Crimes Against My Brother (57 page)

Now he opened the locked personnel office where half the chairs had been stacked. He saw under Annette’s old desk the little monkey Liam had bought for her. It was lying on its side, as if ready to bang its cymbals in defiance. And there was a note on a yellow sticky from one secretary to another, written more than six years before: “Meet you in five minutes.”

Liam was alone again.

Once, Pint McGraw saw him and tried to catch up to him. He said, “Liam, wait! I have to tell you something very important—they are going to take me …”

But Liam kept walking. In the far corner of a downtown building in the middle of the afternoon, he hid, and watched Pint as he looked for him, up and down the deserted street, trying to catch his breath.

“I am sorry, Pint,” he whispered. “I am sorry.”

Pint never had his own room. He never had a birthday party—the closest he ever came to a celebration was when Liam took him to his fort. He had a few Pokémon cards that Liam had given him long ago and a small case to put his glasses in. But sometimes he was so exhausted he would fall asleep with his glasses on. When they took him to the hospital, to the children’s ward, to the room with one window, it was already late in July. He had no visitors. They promised him his own harmonica. He asked them if Liam could visit.

“Of course,” they said.

He didn’t want to be there. Scared of being alone, he told them that he was feeling much better, so maybe he could go home.

After a while—and a short while too—his hair fell out. He never saw Liam again.

Liam lived alone. And his house was big, so he could hide there. He never spoke to people, so he didn’t know about Pint at the hospital, who was asking him to visit.

He began to go back and forth to the beach at the enclosure. He began to notice that outside the huge mill, men had gathered in protest. Leading them was Rueben Sores. Rueben offered him smokes and told him stories—once placed a ten-dollar bill in his hand.

Liam would remember that his mother had driven these roads for four years, working, believing she would have a good life. She in a way was a star—as close to a celebrity as we had here—and that is why they needed her to destroy herself.

Once, he snuck under the gate by the lower entrance and placed the necklace Wally had given her on Wally’s car’s inside mirror. Then he turned and walked away.

I don’t think he liked Mom at all, he thought.

He would go visit his mother’s grave and sit beside it in the day.

He didn’t think of things she had said to him about his teeth and how they were crooked. He knew that she was in many ways like a spoiled child. Even when she saw disaster all about her, she couldn’t stop pretending to be loved. He sat at the fresh grave, not able to bring himself to leave. His mouth would open in agony, and he would shiver the same way he had when they took the boys away and said he couldn’t build them forts.

No one bothered with him anymore if he walked by his old school or toward the playground in the long dreary afternoons, or when he went out looking for beer bottles to drag up to the bottle exchange so he could go to a movie. So he could see Spider-Man like other kids. Or go swimming for fifty cents at the Kinsmen Pool, and sit in isolation near the rusted mesh fence.

He could tell the town had come to its end.

Sometimes he walked by his mother’s grave and did not go and visit it anymore. And once or twice someone asked him, “What are you going to do, Liam?”

And he said, “I am going to go away.”

Once Liam went away no one would bother him, no one would care. This is what he thought. He often thought of his mom, and tears would start. The treatment she had was, he believed, a crime against his brother. But she had been forgiven—if only she had known.

He never answered those who called out to him. He never spoke to classmates at the beach. He never listened to his messages on the telephone.

Then Harold and Ethel asked Liam to come and stay with them.

Some days it got cold, and you could see fall would come. Harold said he cared for poor little fellas and he wanted Liam to work for him—he had started getting contracts that Lonnie Sullivan once had to move garbage. They would go and clean out sewers, sewer lines and septic tanks. It was a good job, and was how he himself had started out thirty years before.

“How are things at the pawnshop?” Liam asked.

“I had to close it up—too many people selling and no one buying. Couldn’t afford the rent—the downtown, boy, is dead!”

“In some ways I expected that,” Liam said.

“We will go and bring the stuff back here,” Harold said. “You can help me.”

So they went and loaded what was left of the world. There were two table lamps, a wicker chair—the shotgun that Evan had once won on the horseshoe toss, that Ian had used, and was traded to the pawnshop by Hanna Stone’s son, along with two slugs, for the diamond of Annette Brideau.

They put it all in the back of Harold’s half-tonne truck.

Harold said that he had waited years to get that shotgun back. He told Liam how he had lost it and said, “You can have it.”

“I can have it?”

“Sure, it’s yours!”

Harold bought Liam a Coke on the way downriver, and tousled his head.

“How much did you love your mom?” Harold asked.

But Liam couldn’t answer. His eyes filled with tears.

“I’ll be the best father you ever had,” Harold said. There was a long pause as he shifted gears.

Harold and Liam went fishing, and out on the bay one day they spied an old drifter, half covered in sand, lying on the beach in Neguac.

“Do you want that?” Harold asked Liam and Ethel.

“What could we do with it?”

“What could we do with it? Well, we could put a new wheelhouse on it and redo the Cuddy—repair the keel, keep it for ourselves. I can drop an engine into it.”

They hauled it home by truck. It was called
Isa’s Morning Star
. Harold said, “We will change the name to
Ethel’s Hope
.”

At night they sat on the porch and drank beer.

Harold had contracts for fourteen houses. It could have, might have, should have been a very good life.

