of the ceremony of payment—gave them less than he had promised and confused the payment with their past obligation, which they were sure they had previously worked off, and then paid Sydney less than the others by seventeen dollars, when he had children and what everyone said was a beautiful but simple-minded wife to feed.

Yet all three boys—and this happens everywhere when man deals with man—committed the sin of omission, and did not defend the one who should have been defended, and said nothing more. And Sydney walked home alone in the bitter dark with puddles freezing over and snow falling close on Good Friday in 1975.

I remember I saw Sydney Henderson around that time. It was at a wedding—I do not know when exactly, but sometime in the summer that same year.

My mother insisted I go to this wedding—put in an appearance and tell everyone I was a Rhodes Scholar, as if they would be impressed. I loved her, but I realized I was an oddity; and in fact, I always would be.

Still, I went to the wedding because my mother asked me to. And I saw at this wedding—as at all weddings—the kind of finery that shows us to be rural people. The kind of people who will always, no matter what tux they wear, have broad backs and uncomplicated smiles; no matter what dresses, have the feel and look of the earth; and no matter how proudly they walk, exult in the strains of fiddle music only a half-step away.

I told my students later on that this was the first time I remember seeing Sydney Henderson. I had heard so many stories about him I stared at him too long, until he noticed me and smiled.

He was standing off to the side of the large yard where cars were parked. He had long had the reputation of being an oddity, something of a soothsayer—and I remember he was speaking to Annette Brideau. I did not recognize her at first—it took me a while to place her, to remember who she was, because she had become a young woman now. She was in fact one of those few people who would always stand out. Still, I remember that she was looking frightened or concerned, as a person will who is suddenly told some unexpected bad news.

I later learned she had been teasing Sydney, asking him to tell her a secret she had about herself—for this is what Henderson was supposedly able to do. And Annette loved to have her fortune told. All her life she wanted to hear agreeable things about herself. Especially, I found out,
if she was told she was both pretty and wise, and that all nice things would happen. So she smiled tenderly and readied herself to be pleased.

At first Sydney did not answer her; he did not want to. He seemed to want to ignore her, without giving away the reason. But she continued to press him to tell her something about her future.

“Tell me now—what is it you know, Syd, what big secret do you know? I know you are keeping it all from me—something you know!”

She grabbed his arm and then took his hand in hers; she waved to passersby and winked at them, as if all were engaged in her tender conspiracy. So finally he bent toward her and whispered something. She was smiling as he bent and she winked at a friend. But bit by bit she turned white, and then backed away.

“That is not true! You are being mean—that’s what everyone says about you—you are mean and stupid! Why would you say this to me?”

“No—you are right—I had no right to say it,” he said, suddenly very upset with himself. “I am likely very wrong. Why, you ask Elly. She often says I am wrong.”

Annette was now scared and stammered, “Well, your wife is as dumb as you, and you have an albino daughter as far as I know, and you can’t even afford milk for your children as far as I know—and you write stupid poems as far as I know.” She gave a lilting, defiant laugh.

Then she ran across the lot, and sat on an old wicker chair and stared out at the bay, now and then swatting at a horsefly circling her. Henderson turned away and started to walk toward the lane, the dust of it over his shoes and pants. He seemed rattled that he had upset this young woman. Then he started walking back toward Annette as if he wanted to apologize. But he stopped and looked in the direction of Verna Bickle and her son, Wally, as if he was very startled by them too. At that time it was a standard joke that wherever Verna was, her son, Wally, was too. Whatever Verna gossiped about, Wally would as well. And just as some people could be called professional Catholics, Verna was a professional Baptist.

Now Wally stood beside his mommy and the other grown-up guests,
a rotund little boy with a red bow tie, and spoke about someday being in the student police. There was nothing about him that struck me as unusual—except that Henderson looked at him intensely, almost sorrowfully, but only for a split second, then looked over at Annette again quickly, seeming troubled.

Then he looked at me and said, somewhat joyfully and almost as if we had known each other for years and years, “I am going down the highway to hay. You are going back to university. That is a great and good thing to do. But you will come home someday, and help solve something important for us—perhaps!”

“What did you say to Annette? She seems very upset.”

“I told her that what she is led to believe about her firstborn might someday destroy her second—and I should not have said so, it was foolish of me. But I have had that feeling now for some while, each time I see her.”

