Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (15 page)

“The day got longer and snow fell – and he kept checking his sights. We were staring down at a little gully. I had worn leather boots and they were freezing my toes off, but I didn’t want to complain – I was afraid if I did Ivan would push me out of the tree.” She looked at Nevin and smiled. Now and then rain fell off one of the spruce bellies and landed on her chest. “So we waited. And the snow got badder and badder. It started to blow – and was cold – and Ivan didn’t move, didn’t speak to me. Every now and then he would take out some scent from a deer’s privates and drop it on me head. ‘There, you can get yerself a young buck tonight,’ he’d whisper.” She looked at Nevin again, glancing quickly as she always did.

“We kept on waiting. The day got longer. I was scrunched up beside him. Then I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to get out to the road, and be snowed in and die in a ditch somewheres – the snow come down, over my pants – there was six inches of snow on my shoulder.”

She stopped talking and lit a cigarette.

“Then it started to get dark – I was getting real scared. I wanted to go home – it weren’t no fun. I had chapped my bum from peein myself,” she laughed. “It weren’t no fun at all. ‘It’s dark, Ivan,’ I said. ‘Wait,’ Ivan said. So I waited ’cause there was nothing else to do. It was that dark I didn’t even see it. It looked like a bush. It was about two hundred yards away. And I was staring at it all along, but not knowing that it was nothing more than a bush. Ivan had seen it for the last fifteen minutes. He hadn’t taken his eyes off it. But it had to step out – and he waited. He just stared at it. Suddenly
it stepped out and began to walk towards us – covered in snow, with its head up, and its tongue tasting the air. Ivan shot it in the head.”

She finished her story. The rain beat down, and she shivered. And Nevin, for the life of him, not knowing why, bent over and kissed her.

She just stared at him, going on with her story.

“Then we had to lug and lug and lug,” she said. “It was a 247-pound, 12-point buck – and after he cleaned it up we had to lug it. I was never so tired. I was sorry for the deer, but the only thing I wanted was to get it home and eat its liver,” she nodded with conviction. “I never seen a man so small as Ivan so strong.”

Nevin, not knowing why, went to kiss her again, but she turned away, and he coughed and backed up.

“I’ve never been kissed before,” she said.

“YOU!”
came a voice. It was Antony.
“AND YOU – IT’S YOU!”

“No, no, it’s not me,” Nevin said, weakly. First you could see Antony’s boots and pant legs and then his whole large body moving towards them.

“I’ll get you,” Antony said. “I’ll get the police – that’s what I’ll do.”

“NO, NO,”
Nevin managed. “It’s not me.”

Margaret had run off the other way towards the house, and Antony was hauling Nevin towards his. “
NO
– don’t tell!”

Vera was standing out in the yard now, with her right hand shading her eyes as she looked in their direction, although it was not sunny, and a goat near the garbage pail stood eating a tuft of blond cabbage while the rain off the roof hit the lid like a drum.

“What’s wrong,” Vera said. Pregnant, with her feet swollen, her eyes were puffy, and her face bore the
expression of all people who in the midst of planning joy come upon sudden upheaval and tragedy.

“He was fondling my daughter’s titties.”

“I didn’t,” Nevin said.

But Antony was incensed, with the irrational anger that at times hits broken men when they have found a beacon for rage.

“He was at her – I’m getting the police.”

“No, please,” Vera said, “don’t get the police.”

“I’m sorry,” Vera said, “I’m sorry.” This is all she could say. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying, “I’m sorry.”

Suddenly Antony turned and walked away, left Vera and Nevin standing beside their little house, in the rain.

Nevin could hear them about the house. He was sure they were about. The next afternoon, as he was sitting in his chair, he saw Antony and Frank Russell walking towards his house, Frank with his left foot turned sideways and his green work shirt making his red hair look fierce in the afternoon heat.

And behind them, at right shoulder, was Jeannie, with a determined nasty grimace, with an unflagging step beside the men.

