Crimes Against My Brother (58 page)

Wally smiled at them timidly, took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth. He stood there, with his heavy gut, in a cheap ochre suit. All the pain he had been ordered to cause over the last three years was now on the faces before him.

“It’s not my fault,” he said. But Rueben Sores simply picked him up, and tossed him aside.

They ran over him, breaking his jaw as they came inside.

They jammed the paper machines with plywood and straw until they smouldered. They laughed and roared and used the forklifts to damage the walls, used the fire extinguishers with glee. They shit on the floor and wiped their arses on the executive towels.

Then they all of a sudden realized what they had done and ran—ran away.

Rueben had a gold necklace he had stolen from Wally’s car. He carried it in his pocket, then gave it as a present to his girl, Diane. She wore it to Cut and Curl.

Later he was arrested for sabotage, and the workers turned on him. He was not true union, they said, not a brother. So it was Rueben who did the eighteen months’ jail time for that.

“Animals!” Fension said to his demure beautiful wife. “Canadians are animals. My father knew that much fighting the fuckers in the war.”

Liam sat in the home he had come to, after running errands and helping out at the woodlot—helping Harold as they trucked away the remains of the pawnshop and put them in the shed that lay sunken and deformed at the back of the house.

Harold was waiting for the bay to freeze so he could walk straight out toward the icebreaker’s path and toss the wrench away, under the ice in the middle of the bay—never to be found, for this was to be the last year the icebreaker came into our bay.

But the days passed. And November came and went, and the month of Advent, when Ethel was busying for Christmas and waiting for the third Sunday so she could light the pink candle—to her, the most joyful and solemn candle. The bay had not yet frozen enough for Harold to walk on the ice, and Ethel and Liam had gone to the woodlot and got a lovely fir tree, and put it up near the mantel with the manger.

It had started to snow the day they got the tree, and they had hauled the boat up on logs, near the back shed, and made a cover of tarp and wood for it.

Sara too lit the third Advent candle on Sunday, December 16. Then she went to the jail and asked Evan what she should do. “Is it your blood?” she asked.

“To tell the truth, I don’t know.”

On December 17, Sara gave the vial to the RCMP, and they sent it to Moncton for testing. It would take two to three weeks before an answer came back. Still, it might never be used, John Delano told her, for as much as he personally believed her story about collecting the blood, it hadn’t been secured at the time of the murder.

On December 17, Liam woke to an argument in the house. He lay listening to it, thinking it might be about the Christmas tree. Wind rattled his window and a pale crust of snow lay on the tin porch roof. He sat up finally and said, “What is it?”

But no one answered him, so after a time he came downstairs in his underwear, shivering.

Ethel was sitting in her old knitting chair. She had been knitting Liam and Harold socks for winter, and the night before had both of
them try them on so she could finish the toes, and her pile of yarn was piled around her feet.

The phone was upset in the middle of the room and there was a bruise on her eye. There was a patch of mean snow outside. One window was frosted and an icicle hung against the window.

The night before, Harold had taken the wrench down to the shore and started out on the thin ice, but the ice had cracked.

Tomorrow I will get rid of it for sure, he thought.

He put the wrench back under the same small board in the shed—the old board with the nail that had once, years gone by, held the two marten pelts he had taken from Evan’s traps.

Ethel had got up the next morning when Harold had yelled at her to go across to the old shed and get his jigsaw. He wanted to finish the cover for the boat, and he was in the midst of putting on the name:
Ethel’s Hope
.

So she went. She hated this dark spooky shed. She stood by the door for five minutes, and Harold yelled, “Come on now, Ethel—I has to get this here done. Then I’ll take you and Liam to the Pudding Lounge for dinner—how about that!”

She took a deep breath, opened the shed, picked up the saw and started to leave, when her face brushed the old muskrat pelt that had been brought there by Evan years ago, and hung from a beam over the stall. In the darkness it frightened her. She tumbled backward and fell on a board, and a nail punctured her leg. She dug at the board to get the nail away and picked up a handful of dirt as she did.

She wouldn’t have looked at the wrench if she hadn’t touched it, buried as it was under the plywood board she’d fallen on. Late last night, coming back from the shore, Harold hadn’t buried it properly at all.

Ethel sat down on a little wobbly sawhorse and looked at it as if inspecting a new piece of equipment.

