Crimes Against My Brother (44 page)

“My mom says it wasn’t Mr. Preston who was a father to him, ever.”

“Be kind—be kind,” Sherry Mittens said.

At home Liam waited for his mother, who did not come home.

Finally, he lay on the leather couch in the back room, tears coming down his cheeks because of the pain in his mouth. It had been his father’s favourite couch. But all of that was over now.

The last four years had cost Ian everything. The store was gone. His wife had spent even more than he had trying to keep the house and the furniture, but in the end the house would have to be sold. That is what her lawyer told her. After a while—after all things were settled—Hogg sent his last bill, for $13,782.75.

Many days fixing his radios, Ian would think over his life. Ten dollars a week he tried to put aside for Liam, but sometimes he could not manage to do it. He tried as best he could to keep in contact with his son as well, but at times it was difficult—and he knew he was losing him without wanting to. Long after Liam had stopped hoping he would, Ian would walk to the school to meet him—but as so often happens, it was too late, and Liam seemed more and more solitary and alone. And Ian would return to his room and his own solitude.

At times he would reflect on Sydney Henderson, the boy he and his friends were supposed to be different from—the man who was so poor he could never put money aside for his children either. In so many ways, Ian thought now, he was the same.

Ian never drank. Syd Henderson did not drink. Ian was not violent. Syd was not either. Ian loved his child, although it was said he didn’t—just like Sydney, and too, just like Evan. In fact, Wally Bickle constantly told people that he loved Ian’s child more than Ian did himself.

Both Evan and he were, in fact, now accused of some of the same things Sydney had been accused of long ago. In fact, so little seemed to be different in their lives that they must in some way have devoted themselves to the same causes. Yet, Ian knew, their causes were entirely different. It was the world that sought to destroy them all. Sydney’s wife, Elly, had been accused of theft, and this was completely false. Sydney told Ian that someday someone would accuse his own wife of the same crime, and he had.

The night before Liam went to visit his dad in the motel room, Ian had gone for a walk, his mind plagued with thoughts of Sydney
Henderson and with the idea of getting his luck back by finding out in his heart what had caused him to lose it. To lose everything.

It was almost Easter, and he thought of the blood of the saints for the first time in a long time. That is, he thought about what his forefathers had believed. Yes, and they died for their belief, many of them—and he had died for his belief as well; or one could say with a good deal of truth that he was prepared to die for it. And his belief was looked upon as insane—so he was now, in many ways, more than a little like Sydney Henderson, that man they had grown up with and mocked. Ian in fact had, like Job, called out to God many times to stop his pain. He just did not admit that he had.

He looked up through the leafless trees toward the moon and found himself on a side street, walking down toward the town square.

The trees themselves seemed pitiless, and his shadow showed how he walked stiffly because he was unable to bend his back. Annette’s friends had accused him of spending money on quacks to find a cure, but he had not seen anyone about his back in years. He no longer cared. That is, though he fought the pain, he no longer cared to be cured.

He thought of it this way: Corky should have been in the store helping him move the fridge—why wasn’t he? And was that the start of his business’s decline? Once the decline had started, so his marriage had started failing too—and because Annette was so impressed by all those men at Helinkiscor, he had decided to fight the mill. Now he could see clearly how every moment had led only to his destruction. Then, as he got to the bottom of the street, he thought of the trunk—the thing he had wanted to buy. Why wasn’t it there at Joyce Fitzroy’s—that in itself would have changed every other event in his life.

And as he walked by the law office of Hogg and Hogg, he glanced in—just a glance, nothing more, and at nothing in particular.

And there it was—the travelling trunk that had belonged to his family that his mother wanted, that he had tried to buy seventeen years before as a wedding present for Evan and Molly.

He stopped and looked closely. No, there was no mistaking it at all.

The night air had that glaze of spring, when there is still ice in the ditches but the snow is gone.

He looked around for five minutes or more, trying to find a suitable weapon. Finally he loosened a frozen rock from the soil and threw it through the plate glass. Then, with another rock, he broke the rest away. He entered the office and began to overturn everything, even as the alarm was sounding. He picked up a fire extinguisher and crouched down behind the trunk. When the police came in—one of them was Constable Fulton, who had always been very kind to him—he stood and sprayed them. Fulton told me that Ian held off the police with a fire extinguisher for five minutes, and then with his boots for as long as he could, until they threw him down.

“We threw him down very hard, and I was worried we had hurt him,” Fulton told me in that interview.

Reports circulated that he had died, but that was not the case at all. He only wished he had.

