Although ten people dropped by to help him, and each one of them said that he shouldn’t move the furniture, he was determined to move it. He ordered Vera in to pack her china, and ordered Ralphie to help him carry the cabinet out.
And every time someone obeyed him, he would nod in an aggressive way, as if this was the best feeling he had ever had. Then, about three o’clock, all the furniture that they had piled in the field burned, but with the neighbours helping they managed to save the house.
The black smoke rising in the cloud of grey smoke Ruby had seen was the lumber that had been upset on the old bridge finally going up in flames. Ivan was walking chest deep in water beneath it because of his fresh worry – that the entire bridge, as old and as rickety as it was, was about to fall upon the horse. And Rudolf, sensing this, was looking behind him, and Ivan was trying to find ways to prop the bridge up.
“What we gotta do, Rudolf, is find out a way to haul her in the other direction when she goes – and that might be the fuckin ticket all around.”
Then Ivan went beneath the water to get a look at things. The horse’s outside hind leg was stretched back and caught up under the runner, and probably broken.
Ivan came up, took a finger and wiped his nose.
“You got yourself in one fuck of a mess here, Rudie,” he said. “How did you let the old man talk you into this,” he said, as he walked in front of it. Ivan, for the first time, felt feeble in his efforts to do anything, and in his sudden anger he took to beating the horse to make it lunge. “Come on you son of a bitch, come on,” he said, “you fuckin cocksucker – move.”
The old horse made three or four great lunges, tearing up the mud and roots beneath it, splashing itself up to the blinkers, wheezing and showing its blackened teeth. And after Ivan’s fury, settling down seven inches from where it was before, with the bridge on fire just above its head.
“Ah, ya poor broke-up son of a whore,” Ivan said, looking at the horse’s tarnished studded collar, and its flags and two little bells. “If I had half an I.Q., I’d be on my way to Sudbury.”
Stepping away from the horse and shaking his fist, he yelled, “Sudbury, Sudbury, Sudbury – where you can’t find me to get you out of fuckin scrapes like this here. Because you are a dumb horse – TROY is a smart horse, and right now he’s in his stall eating hay. And where are you? Answer me that!” he said, crying suddenly.
Then he walked furiously across the bog and into the woods, wiping tears from his eyes. He came out a minute later dragging a pole three times as long as he was. He was going to jar the bridge the other way. Once he did that, he felt he would have much better luck moving the sleigh.
The horse wheezed and coughed, and watched him with the pathetic stoic eyes seen so often in beasts of burden; the little flags on its blinkers, crooked, and the coarse twine unravelling from its bobbed tail.
Ivan, tears still in his eyes, laughed when he looked at the flags, and got upon the horse’s back to straighten them out.
Then suddenly, out of the blue, the old horse’s ears caught on fire as sparks flew in a great billow, snapping at the air.
Ivan, furious at this, put them out with his bare hands, yelling: “I’d rather you die of smoke than flame.”
Then he laughed because of the way the ears smoked, and then cried for the same reason.
“You know what I’ve just been thinking, Rudie,” he began to say, “that goddamn Cindi is probably at this moment –”
But just then the bridge unceremoniously tumbled upon them both.
15
By November there was snow on the ground. People could walk on the icy fields through the woods and not see a living sign of an animal, only the eerie, indefinable, and somehow calculated design of ice webs in the burnt-out trees.
One day a little coyote padded out across the field, with a small body but great big paws and ears. It walked into old Allain’s yard and stole a chicken.
Antony came out with the .30–.30, fired at it four times, but missed it every time. Then he walked back into the house and sat down.
Then, sticking his tongue into his cheek to puff it out, he got Valerie to kiss him, and without looking at her, hauled his last Extra Big chocolate bar from his pocket.
Then he took a walk to see Vera and Nevin and their new baby girl.
He would come over every day now to talk to them. It didn’t matter what he talked about. Sometimes it was the weather – the storm that might come, the planet might explode, something was going on in Lemec with the snow crabs, or he had heard Clay Everette had finally been put in his place at a horse-hauling in Napan – and he would sit there and drink tea.
He said nothing about the past summer. Once in a while when someone mentioned the past summer he would look at them, with casual interest, as if he were a stranger that had just been informed about events that were unknown to him.
He found that it was best not to mention Margaret to them, so he did not. And he sensed that it was true that Nevin was going to go away for a while, and Vera was going to move to town.
The birth of Hadley – for this is what the little girl was called – happened at night. Just as Vera could not have foreseen that she would become pregnant, and then believed it was her moral choice that she had, she did not foresee the events of the birth either. Two weeks before her due date her water had broken when she was visiting Thelma, and so it was convenient to cross the road to the hospital, where the baby was born in the delivery room, and because it was going to be a dry birth and inducing didn’t work – they were forced to do a Caesarean.
And this is what Vera spent her time talking about to Antony, believing that she alone was responsible for everything that had happened – and therefore more content than at any time in her life.
