Crimes Against My Brother by David Adams Richards

Author:David Adams Richards [Richards, David Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67117-0
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2014-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

Six weeks after the accident on the staging, while Evan was still in hospital, Corky packed his belongings and came home, bringing the wrench with him.

He took the wrench one day and sold it for twenty dollars to Lonnie Sullivan.

And this is when Corky began to obsess about the radiator, and how his act of borrowing the old Chevrolet had caused the leak.

Some months after he came back home, a letter arrived saying that a lawyer had been hired to investigate the accident on the staging. They were asking everyone to write a statement. The lawyer was Jeremy Hogg. Corky tried to write a statement and couldn’t. Then he asked Ethel to help him write it, but Ethel did not know how to write letters any more than he did, and simply sat in the corner of her house worried and biting her fingernails.

“Well then,” she said, with a big sigh. “What we have to figure out is what happened to that wrench. I know what wrench, Corky—I saw it a dozen times. It was the one you sold to Mr. Sullivan.”

“No, it was not,” he whispered, and banging his fist on his knee, he protested wildly.

And then Ethel started to cry and wring her hands. “I hate wrenches—I will go to my grave hating wrenches.”

Twice during this time Corky went to Ian and spoke to him. He told Ian that he was going to go live in the woods, and snare rabbit and hunt—though Corky wasn’t much of a hunter at all. He said he was fed up with people and would live off the land. He saw how Ian walked, how he was in pain, and Corky trembled. If only he’d been at the store like he was supposed to have been, Ian would not have fallen.

He tried to impress on Ian that Ian’s sudden and impulsive decision about Sara had caused much unhappiness, and that he was coming to understand how the world was created by such numerous untold events, formed in the vast air about us on a daily basis. “Maybe even in another dimension!” he shouted, to make himself understood.

Ian told him he might need a psychiatrist and not to be ashamed if he did—Ian would help him pay for it.

“I do not need a psychiatrist,” Corky said. “I need only to forgive and in turn be forgiven. And if that was the case, none of us would ever need a psychiatrist—would we?”

Corky then went home and asked Ethel to marry him—to marry him right away.

She said she would marry him when, and only when, he stopped drinking. Of course, he said; he would stop immediately. Then he bought a bottle of rum. He was on his way to talk to Ian at the store but saw that Ian was there with his little boy. So he didn’t want to bother him. He took the bottle of rum and hid it in Ethel’s attic for some future day when he would tell Ian about the wrench and ask him to intercede with Evan on his behalf.

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