And that was that: the only time Henderson ever spoke to me. But no one ever believed Henderson, or really cared what he said. And it was only recently I remembered this incident, when I started to compile notes about the three boys to write this book.

I remember as well how Lonnie came down the lane that day, driving his white Eldorado, wearing a gold chain around his heavy neck, and picked young Annette Brideau up. She slammed the car door and glanced at me with imperious and startling beauty. Then Lonnie roared up the lane past Sydney, covering the man’s old suit in pebbles and dust.

“She is one of his many little urchins,” someone said as we watched them drive away. That is, so much that people believe is hidden, is not.

By now, as we know, Lonnie had amassed a large car, a few trucks, a pocket full of cigars, bottles of old navy rum—and horses he raced, whenever they weren’t down, in Charlottetown. And the three boys were certainly charmed by that. And he seemed to have Annette Brideau as his mascot in his car on those long summer afternoons when he would drive down to the beach and call the boys over to him.

“You want to make some money?” he would say. Boys would clamour around his car like a swarm of petulant bees—half of them just to look at Annette, who in the swell of heat and early blossom was a rural and earthen and ethereal presence all at once. But it was also the smell of his car, the look of the big cigars sitting in the pocket of his white shirt, the way he drawled his response and took out a wad of money to pay for something small, that impressed them. He would send the kids scrambling to the corner store for a chocolate bar, pulling from his pockets a wad of twenty- and fifty-dollar bills.

But this secret was well known: Lonnie Sullivan did not have all the money in Bonny Joyce, as he said he had. Joyce Fitzroy too had a good deal hidden—at least as much as Big Lonnie. And so Lonnie would lie awake at night wondering how to convince Joyce to share it with him. Lonnie was obsessed with always having and obtaining more. He also believed that Fitzroy did not respect him, and this irritated him terribly. And from that first moment when he saw Annette hiking home, these impulses in him would in some way destroy her. That is, whoever he drew to him he must, by his nature, twist to his purpose. At first, as always, he was thinking only that he would be her mentor. Still, being her mentor, he felt she must think like he thought, and act the way he told her to. And after a year or so he began to include her in his long-term plans without ever thinking he would harm her. But there was never a person Lonnie knew who, at some point, he did not hurt. If there was a man who kept secrets on his friends in order to turn on them when he was given the chance, that man was Lonnie Sullivan.

One of the boys who gathered around the car on those lost summer afternoons—so long ago that transistors were still in fashion and no one would have known what a computer was—listening to the corrupt ramblings of Sullivan, was Ian Preston himself, who could not take his eyes off Annette. So with timidity and love he asked her out. Annette did not know whether or not she should go. So, as always, she went to Lonnie and asked him what to do.

“Oh, he’s a little twit,” Lonnie said, while he busied himself polishing and spitting on a boot. “But still, it’s very interesting—very interesting that he would get up the nerve. So go and have a good time. He has saved his money—so you may as well enjoy it.” He looked up and smiled, and then spit on the boot again.

Then he added, in a sardonic voice, “All the boys are after you. Harold is too—don’t you kid yourself. You watch that they both don’t come to blows over you.”

At sixteen years old, this both shocked and thrilled her.

“But I want you to take heed.”

“What?” she asked.

“Don’t pick the wrong boy. You have to think of yourself in all of this.” And Lonnie wagged his finger and looked sternly at her. “Don’t think of anyone else—time is on your side now, but someday it will no longer be. So if I give you advice like a father, you should take the advice I give. You come back and tell me everything.”

So Annette telephoned Ian and said yes, she would go out.

She went to a movie with him that first night, and after that whenever he had the money, and soon she took a milkshake from him at Bobbi’s Dairy Stop. Perhaps she did not know just how much this cost Ian out of earnings he himself was trying to save. And he did not understand at that time how little of what he said could impress her.

Still, on a summer evening so long ago—the trees waving, as if with the kind of passion that makes one think they not only are alive but vying for attention; on one of those summer evenings so long ago, when the sky was warm and black—there was a moment when Ian tried clumsily to sneak a kiss. He put his arm around her so abruptly that she almost fell forward, and then he tried to draw her to him. Annette looked at him in sudden—for it seemed to just happen in the moment—superiority, and turned her head away.