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Last winter I learned that my brother had frozen to death somewhere in Edmonton. I’ll not name him here because his infamy was his greatest accomplishment, and I wish to offer him no honour.
He was in Edmonton because that is where he’d been sent to finish out his prison term and serve his parole. He died legally in the clear, but I have little idea of what was in his heart, his head or his charred soul. I hadn’t spoken to him in 30 years and I don’t regret it. Still, the way he died haunts me – though not as much as his spectre when he was alive.
As a boy, my brother committed an escalating series of acts ranging from high jinks to heinous. For none of them did my parents seek either intervention or assistance. As an adult, he rose from petty criminal to semi-effective conman to calculating arsonist. Some other stellar moments included holding a “garage sale” in which he stripped my mother of her every possession during one of her involuntary stays in a psychiatric ward, hiding in my grandmother’s basement while holding a stick of dynamite, glibly informing me he had raped a woman whom he called Bambi because she looked like a deer, and crashing funerals. For some of these things he was investigated, but never imprisoned, hospitalized, monitored or required to undergo testing of any kind.
In 1999, he infamously set part of Osborne Village in Winnipeg ablaze, ruining four businesses and causing a large building to be torn down. He tried to burn down Holy Trinity Anglican Church, the Ukrainian Cultural Centre and sweet little St. James Anglican Church (Manitoba’s oldest wooden church). He succeeded in destroying the mini-train at Assiniboine Park, where we once played. As a topper, when another man was arrested for these crimes, my brother allowed him to take the fall (the man was cleared later, after my brother was finally apprehended).
I only learned of my brother’s culpability when the public did. After much brilliant police work, the arson task force finally took him down after retrieving his fingerprints and DNA from a glass at a university cafeteria where he was pontificating. This evidence matched what was found at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre.
My brother was severely mentally ill, but I did not then and I do not now forgive him. I don’t care what all the doctors, experts, lawmakers, doctrines and dogmas say: I believe that excepting full-scale psychotic breaks and deeply compromised intellects, everyone at their core knows right from wrong.
I should know. My brother wasn’t the only person in my family burdened by mental illness. As the youngest, I spent plenty of time with all of them. My mother was often outright abusive, but always within the confines, the shield, of the home or car. If there was company, or we were in public, she knew how to be pleasant, amusing and even urbane. She was intelligent, witty, darkly beautiful and did, in her inadequate way, love us. She may not have been capable of escaping her demons or visiting them upon us, but she knew how to hold them back. That is to say, she knew what was acceptable behaviour and what was not. She knew right from wrong.
As a child, I thought my brother to be brilliant, mysterious and powerful. Weirdly, my sister and I called him “uncle” as if, already, to distance ourselves and define him as “other.” As a teen I became wary of him without knowing why, but I recall being disturbed by the way he looked at me. As an adult, armed with more knowledge, I feared and assiduously avoided him.
My parents, ineffective right up until their deaths, would ask me stupid things such as: “What do you suppose happened to him? He took LSD once; do you think that’s what did it?”
As a child I lay very, very low. I was ridiculed, nicknamed “prissy-pot,” for trying to do right, and often slapped in the face if I excelled at anything. I was the white sheep of the family (not the scapegoat, however; that honour was reserved for someone weaker, my twin sister). I became determined never to follow any of them in their footsteps, behaviours or violence. After a time it became easier.
Still, though, a memory or event can suck the air out of my lungs. Like my brother’s ignominious death. Even for him, to freeze to death is so irrefutably awful, bitter and sad. His story is a tragedy with no hero.
I don’t wish to visualize the way he died. I can’t. I won’t. But something must be said. My brother repeatedly tried to incinerate people, and only through the sheerest and dumbest of luck did he not. He unnerved a city. He destroyed buildings, businesses and peace of mind. He excelled at subterfuge, plotting and working himself into an angry critical mass. He knew what he was doing was wrong.
The little boy who played with fire mercilessly fed his anger and self-pity, and turned his loathing upon us all. In the end, every bit of heat in him was stripped away, lost and left to float in the ether. And something in me says that’s okay, that’s a relief, that’s over. That’s right.
Lenore Moreau lives in Winnipeg.