Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (6 page)

There was snow on the ground, and the wind smelled of ice in the frozen rain. She moved towards her father’s truck in the dark. If she had gotten a drive home with Lloyd, her father’s foreman, as she had on the previous two nights, she would have missed him.

But as she waited for her father, Armand Savard came out of the rain towards her. She gave a start because he looked something like Missle, except his skin was darker, like an Acadian’s. In fact, Missle had a blemish on the side of his chin – and just on that side, Savard had one also, a little darker perhaps. These marks were signs of premature birth. Missle had been two months premature and so, too, had Savard.

Just the day after she met Adele, she was sent with a load of old tires to a warehouse down river. The streets were broken up, the bay was dark. There was a lonely sea gull sitting on the pier. Suddenly the sun came out cold and caught a window above her and sunlight hit her eyes. She turned about and saw an apartment building across the road. There was an ugly window that looked out onto a dirt parking lot.

It did not enter her mind at the moment, but over the course of time and events, the apartment building, Cindi, and Savard would all seem to fuse together.

Antony walked up the church lane with his daughter Valerie by the hand. He was puffing, and every now and again he would stop to cough.

It was at these times, when alone with her that Antony would tell Valerie about his youth. He would tell her how he worked in a hotel in Toronto when he was sixteen, and how he swam the river with his brother Claude, or how a friend got killed in the hold of a ship in Millbank – the dry pulpwood on that far-off 1955 June day, which seemed only a second removed when he remembered it, falling an inch from his own skull. He would talk to her about the road and the river, and how everything was growing bigger.

He stopped to find a Chiclet for her, covered her little hand with his big one, and they continued on their way.

When they got home, his daughter took her brownie uniform off and put it in the closet. Later, Antony went up to her room and, getting on his knees
with her, said two and a half prayers – that is, two Hail Mary’s and a half of the Our Father.

Then, tucking the little girl in and collecting every doll in the room to put on her bed, plus the transistor radio so she could listen to her “Hour of Power” rock program, he went in to see his older daughter, Margaret.

“Yer not hanging about with all those boys,” he said to her.

“Garçons?”
she said, looking up.

“You know what boys – Bramble Much and that crew.”

“No,” she said. She stared at her father with a great deal of indifference, but he didn’t notice this.

“Good – you help Val wash her hair tomorrow morning before you go to school.”

He went into his room and sat on the edge of the bed, just as he had sat there since he was three years of age. In fact, except for the bed getting bigger, the room hadn’t changed. There was an alarm clock on the floor, near the box of Kleenex he always kept beside his bed, because he coughed all night, and a floor-model radio near the window with the curtains pinched back.

It was a lovely night in spring. You could hear the cars from a long way away splashing through the last of the snow that had run onto the road. The twilight lasted a long time, and the sky was warm. At dark, birds twittered here and there, one sitting on the oil barrel, a group of small sparrows in the tree, and a swallow darkly darting into and out of the shed. The window light also cast on the stones below, as if inviting all into this warmth.

He decided to clean out his wallet, laying things that he wished to throw out on the lopsided bed, with the pink covering, beside him.

Then he found a pen and scribbled down some things he would need for the upcoming horse-hauling.

Then, when he heard Frank Russell in the yard, he left the house. Frank had brought the truck around to take away Rudolf for the horse-hauling – he was going to team him with his own Belgian, Catterwall, which he had done before.

Antony was paid sixty dollars to rent the horse out for the hauling. The trouble was they had a hard time getting the old horse on the truck. It stood firmly in the mud, sideways to the truck with its ears back, breathing in a sombre way, a solitary member of its race standing alone in the little yard, haltered and blinking, with the bandages hanging from its hind leg, and its stomach covered in sawdust where it had lain.

It would neither eat an apple Frank tried to give it, nor react to Antony’s kicks. Finally Antony, vest and jacket opened, hat tilted and boots untied, and the laces dragging happenstance in the mud, went in to get the pitchfork.

“We’ll get you on the truck, mister fuckin man,” he said.

Frank had already planned to guard his team very carefully for the next day’s event, but he and his wife also planned to tea another team; his wife, Jeannie, being the one to put him up to it.

