Free Crimes Against My Brother by David Adams Richards

spoken about in a peculiar way. That is, he was soon mocked behind his back by people who heard of him, and his antics became known at the mill where many worked. And this, I know, played a part in his life as well.
    Ian sent Harold and Evan letters and Christmas cards, but they have not survived, nor were they answered. He was lonely, and walked by himself along snowy streets at dusk, wondering what would become of him—not fitting in, not knowing anyone. His two uncles were both town drunks, and sometimes came by to ask for money—and he felt obligated for the first little while. Then in anger he chased both of them downstairs, furious, saying he would kill them if they tried to rob him again. This was the first indication of his violent temper and it brought the police, the two uncles standing sanctimonious behind the officer, as filled with civic duty as mayors, ready as always to tattle.
    Ian spent that Christmas by himself, with a small Cornish hen he had scraped together enough money to buy. The mill stank in his lungs, but in desperation he applied to work there so that he might impressAnnette with a big mill job, and a man from middle management—the kind most of us know if we live in small towns, a man who curls and belongs to the Kinsmen, who has ordinary ideas, a man with a fine and open face, happy-go-lucky, with nice wavy hair, and who couldn’t seem more pleasant—dismissed Ian outright because no family member of his had ever worked there. The mill glowered in the night air like a giant red sore over the river, and Ian was left to walk the road back to his room and open his door to a small couch and a night table.
    He walked back in the February slush for four miles, his feet soaked and his suit pants covered in salt. He counted his money, quarter by nickel on the metal table, a plastic curtain over the window. He looked at the calendar and wondered where he would be in seven or eight years. He would see that man from the mill again, he thought to himself—yes, someday this man would come to him. Someday he would stand in a place Ian owned. And when that man did come to him, when he did, the tables would be turned. This is what he hoped for and prayed for—though he said to himself that he did not believe in prayer. But he thought about how the town, this town, orchestrated itself into a hierarchy of small-minded businessmen and conceited mill officials, all succumbing to the idea that a paycheque in their back pocket and new pants on their arse made the man. And then he was ashamed to have been thinking such unkind thoughts.
    He was brighter by far than they were, and he would prove it.
    So Ian rented the room in town, and fixed radios for money. No one knew much about him, and that, it seemed, was the way it would always be. He took jobs when he could—mainly lifting and carrying, and working the boats. He did this for a year. At the first of each month he struggled to make the rent. And he promised himself that he would not drink, for drink had destroyed his family for three generations.
    Although he was alone, his reputation for being able to fix whatever he put his hand to grew, so after being out of work for some time he finally got a job at a large second-hand appliance store on the square. There people noticed him, and some—more than some; many—calledhim brilliant, for twenty-year-old radios would find a spark in his hands. But this was nothing to him.
    In a way, it was Annette who kept him from drink—for it was she who he kept hoping for. He kept her picture in his room, and his ability to stay sober helped keep his hope of being with her alive. Oh, it was a false hope and stupid, and he felt stupid too, and he thought of how foolish a hope it was. But he was proud of his ability not to drink; so many around him had already succumbed to this very thing that had destroyed their fathers.
    “I don’t drink,” he would say to people who offered him an ounce. “Drink is a whore that