Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (14 page)

By the third week of July, Cindi was no longer at the apartment with Ruby. She had come back home and wouldn’t go outside. Dr. Hennessey went over one day to see her.

She looked terrible. Her face was bumpy – just as Ruby said.

He asked her how she was, and then, without being asked, he gave her a quick check over, satisfied himself that she was still on her medication, berated her for not eating.

“Well, you don’t look too bad, but,” he said quickly, “you’ve had at least one seizure since I’ve seen you – and probably two –”

“I had three,” Cindi said. “I’m near up to five a month now – that was how bad I was in high school.”

“Three, yes, well three – and what’s this Ivan business about – why don’t you see him?”

“He won’t come to visit me,” Cindi said.

“Well – I’m sure he isn’t the best husband in the world, the little bastard, but I don’t believe he tried to knife you either. And when you look back on it, it was very exciting for some people – very gratifying to pretend he had that in mind.”

“I don’t know,” Cindi said. “I was there and he did walk in with his knife.”

“Well, think what you want,” the doctor said irritably, and then he realized he had frightened her – and that she had spent half of her life frightened of people and he felt angry with himself because of this. “But I don’t think he wanted to knife you – and if I had to trust someone – well, he would be a person I would trust –
MORE THAN A LOT OF THEM
!” he finished up, screeching.

The red building was hot, and the curtains hung limp above the sink. When the doctor came in, Cindi was sitting near the bedroom door, as if hiding behind a cardboard box. She told him the only one to visit her since she’d come back was Margaret. Margaret came to visit her in the daytime.

“Oh yes, and what about that Ruby?” Dr. Hennessey said. “Not that she’s any of my business – it’s just that you were as thick as porcupine quills in a dog’s arse a week ago – something happen?” he asked innocently, with his face looking suddenly almost like a little boy’s, and, in spite of himself, beaming in delight.

“Ruby’s mad at me,” Cindi said, rubbing one thumb against the other and looking at her feet. Then she looked at him. “I bug her,” she said, drawing a deep breath and exhaling, as if the fact that she “bugged her” was insurmountable, and not to be questioned.

“And what about that Adele – where the hell is she anyways? She was a friend of yers, wasn’t she?” Dr. Hennessey said loudly.

The whole idea that Cindi needed someone to stay with her was paramount not only to the doctor but to Cindi herself – who had become so depressed that she hadn’t washed in a week, and yet kept putting on new
makeup every day, so that the doctor thought she looked like a cake.

“Ha,” the doctor said, “maybe we should get Dr. Savard to come here and sit with you –”

Then, realizing he’d overstepped his bounds, he became silent for a moment.

“Everything is happening on this river today,” he said.

With that he shook his head, and, digging into his pocket, took out eighty dollars and laid it on the telephone table beside her.

Cindi was too nervous of him to say anything about this – although in every gesture and movement he showed that he wished to be loving and kind.

“There’s lots of ways people hide bigotry from themselves,” the doctor mumbled. “Today’s way is progressive concern.”

Four days later Adele moved down with Cindi on Hennessey’s request. The first thing was to get a fan for the apartment, and she took Cindi up to the mall and bought one.

“Now we’ll have some cool air at night,” she said.

Cindi looked at her and smiled.

“Now, dear,” Adele said, “the first thing you got to do is take a bath –”

“I don’t want to,” Cindi said.

“I don’t care if you want to – you’re going to,” Adele said. “You fuckin stink – and you have more powder than face.”

Her only concern was getting Cindi to take some action and make her do something.

“And burn them fuckin clothes” Adele said. “You’ve been sleeping in them for a week or more, it looks like – and what’s this all over the floor here? I don’t know – this place is a Christless mess, Cin – you know bettern that.”

Cindi was as depressed as she was at times before she had a seizure, something which she almost never recognized in herself but which Adele recognized instantly.

Antony had acquired thirty-seven velvet portraits of Elvis Presley and had them hanging at the house – he was commissioned to sell them for Gordon Russell.

He was back once more with Gordon. Gordon’s dusty red Cadillac was often in the yard, and Antony would stop whatever he was doing to entertain him. And they would go into the backyard and suck clams and drink beer. Gordon made light of Antony, called him “the frog,” and Antony took this as a sign he was once again in that inner circle of people and events where he so wished to be.

By this time Nevin thought of only one thing – of extracting himself from Antony – who had been bullying him for a month.

And yet each time he thought of getting away, new complications arose – new facts were introduced into the complicated arrangements he and Antony had, all of which changed day by day, with Antony’s incessant
calculations. And each day Nevin was forced to pretend that everything was going along just the way they wished it – and, in fact, nothing was happening that he himself did not foresee.

He did not foresee that he would have to wade up to his arse in water, while Antony waited on the shore, hidden in the bushes when they went to poach salmon.

Nor did he foresee that he would have to wait hours on Antony in places like St. Antoine or Petit Rocher, while Antony would strut about paying no attention to him, chewing on Chiclets.