But was it fair, now that Harold had turned his life around—because
of Liam and Ethel—was it fair that he would have to pay? And pay with twenty years? In doing so, in paying this way, would this redemption and change that he was experiencing for the first time in his life continue, or would he fall into bitterness and hatred again? And those other two—Evan and Ian, now both in jail—was it fair in any way that they were paying for things unseen? For Molly’s and Sara’s pain?

This is what we spoke about in my class just a few years ago, before I retired to my house in Burnt Church. If Harold paid, what would that do to Ethel and Liam, who’d had no one in their lives until Harold? If Evan remained certain he had killed, what would that do to Sara?

A fair country—that is what they often said on CBC Radio.

Did my students, living in such a fair country, have any answer for such things?

Harold and Liam worked on the old drifter together in August and gave it the new name
Ethel’s Hope
. And Harold and Ethel took the boy to mass on Sunday, and they all played horseshoes, and Harold taught Liam firearm safety and showed him how to work the shotgun.

Then one morning Harold and Liam got up and went fishing together. It was a beautiful day and the sun was on the water by ten o’clock. Harold showed Liam how to cast behind the half-covered rock on Arron Brook, where the famous Lyle Henderson used to fish. He taught him how to follow his fly, and how to cast up against the current with a White Wulff dry fly or a big bug—and that day they came home with seven trout, all over two pounds and two over five pounds.

“I have never caught a fish before,” Liam said.

“Well, with me, Glen, you will catch many.”

“Who is Glen?” Liam asked, smiling.

“Oh well,” Harold said, hugging him gently. “Oh well, my boy, oh well!”

Yet there remained the matter of Lonnie Sullivan’s inventory.

What inventory? Even my students laughed. Who would think a hardscrabble shop at the end of the world could have something called
inventory? A shop that had sat through thirty-seven years of summer and winter, spring and fall where Lonnie Sullivan plotted his empire out of scrap metal and copper wire; his empire of leftover bits of the past, built using boys who had nothing, to work for next to nothing for him. A place such as this, a shed torn down a year after the funeral, to have anything called inventory?

And yet, of course, it did. And one piece of this inventory was something both John and Markus were certain existed, from magnifying the pictures of the crime scene on a wall at the back of the RCMP office in July of 1998. It was not there, but its outline was obscure yet visible, and so they published this photo in the local paper in August. It was a long shot, certainly silly and perhaps meaningless in the ragtag drift of years, this partial outline of a huge industrial wrench.

It appeared in the paper, with a small caption: “Outline of industrial wrench quite possibly used as weapon in the murder of Lonnie Fitzgerald Sullivan, March 5, 1992. Persons with any information contact the RCMP or Sergeant John Delano, cell: 506-476-4746.”

There were no callers, of course, but people spoke about it. “Look,” they said, “it’s perfectly visible—so clear!”

“No, it’s not,” others said, “what a joke.” And the local paper drifted here and there with this outline on the front page some few weeks.

For Harold, when everything else in his life was going well, it seemed like a trick played upon him by the heavens.

It was worse for Sara. She became the target of a personal scrutiny. Engaged for the second time—the first man deserted her, the second accused of murder that even he says he may have committed.

Both these men sitting side by side in jail.

Cruelty, hilarity, laughter, kick in the cunt—nothing but.

Once in a while, far up in the office on the sixth floor of the main building, a light would burn. Sometimes Wally would open the doors and go into
rooms where the laughter of years gone by still lingered, the sexual tensions between men and women in offices near the edge of the world. Sometimes he found things that spoke to him only in sadness for a past that was wasted. He was trying to do his job, and waited for obscure orders at obscure times. Sometimes the phone would ring, and a voice with a French accent would tell him that only two trucks had made it through the new Good Friday Road that afternoon, and what was he doing about it? And Wally, his hair receding, his moustache bushy and his eyes bewildered, would try to look up work orders and invoices and general directives, only to be hung up on. Sometimes he would look out of the window and see men milling about in front of the barred gates. He was alone and scared—Fension and the rest had left him and gone back to their own country. One night, someone threw a rock at his car.

All the great wood was being sent to Quebec—and Wally, without fully knowing he had done so, had seen to it. Now that he realized this, he too was to be laid off in two or three weeks. This came suddenly to him, in a thunderbolt—that is, he too had been left behind. Then about a week after the calls from the Quebec mill stopped, he began getting other phone calls.

“Leave the building for your own good.” Then the caller would hang up.

The corridors were empty, like spokes running into a hub—the plaster cracked and the calendars two years behind. Some afternoons when he was checking the rooms, his keys on his belt, the phone would ring somewhere—and keep ringing, and he would rush from one corridor to another, trying to find which phone it was.

“Get out now!”

Late one afternoon the sun disappeared beyond the clouds and rain started. He heard men at the gate yelling. Terrified, he thought he should find a place to hide.

He took his briefcase and his jacket, and walked along the long second corridor that led down the metal stairs, toward the small side door. He thought he’d be safe going out the back way.

It happened that this was the day Rueben and his brother had planned to enter that very door. So a crowd of men, led now by Rueben Sores, who had busted the gate down with his old truck, which had once belonged to Lonnie Sullivan, stood before him.