Crimes Against My Brother (42 page)

Liam continually asked why. In fact, that is all he seemed to ask.

He was told his mom had to leave his father.

“He just can’t accept your mom for the way she is,” DD said. “All of us are only human—isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Liam said, and suddenly he smiled his still-joyous smile. “And my dad is only human too—and people should be kinder to him because he is! He is a greater man than Wally Bickle. Or any of the other men Mommy knows!”

But no matter what Liam hoped and prayed for, the divorce became final—and Liam was left alone. He was left alone almost entirely, day and night for weeks on end, while Ian paid his own lawyer and had his own fight trying to obtain visiting rights.

But it was during this time his cocaine use became known. So visiting rights were denied.

“That is why he was up to all his dirty tricks—to get insurance money for cocaine,” DD said.

Annette was a secretary in the mill’s main office. Her boss was Wally Bickle. Ian had, Wally said, stolen a fortune from her—and many other things. Wally had come to her aid, he told people, and was taking care of the boy.

“Really?” one of the men said.

Wally shrugged.

“I don’t mind that at all. All that boy needs is discipline, a man willing to be a man.”

Except, of course, Wally had spent no time with the boy.

And Annette was famous at the mill—someone desired, beautiful and on her own.

One day she got an anonymous note with a chocolate doughnut from a secret admirer.
I love you with all my heart
, it said.

Who could it be? she thought, looking about. It made her smile.

“It’s a sad thing,” Harold would tell Ethel. “I never thought I would live to see the day—but the world catches up with people, it always does!”

However, there was one thing Harold had not foreseen: Evan Young’s luck seemed to have come back by this same circuitous route. Evan had joined a construction company, Doan’s Roofing and Construction, and had recently paid off all his debt and built a new house miles away. He had begun to read again, voraciously—books of all kinds, like he had in his youth—and play the bagpipes so well he was invited to join the Scottish Society. One night he spoke about the Battle of Culloden, and Sara Robb was there. Though they did not speak that night, she was suddenly taken by his intelligence and kindness.

Harold, sitting in his big happy pawnshop on the far side of the square, guessed how it must have happened. If he had not gone to find the pregnancy test, he wouldn’t have encountered Lonnie. He wouldn’t have been attacked from behind nor would he have got into that terrible fight in the centre of the room. He wouldn’t have used the wrench as a last resort to defend himself.

The demise of Sullivan had allowed Evan to escape his obligation, just at the time the priest wanted him, and Doan saw him work and needed a good man in Halifax.

Doan said, as he hired him, “You go to AA—quit drinking and fighting—Molly would not want that!”

This tore at Evan’s heart. And he had been sober well over two years. And the man he met there—the man who helped him stay sober those first few awful months, when all he wanted to do was to drag himself back to the bottle—was Leonard Savoy, the man who had been kind to Molly at the church picnic so long ago.

Now, after all this time, he could not imagine ever drinking again.

The two policemen who’d worked on Lonnie Sullivan’s death were not the officers who had decided it was an accident: Constables Jarvis and Roy, who had driven the photographer there the next day and stumbled upon the scene in the bright morning air after the storm had blown itself out. No, the files were transferred, and the death was now being reinvestigated by the RCMP.

It was some years later, of course, but there were still a few unanswered questions. This is what the two policemen, both RCMP officers, now spoke about.

“It is a burning question,” Markus Paul said to his mentor and friend, John Delano, in the snowy cold winter of 1995. “And the burning question is this: how does a man slip and hit his head on a dry floor when his body is found two body lengths away from the narrow bench he supposedly hit? What I am saying is, he couldn’t have fallen like that. If anything, the body should be facing the other way—if he hit the bench like the report says.”

“Well then, maybe someone killed him, someone who had a loan,” John said. “Someone who didn’t want to work it off. Someone who’d had a car or a motor confiscated from him—something that he did if people couldn’t pay.”

They were talking by phone, one in Neguac and the other in Newcastle, thirty-three miles away.

“Maybe, yes … Do you know what I am looking at?”

“The pictures of the scene?” John said.

“Yes. So he comes in and finds someone stealing something—or whatever—and pushes this fellow, so that the fellow he pushes hits the end of the bench …”

“And then this fellow turns and hits him—”

“In fact, if you wanted to be smart about it—looking at the picture of Lonnie now, I could say two blows did land on his head. And I don’t think anyone picked up a bench to hit him.”

“No—so what was lying on the bench?”

It would take an inestimable time to narrow it down.

Two more years passed. Wally and Annette organized staff parties, and even went on a company retreat to the spa resort at Bald Mountain. Wally tried to fish. Wally tried to paddle a canoe. Wally tried to horseshoe-toss. Wally was gruff with one of the waiters because his shoes got wet. Wally wanted things just so.

And if you saw Wally at work, you saw Annette. He drove her home almost every second day, Wally did.

Years ago, after he was in Ian’s store that day, Wally had shifted loyalties slightly, from the man who was in the main office to Mr. Ticks himself. For many a week and month he was seen wherever Ticks was; and then, realizing Ticks was beginning to be disliked, he shifted again and was suddenly seen at Mr. Fension’s table when they were at the golf or curling club. In fact, sometimes he would not even speak to Ticks anymore. Ticks no longer got along with the upper management at the mill. Wally did not know why, but the trouble Ticks found himself in was advantageous for Wally, who never missed an opportunity when someone was down.

