Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

by David Adams Richards

  Ivan saw in these few days that Ruby wished for Cindi to once again have this fun, to bring her into it, in a manner which would seem once and for all to exclude him. For if he advanced on them to stop it, it would only be proof of the puritanical, brutal strain Ruby was now convincing herself and Cindi that he had.

  He did not know that people used words like shotgun blasts in the dark.

  Once, a long time ago, Ivan went down to Vera and Nevin’s place to deliver a parcel for Ralphie. Vera, this first time they met, hearing that this young, jean-jacketed youth with dark lively eyes and a pug nose, and large hardened hands with tattoos on his knuckles, was about to be married, took him aside. And, as if she were being watched by the obscure matron of those ethics Ivan knew nothing about, Vera spoke reverently to him abut the position of women in society today. He caught only that glimpse of the hidden world where certain ethics were at war, which he knew, or Cindi knew, nothing about.

  He could remember of that day the smell of the fine linen in her hand as she folded it against her stomach as she spoke, and this, along with her quiet, measured voice, left with him the idea of sincerity, which very few other people had ever done. This and the way her husband Nevin moved back and forth, trying not to intrude – much like a brother would not intrude upon a priest giving a lecture to an altar boy about the moral danger of masturbation – gave him a sense that they felt their duty was to instruct. He had no real idea of why.

  He had a better idea of the motives of the police. But they had no idea about him, or the shotgun. The reason he had the shotgun out was to destroy the large oak cabinet in the living room. Since his father had continually for the last twenty months helped himself in one way or the other to those meagre savings of his and Cindi’s, Ivan, in taking his anger out on the oak cabinet, their favourite piece of furniture, believed he was reducing everything to its logical conclusion.

  He tore the money up for a more obscure reason – but a reason the police would not consider. Nor would any legislative assembly, speaking, as they often do today, on family violence. Ivan could not stand that he had started this argument over something so shallow as money. It was better to be rid of it, tear it to shreds.

  Yet he was still resolved to pay Vera and Nevin back.

  Everything was suddenly looked at, not in this light, such as it was, but in the shadows he had been sometimes shown by the more obscure motives of others. He did not understand them as well as he should have, he was too certain of life to be bothered by them; he only knew that they were there.

  The police had not charged him as yet, so it was a matter that was too insignificant for them to hurry over. This also gave him a sense of disquiet. He felt by this almost made light of.

  Finally, after five days, Ivan went back to the apartment and packed his clothes, took his buck knife and rifle, and moved onto his grandfather’s old lobster boat.

  “So you are leaving her,” someone said.

  “She has left me also,” he replied.

  Living together and married, their life was, for that short time, never boring.

  In the winter Ivan would get home after dark. Then, after supper, he would go out and take long walks up behind the high line – where Adele’s father, Joe Walsh, had his camp, or in the fall he would take a bucket of apples and put them out at the edge of a field, or he would put a salt-lick down somewhere, or have his back pockets filled with carrots or lettuce.

  Once he said: “Well, Cindi, there’s a dry doe coming out behind Ruby’s paddock in the morning – and that little buck is there as well – but I don’t think he’s going to last too long with the poachers about.” It made no difference to Ivan that he was a poacher himself. “I have to work tomorrow, so I want you to take a walk, and take that road up to the left of the high line behind there, into Joe Walsh’s – Joe knows me – I’m a big friend of his, so he won’t mind. And if he does mind, too bad about him.”

  “And what am I spose to do, Ivan?”

  “I’ll tell you what yer spose to do,” Ivan said, as if he just this moment thought of it. “You have to see if the deer are crossing the road. Just check for signs up to the big puddle – or,” he said, brightening up again, as if he just thought of this as well, and now it had become indispensable to his train of thought, “you could take my waders and put them on – of course you’d look like Popeye’s son Sweetpea in them – and try not to get stuck in the middle of the puddle or you’ll get all puddled up and drown or something – and watch out for moose. On your left on the other side is a little path which goes down to Joe’s camp at Brookwall. Better yet,” he said, brightening up once more, “take a barrel of apples – as many as you can – saddle Troy, tickle the back part of his mouth to get the bit in, and take those bunch of apples I got down there by the laundry basket, just hang a bucket of them off the horn – or, better yet, tie the bucket to the horn and then through the back split where the show girth is spose to go – so then you won’t have to worry about it –”

  “The show what?” Cindi said, blinking at him and moving her knees together and the toes of her sneakers so that they touched one another.

  “Show girth,” Ivan said lackadaisically. “And make sure you watch all the time, for there might be someone who mistakes you for a moose and shoots you – we can never be sure who’s out there in the woods with a rifle. It’s usually Dad. But don’t be scared of them – better yet, you may as well take the rifle – not my .306, because it’ll knock your shoulder off – take the .30-30.”

  “Which one is which?”

  “I’m not going to answer that because I’ve told you a thousand times which is which – and I’ll probably never be able to tell you – you’ll just have to figure it out sooner or later, but I’ll give you just a small hint – it’s that one right there.” He pointed. “You used it last summer when we went target practising – dontcha remember?”

