There is one true kind of loving—heartfelt, unselfish, pure in heart, life-affirming; but there are many vivid versions of hatred. The hatred that makes your enemy abandon you is nothing compared to the hatred that impels this monster never to leave you alone, infecting you like a virus, sickening you and seeming to gloat.
My brother, Frank, resented my long absences from town, because it was harder then for him to provoke me. I knew this, but for my own mental health I avoided pondering what was in his head. And as a prospector, in the business of searching wild places for minerals and metals, I’d dealt with some rough individuals. They were ornery or contrary, but I could handle them; they were difficult, but like me they were looking for profit and were willing to work hard for it. Prospecting for any ore is a physical challenge and only the toughest are equal to it. These men and women didn’t intend me any harm; it was territorial—they wanted to be the first to stake a claim.
Frank was different: his was a mental game, no risk involved, and it was personal. He wanted to torture me, he enjoyed seeing me suffer, he aimed to ruin me. I had no idea why.
Over the years, I was frequently far away from Littleford and Frank, but even at a great distance he could be obnoxious, because he had a gift, common to tyrants, of insinuating himself into my consciousness, and humming there like a fever. When I was anywhere near him, he was unbearable. I banished vengeful thoughts from my mind and was unfailingly courteous to him, the way you might behave with exaggerated politeness to someone you dislike, because you don’t want your contempt to show.
We were born three years apart, to older grateful and therefore indulgent parents. I came second and was the happier for it, because so much less was expected of me. As the firstborn, Frank was adored—he was a pleaser and a prodigy, Mother’s favorite. Father consoled himself with me, as both of us were lowly and solitary. Like Dad, I was restless, good with my hands, but slow to speak. I didn’t mind the attention that Frank got from Mother; to be overlooked freed me from the responsibilities and high expectations that burdened Frank, who was (Mother said) destined for great things.
In an early family portrait, taken in a Littleford studio, we fitted together as a plausible and matching quartet, parents and children. Mother was small and delicate and smiling; Father, stern, his features echoed in those of the two boys, his beaky face with his interrogating nose, his querying close-set eyes, thin skeptical lips, sharp chin, dense dark hair, thick at the sides, modifying his large sagging ears. Quebecois features, he would have said, but powerful. In a red flannel shirt he’d have looked like a lumberjack; in his expensive suit he could have passed for an aristocrat, a bit foreign, aloof, with an air of concealment—his origins perhaps.
It was this, though he seldom mentioned it: his mother was Native American—and our mother had an Abenaki in her ancestry. So we Belangers were special in Littleford, where everyone but us had an immigrant story. We had no tale of an Atlantic crossing, no Ellis Island stopover, only the simple fact that in hard times the families (Mother was a Bouchard) dropped into New England from the north, after being in Quebec forever, or before recorded time, at least recorded in the family memory.
Dad was mostly silent, watchful, stoical, accepting, somewhat unreadable. His belief was: we have always been here, we will always be here. His out-of-town friends were of the same mind—Ed Pigeon and the others, Picard, Benoit, Tremblay, Parenteau, and Gauthier, his secret friends, though listing them like this makes them seem like members of the Académie française. Settled in Lowell and Nashua, they were almost tribal in their confidences and habits, quite separate but blending in. In their hearts they were woodsmen and fur trappers, and they often conversed in the lingo they learned from their parents, Quebecois French, with its peculiar words and elliptical phrases. C’est plate! when something was boring, and the odd repetition in Tu t’en vas-tu? for “You going?” There were bluets and plenty of poutine in Quebec, but none in France, so no words for them. As an amateur handyman, Dad called himself a bizouneux, and for my elusiveness, I was a ratoureux, and Frank the talker, a placoteux—words that would have bewildered a Parisian.
That language I absorbed by hearing it constantly, barely being aware of my fluency, and so I excelled in French. This was a relief, because it gave me more time to pursue the sciences—chemistry, biology, and the refinements of these disciplines as they applied to geology, which was my great love.
Without much study I could converse in French and could easily translate the passages Miss Sirois gave us at Littleford High School. Once, looking through an anthology of poems, I found a poem, “Le Chat,” and read it with pleasure, because we had a dark cat just like the one in the poem. I told Miss Sirois that I wanted to read more of that poet’s work.
“You’re not ready for him yet,” she said.
He was Baudelaire, his book Le Fleurs du Mal—magical title to a sixteen-year-old—The Flowers of Evil. I found a copy in the Littleford Library and sat entranced, reading it, thrilled by “Abel et Caïn”—“Race de Caïn, dans la fange/Rampe et meurs misérablement”—which was how I secretly felt about Frank: crawl and die in the mud miserably. And I loved “N’importe où, pourvu que ce soit hors du monde”—Anywhere out of the world. That line, the wicked word evil, the poems about death and flesh thrilled my teenaged imagination.