“Come on out,” Antony said.

Frank and Jeannie stood side by side, looking towards the house, the shiniest thing on Frank being his immobile belt buckle in the suffering heat, and Jeannie, her hair, which was a hay-crop red thrust back into a bun, and a small hearing aid in her right ear.

Jeannie looked from one man to the other.

“They want you to go out,” Vera said to Nevin, looking out the window at them.

Nevin said nothing.

Vera stared out at the two men and the woman standing in her lane near the row of alders.

“Child molester,” Frank yelled.

And Jeannie, with an ever-present nod, looked up at her husband in the blind approval that they had for each other.

Finally, Vera went out and stood at the door. Her maternity top lay on her, and her face bore the expression of suffering and beauty.

“Go away,” she said.

“We don’t want no problem with you,” Antony said. “I always liked you –” “For my sake,” she said.

Vera went back inside and locked the door. She went over and sat beside Nevin.

Nevin laid his head back and said nothing. Then he went to the window, looked out it, and stepped back.

“Are they still there?” Vera said.

He nodded. Then he started walking about the house, with his knapsack, picking things up.

“What are you doing?” Vera said, her hands clasped tightly together so that some parts of her fingers were red and the other parts white, and tears started to run down her face.

“Packing to leave,” Nevin said, as if all of this was natural and she should realize it.

“You can’t,” she said.

She started to cry, and Nevin, not really understanding what he was picking up, or why he had the knapsack in his hands, finally threw it down and went and stood in the corner.

An hour passed and they were in the same position.

“Go look out the window, Vera,” Nevin whispered.

There was a smell of cinder in the air, that smell that came from the back of the house on hot days. The goats were in the garden. Vera’s pruning shears lay in the dirt where she had dropped them the day before just as she had seen Nevin being dragged across the yard.

Vera stood and went to the window. Yes, they were still there.

She waited by the window, looking at the three of them – to her, they had the weight of a sudden, furious apocalypse.

Nevin was still in the corner, leaning against the wall.

“I’ll phone the police,” she said, breathing out of her nose quietly. “No,” he said.

“Then what do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t care.” And he sank down against the wall, with his elbows on his knees and his hands dangling outward.

“Then I’ll make supper,” she said.

The heat bore down, and Vera picked up her vegetables on the fork and ate.

Now and again Nevin would look towards the window and see Jeannie’s small face looking in at him. He would look at her and pick up some water and drink. Vera silently continued to eat.

“We got the horse here,” Jeannie yelled.

“We’ll tear the door off,” Frank said.

Vera kept her back rigid in the chair, her eyes on her plate, her fork in her left hand, and her right hand under the tablecloth.

“Gaddup,” Jeannie yelled to Rudolf. “Gaddup outta that.”

“Gaddup, you son of a whore,” Frank yelled.

And Nevin, when he heard this, smiled solemnly.

There was a jerking of a chain, and the whinny of the old half-blind and ill-treated horse. The air was suffocating, more so than before.

There was some confusion in the yard and Nevin got up to look out the window. He couldn’t see clearly because of the sun in his eyes, reflected off the water. Vera sat where she was. Nevin went to the window in the far room and looked out. Here he could see Ivan with a pitchfork in his hand, standing between them and the house. He had already unhitched Rudolf and had walked it about, holding it by the halter, which he had slipped over its neck.

“I’m taking the horse back to the shed,” Ivan said. Jeannie walked up to grab the halter and Ivan simply pushed her down and, without comment to her, said to Antony, “Leave the yard.”

Antony, backing up slightly, stood separated from the other two and watched.

Then he pointed a finger towards the house, but Ivan never looked his way.

“Yer some big-feelinged, arentcha,” Frank said. “I’ll have to take you down a peg or two.”

“As I said before – don’t let fear stop you,” Ivan said, holding the fork to his throat.

Nevin couldn’t tell what other things were said. But no more altercation arose.

He kept going from one window to the other to listen. But he only got bits and pieces.