At this point, Antony stood, pitchfork in hand, standing under the lone light of the shed, with the smell of mud and the twittering frogs in the ditch – that is, all the sounds and smells of nostalgia.

Just then, Ivan drove into the yard and, with his car still running, came over to them.

“We’re trying to get Dolfy into the truck,” Antony said, moving back slightly.

“Yer not going to team him.”

“Yes–”

“Oh for fuckin sure now,” Ivan said. Then he spoke in French to Antony, but Antony, as a formal reprimand, answered him in English.

“His leg’s the very best,” Antony said. The weight of his statement fell upon the old blinkered and haltered horse, with its belly covered in sawdust.

Antony then snapped the flat side of the pitchfork against the horse’s rump, but Ivan said, “Hold it!” And to Rudolf, “Get up in the box.” He took Rudolf by the halter and smacked his lips, and kicked gently at his front left leg. The old horse turned about and walked up the plank.

“Oh, we’re some smart,” Frank said.

“I don’t need to pitchfork a fuckin horse at any rate,” Ivan said from the far side of the animal.

“Ya, well maybe I should cure you of being the big-feelinged lad,” Frank said under his breath.

“Don’t let fear stop you,” Ivan said.

Antony looked at them and the horse in the box, sighed, and took the sixty dollars, two tens and two twenties.

At the horse-hauling there was an altercation. Ivan had come out of the woods, after going along the trap lines and picking up his sets, which he had hanging in the trees. He came out and got to the dance at 11:30.
When he saw Cindi dancing with Dorval Gene, he threw a chair at them and left.

Some time later, Jeannie Russell woke up to find Ivan with Rudolf and, thinking he was teaing the horse, attacked him with a crop as Ivan was leading him out of the stall.

Jeannie was a small, spiteful, nasty little woman who treated the horses worse than any man she knew would because this would prove her superiority. Her scorn for men was great. She and Frank kept vigil all night over the horses, slept beside them – accused others of doing what they themselves would do, and Frank was, in more ways than one, under her control.

Later Frank, with his raw-boned look – a reddish, almost fierce complexion – and his wife, standing tooth and nail beside his waist, fought against the small, deceptively strong Ivan Basterache, with the old half-blind horse, Rudolf, breaking through the paddock and clomping at a sort of half-halt, heavy-footed, down river, moving sideways along the road, back to its floor-dug shed. Cindi tried to stop the fight, which she believed had started because of her, and in doing so she was hit in the stomach. Other people joined in and beat Ivan to the ground for attacking his pregnant wife. Cindi went to the floor on one knee, like a boxer who had just been hit in the liver.

Because of what was happening to his son, Antony found himself catapulted into the fierce circle of rumour that he tried to control to his own benefit.

“What happened down there?” he asked Gloria.
They were sitting in her glassed-in porch that looked out over the dry highway.

“I don’t know,” Gloria said. “When was the last time you saw me at the community centre? Ruby’s gone out to see her colt – you have to ask her.”

But he shook his head, expecting the worst – in some secret perverse way – because his own life had been miserable, hoping the worst would happen to others.

Dorval Gene had said that Ivan threw a chair that missed them by a fraction, and that Ivan had run from the hall as if all courage had failed him, only to be found hidden behind a horse an hour later. This was the rumour that started to circulate.

“Now what in hell is Ivan up to?” Gloria said.

Antony just shook his head.

“It’s all different now than when we were young,” he said.

Far away across the field the trees were green, and the pulpwood in the field below was drying in the sun.

“Well, we can’t live our children’s lives for them,” Gloria said. “They’ll have to work their squabbles out.” Then she added, “Clay just decided he’s going to build Ruby a house.”

“Ruby a house – God bless her.”

“He says she’s too old to be here and she mayswell have a house of her own,” Gloria said.

“Of course,” Antony said, “I can see that – she needs a house. …”

After talking a while longer, Antony went out to see Ruby.

Ruby had the colt chained and was brushing it.

“Tony,” she said, “how are you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s this trouble –”

Ruby frowned over the top of the colt. The little thing got skittery when Antony came towards it, its small head lifting rigidly up against the halter clamps.

