Crimes Against My Brother (54 page)

But no—always she had been too afraid. And yet now she realized something more deeply than ever: Sara, lame and left all alone, had never been afraid of anything.

“I wish I was more like your friend Ethel was to you,” she said to Liam one night. “She was so good to you. I would give anything to go back and change things. Do you know—shhh—I tried to rob your dad’s store—shhhhh.” Here she sat up and looked at him with such terror he almost looked away. “It was the worst thing I did. And then I went with Wally—oh God, why did I? Liam, I got mixed up—with bad people. It started when I was so little—Ripp and all those people Lonnie introduced me to. Who can love me now?”

“I do!”

“Shhh—I do not deserve love.”

“Maybe none of us do—and that is why love is so … blessed.”

“I am still loved,” she whispered, looking around again in terror.

“Forever—” He smiled.

“By who?”

“By me. And by Dad.”

“But I beat you with a belt,” she said. “Shhh—I hit you with a belt!” She reached up and touched his face.

“Yes—and it hurt,” Liam said. Then he laughed. In his laugh was the sound of more pain than she’d ever imagined.

And then she said, reaching out to hold his hand, “I wish Ian and I were still together. Do you think we could be a family once more—do you think he would want me?”

And then she whispered, as if to some dark certainty in the corner of the room, “No—not anymore. It’s too late now, I think, for that!”

Then she smiled bravely and said, “Oh well.”

The morphine pill would soon put her to sleep. But in her daze, complete with a pleasant irrepressible numbness and gentle fatigue that would increase moment by moment, she would realize how little she had shown her son love, and how much she should have. Staring at the door of his bedroom, she would become frozen in a kind of melancholy she could not control. Once or twice she would cry, thinking of him as a little boy standing in the backyard all alone.

Diane had been so important to her. They had held hands and promised never would they divulge each other’s secrets. Never! Diane had been more than a sister to her. So what had happened? Time and disillusion, and Diane’s sudden realization that Annette wasn’t part of the group, and to be a part of the group DD would have to forgo the friendship.

She often tried to find Diane, to ask her what was wrong. To ask her what she had done.

“Remember,” she said, suddenly trying to sit up, “when I took you for ice cream and pie at Steadman’s?”

“Yes, Mom.” He smiled. “Yes, I do and—”

“Boy,” Annette said, “did I ever look fuckin’ good that day!”

Harold had everything he wanted—almost. He had made a little fortune—little to be sure, but his cigars and pawnshop and gold rings
and pompous stare and affected concern were the same as Lonnie’s had been, and Lonnie had ruled a backwater for thirty-three years. The one thing Harold did not have was Liam. Not officially. And more than anything else, this is what he longed for.

He did not tell Liam anything about this, but he made two phone calls to Annette.

Then he went to see her. He went on a rainy afternoon, and held the same envelope Ian had taken to Lonnie years before, with the exact same money in it—the very same bills.

She let him in the back way, thinking he was bringing her diamond back—that he wouldn’t be so cruel as to keep it. They sat in the kitchen at the granite counter—the last new thing she had bought—glinting under the stove light. She seemed at times to be hardly awake, drifting in and out of time and space, and looking at him startled when he spoke. She sat in a kitchen chair with her arms at her sides, her legs straight out and her body limp.

And once he snapped his fingers in front of her. “I want to offer you something,” he said. He whispered it kindly, and he took the envelope out and pushed it across to her with a clandestine gesture.

“I want Liam to take my name—Dew—and I will offer this for it.”

She looked at him, now like a porcelain doll upon whose surface years have left bruises and darkness, and she tried to speak but couldn’t. Her mouth opened and closed and her lips trembled. She looked to the right and left as if to find a friend. And as she turned her head to the left, she smiled at nothing.

“Ian,” she whispered, “shhh—I loved him. You did not know—that Lonnie made a mistake—shhhh. He thought I wouldn’t lov-love Ian—but I did. He made a mistake.”

Harold snapped his fingers in front of her face again, and lifted her chin.

“No, he didn’t make no mistake. Listen! What would it matter to you,” he said. “You want to pay Ian back for all the bad things he did. We will do this—take this money, have a good time. I will adopt the boy and give him my name!”

Here he took out seven more pills and placed them in her hand—enough to kill her if she took them all at once. “You can have these pills if you say yes.”

She began to shiver and look behind her.

“No,” she whispered, “no, I won’t. Well, you know—remember—Liam—you see it’s—a bicycle—once as a young girl I tried to ride one—I was just a little girl.”

Tears flooded her eyes, and her porcelain face and dyed blond hair seemed to quiver slightly at the insult.

“Who does a bitch like you love?” he shouted, grabbing her face for a second and glaring at her. “I loved you all my life—but then, who does a cunt like you love!”

