I was wound tight, supremely uncomfortable. I hadn’t had time to take Erik aside to grill him or threaten him or whatever I needed to do. I loved my brother, but I’d acquired a powerful protective love for this farm and these people, and I was not going to let him put it at risk any more than it already was.
We sat at the oval dining table, six of us, Brassard at the head, and talked about Max; Brassard recounted a few of Pelletier’s infamous exploits. Married young—“Seven kids!” he marveled.
“Jeez. Could put himself out to stud,” Earnest muttered, then looked abashed.
“Well, he more or less did, back in high school.”
Everyone laughed, much pleased. It had been a long time since Jim Brassard had shown any levity.
“So, Erik, tell us about yourself,” Brassard said.
The laughter quickly died away. Though he was a weary and blunted man, Brassard’s authority came across—nothing accusatory, but a simple inquiry from an honest, elder man is not easy to deny.
Cat jumped in: “Yeah, and I want to know what your tattoo says!”
Erik rolled his sleeve farther and held up his arm so we could see the whole line of characters, stretching from his wrist to the inside of his elbow. “It’s Chinese, and it basically says ‘Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.’”
This morally loaded choice for a tattoo changed the dimensions of everyone’s curiosity.
“Churchgoer?” Brassard asked.
“No. Never been in my life.”
“Well, it’s sure good advice. Why that one?”
“I guess so I could show it to good folks like you.”
The clink and scrape of eating continued, but the easy bustle of lunch-making had become something very different. This was, as Erik would have said back when, heavy stuff. Earnest and Will leaned back in their chairs, as if clearing the air space, the line of sight, between Erik and Brassard, surrendering control of the transaction to the patriarch. If Erik had hoped to tell me his story first, the option seemed to have been lost.
Brassard took off his glasses, tipped his head forward and thoughtfully scratched his left ear, and I saw that it did indeed bear a scar, a pale braid of raised skin that started at the top of the shell just at his temple and disappeared into the whorls below.
“Out on the West Coast all this time, Ann says,” Brassard said. “Kept yourself busy, I guess.”
“Wasted some years with a decadent lifestyle. Got a little smarter and got some schooling, though.”
“What’d you study?”
“Last five years, I got a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a concentration in marketing.”
“Good choices, this day and age.” Brassard, burdened again, was wiping his glasses on a napkin. “Huh. Maybe you can give us some advice on that score—could sure use it. Farmin’s not what it used to be, put it that way. What school?”
Erik had been toying with his fork, balancing it across one finger, tipping it almost to the point of falling, then letting it settle back into precarious balance. Nervous, but maintaining a wan smile.
“Mostly the school of hard knocks. But for the degrees, let’s just say I got the best public education money could buy.”
Earnest chortled, bobbed his head once, as if finally putting together the pieces of the puzzle. He leaned back into the table. “Where’d you serve?” he asked good-naturedly.
“Up in Elk Ridge, Oregon.” Erik seemed to be playing out a long joke, and clearly Earnest had anticipated the punch line.
“In the service!” Brassard said, pleased. “What branch?”
Erik stopped fiddling. “Mr. Brassard, I served time—seven years at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Elk Ridge. I got out twelve days ago.” He tipped his chair back, hands clasped behind his head to observe our reactions, both resigned and defiant. Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone, his forearm insisted, in Chinese.
Silence. These were not overly judgmental people, but such an announcement demands a moment to consider and adapt to. Do you ask, “What were you in for?” Do you sit and wait for more explanation? Do you really want to know?
Then Cat asked, still on about his tattoo, maybe trying to kick-start the conversation again on a more positive note: “So … why’d you write it in Chinese?
Erik’s face grew serious. “So people would have to ask what it says. And then I could say it out loud.”
Chapter 37
Erik dropped our jaws about five times that day.
His tattoo, his whole approach, brought back to me just what a complex person he was—wired a bit differently from the rest of us, seeing the world through multiple lenses. He had always known that about himself. Back in high school, he’d gone through a period of being big on “cognitive dissonance,” usually considered a negative and stressful psychological state in which a person’s mind struggles with conflicting thoughts, opinions, emotions, or intentions. It can be paralyzing and painful.
But Erik had decided it was a positive state, essential to good mental health and moral integrity: “Ever think what would it would’ve been like if the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had been able to entertain a little fucking cognitive dissonance about their differences on religious dogma?” he’d ask.
Except that nobody got it, so mostly nobody got him. Those who did like him, those he therefore hung out with, were kids who liked his dashing negligence, his disaffection for convention and authority, not his smarts or subtleties. One likes to be liked; his social choices took the path of least resistance.
The way he explained it to me was that you could be a rabid Red Sox fan, as we all were, and still admit that the Yankees were the better team in any given year. You could be into heavy metal, as he was, and still love Mozart, as he did.
The problem was that he too often induced the state in others who couldn’t endure it as well as he did.
One particular Sunday afternoon gathering at our house, when Erik and