“Yes,” Ruby said, “he went down there last week and got into a big blowout – that’s the tricks Ivan gets up to.”

“Goddamn him,” Antony said, without needing one more word of explanation but as if everything had already been proven to be true.

He paused for a moment.

“And that little girl pregnant,” he said. “He’s a coward.”

“I know, I know,” Ruby said, blowing a bubble with her gum and brushing the horse back from the withers. “He never thinks. Once again he could have killed her.”

“Almost did,” Anthony said.

“Just a bee-hair wide,” Ruby said, “with that old chair.”

In Clay Everette’s yard, Antony’s self-esteem always fell. He wanted to leave but he went back inside. Gloria was still sitting on the couch. There was the smell of boiled turnips and the whir of a fan somewhere. There was the long-tailed fluffy cat sitting beside her, and she was stroking its fur absent-mindedly with her red-painted fingernails.

Clay had gone to pick up a truck that he’d bid on tender the month before, so she was alone. He sat down on the smallest of the three chairs facing her.

“Tony, how’s Margaret?” she asked suddenly.

She was drinking and her eyes were glassy.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. There was a smell of burning leaves that emanated through the long windows
that made the sun hotter on his back, and he could see Gloria sweating as she tipped up the glass, and he saw her neck. “She’s man crazy,” he said.

“Poor Margaret,” she said, and as she said it she clinked some ice at the bottom of the glass and looked down into it a second. “I could have taken her – she begged to come with me. Valerie was too young – I mean, we know that now. Now Margaret and I could have done things together.” And the way she said “now Margaret and I could have done things together” was surprisingly shallow.

She finished her drink and looked about the room. Then she grabbed the cat by the fur and dug her fingernails into it. “Oh, scruffy cat,” she said.

“Oh, scruffy cat,” Antony said, reaching over carefully to pat it. “Our kids don’t know who they are today – with all this shit going on,” Antony said.

“No, they don’t know who they are,” Gloria said, getting up and walking into the kitchen, walking away from him so that he couldn’t help staring at her hips, and, holding the glass in her hand, she clinked the melting ice. “But we tried – and we tried until we got tired of trying – and then,” she said, as she poured another vodka out of the large side of the jigger, “we tried some more. But with you and I not getting along – and the money not coming in. Well,” she said, biting a piece of celery, and wagging it, “no matter how we tried, it was out of our hands.”

Then she came towards him, still wagging the celery. “But I’m still sorry I wasn’t with Margaret when she was growing up – there’s so much a woman could tell her.”

And there was something about the phrase that was again false and meaningless, that came off television
sets and nights in bars or cottages, and had nothing to do with the magnificence of her daughter. Nor did she care that her voice was false. Then she sat down heavily on the couch and took a drink.

“We should have boarded Ivan out longer,” Antony said. “If we could have kept him in school at Tracadie, it mightn’t have been so bad on you.”

“Ivan, I never got over the pain he put me through.”

“I told him – I told him,” Antony said, shaking his head bitterly.

“And now he’s exactly crazy,” Gloria said.

“Well,” Antony said passionately, after a minute, “I knew you suffered but I didn’t know the half of it. I should have trusted ya before – I shoulda – I shoulda trusted you before!”

Gloria finished her drink as if she were angry with it. Then there was a silence. Her eyes burned brightly and there was water in them. Then she stared up at him indifferently, as if he wasn’t there.

Antony got home to the same house, the same walls, the same yard, with the ever-present sameness to the problems he had, leaving behind his other life. He took off his sapphire ring and placed it on the windowsill above the sink, and stared out at a flat bunch of alders and the old, rusted oil barrel across in the field.

He was quiet until he saw his oldest daughter.

“What in hell are you doing with your new slacks on?” he said.

She had come in through the back way, up through the woods, and had some mud on the bottom of her new slacks, which he had just gotten for her. He
noticed how she had been looking at them as she walked, and how they bagged about her knees. The May heat lay against the window and in the corner of the room.

He did not know how furious he would become. But once fury starts it is hard to calm.