There was the smell of straw. She could smell snow too, and remembered how she had once said she hated wrenches. She kept staring at the wrench and then her eyes widened, and she began praying to herself in a whisper, as if she was trying to answer all the questions she was asking
herself. She hid the wrench in the same place, put the dirt over it again and put the plywood back. But she could not stop looking at where she hid it. So she dug it up again.

She walked toward the house, stopping every few feet to try to think why this was important. When she got to the boat, Harold was waiting for her. She hadn’t even put on a coat and only wore her blue jeans, a sweater and short winter boots.

“Come here and see your name on this here boat, love,” Harold said.

But she simply turned and started walking up toward the road that led away from Clare’s Longing, with the wrench in one hand and the jigsaw in the other.

“What are you doing—bag o’ bones!” Harold said.

“I’ll be back in a while,” she said. “I think I will go to church.”

“Church—are you nuts? You’ll freeze yer arse off!”

Then suddenly he could make out what she carried. “Hey!” he shouted.

He ran across the snowy yard and grabbed her.

Now, as Liam appeared, she was sitting in the room and was asking Harold about the wrench.

“Where did you get it?”

“I got it a long time ago—I won it at bingo.”

“No, this big wrench has caused so many problems,” Ethel said, tears in her eyes.

“Give me the wrench and I will toss it in the sea, and it won’t be seen no more,” Harold said.

“No. It was Lonnie Sullivan’s—Corky sold it to him, and you know how it got here. So—well, so it was Lonnie’s.”

“It weren’t ever, but so what if it were?”

“I don’t know, but it might get Evan off—it just might be a valuable piece of evidence, about how Lonnie died. And I think you hit your head that same night—because of the mark on your head—and this is what I think about this valuable piece of evidence.”

“A valuable piece of evidence—you brain-dead idiot!”

They argued for five or ten more minutes. Liam said nothing; he just listened to it all.

Harold then told her the truth. But, he said, he had changed completely—his life was new. He would not do anything to put the new life in peril. To turn him in now, when he had a new life, was not fair.

“I know, love, I know” was all she said, and she sounded far wiser than he or Ian or Evan. “But I will be here for you, and they will say it was self-defence!”

“But if they don’t?” he said, his voice almost hysterical. “It’s no longer fair for me to go to jail.”

“But you might only do three years,” Liam said, for some reason, and he touched Harold’s shoulder and smiled.

“No—they will turn on me and I’ll do twenty-five!” Harold roared.

Harold tried to take the wrench away from her. Liam told him to leave her alone. Ethel broke free and Harold began to chase her, first around the living room then across the hall, then into the kitchen and then outside. The day was snowy but still. There wasn’t a sound, not even that of a bird, now that the wind had stopped.

Ethel would not give the wrench back. She made marks in the snow as she tried to crawl to the culvert to hide.

“No, Harold—I have to show them! It might be important for Evan.”

Every time he picked the wrench up, her whole body came with it, and he would toss her down on her back.

“Don’t!” Liam yelled. “You are going to kill her!”

Liam ran into the house and found the shotgun in the spare bedroom near an old box mattress. The shells were on the dresser, covered in dust. He snapped the gun together and came into the yard. Harold, in a blind rage, had the wrench in his hand.

When he lifted the wrench, Liam yelled for Harold to stop. Then he simply closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

The blast blew Harold forward into the ditch and peeled away the back of his head. He lived close to four more minutes.

John and Markus were called a little later. When they drove up to the house, Harold was lying in the ditch, face down, with his feet sticking up over the culvert. Ethel was sitting on the culvert, holding the wrench. Many other people were standing around.

Liam sat alone in the house.

When John Delano called Liam into the RCMP office, he offered him a pop and chips. He asked him how he was feeling. He asked him if he’d heard from his dad.

“What do you plan to do?” he asked.

“I am going away,” Liam said.

“Did your mother suffer a lot?”

“Yes.”

“I am sorry that your mother suffered. I don’t want you to suffer anymore. Is that why you went to get the pills for your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we don’t want you doing things like that anymore.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Was Harold good to you?”

“Yes—he was very kind.”

John didn’t tell him about Pint McGraw. Liam was to find out the next day; Pint left him his harmonica.

He visited his mom’s grave no more. On the day he heard his dad was getting out of jail, he boarded the train. He did not wait to say goodbye.

In the last letter he ever wrote to us, he left instructions about how he’d done his magic trick and risen above the ground.