Crimes Against My Brother (59 page)

Wally gave testimony against the men who had destroyed the mill, and Rueben was sentenced to two years in jail, which meant eighteen
months with time served. Then our Wally went back to the collection agency in Bicklesfield to work and phoned people about arrears.

Missy worked for the same agency and called people on another phone down the hall.

She had a nice picture of Wally and a few hand puppets she liked to play with. But she did not have her own office window. Missy wore purple and had a wide face. In five years, she and Wally looked exactly alike: rotund and self-righteous and, like Verna, a party to gossip.

Missy and Wally weren’t planning on having children. They were too noble for children—you know, in this day and age. No, they wouldn’t think of adoption. It wasn’t really for them. They would sacrifice the need for children and be forward-thinking instead. Wally Bickle would never would have to suffer the torment, worry and love of bringing up a child. And that was nice for him.

However, they both snapped to it whenever Verna was around. She was terrible with Missy, some did say, and gave the girl a nervous breakdown in 2003, which was hushed up—you know, the time Missy heard all about Wally at the bible camp with that young seventeen-year-old girl named Ju Jube Malone, and tried to swallow pills and take her life.

“I’m not on no diet,” she would say later, you know, at the church suppers—until she got so large you could hardly recognize her anymore. Both, it was said, were interested in politics, and once had dinner with a Member of Parliment.

On September 11, 2001, Evan and Sara were married at the church in Clare’s Longing by the priest who had hired him to fix the steeple. It was a clear and beautiful day all down the eastern seaboard. Leonard Savoy was Evan’s best man.

Ethel and Ian were married in 2004, after Ian sold his little invention to Doan. It was used on industrial sites to test effluents all over the Maritimes until better inventions came along. It wasn’t the best
invention, but it wasn’t bad. He must have made a profit of about ninety-five thousand dollars on it. And with that, he and Evan bought and refitted Jameson’s sawmill, and used the wood stands far up beyond Little Hackett Brook, and began to sell the best lumber in the province. They also began to replant Bonny Joyce—and after a few years they put up a headstone for Harold Dew, with the inscription

OUR BROTHER, GONE HOME TO GLEN

Sara gave Ian and Ethel the house on Pleasant Street as a wedding present, along with the travelling trunk she had bought at auction. Ian and Ethel kept mementoes of Liam in it. It became sacred after a while. They put in it all the things they remembered he once had loved.

Every vacation, Ian, who I got to know fairly well after I retired and who was Evan’s partner in the mill, would get in his truck, and he and Ethel, who now worked in the office of Dr. Sara Robb, would spend three or four weeks trying to find his son. But as time passed, the chances became more and more remote that Liam would be found.

Someone said he’d seen him on a street in Toronto on a July day under a great building that offered little shade. But that lead went nowhere.

They came close a few years later, after a sighting in Windsor. Someone said he’d worked with Liam at a video store. Liam would tell the kids stories about how he built forts, and he’d talk about his friend Pint McGraw. In fact, he seemed comfortable only with children. But then, after a few months, he went far, far away. He had his passport and a work berth on a ship to Australia. “There is nothing for me here,” he’d said.

The person who had invited Liam to come to Australia was in fact a forgotten neighbour, Sydney Henderson’s son, Lyle. He had sent Liam four emails asking him to come down and work with him like a brother at the other end of the world.

Before Liam left, he told someone he had no family.

With the reverence certain young men have for the new age, this man spoke of Liam, how he could go to the highest levels on the most
difficult video games in the world and was a master at fixing computers. Everyone wanted to retain him because of how well he could solve cyber problems. He played the harmonica, had grown tall and strong, and had the most beautiful white teeth and smile.

He was a whiz at mathematical problems too, and had read
The Diary of Anne Frank
and talked about it always, and carried it in his duffel bag when he went west to board the
Southern Star
one grey evening in autumn.

“What did he say?” Ian asked, his face filled with tears and premature wrinkles, while Ethel stood beside him holding his hand.

And the man recounted what Liam had told them before he went into the dark.

“Men!” Liam had said. “Those lads, let me tell you, they drink nothing at all—but blood.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my agent, Anne McDermid; my editor, Lynn Henry; my dear friends Liz Lemon Mitchell, Jeff Carleton and Philip Lee; and my family: Peggy, John and Anton, and sisters Susan and Mary Jane.

I remember my parents and many others who are gone, such as Peter Kelly, whose lives touched me deeply; two noble unsung writers: Rick Trethewey and Wayne Curtis; those at McCord Hall, such as Bob Gibbs, the quiet genius; and Michael Pacey and Brian Bartlett, who knew me way back when.