And each time Nevin went to quit – each time he decided that it was enough – each time one thing drew him back. Something which complicated everything else. Antony made him feel he was ungrateful, that he, Antony, was only trying to make them both money.

“I’ve one son now who doesn’t do anything – lives in a cuddy, kicks the snot out of women, and has no future. I have to support eight people all by myself – and my partner and his wife also.”

By day Nevin had the look of certain people of his generation who miscalculated what was significant in the events of their youth – and though still driven by those events, and still assured of their significance, nothing worked so well for them as it did those few years when they were protected by the parents they were so committed to being different from.

But he did not talk about this. He only wanted one thing. Just as in the winter he wanted heat, and last spring he wanted to be paid his money back – now he wanted escape from the heat, the blackflies, and the
illegal enterprises Antony was propelling them towards.

He would look at Antony, with his welder’s cap, his torn red jacket, his
ELVIS LIVES
button, and realize that all his ideals had come down to stealing two kegs of swish.

The biggest problem was Vera. How could he admit to her that he had stolen. When Vera asked him how he was doing, or especially if she tried to include him in a joke about Antony, Nevin would turn away.

One morning they took the truck and drove along the upper part of the doctor’s land. It was mid-morning. They came to a huge brown puddle. The poplar trees that overhung the roadway were caught in a milky light.

They stopped at the puddle, and were looking for a place to turn – in another instant they would have been gone. But just then a young cow moose and her little calf stepped out on the road. The little mother was not much bigger or older than her offspring. She stood on the far side of the puddle, on the right-hand side of the road near the turn, flicking her ears and waiting for her calf to wobble up behind her.

The calf kept twirling its ears to keep the hundreds of flies off it.

“Get out your side – but don’t slam the door,” Antony ordered.

“Why?” Nevin said.

“Why – what do you mean why?”

Once Nevin got out, Antony pulled the seat forward and took out his rifle. Nevin was filled with a mixture of fear and excitement.

He heard Antony cursing because he dropped his bullets and had to reach under the truck for them.

By this time the calf had wandered across the puddle and its mother now waited in the centre of the road.

Antony’s hands shook as he put the 180-grain bullets in, but his whole body shook as well. And just as he raised the gun, the mother gave a short owl-like call to her child. The calf, instead of heeding this warning, walked even closer, on the left of the road, still twirling its ears, curious as to who they were.

“Why aren’t you twirling your ears?” it seemed to ask.

Antony managed to fire once and the gun jammed. But that first shot dropped the cow, and it bellowed, falling ahead on its knees and making a track in the dust at the puddle’s edge. Its eyes, to Nevin who had never witnessed anything killed, looked about as if wondering at the nature of its distress.

It called to its calf, a gurgled cry because one of its lungs was filling with blood, and tried to stand up – which it did momentarily – and run – which it couldn’t do.

The calf looked back at its mother, and then looked back at the men, and ran behind a bush, where it stood watching, its ears still twirling, one clockwise, one counter-clockwise, over the top of the branches. Now the mother ran also, but fell headlong into the alders.

Antony walked straight into the puddle, still trying to unjam his rifle, and cursing. “Get the axe, Nevin – get the axe,” he said.

And Nevin reached into the box of the truck and got the axe.

The cow moose was bleeding a great deal. Spots of bright red blood were all over the road, but a huge amount of dark clotted blood was on the leaves.

All the while the sun beamed through the milky white trees as it had done five minutes before, and three broken branches the little cow was munching on were still wet from its tongue.

“Give me the axe,” Antony was saying. “Give me the axe.”

Antony was now beside himself, because the nature of the situation had begun to sink in. They were on the dirt road. Anyone might have heard the shot, or someone might pass by. Not only did they have the cow to worry about, but Antony realized they would have to kill the calf as well – and this was just beginning to sink in, as was the water and blood on his pant legs.

“I’ll show you!” he roared.

He crashed the blunt side of the axe down upon the cow’s head. This made the cow, as small as it was, stand to its feet, and try to back Antony away. But another blow came down upon its skull, and it fell once more.

The calf had come to watch and was standing ten feet behind Nevin.

After a while, Antony came out of the bushes with the axe in his hand. His big belly was jiggling as he walked, his pants were all twisted. He waved the axe and began to chase the calf.

They had to chase the calf back and forth across the puddle, trying to corner it. For ten minutes it eluded them, while refusing to leave the road. But after hitting it a number of times on the back and legs, it fell, crying, and Nevin was able to finish it with a dozen blows to the back and spine.

Each blow purposeful and spotting his cheeks with blood.

After Nevin went home, he shook for three days. Every time he looked at food he would think of the little calf moose twirling its ears.

“Oh, Nevin,” Vera would say, “why aren’t you eating your supper – you can’t expect me to make supper every night and you not eat.”

