Crimes Against My Brother (9 page)

So now he said to Annette, with paternal caution, that she should look for someone closer to home. He asked her if she had seen Harold lately, if they were still dating. She told him they were, now and then. But she was not really in love with Harold. Not really.

Lonnie shrugged.

“Love! Love is nothing. He’s a good lad—and smart,” Lonnie told her. “And you are going on twenty now—perhaps he will be the best deal for you. Not that you ever need a man, or anyone. I am not saying that any woman needs a man—just saying.” And he shrugged.

Soon, in spite of all Annette’s plans and Lonnie’s promises about men in distant places who had seen her, rich young men he knew; in spite of Lonnie acting as her agent and speaking about what he intended to do for her; in spite of all her wild, unrealistic hopes that Lonnie had fed for five years, she was suddenly engaged to Harold, a man from Clare’s Longing. And she became engaged without even knowing she would be, or that she would accept when he asked.

“It can’t be,” she would say some days.

And yet it was. And she was exactly like twenty other young women she knew, and not one bit more satisfied.

“Things will be different with me—won’t they, Uncle Lonnie? I mean, there is still a chance?” she said one gloomy day, sitting on the porch couch, staring out at nothing at all.

“With you—oh, of course! A chance? A woman like you will always have the world by the balls.”

Would
you kill for her? Ian was haunted by his declaration, and told himself: Look at the girls in town and forget her forever.

Yes, kill for her, Ian thought—my God, what a thing to say. But then, just the memory of Annette running to Harold at the horse haul was enough to enrage him. How
could
she have done that to him? How could she have done that—to
him
?

So after she was engaged, this is what he resolved to do: He took her picture off his mirror and put it in a drawer, determined never to speak of her again. He ate alone at Susie’s steak house on the corner, and went to work in a blue-collar shirt and pair of workpants. He read serious magazines and had a subscription to the
The New Yorker
. Of course, there were many jokes about Bonny Joyce and the Clare’s Longing stretch that he had to listen to—about the skanks that lived there and how many children could be accredited to any of their husbands. And once others in the city knew where he was from, it got worse.

But people relied upon him, and his one ambition was to work hard and keep his mouth shut. In fact, people went to the store where he worked because of Ian—his expertise in dealing with electricity and plumbing and all things of that nature was natural and profound. Soon customers were asking to deal solely with him. He found himself indispensable. It was at this time he was offered another interview for a job at the mill. He declined in a stiff, formal fashion. He remembered and hated the personnel manager with his wavy hair and small red tie. His bosses at the store knew about this and raised his salary twice. So he knew that someday—somehow—he would save
enough to buy the huge appliance store he worked in. He began thinking that someday he would own his own house too.

The store owners were two elderly brothers, who had over the years borne a grudge against each other to the point where they did not speak. Many times Ian would have to act as a go-between, and he became familiar with their finances and knew about the younger brother’s desire to sell. This brother muttered to Ian many times during that long first winter, and then into the second, that if he could find a buyer, he would convince his brother to sell.

So Ian began to save toward this eventuality.

All through his adolescence and into manhood, Evan Young had his hopes set on buying the old Jameson sawmill, and he had often walked up to the siding to view it, to walk its grounds, to stumble over its buried artifacts used by men dead a generation ago. He had been inside it many times, always in secret—for he wanted no one else to get ideas about it. That is, as old and decrepit as it was, to him it was a treasure. But over the last few months something had come up. Lonnie Sullivan had been to the grounds twice.

For seven years, the estate that paid the taxes upon the mill had offered it for sale. No one had even looked at it. But now Lonnie thought he might buy it and sell it for scrap, and he was in the process of deciding if it was worth it. Evan kept silent when there was any mention of the mill, because he did not want to give his plan away. But Lonnie knew his plan, and just for torment decided one cold spring day to buy it out from under him. For there was always money to be made some way.

So Evan knew if he was to own the mill, he had to buy it now. But where would Evan get the money? He was in worse financial straits than he had been three years before, with no prospects to get out from under. That is, he owed at least nine hundred dollars to Lonnie for loans he was trying to work off. So there was only one possible way. There was only
one place to get the money: from Joyce Fitzroy, the person who had once offered him that money years before.

Evan knew that if Harold got Fitzroy’s money, Annette and he would have it gone in a year. He had watched them from a distance, and knew this was the truth of it. Whereas he was certain he could both borrow and return this money to Fitzroy, and have the mill turn out finished product, in eighteen months. Then, if Fitzroy wanted to will his money to Harold, he could still do that.

Yet Evan felt he needed someone to go with him if he was to broach the subject with Fitzroy. That is, as strong and as powerful a man as Evan was, he felt he had no ability to position himself as being different than society saw him to be. He was frightened to ask Fitzroy on his own. But he knew someone who seemed to have this trait he needed—that is, a clear vision about his own will. Evan needed someone sure of himself to come with him as support: a man who had thrown away booze at seventeen and said he would never again take a drink.

So two years after Ian had started to work for Craig Electric, Evan Young showed up at the store. He stood inside the door, a huge man in work clothes and heavy boots, and asked Ian if he would like to go hunting.

I suppose neither one knew the other was longing for money to go into business. Yet the one thing both men possessed that trumped everything else was honesty.