Sara went down in the afternoon to see how her sister, Ethel, was, because it was close to Easter and the earth was warming, and they sat together on the porch in the glare of sun and the fading scent of winter. And Sara spoke with the soft certainty that had directed her life now for the past fifteen years, and her breath made a faint outline and was gone, and she whispered, “Something happened, Ethel, long ago, and now everything is wrong—I do not understand it at all, but something, some small trick of fate, caused all of this to be, don’t you think? Ian was so gentle, and still is, but he has been betrayed—and lashes out at shadows.”

Ethel nodded and said simply, “People get married to the wrong people—and things get mixed up when they do. I was supposed to marry Corky, and you were supposed to marry Ian, and Annette should
have married Harold, then Molly would still be alive. But here we are, mixed all up. Still, things always turn out, in some way.”

“Do you hate Annette?” Sara asked her.

“No, no, no, I love Annette. At times, in the house when I worked there, I know she loved me too.”

Sara smiled and nodded.

Ethel took the fur hat Harold had given her and started to fluff it with her fingers. Her little house shook as the great trucks filled with Bonny Joyce timber went by, still smelling of dying sap. Everything along this road was heaved and pulled away, as desolate as a marsh in late fall. The smell of machinery entered the rooms, diesel on the air mingling with the shouts of men, harsh yet loving at the exact same time.

“Can you stand those trucks every day—and all that noise?”

“Maybe I am thinking someday they too will be gone!”

Sara kissed her, put forty dollars on the windowsill and left.

Ethel had the mind of a little girl, as Sara said. Ethel would try not to—that is, she would try to be bright. She would sit at the kitchen table and try to remember things, like how to make pancakes.

She would forget she had a mom who loved her and a dad who used to tickle her and say, “My little angel who will go straight to heaven—not a moment in purgatory—right up to the clouds—and all nice clouds too, because you are the kindest child in the world!”

Even when she failed grade two, and then grade three, and had to go into something called “remedial” in grade four, and walked home alone all those winter days ago. Once last autumn she had tried to carry a huge pumpkin into the house, thinking she could make Harold a pumpkin pie. It had rolled on top of her at the bottom of the steps, and it had taken her almost twenty minutes before she could get it off.

Sometimes Harold didn’t even have to speak and she would say, “I’m sorry,” because she did not know what it was she had done wrong.

She sat in the room with her long hair in pigtails, her eyes staring into the dark and her tights wrinkled at the knees, and her legs so thin they looked like sticks. And there wasn’t a person you could mention
that she didn’t love. And if you thought that wasn’t important, she would say, “Just go and ask God.”

Today when Sara left, she picked up the rosary blessed and given to her by Father MacIlvoy, and put it in her big dress pocket. She thought long and hard. So hard she squeezed her eyes shut. Yes, it was up to her. She was the woman who had managed to get Liam his first communion. Annette had in the end relented on that. Now she decided he needed to be confirmed. If he was not, he might get in trouble. For who knew what might happen if a person was not confirmed?

She told Harold this when he came home from the pawnshop. He said, “Sure, confirm whoever you want.”

Harold had asked Ethel’s mother to allow him to go to the old house and take some things from it for his pawnshop. The first time he went he took a little windup monkey that had once belonged to Sara, which her mother had bought her long ago for being brave that day they’d almost drowned.

He went there once more, to get the wicker chairs he believed he could sell for seventy dollars. He looked into the dark back closet at the end of the attic to see if he could find anything else. He suddenly noticed the bottle of rum Corky had bought when he was worried about the wrench. Harold picked up the bottle and put it in his jacket pocket, and carried it with him into the future. Then he went back to the pawnshop and brought the newspaper with him.

LOCAL BUSINESSMAN INVOLVED IN LATE-NIGHT BREAK AND ENTER
, it said.

Sherry Mittens told her friend Liam about his father being in jail. That is, Sherry was Liam’s great friend, always telling him things to try, in her little heart, to inform him, and say it was for the best that he heard
all these terrible things from her. She was filled with sarcastic irony, always willing to undercut his dreams. She would wake in the morning and prepare herself in front of the mirror, thinking of what she would say and how she would say it, and her little mouth would turn up in a slight smile. Then she would time walking to school so that Liam, pants rumpled and hair uncombed, came out of his front door, and she would catch up to him. Her whole body would smell of nice pink soap, and a scent of cleanliness would pervade his senses. He would wait for her, and she would entertain herself by speaking of non-specific things—how her cat, Muffy, was—how she herself would never have children, and how she would like to live in a city like Toronto. How her father was from Toronto—did you know? How the university here was not for her father, who was so much more devoted and brighter than others in his sociology department, don’t you know.