I longed to leave Littleford, and go anywhere out of the world, to distance myself from Frank and cease being a Bad Angel brother. To rehearse my escape I joined the Boy Scouts and went for hikes in the woods, the Littleford Fells, often camping there at a secluded hillside spot known as Panther’s Cave, or farther in, past a pond (Doleful Pond) at the Sheepfold. I was practicing my ultimate departure, and a fellow Boy Scout—he of the gashed hand—Melvin Yurick, often accompanied me. Daylong hikes and overnight camps were legitimate: we weren’t fleeing from home, we were earning merit badges.
Yurick lived in the Winthrop Estates in an elegant brick house, surrounded by a lovely lawn. In the summer I mowed the lawns of his neighbors and aspired to live in the Winthrop Estates. Someday, I thought, when I’m married, and have enough money, I’ll come home and buy a house there—maybe one of those grand houses with columns and porches, where I once cut the grass. I’d raise a family, away from Gully Lane, and Frank, and the neighborhood where I grew up.
“I want to get out of here, too,” Melvin Yurick said quietly on one of our hikes.
I smiled, thinking: You live in the Winthrop Estates—why would you want to leave? But I admired his ambition to want more.
That’s who I was and where I came from; but the early family photographs of Frank and me are misleading. Family features are not fixed. You start out looking somewhat alike and then you change; in time, experience and circumstances and moods begin to work on those features. In high school, even with his palsied face, Frank and I resembled each other enough to be recognized as brothers, but after I left home for college, becoming myself—my face reflecting the person within me—my features softened, my eyebrows growing owlish, my lips readier to smile, my eyes more welcoming to new scenes; and I’d become muscular, while Frank had grown fatter, his face more asymmetric and complacent, a malicious mask for his ruthless ambition. By my late twenties no one would have taken me to be Frank’s brother, and that suited me. We made our difference emphatic in the two ways we pronounced our name. I kept to Dad’s slushy Quebecois way of saying it, “Bel—onzhay,” while Frank’s clanged, “Bel—anger.” But never mind—in Littleford we were always the Bad Angels.
The focus was mainly on Frank, who’d stayed in town. He said he had a righteous reason. The summer after Frank graduated from high school, Dad died from a heart attack in his office, Belanger Insurance, in Littleford Square. He was forty-nine years old. It came without warning. He smoked a pipe, he was a moderate drinker, and he seemed to be in good health. This was an ominous sign to Frank and me: a warning that we too might be struck down at an early age, and I’m sure it was a factor in both of us living with a particular urgency, the shadow of Dad’s death hanging over us. Being an insurance man, he was convinced of the necessity of being heavily insured, and shrewd in devising the most beneficial policy, so his death made Mother wealthy in a manner that she found daunting. What to do with all this money?
That was when Frank announced that he would not leave Littleford. After he graduated from law school, he would remain in town to protect Mother. “I’m staying. I’m looking after Ma. With all this money, she’s got a target on her back.”
Mother was relieved, because Frank was exceptional. But this notion of his high intelligence was a burden. The assumption of his having to work wonders was so powerful it made Frank a cheat at an early age, and this cheating altered his features, first his eyes—a flintiness, then the exaggerated droop in his face. He knew his lopsided gaze was intimidating. Needing to win, to be best, made him into a bully; having to score high marks meant he often had to bluff his way, fudge his answers, and that pressure turned him into an arguer and an explainer and a blamer, a public school pusher, later a neck-biting lawyer.
This makes him sound repellent, and if this were the whole of him you’d write him off as a monster and avoid him. Yet there was more, not another side of him but a subtler aspect of that same treacherous side. He could seem kind, he had a residue of charm, he knew how to be generous, he had mastered the arts of persuasion. All these plausible qualities made him likable, yet they were insincere and shallow, merely strategies to aid him in his manipulation. And really this charm and apparent generosity in such a man was proof of his darkness. At his most sinister he seemed trustworthy. His skill lay in knowing how to exploit a person’s weakness. He would have made a great actor, a master of tonalities and gestures, convincing in every role he chose to play.
That’s how he looked—those were the outward manifestations of his thrusting personality. What lay behind all this—what Mother’s expectations produced—was a habit of ruthlessness that left him without a conscience. He could hold a dog turd in his hand and look you in the eye and swear that it was an orchid.
If you were not immediately convinced, he would work on you, first by flattering your intelligence, wooing you with praise, and winning your confidence. When he saw you waver, he would emphasize that this object in his hand was something of value, to cherish. He would wear you down with a monotony of insistent description—and might raise his voice, or whisper, or blandly list its attributes—until you were either exhausted from being browbeaten, or actually persuaded. And then he offered his hand and you sniffed the dog turd and remarked on its fragrance.
He had no conscience. This seems like a diabolical trait—and of course it is, shared by mass murderers and villains—but it is also useful to anyone with ambition. It leaves a person who wants to win with an enormous arsenal of weapons and it frees them of any moral considerations. But someone without a conscience is also unknowable—you have no idea of what they will do next, or what they’re capable of, because—conscienceless—they are an enigma, capable of anything.
Frank was so full of surprises that it occurred to me early on (and the thought persisted throughout my life) that though he was my brother, and we’d grown up in the same house, I did not know him. But one day he offered a glimpse of his heart. I was in grad school, pursuing my studies as a prospector; and Frank, in his last year of law school, for the first time took an interest in my career. He was swayed by one word.