Nevin would look up and see the pork chops on the table and begin to tremble as if he felt cold.

“I’m not hungry – just feed it to the goats.”

And he would leave the table and go to bed. He had hardly seen Antony since that day either. Nevin could not look at him without hanging his head.

“Why, why, why did we do that?” he would say to himself. “God, why did you let this happen?”

And he would stare at the walls, and listen as the wind blew and dust rattled the window – for it was a tumultuously hot dry summer – and he would put the pillow over his head.

But all he envisioned when he closed his eyes was the little calf moose trying to run away, and thinking it had outsmarted them once because it turned left instead of right.

So he would open them again, quickly, and stare at the sheet. Like a person suffering a hangover. Moose swam before his eyes, and water and puddles, and little twigs, and voices of sad animals – all seeming to suffer at the exact same instant.

“Why did you let that happen?” he would ask. Nevin, like every other mortal who cried out, cried out to something, though indeterminate, which was far greater than himself.

And the answer came, just as it had come when his first wife left him years before – through, he thought, no fault of his own.

“God either wills or allows.”

There was no other answer at all.

What Nevin was most conscious of now was his great love for Vera. Why this seemed so striking in the midst of his failure he did not know.

“You’re just filled with energy,” Vera would say, smiling, because she confused his condition with energetic excitement and did not know his agony.

And at work, what did he do? He did nothing. He wore his new work gloves that looked ridiculous upon his slight hands, and picked up whatever it was Antony told him to.

So he had no one at all. He thought really of ending his life – but then he thought of how much he would shame his father if he did this. Or he thought that if he did this, people would laugh at him – maybe, he thought, they would refuse to bury him. So perhaps they would have to cremate him.

He was frightened and apologetic and only wanted people to like him.

And no one in the world seemed to like him or care for him – except Margaret, who helped with the goats, and fed the chickens, and made sure the rabbits didn’t do too much damage to the garden.

Margaret had no friends. All summer she had been alone, doing her jigsaw puzzle, or taking care of Valerie. Every time they met she would talk about her brother, Ivan. She was sad about him. And worried about him – because of all the rumours. Everyone said things about him. It seemed his old friends were the first to turn on him.

Sometimes, when she met Nevin, she would be wearing an old pair of her brother’s cutoffs. She was very pretty. She, like her brother Ivan, had inherited that simple strength that showed in her movement.

Once, when she brought him one of her grandmother’s blueberry muffins, she said: “We’ll have to go on a picnic.”

And once she wanted him to go swimming.

“Where will we meet?” he said.

“I change down behind the shed on the shore,” she said. “You could meet me there if you want to.”

He only wanted to talk to her and eat muffins, but he kept going over in his mind if this was really the case. He was worried that he had hidden intentions, and therefore had been embarrassed when she mentioned swimming. He had to realize that he was much older than she.

“No, no, no,” he said. “I’m not going to see her again.”

But then, the next day, she came running over with two pails and told him that if he wanted blueberry muffins, he would have to help her pick some blueberries.

That day he and Antony were supposed to go to Buctouche, but since it was raining Antony didn’t want to go. He had decided to stay home and stamp DECEASED on the most pressing bills, and return them – something which never failed to stall those he was indebted to.

Margaret and Nevin met halfway between his house and hers and stood for a while smoking under a spruce tree, which allowed them both to stand as long as they stood with their backs pressed to the trunk. It was where Margaret came to be alone, where she had
built a fort. Spruce boughs dropped over them and they could hear the rain beating and pelting the ground, while only one of Nevin’s shoulders was getting a little wet.

Nevin started telling her about his early manhood, about university, about the things he and his first wife used to do.

Nevin talked for almost an hour. Margaret was silent, but sometimes her eyes would wander a little, and she became uneasy, and then she would grow attentive again.

After he stopped talking, he looked at her.

“Ivan used to take me out once in a while as he cut pulp,” Margaret said. “He could work all day in the rain – or snow. I would have to get under a tree or something – and then I’d get cold, and he’d have to come make me a fire – and rub me down. At night he’d sit me up on Ginger Cake and lead me out. And if we got out before eight o’clock, then he would get me a pop and a bag a chips at Donnie’s store. Ivan once had a pit bull that bit me, and he had to destroy it – as soon as he saw me bleeding. That was it for the pit bull.”

For some reason it seemed she said this as if answering his story. And in her story there seemed more freedom than his could ever possess. But what was sad is he did not know why.

“I love November eleventh because we would go hunting. Two years ago it was snowing, and Ivan and I sat in a tree from seven in the morning. He didn’t get down, and wouldn’t let me out of the tree. He wouldn’t let me sneeze. Every time I wanted to sneeze he would stick his finger across my nose. He wouldn’t let me piss” – Margaret said “piss,” which startled Nevin – “so I had to wet my pants – honest. He said to me, ‘You
wanted a deer – make the best of it – this is my last chance at getting you a deer.’