  Cindi nodded and tapped her sneakers together.

  They were silent for quite some time.

  Then Ivan, sitting at the small round table with the flowered plastic table mats, noticed Cindi talking to herself.

  “What?”

  “I’m just trying to remember all you told me to do.”

  “Well never mind – just do what you can remember, when you remember to do it.”

  Then the telephone rang and Ivan answered it and yelled: “What’s goin on! Oh hello, Doris – you old dog. How’s your mustn’t-touch-it? What? No problem – if I can get the car started – ya, ya, ya –”

  Then he hung the receiver up gently, mused over something, and put on his boots, untied. His eyes looked both gentle and wild, and his tattooed hands were scarred from climbing trees to throw raccoons to the ground. The raccoons would tear at his hands as he threw them out of the trees, and when they landed on the ground they would all run away. “Don’t tree them if you can’t handle them,” Ivan yelled, swaying from the top limb, forty feet in the air.

  Then he went over to Doris’s to tear down a nest the wasps had built just above her porch. When he came back he gave sugar lumps to the horses – being extra nice to Troy, and Ruby’s horse, Tantramar.

  When he got back into the house, he said to Cindi: “She yelled at me not to drop the nest, so here I go and get stung by fifty of them or maybe a hundred.” He lowered his shirt collar to show the welts on his neck. For a moment he seemed to reflect on this.

  “I’ll put some ice on those,” Cindi said.

  “Yes, ice me down for Christ’s sake – or I’ll go into shock or something. That’s the last wasp nest I’ll ever take down from her porch.”

  He folded his arms resolutely and tapped his feet.

  “That don’t matter for poor old Doris,” he reflected, smiling, and lighting a cigarette quickly, as if to hide this tender reflection.

  The next morning Cindi tried to think of all the things he had told her, and, going out to the edge of the paddock, she shifted the bucket of apples from one arm to the other, and, weari
ng a pair of huge waders that were tied about her neck, she stared gloomily off into the distant high line. And after walking twenty yards or so, feeling the wind at her back, blowing against the long, cold furrows of a muddy field, with the sun lukewarm in the greying sky, she began to back up again. Little by little, she backed up until she reached the spot where she had been. Then with fierce resolution she turned and walked back to the apartment.

  “What did you manage to do?” Ivan asked at supper that evening.

  “I managed to get your waders on – but I had to tie them up with that friggin old garter belt that was left down in the basement – by that woman.”

  “That’s the very best – did you take the apples?”

  “I took some apples, and I went out to the field –”

  “That’s the very best – you saddle Troy?”

  “No, I didn’t think of it.”

  “No, that was a bad idea. Thought of that at work and came to the decision that it was a bad idea anyways –”

  “So anyways, I didn’t take the rifle because you have two kinds of bullets –”

  “Ya – that’s right, as I was thinking I wouldn’t want you to blow your head off anyways. So did you see if they were crossing the road?”

  “I didn’t see them on the road.”

  “Where did you put the apples?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The apples?”

  “Well, I left them out by the paddock as you said the doe comes out there anyways.”

  “Okay – apples right by the paddock.”

  “Except Candy ate most of them.” (Candy was one of the draught horses.)

  Ivan said nothing, reflected on this, and then gave a sigh.

  “But,” Cindi said, “I saw some tracks –”

  “Saw some tracks. Good, where did you see some tracks –”

  “I’ll show you,” Cindi said, smiling in self-delight.

  After supper they walked out into the field. Behind them, snorting now and then, was Troy, plodding the cold earth.

  “Here,” Cindi said, in triumph. “The tracks!”

  Then, seeing the look on Ivan’s face, she put her head down, as if she had been accused of something.

  Ivan often noticed this about her and decided it must have come from her epilepsy.

  “Those are good tracks,” Ivan said, sitting on his haunches. “And everything like that there, except they’re rabbit tracks – but no matter – we know where the rabbits are. I was wondering if there were any left about here – so now I know – well, mister man, she’ll be a different story this winter than last – because we have found our rabbits, Cindi.”

  “Found our rabbits,” Cindi said, her nose running from the cold. “Yes, we have found our tracks,” she said.

  But now everything had changed. At work he had a pink slip. He had moved out of the apartment. Some nights he would go for long walks, but what did that matter? And people whom he didn’t know looked at him, as if they knew all about him, and smiled.

  There were other things also – those people whom he did not like seemed ready to express a gaiety when he himself was miserable.

  It was true that he had seen Ruby’s cousin Eugene visiting Cindi three nights ago – this was just before his pink slip. At work there had been some ore clogging the shute to the crusher. Men jabbed at it, and poked at it with no result, so Ivan, sweat and water running down his face, and his left ear seeming to be permanently twisted under his hard hat, stood upon it, jumping up and down.

  The foreman told him twice to climb out of the bin, and he twice told the foreman that he would.

  “Ya, ya,” he kept saying.

