So the older Fiset brother spent five years in a prison at 175 percent capacity: 438 men in a building designed for 250. On weekends the gym converts to a dormitory for people serving minimum time for too many unpaid parking tickets. Rusty rebar juts out of crumbling walls. Cells designed for a single inmate now house two or three. Which means one unlucky soul has to sleep on a mattress on the ground, with his head jammed up against a seatless toilet. The blue mat looks just like the ones we used to land our somersaults on in gym class when I was a kid.

There’s a special section of the prison reserved for sexual deviants. They need to be protected from the other inmates. Prison is its own world, with its own codes, governed by an ossified version of the “women and children first” ethos of panicked sailors on sinking ships. Unable to defend their own women and children, forsaken by the rest of society, men inside kill each other over rumours of pedophilia or sexual violence against women. I wonder if Fiset made some little buddies inside. If he had to lie about his crimes to come off like a hard case instead of the coward he is. The article online features his mug shot. Five years later, no one bothered to track down a more recent photo. He looks like his mom. Same face with thick features, jowls like a bulldog, lips hanging down under the weight of so much skin. The article doesn’t say anything about what’s happened since the release, content to rehash a brief biography and highlights from the trial.

He’s our very own dangerous criminal. A local boy, born and bred on Pattenaude Farms corn and AgriNor milk. That’s all anyone had to say when he was arrested. Some say he never got over his brother’s death. Others insisted that he killed his own brother, his little brother. They just couldn’t prove it.

At least the older Fiset did his dirty deeds somewhere else, off in the big city. I have no idea how he ended up here. I always had him pegged for the kind of guy who would never leave his hometown because the idea of moving away was just too much.

Back when they happened, Fiset’s crimes were serious enough to warrant an article in the national newspaper. It was so typical it almost brings a tear to your eye, strictly paint-by-numbers: drugs, low self-esteem, and of course the age-old curse of the Fisets: stupidity. Fiset got completely wasted and raped a young woman who’d rejected him the previous night, after punching her a few times to soften her up. He broke her nose and ocular cavity and cracked a couple ribs for good measure.