We were home for Thanksgiving, raking leaves in the driveway, while Mother roasted the turkey and, in Dad’s memory, was making his signature dish, a poutine his Quebecois mother had made for him, but one that Mother disparaged as “peasant food,” since it was a mass of French fries topped with cheese and brown gravy, hearty but not much to look at.
While we were raking, Frank asked about my classes. I mentioned metallurgy and chemistry, x-ray diffraction and assaying.
He misheard this last word as “essay,” and so I explained what it was and that I wanted to buy my own assay kit, which included a small furnace.
“To what end?” he said, skeptical when I mentioned the price.
“Gold,” I said.
That was the word. It silenced him, it gave his face a look of hunger and his eyes traced a sort of pattern on my face as though trying to read my expression or penetrate a secret. His fingers twitched on the handle of his rake, clutching motions that matched his hungry face. I had uttered a magic word.
I tried not to smile, because the emotion throbbing in him was one of the oldest in the world. Yet all I had told him was my simple ambition as a student of mines and metallurgy—to look for gold, or platinum, or copper, much as a lawyer might be looking for clients.
In an old historical novel about an early European voyage, I once came across the sentence “Precious metals excited the greed of conquest.” There it is in a few words, the history of world exploration and colonization, the politics of plunder, the lust for gold. For the Spanish in the Americas, the Portuguese in Africa and India, the Dutch in the Indies, the English, too, the quest for gold was paramount. DeSoto looked for gold in Tennessee but didn’t find it. Cortés massacred the Aztecs for gold, Pizarro killed the Inca king Atahualpa because the Incas, too, were gold seekers, and Atahualpa’s throne was made of 183 pounds of gold. In 1595 the Spanish Captain Mendaña sailed the Pacific Ocean from Peru to the Solomon Islands looking for gold; that same year, Sir Walter Raleigh crossed the Atlantic and splashed his way up the Orinoco River in search of El Dorado—the Golden Man, in his fabled City of Gold. Twenty years later, in 1614, Captain John Smith tacked up and down the New England coast, tramping the dunes, for gold. Gold in China, gold in New Guinea, the Gold Rush in California, and fifty years later the gold rush in the Klondike area of the Yukon.
I did not tell Frank any of this; I knew it as a geology student from the history we studied as part of our courses—the quest for precious metal was as old as humankind. A gold bead ornament found in Bulgaria was determined to be sixty-five hundred years old, the boast of a seminaked member of a Neolithic tribe.
“What?” I said, because Frank had not said anything but was still running his tongue over his lips and swallowing, as though in the throes of gold fever.
“Gold,” he whispered.
“Dentists need it, you find it in electronics—gold is a great conductor,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone, the way you might talk about plastic or rubber. “It’s in medicine. It helps treat arthritis. Oh, yeah, and jewelry.”
“That’s what you’re studying?”
“One of the metals,” I said, more casually, because I had his attention. “There are other precious metals. Palladium. Iridium. Osmium. Your pen nib is probably osmium. Lots of that stuff in Alaska.”
He was swallowing urgently, he did not know what to ask, but he wore a fixed expression of longing—one of the rare instances when I could read his mind.
“Dinner’s ready!” Mother called from the porch.
Frank did not move. He was staring at me with greedy eyes, and he looked at me differently after that, as someone who, after a long journey, might return with a sack of gold.
But metallurgy was work for me, a way of making a living and, most of all, getting me away from home—away from Frank.
We were different in many respects—perhaps in all respects; but something that set us apart was our attitude to risk. Frank was risk averse, he dreaded the unknown, he needed a sure thing. This might have sprung from Mother keeping him by her side, praising him, encouraging him, but always suggesting that he’d be happiest at home. And there Frank stayed, making it his mission to please her.
I was formed by Dad, who had a restless Quebecois nature; but as an unselfish parent he lived through me, urging me to get out of the house, join the Boy Scouts, go camping. God’s fresh air! was his cry. He admired hikers and backwoodsmen, trappers and forest rangers.
There were no women in Dad’s fantasies—no girlfriends, no wives. His dreams were of hearty excursions into the wilderness, and I fulfilled them. It seemed he longed for the freedom of the forest, while still understanding that hiking and rock climbing and swimming involved an element of risk. But he trusted me to surmount obstacles and to minimize risks through experiencing the outdoors. A long hike needed to be planned, a camping trip required equipment. Dad insisted that to overcome risks I had to be prepared. And so I became a connoisseur of camping gear—backpacks and tents and sleeping bags and hiking boots. And the revelation to me was that, with this gear, I was completely portable and independent: with shelter and a sleeping bag. I had a mess kit and food; early on I learned to cook. As an outdoorsman—while still in my teens, hiking with Melvin Yurick—I was liberated. Dad’s death was a blow but it also inspired me to follow his advice and leave town. And later, after Yurick vanished from Littleford and my life, around the time I bewitched Frank with the word gold, I was able to trek for days, even in winter—on cross-country skis—camping in the snow, collecting rock samples.
Meanwhile, Frank was indoors, in his bedroom, readying himself for his final exams in law school.