  Then, just when he was about to climb out, he took a final kick at a small piece of ore under his boot – to the left of his boot – which, in fact, he did not see as he kicked – and the tons of ore let go immediately beneath him. Now, when the ore let go, it seemed not to be under him, but, in fact, over his head, and he reached up and managed to catch a chain at the side of the shute and hold himself. Then, pulling himself over the bin, he walked away as if it hadn’t happened. He simply went to the cage and surfaced, got in a Jeep and drove to the dry, stripped off and showered for a half-hour. Then for the rest of the afternoon he worked on his car in the parking lot behind the warehouse.

  The parking lot was dry and empty, while the greying headframe sat heavy in the air. He had jacked the car up and was under it, when suddenly he was being kicked on the boots.

  “What’s this, a fuckin floater?”

  “No,” Ivan said, “I had a scare.”

  “You had a scare – you talk to your shift boss – you don’t come out and steal my fuckin Jeep.”

  Ivan looked up and saw the man’s legs, and then rolled himself out from under the car.

  “Ya – well I had a fuckin scare,” Ivan said, knowing he was talking to the mine’s manager, and knowing instinctively that this was the one tactic that would save him. He simply turned, threw the wrench on the ground, kicked the jack out from under the car as if he was terribly annoyed, and walked back into the dry.

  He was given a pink slip, but he knew in actual fact he could have been suspended. But the one thing about this experience is that he could not tell Cindi about it, because even if he did, it would not be the same – that is, everything about it would be told differently than he would have told the exact same story when they were together. Everything was different.

  He left the mines the day after and never went back.

  2

  The next night he met his father Antony at Dr. Hennessey’s. His father had arthritis in his left arm and was there to get a shot of cortisone. During the winter, Antony would use a small butane lighter to warm his left hand if he was out with the horses. His father was Allain Garrett’s son; Ivan, however, had kept his mother’s maiden name, Basterache.

  Ivan felt responsible, not only for his father, but for his two sisters – Valerie, who was eleven, and Margaret, sixteen.

  “I might seem to be a carefree individual,” Antony said to him one night. “And sometimes I might be something of a carefree individual – the way I can wiggle my ears – but I have nothin since your mother left me. You’d think a woman would come home after seven years.”

  Antony would get into conversations with people who stopped to buy Valerie’s worms in the spring. Valerie would sit out near the highway, a decent little girl of eleven, in a big hat, behind a huge cardboard box with a sign which read WORMS 4 SALE : 2 4 1 ON WORMS!

  Ivan had noticed that Antony had gotten into what Ivan called “The World War Two Factor,” and he would occasionally blame his lot in life on the fact that there was a bias against him because he was French.

  “The only thing I was ever any good for was to bleed to death in a war – that’s all they wanted me for,” Antony said to a man, who was busy holding a night crawler in either hand. “And I went – I went – look at this here.” And he would show a scratch on his forearm quickly.

  “Where did you fight?”

  “Just about everywhere.”

  “Who did you fight?”

  “Almost everyone – I was at Dieppe – twice. I fought the Dieppenamese over at that place.”

  “Well, we all had to offer something during those years.”

  “Offer – I guess offer – but my kids are no good, and my wife took off with Clay Everette Madgill because he has money – so things are bad all around. No, I didn’t mind fighting – don’t get me so wrong on that – I believe in it–”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Forty-seven.”

  The man said nothing.

  Antony sniffed and picked up a handful of worms, looking them over, and then told Valerie to go get some fresh earth.

  “I look forty-seven – more closer to fifty-seven,” Antony said. “In fact, almost sixty.”

  “I was going to say if you were just forty-seven, you’d be kind of young for the war.”

  “Well, it was a
long son of a whore of a war,” Antony said, as if the person had offended him and he no longer wished to talk. Then he looked so quizzically and angrily that the man decided it was time to leave.

  “And don’t be back,” Antony said. “We’ll sell our worms to those who know how to treat them!”

  Now Antony was sitting on a chair with his feet up on Dr. Hennessey’s desk. Aunt Clare, the doctor’s sister-in-law, had let Ivan through the side door, so Antony didn’t know he was there.

  Ivan stood at the door, watching his father as Hennessey gave him the shot. There was a moon over the dark, stubbled lane, and hard snow still piled in the yard.

  Antony rolled up his sleeve because he knew he was going to have his blood pressure taken. His arm was quite white, surprisingly to Ivan, who had hardly seen him with his shirtsleeves rolled up. And his shirt was opened, and his undershirt was the old-fashioned type with straps.

  Ivan knew intuitively that Antony had been discussing him and the marriage that had fallen through. Dr. Hennessey took no interest in such talk.

  But Antony had always told Ivan that Cindi was as “stupid as a fucking boot on a two-year-old. …”

  He looked at his father’s huge back, and the way his head was bent, and the way the room’s shadow played on the back of his reddish neck. His father had marvellously sad eyes, and Ivan could forgive him almost everything because of that.

  Doctor Hennessey looked bored with the talk and stood in salt-and-pepper slippers and his old khaki pants that were held up by a gigantic belt, and wearing a big red bow tie that seemed to wrinkle his Adam’s apple more than usual. He was standing off in the darkness of the study. The darkness rested on the table and on the brand-new table lamp, which glowed greenly in the late-evening room.