Finally Antony went away and, with him, Frank. Jeannie was the last to go, her black, red-topped rubber
boots looking sorrowful in the heat, staring over her shoulder at Ivan as she walked.

By the time Nevin came downstairs and opened the door, Ivan was leading the horse out of the yard behind the shed, the horse moving solemnly into the brush. Nevin yelled to him to come back but Ivan didn’t hear – or, at any rate, he didn’t turn around.

Antony’s story was the same one at all times. It was just presented differently, with an indefinable self-deception and a lasting hope that the best points in it were true. And it had become clear now that his side lay with people who had made light of him, ridiculed his family, cheated him out of money, defamed his wife, bore false witness to his son, and held him in contempt.

For the moment, he was satisfied. He felt he’d gotten back at almost everyone in the world.

“Well – I’m well out of that,” he said to Ivan, as Ivan brought the horse about in the dooryard. “You’re right, there – I shouldn’t get mixed up with Nevin – and all that crew.”

Ivan looked at him and didn’t speak.

“Nevin and Vera are the worst set of Walloons I ever saw,” Antony said. “With all that hypocrite stuff.” He looked at Ivan and sighed. He was sitting on a bale of hay in the dark side of the shed. Far away, other sounds could be made out in the early evening, the passing of a car and the starting of a chain saw.

“And besides,” Antony said, “look what they did for you – Vera and Nevin didn’t do you any favours either, Ivan – let me tell you that. So I told Frank and Jeannie I’m not going down there and start up anything, but then I figured I had as much right there as anyone else – take when Gloria left. Clay Everette had me on the road day and night driving grader so they could be together, and everyone knowed about it except me – and everyone knowed when I was out ploughing they’d be together. So when I found out – for four months I didn’t even quit my job – I just kept going, pretending also that I hadn’t yet found out.”

He looked at Ivan and said nothing for a second. He seemed genuinely sad at this.

“And then I was beaten up that time – had the snot pounded out of me by people up in town that night there –’ member that?

“So anyway, now it’s Nevin and Margaret, and I just went crazy – I shoulda realized it, right from the start.

“And Vera, too, had a big black attack over at the university there with some Watutsi – mark my words on that – skinny as a hen’s cunt back then, big shoulders, looked like Ralphie, almost the same sex eighty per cent of the time – to think that we went and fought off the Norman’s for that crew there.

“None of them were any favourite friend of yers in this here scrape with Cindi, Ivan. The whole crew would rather sit back in their houses and twick the hairs off their arse before they’d move to help you. And then Cindi gets into the big aborted scrape down river. If you ask me about it – we could have called the kid Lemondo or something like that – I figured Lemondo after your great-uncle Lemondo.”

Ivan was brushing the horse and looking at the
sores on its back, dug deep and filled with dirt, and its mouth ran a purple phlegm. Far in the corner, back beyond the fox bins, was Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer’s painted sled, with its runners coated with sawdust.

“So we’re well out of that there, all of them. Fall is coming soon and, mark my words, they’ll all want you back again to shape up the sleigh trails for their sleigh rides, and turn the horses out and wash down the stall all the time – and give those little twats their riding lessons –”

“But they didn’t take no one else to court, did they – except you – and it was all in Ruby’s head to get Cindi with Dorval Gene and have her to go with him – it was just a whim – something to do for the summer. So now summer is getting on, and there’s this big tickedy boo going on between Dorval and Ruby.”

“And,” Antony said, “where was Ralphie when you needed him?”

“Will you shut your mouth please, Antony?”

“Hear Ralphie came to you to get the money back for Nevin – some ironic, if you ask me about the whole thing. That is, he put you and your father against one another for the first time in their life –”

Ivan turned and looked at his father, and then in fury he punched the poor horse in the head and turned and left the stall.

“Oh, sure,” Antony yelled. “Beat up on the horse, beat up on me, beat up on Jeannie Russell, beat up on yer wife, beat up on us all – but you won’t listen to the truth of the problem – will you!”