Three years ago, as he’d left the mill that did not hire him, Ian had said to the smiling personnel officer, “You will never cut on Bonny Joyce.” And soon after that, he had started a group called “Save the Joyce.” He wore a suit and tie to the conservation meetings, and spoke to retired coast guard captains, widows, two men who lived together at Grey’s Brook, and a former teacher of mathematics, Miss Finn, who was now seventy-nine years of age. These people not only admired Ian Preston but somehow believed he could do whatever he said he could. Evan, in a way, thought this as well.

So Evan met Ian that day with a particular request in mind. To have Ian come with him to Fitzroy and help him argue his case for the loan.
Evan had decided he could sooner or later put twelve men and three women to work at the mill. He would cut out what lumber he needed from the area below where Ian’s concern lay, and this, in fact, would help re-growth. He felt this is what Ian could explain to Joyce Fitzroy, who was against cutting on the Bonny Joyce as well.

Evan knew that a single sawmill had never been Ian’s or anyone else’s concern; the worry was over the huge pulp and paper mills mainly owed by foreigners, mills that would come in and clear-cut a place down to the ground A sawmill, on the other hand, was looked upon as being the most traditional and the most caring way to use a forest.

“I know I asked you late, but was thinking if you could make it, we’d go up to my camp and hunt awhile,” Evan said.

“I don’t have a rifle anymore.”

“I have a shotgun and you can use that. It was Harold’s—that little .410.”

“How did you get that from him?” Ian asked, because he remembered the shotgun and its beautiful stock and silver barrel. “He wouldn’t give it away?”

“He did not give it away—I won it. On one horseshoe toss—my old Chevy car for the shotgun.”

But Evan did not complete this story—that is, he did not tell Ian that Annette had prodded Harold all afternoon into doing this, because she wanted a car to ride in and Harold was a great horseshoe player. But he lost on that toss. Annette could never have imagined how much that shotgun meant to Harold Dew.

Ian agreed to go hunting on one condition: he had to be back by Friday morning for business in town. So the two men went to the camp deep in the black woods near the south branch of the Sevogle. The sun shone lonely through the cabin’s one window, and the wind rattled it half the afternoon. Ian took four birds that day at dusk and went back to the cabin, took the breasts from them, placed the guts and feathers in a bag, then cut up onions and green peppers, carrots and potatoes, and made a stew.

But it was long after dark when Evan Young arrived back.

Ian went to the front of the cabin with a lantern, and watched his friend carry his nine-point buck into the front of the yard. Evan must have been far away because Ian hadn’t even heard the shot.

The night was warm, and smoke drifted out over a space near the lake. They had the buck hoisted and were taking off the hide. Evan did this with a small buck knife, starting at the hind legs and cutting a strip away to the haunches, and then rolling the hide back from the fat. The two men talked in special and spectacular ways, in an idiom that was peculiar to the river. Evan spoke of having to defend his mother, of being alone from the time he was seven, of always wanting something better and not knowing how to attain it. He finished by saying he was about to ask Molly to marry him. He was hoping to be married in a month.

“It’s about time,” Ian said.

Evan paused, flustered, then looked at Ian with great seriousness. “Well, if I ask you for a favour—would you help me?”

“Of course.”

“I mean, I want you as best man, and you could put in a good word for me … Would you? It is the biggest favour I’d ever ask you, and I’ll help you in return, in any way I can.”

“Of course—when?”

“This Monday—come down!” Young said quickly. And then, determined not to give away his reasons, for he wanted nothing, not a word, to get back to Sullivan, he said little else. “Please come down,” is all he said. “I will wait for you. And then I will tell you what the favour is.”

Over the years that followed, Ian Preston always maintained that he thought the support Evan sought was for Molly’s hand in marriage, not for Fitzroy’s money. And the fact becomes more and more apparent as time passes that Evan did not tell Ian what this request was—not at all. I have wrestled with this riddle myself, in classes I taught when I came back to the university here—for I vainly used those boys as subjects—until I saw how little the clever people I taught respected the subjects I spoke about. Some young ladies in my class came to their conclusions by saying, “I wouldn’t have anything to do with any of them.”

Or: “I wouldn’t clutter my life up with people like Evan Young, or anyone else from there.” Yes, with a grandly schooled middle-class sniff of disapproval—the first of many tyrannies associated with liberty.

Still, my classes did reach this conclusion: that Ian never knew what Evan wanted from him. After all, Ian was to be best man, so it was not inconceivable that Evan would want him to approach Molly about his feelings. He didn’t know that Evan was asking for another favour. He thought that Evan, after all these years, and about to be married, had now come to ask for his friend’s good word.

So Ian decided he would wear his suit jacket, and his new fashionable pink shirt and his big yellow tie, and speak to Molly about Evan. Perhaps, he thought, he would bring a bottle of Mateus wine down to celebrate, even though he himself did not drink. So he bought a bottle of Mateus. And maybe he would bring some of that new cheese that he liked. So he bought some Gouda cheese as well. And maybe he would tell Evan and Molly how he was saving for the store, pinching every penny.

But nothing like this happened.

Evan Young never got those funds; and neither did the man who most coveted them, and thought of them as his, Harold Dew.

Ian Preston, who I maintain never knew about this money, did, however, acquire it all.