Wally was a company man because it was most advantageous to be one.

Wally handed out his cards, and left them in places to impress others, places like the office of J. P. Hogg.

Why was Ticks no longer a force at Helinkiscor?

Mr. Ticks was from Maine. He was a woodsman, like many here. And he was a good woodsman—and he walked the cut in his heavy boots, and with a knapsack to have lunch—and soon he realized what Helinkiscor was planning for the wood—and within eleven months he was disturbed by what was happening. And he called a meeting first with his own bosses and then with the new MLA—the one who had defeated Ian Preston—the young man who looked terribly concerned and forward-thinking, and who was initially fired up to do something but who, suddenly, did not get back to Mr. Ticks at all. Because if he did, he would have to admit—and his government would have to admit as well—that Ian Preston was exactly right.

And on occasion Wally himself was summoned to a meeting, and the only thing Annette could tell DD was, “He is at a meeting, so something important is going on.”

“Does he run the mill?” DD would ask dreamily.

“He will,” Annette would answer, “he will.” And she added, “I’ve heard the rumours, DD—about Wally—that he has someone in Bicklesfield. Let me tell you—that is not true!”

“Oh, I know,” DD would say, looking at her and smiling. “But won’t you have to become Baptist for him?”

Each day the huge mill rumbled, the smoke belched out into the huge sky, the great river boiled darkly. Yet each day the price of paper and wood product plummeted, while the price of electricity, which the mill was so concerned about, went up—because the price of oil went up, and therefore the price of energy.

Then layoffs came, because there was no sense keeping men at work when no profit was made. This is what was said in the offices where Wally worked. This is why Wally was asked to call men into the office and give them the pink slip.

But if one looked closely, one would see: The layoffs were necessitated by a lie—and the lie was predicated on a truth, and the truth was this: the mill would have been in difficulty if it was selling its product only to the US market, where an ongoing dispute was entering its fourth year,
but in reality this mill was sending 80 per cent of its finished product to Japan. Yet the province simply assumed it was a depressed market because the mill kept telling our government their product was coming under unfair regulation and tariffs in the United States.

By this time, a quarter of the mill workers had been told they were going to be laid off, and the government was in meetings to try to bail Helinkiscor out a third time. What was more subtle was that both Helinkiscor and the government were using these talks to assuage the public. All of this is what troubled Mr. Ticks—for Ticks knew, after one year, that Helinkiscor had a timetable to close the mill.

And this was for one reason: the deal to bring Helinkiscor here had guaranteed the company a free hand to cut wood and to own whatever they cut, whether the mill stayed or not. Now, the people who had negotiated this deal with Helinkiscor had no idea that the mill would have thousands of tonnes of wood on the ground that the company did not intend to ever process here. They simply assumed this was impossible.

Yet this was why the Swill Road property had been bought, and it was why there was now a road into Quebec. From the first, Helinkiscor was thinking two or three steps ahead, and knowing two years before the government did that such talks would begin, such talks would fail, and that once the company culled the thousands of yards of timber, they would leave the province for good. They would leave as soon as they got the amount of wood on the ground that served their stockholders best. They would process this wood not at this little mill in New Brunswick but at their larger mill in Quebec, with its more acceptable access to markets through the Chaleur Bay and St. Lawrence Seaway. And how would Helinkiscor pay for the transfer of wood? It would get our province to help subsidize it and to build the road into Quebec itself.

Then, after a few more years, they would leave that mill in Quebec as well for one in Russia. Helinkiscor was using the real difficulty in the softwood dispute with the US as a bogus infliction upon itself, and getting guarantees of more money from a province already broke and desperate to keep its own people in jobs.

Helinkiscor leaving is what Ticks was trying to stop. This is why upper management was silent and antagonistic toward him. Therefore he was alone, and therefore Wally Bickle, without the wherewithal to know why Raymond Ticks was now on the outside, took advantage of his being alone and no longer sat with him.

Wally saw this—as he told his mom in his twice-weekly phone calls to Bicklesfield—only as a potential bonus for himself. “If Ticks goes, I’ll get a raise,” Wally told her. Wally, as people knew, loved his mom.

So a third time Helinkiscor was bailed out, and a third time people came away from the meeting ecstatic that this company was going to stay. And a third time people like Mr. Ticks and Mr. Fension, the mill’s senior management, were given dinners and talked about as businessmen of the year. Ticks sat in his old wrinkled suit, wearing a pair of winter boots and eating his salad without a word as the speeches railed on. Only once did he look up, blinking his strained eyes. That was when the premier, looking like a little boy, saluted them and gloated that Helinkiscor’s commitment to the river was unequivocal. And got a prolonged standing ovation for his remark.

When Wally went home to see his mom, he would often talk to his friends there—who believed what he said to be true, for they had no reason not to. He told them he took care of a child of a violent man, and protected him, and helped the child’s mother. He spoke of it so often that he believed it all.

One day at the old Copps service station in Bicklesfield, Wally was saying how much he did for Liam, and a man was there waiting for a ride north, to work the power lines. It was Sydney Henderson. He listened to this young man quietly and was about to leave, when Wally Bickle said, “So, where did I go wrong, Sydney—trying to help out a youngster? Isn’t it what you are all about?” And this got some of the wags laughing.