And he followed his son outside into the light, across the yard, screaming at him to come back, and for some reason, crying.

No one knew where he was. Ivan didn’t tell even Margaret, who was the last person he saw before he left.

The nights were still soft and warm, though there was a hint of frost. The trees sat heavy in the dark – the highway bathed in yellow light, the field strangely mistlike in the moonlight.

He slept half the day, and at dark, lit a fire, after the sun went down, cooked some fish in flour, boiled tea and potatoes, and ate. Then he would move down through the woods, following the coyote he had promised to trap for Olive and Gerald. As he had told them, he didn’t want to kill her, but if she was coming out near the child, he would.

At three in the morning, he would be sitting on the same stump he circled to every night, smoking a cigarette, listening to the wind move down through the trees. He would smoke two or three cigarettes at the same spot, and then he would move down through the woods again, and back to his camp.

He would lie back, and listen to the wind, and with dawn he would drift away to sleep.

He kept this up for four nights. On his fifth night, just before he was about to go back to his camp, he heard the coyote in among some spruce, where he had set his traps. He realized the coyote had got caught and was dragging the poplar pole the trap was attached to down to the river.

Ivan waited until dawn before he began to track her. The old coyote was smart, but she had her pups with her, and was easily followed because of the pole she had to drag.

She was caught by her right hind leg – and she had attempted to chew the leg when the pole had become wedged between two windfalls. But she had managed to drag herself under the trees without getting caught up, and continued her desperate course, with her little ones yelping encouragement.

She ran, she hid, she manoeuvred, she lay down, with only her ears up. She bit at the trap, the pole, and her leg. And always Ivan came closer.

Ivan had no rifle with him. He had his buck knife and a club of wood he had picked up along the way, banging it against a tree to make sure it wasn’t rotted.

Then he came to a clearing. It was small, and tangled all round with nettles and waist-high grasses – and he lost the trail. Ivan was now sweating in the morning sun. Sweat clung to his face and opened shirt, and dripped from his nose and fell on his chest. In behind him was Hennessey’s swamp – so named because it cut the farthest side of Dr. Hennessey’s property. There was an old bridge built over this swamp that had not been used in forty years. It was made of poplar poles and looked like ripped-up shreds of tar.

Ivan took out his compass, and, flicking his right hand against his ears to keep the mosquitoes away – while dozens of them sucked at the very hand he waved – he took a reading, realizing that the coyote had been backtracking for some time. He put his compass in his vest pocket. He had on a fishing vest, because he could carry everything he needed in it, and he looked about.

On the other side of the swamp, rising out of the ghosting mist, was a maple tree, which Ivan caught out of the corner of his eye, and, cutting along the edge of
the swamp, he made it over and climbed it. He climbed it easily, and when he got three-quarters of the way up, he sat on a branch and looked around. He looked for ten to fifteen minutes without seeing a thing, and was actually drifting off to sleep. And then, in a half-conscious shrug, he opened his eyes and saw a pair of eyes blink ten yards away, looking up at him. She had been there all the time, deep in the nettles, not moving.

As soon as she knew she had been spotted, and though the pole was very heavy, she turned quickly towards the river.

Ivan went to step onto a lower branch, but was so busy watching her he missed it and fell twenty feet.

He landed on his side. But he was up on his feet in a moment, and though it took him ten minutes to get a good breath of air, and though he vomited, he was furious now with the coyote, and remorseless.

He moved forward through the now hip-high nettles, clutching his side.

The coyote moved quickly, in spite of her burden and her pups, whom she was continually watching, and who barked in front of her.

Down they went into the spruce, past the old McDurmot property – where a house stood from 1887-1941 – along the alders, through the stands of poplar and maple, into the fir, into the gully, where the sound of the river became clear.

And Ivan, clutching his side, and leaning against trees every now and then, followed them.