“Everyone.” She trembled, smoothed her hair, and tried, in the end, to sound dignified, like those people like Patsy Mittens she once wanted to be might have sounded. But yes, at this moment she loved them too.

“Everyone—I love everyone. And I am …”

He snapped his fingers once again in front of her face to wake her. “What—what are you? What are you?”

“Don’t you understand?” she whispered. “Shhhh—please, please forgive me—I am sorry.”

Love in fact was the only secret irony could not understand. The one condition of irony those I knew who mocked and used irony never really understood. And Harold took the money and went away, confused, and breaking down on the street, sorry he had called her those names. And wanted to ask forgiveness too.

Helinkiscor’s idea after they fired Mr. Ticks was this: you could do a rip-out job—hire Doan or some other company to come in and take the paper machines out. But then everyone would find out what your intention was to begin with. It would also make the provincial government look corruptly inept. It would also show that Ian Preston was actually right
and justified in saying what he had said. Why? Because weak, soft men in provincial power had given their word. And they had—and this went to the highest provincial office—poured money into Helinkiscor and worked very hard—and this too went to the highest government seats—to destroy Ian Preston’s reputation. They had leaked one-sided and bogus information about his dealings to the press and had—this also came from the cabinet—made a point out of offering his wife, Annette, a job to show him up. The resulting disaster in her life, as well as his, however much appreciated, had not been foreseen.

This government had ignored all the warnings about the mill from both Ian Preston and Mr. Ticks, and in fact had helped Helinkiscor draft a statement against their own government bailout when Ticks went to the press, in order to allow another, huger, bailout to happen. So if a rip-out was to come, which it was, how could Helinkiscor do it to make themselves and the government look good? In fact, this was the only thing the government wanted: an assurance that they wouldn’t be seen as complicit. Because if they were too complicit, Ian Preston might, after all this time, have a legitimate case for legal action—and especially so if certain documents were published.

Helinkiscor knew this, and so gave their word. That is, they knew very well Ian Preston and his wife had been manipulated and used by the very company that had called him mad; and the government was so hoping it would not come out that they had asked Helinkiscor if Mr. Ticks had any information about a file numbered 0991563.

In May of that year, Helinkiscor claimed that they would not do a rip-out job as long as the men did not strike. But from the moment they said this, they also indicated the world of softwood and pulp products was such that men could not be kept working.

And Helinkiscor was actually hoping the men themselves would destroy the machines. The mill would be useless and Helinkiscor would say it had been betrayed by the men, and leave. The government, of course, had paid for these machines in the first place. But, you see, the
government needed the men to destroy these machines as well because they did not want to be accused of putting their faith in a company that would take their millions and then destroy the very mill they had spent millions in good faith upgrading.

So both the government and Helinkiscor pressed Wally to lay off more and more men, and he did so with the certainty that he was a company man and had his duty to perform. And both the government and Helinkiscor knew the layoffs that Wally Bickle was hired to make would sooner or later force a strike. It would only take a few more weeks; the discontent was so great that Helinkiscor would refuse to negotiate, and lock the men out. Sooner or later these men would break down the gates and come in and destroy the paper machines themselves. Then Helinkiscor would say they were forced to go, even though they’d had a new two-year contract drawn up, ready to be signed, between them and the union. They had no intention, of course, of showing this contract to anyone until the machines the province had paid for were destroyed. Then they would say, “Look at the contract drawn up in good faith!” The mill would be useless, and Helinkiscor would have no competition when they moved into Quebec—and all the wood on the ground would still be theirs, ready to truck away.

And this is exactly how it happened.

In July, the men walked out because of layoffs in June. Annette was simply one of almost two hundred workers who were let go. It all happened within a week. And Wally simply put a large padlock on the steel mesh gate to keep them out. Because he was ordered to do so.

“You men are doing it to yourselves!” Wally warned, his round soft face fraught with duty.

But the strike needed a leader—so Mr. Fension inquired about Rueben Sores early one morning.

“He’s in jail for assault,” someone in the office who knew him said.

“Ah,” Fension said. And he went into his own office and closed the door—and the door remained closed for most of the afternoon. You see, the company did not need the president of the local, or the secretary
treasurer, to do this; they didn’t need the political hacks who ran the union and spoke of brotherhood and honour. They needed a man who could take over a huge crowd and decide for that crowd what must be done. They needed an actual leader—a tough charismatic man, who as Fension said, in his thick accent, “Don’t give a hell’s bells.”

When Rueben Sores got out of jail late that day, the streets were empty. Even the tracks leading out of town were bare. The church bells weren’t ringing and the schoolchildren weren’t on the playground. The great mill was shut down, so there was no smoke. There were no cars, and most of the stores were closed. Downtown he went to buy a paper, but the papers were sold out. He went to a tavern and sat in the same chair where he had sat the night he stole Corky’s hat. Today he was the only one there.