Antony didn’t talk too much about his own family any more. Sometimes he would mention Valerie’s marks on a test at school. And on occasion when someone mentioned Gloria, he would look at them and nod seriously.
He seemed unsure of himself now and didn’t do too much outside any more. For instance, he didn’t go down river and drink beer. Nor did he go up to Madgill’s to get his alimony cheque. It came by mail now – always a little late, and signed by Clay Everette.
They had heard that Tantramar got sick and had to be put down. But the news from the family was that Ruby had gotten married to someone one night at the church in Chatham Head. But he didn’t talk about this. It seemed natural, it seemed inevitable, and it seemed pointless.
Antony would return the conversation to the snow crabs in Lemec, or to a weather balloon he saw drifting high in the sky, so high in fact that he thought it was a spaceship – and then look at them with the hope that they would believe him.
He told Vera he could get her another piano, but they didn’t seem to believe him – until he arrived at three in the morning with it loaded on a truck. Antony stood in mud up to his knees, with the lights on and the truck motor throttling in the dark, and with a song playing on the radio in the cab, which smelled of pine freshener. He refused to take money for it, telling Nevin it was for his summer’s work.
Then he got Jeannie and Frank Russell to help him unload it and carry it into the house. Frank, his red, freckled hands showing in the porch light, and Jeannie standing in behind, with her gum boots to her knees, and her hearing aid turned up full volume.
So there was an atonement of a sort, the red hands under the porch light, and Jeannie’s decisive nod to Vera when she entered the house, wearing her husband’s long brown coat, walking squat on her thin sturdy legs, her gum boots squeaking, and her hands clutching the rim of the piano like some little Tasmanian devil, while Vera stood in her nightgown and could do nothing more than offer them hot chocolate – for that was the only luxury in the world Vera allowed herself.
Whenever Antony left Vera’s, he would go home through the field and out behind his shed. He would walk into the house and up the stairs slowly. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he would stare glumly at
the dresser. Then, lying his head on the pillow, with the clock ticking beside him, he would listen as the wind rattled the window and people moved about downstairs.
A year passed before Cindi got married again. Her maid of honour was a girl from Welshford, who was a friend of the groom, so she had moved out of the sphere of people surrounding Ivan’s case, moved away from it – and into a new life and mythology, which caused the standard speculations of how it would differ from her previous life.
What was unfortunate, some people said now, was that she would ever get married again. Thelma only sighed. She sighed, because she believed the sigh made her look concerned and understanding. And then she looked at Vera and Olive – who she hoped would approve of her sigh.
The whole idea, especially from Olive, was that if Cindi had only talked to her, or to somebody like “her” (and here she cast a kindly look at Adele who was not, of course, like “her”), then she would not have jumped right into another marriage. The whole idea that she was pregnant again was awful. The idea was again fostered that she was a simpleton, and was taken advantage of – and another idea complemented it – she was a simpleton who took advantage of others – those who last year had tried to help her, and straighten her about.
The only one of them who went to the wedding was Adele. It looked so eerie. Cindi was more than a little pregnant and was already showing. A band played outside the church with a set of bagpipes. Confetti was thrown, and all was the same as before.
Cindi went past Adele without recognizing her. She had gone into another group, another life. The car door was opened and she waved, caught Adele’s wave, and blinked in the sunlight.
Adele went into the graveyard, which was sectioned in two.
The section near the bay was the graves of the first settlers, and the graves nearest the woods were the newer ones.
At one of the newest graves Adele stopped. Her lips trembled, and then she shrugged. The granite marker in the earth simply read:
Ivan Basterache
A Man
1957–1979
It was quite a famous marker for a while. And then it was overgrown and forgotten altogether.
David Adams Richards is the author of thirteen novels, including Hope in the Desperate Hour, Mercy Among the Children, co-winner of the prestigious Giller Prize; The Friends of Meager Fortune, winner of a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book; and, most recently, The Lost Highway. He is also the author of the celebrated Miramichi trilogy: Nights Below Station Street, winner of the Governor General’s Award; Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace, winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award; and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down, winner of the Thomas Raddall Award.
Richards has also written Gemini Award-winning screenplays for the CBC-TV adaptations of his novels For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down and Nights Below Station Street. “Small Gifts,” his original screenplay for CBC-TV, won a Gemini Award and the New York International Film Festival Award for Best Script. His books of non-fiction include Hockey Dreams, the Governor General’s Award-winning fishing memoir Lines on the Water, Playing the Inside Out, and, most recently, God Is.
Copyright © 1990 by Newmac Amusement Inc.
Cloth edition published 1990
Mass market edition published 1991
Emblem edition published 2000
This Emblem edition published 2009
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Richards, David Adams, 1950-
Evening snow will bring such peace / David Adams Richards.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-311-9
I. Title.
PS8585.117E9 2009 C813′.54 C2009-901617-6
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