The pups were the first to the river, but halted as soon as they got to the water, looking back as the female dragged the pole down over the bank, and then sat quickly on her haunches to bite at the trap. It
was a hot morning and there was a mist of bugs floating above the brown water. A red bird sat on a red rock in the middle – and to the female coyote’s misfortune, a porter was working the far side of the river.

She heard the loud banging, sniffed the air, howled to her pups, and turned to face Ivan.

Ivan watched her a moment. He had lost his club and looked for another, couldn’t find any, and stepped out.

She turned one way along the shore, and then the other – howled, bared her teeth at him – continually watching for her pups, who, whimpering, darted in and out of the woods.

Ivan got behind her, picked the pole up and hauled it towards him, with his buck knife out. But as things would have it, he banged his sore side with the pole, felt a terrible pain, and fell to his knees. The coyote was over him then, and he only managed to get an arm out or she would have slashed his throat.

She bit through to the bone in his left arm, but he picked her up while he stood and drove the knife deep into her brain.

She fell as if she had never lived, and yet as if her whole life had been preparing for this death. There were some ticks in her ears, as if they shared a common mystery with her, and some fresh nettles in her tail. Her teats were still milky. Her eyes watered. A clover was stuck in between the pads of her right forepaw.

Ivan was bleeding very badly, so he tore his shirt and tried to tie a tourniquet. He made his way up along the bank, feeling again as if he had to vomit. He had a five-mile walk to the road. It took him the rest of the day.

He rested on an upstairs cot in his grandfather Allain’s house for almost a day and a half without telling anyone he was injured.

He kept drifting in and out of sleep. He ran a temperature, vomited some more, kept waking up to look at his left arm. The mattress and the pillow slip were soaked in blood.

Some time during the second night, Margaret came in to speak to him. He was in the smallest room, with the slanted walls and the stovepipe, and the window looking down to the bay.

Everything in this room was part of his life. The wallpaper he’d helped his grandmother with, the furniture he and Antony had bought. A picture of Ralphie at Heath Steele Mines, which he had given Ivan – he had written on the back, “To Ivan, in friendship.” There was also a picture of Gloria when she graduated at eighteen – his mother, young and fastidious. An old scrapbook from the 1950s that had belonged to someone he didn’t know – who had moved away some time ago – and left nothing but pictures that had no dates or titles. These were pictures he had often looked at. One was of a swimming pool at a hotel in Florida, with some people sitting on deck chairs, about 1960.

“Who the fuck would they be?” he would often say, walking about the house, scratching his head. “Hey,” he would yell to his grandmother, “oh, deaf one –”

“What, darlin?”

“Were you ever in Florida, sitting on a deck chair?”

“Of course not – I haven’t even been to Bathurst.”

“Well, who took this picture?” he would say, rubbing his nose and looking at it.

Sometimes he felt he must be trying to make the ceiling revolve, just to pretend he was ill – but then it
actually whirled in circles and seemed to draw him closer to it, and then he would vomit.

Yes, there were other times too. They would go to the church picnic. He would always be kicked out of the church picnic. No matter how he dressed, or tried to look – that is, he tried to dress and look exactly the same as everyone else who was on their way down to the picnic – he would end up being kicked out of the picnic by one of the priests.

He would come home, sit on the doorstep, smoking cigarettes and listening to the grasshoppers tick in the yard, with a heavy pair of black shoes still smelling of the nice polish he’d put to them.

Then his mother would be driven home by Clay Everette – whom he only knew then as Mr. Madgill.

“Every goddamn year,” Gloria would say, grabbing him by the ear, and dragging him squealing into the house, “you get kicked out of the picnic –”

“I know,” he would say, “I know. I try to turn over a new leaf, I do. Next year I’ll kick the shit out of the priest – let go of my ear.”

Then he remembered the nights in January. The snow would be high, and the sky clear as a bell. Little girls – there was always a bunch at the house – sat on the porch to see their breath so they could all pretend they were smoking, and the chunks of snow left on the road by the grader felt unpleasant under your boots.