Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

by David Adams Richards

  When Antony noticed Ivan, he winked.

  Then he said to Dr. Hennessey: “Now you did this here, and helped me out – I’m going to come over tomorrow with a load of fill.”

  “Well, I don’t believe I need fill, Tony,” the doctor said.

  “What – of course you need fill,” Antony said. “You could use some on your front yard.”

  Antony turned, his heavy black wallet linked to a chain on his belt and protruding out of his back pocket. Then he stopped by the door and grabbed Ivan by the shoulder, saying for some reason with tears in his eyes:

  “Now this young lad just beat the shit out of his wife – so I have to go straighten him out.”

  The old doctor, puffing on his pipe, turned away furiously. Ivan said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  Once outside, Antony was angry about the fill.

  “Well – why did you offer it to him then?” Ivan said.

  “Well, you know how he relishes what I do for him – first I have to ask him, and then I have to do all the dirty work.”

  So with that, Ivan didn’t say anything else.

  Tonight Antony had a plan – in fact, he always had a plan – he couldn’t go without a plan of some kind, and like people who are always watching out for themselves, this plan might change in midstream if any other direction suited him. As Ivan, who was always a loner, noted about his father, his father couldn’t do without a plan, or a partner. His partner in the last few months was Gordon Russell, whom he happened to be selling porno movies for – which he didn’t think Ivan knew about, except Ivan had found them under his father’s bed, and in his suitcase. Ivan wouldn’t care except he did not like Gordon, because Gordon was one of the men who had had his mittens on Cindi.

  The day before, Antony had cut his horse’s hoof and wanted Ivan to take a look at it. He had cut Rudolf’s left hind hoof. Rudolf had been Ivan’s horse, but Antony had beat him at a game of horseshoes when he was eleven and took it. Antony had bet him the sleigh for the horse.

  It was the only horse Ivan ever owned. However, he gave riding lessons at Madgill’s and had broken Tantramar for Ruby Madgill last year.

  Rudolf was a Belgian. Antony had bobbed its tail so tight that when Ivan was young, he thought it would cut off blood to its head. So he used to sneak out at night to look at it. There Rudolf would be all alone, its one pile of manure looking lonely in the centre of the floor.

  Antony worked it day and night. He hired it out for sleigh rides, with twenty screaming, mittened children aboard, and with a pair of deer antlers attached by a strap to its head, while Antony was dressed in a red suit with black buttons.

  “Are you a Santa?”

  “Fuckin right.”

  He took it into the woods – and whenever he got drunk, which was almost continually, he tried to sell it down river. He would kick it, and then order it to bite his ear off to make people respect him. Though a strong horse, it was small, and Antony had tried to pass it off as a quarter horse to a young girl from the air base who wanted to take riding lessons. Ivan had heard about this in time, just as Antony was about to sell it, and came down and had to put his father in a headlock right in front of the girl.

  “Yer squeezing my fuckin ears off.”

  “Tell her what it is.”

  “No.”

  “Tell her.”

  “No.”

  In many ways Antony had lived by his wits his whole life through.

  “Give us a ride home – I want to show you Rudolf,” Antony said.

  “Why?” Ivan said. He was looking up the road, almost as if he expected Cindi to pop out of the woods and come running to him with her black eye. They were standing at the bottom of the doctor’s lane, in the middle of a long turn, tangent to some small bare trees.

  In the car going down river, Antony tried on a bunch of watches that he was supposed to sell. As soon as they got into the car he hauled them out – he had a whole pocketful. He held them up to his ear. Then he held them up to Ivan’s ear.

  “Go way,” Ivan said. “I’m trying to drive the cocksuckin car.”

  “Don’t tell me I don’t know my watches,” Antony said.

  “They’re all about a hundred dollars a piece – I imagine,” Ivan said.

  Then Antony berated all of his family, starting with Ivan, for not listening to his experiences over the years – that he had at least two-dozen experiences that no one listened to. This was not a new charge that he levelled. He had always felt that his family did not care for him – except for Valerie, whom he doted upon.

  Their situation was this. Ivan’s mother, and now Antony’s ex-wife, Gloria Basterache and he had boarded Ivan out as a boy. He had beaten the snot out of him, and now Ivan was a man. They did not know one another.

  “So,” Antony said, after some reflection, looking out towards the bay, “you and Cindi are on the outs, I hear.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it –”

  “Just being parental.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Very best.” There was a silence. “She’s a dumb quiff anyhow.”

  The moon was high over the trees. Its light cast over the yard. From the shed, Ivan and Antony could see one upstairs light on in the middle of the house. Ivan looked at Rudolf’s hoof. Then he found a nail and cleaned the horse’s hooves.

  “So you were out on the road with him,” Ivan said, cleaning the left hind hoof carefully and looking at the cut.

  “I had him out for a little bit,” Antony said.

  “You didn’t cross over the old bridge by the bog?”

  “How did you know that? You been spying on me?”

  “He’s picked up a three-inch square nail. So how would he do that – I figure you were out on the cock-suckin bridge.”

  “He won’t haul right – he never learned anything,” Antony said, going about the horse and kicking it now and then. The horse started to move back, but Ivan said, “Whoa boy.”

  Then Antony sat on a bale of hay. Then he stood up, and smoothed the hay out carefully and sat down again.

  “That bridge is going down someday – you shouldn’t be putting a horse on it,” Ivan said.

  The door had been left open and moonlight came in on the old stall. Some sawdust, as white as fine powder about the edges but hard and yellow at the top, was piled behind the half-opened door that had a broken hinge. Some fox mash sat in the wheelbarrow, and now and then Antony’s few ginger-coloured foxes yelped. Both Antony’s thumbs were taped where the foxes had bitten him. They bit him almost every day of their existence. And by the time fall rolled about, his fingers were usually too sore to skin them, so he had to get Ivan to do it.

  Ivan wore his jean jacket, the sleeves rolled up near his elbows. Though small, his arms were very strong, and he had the tattoo of his nickname “Jockey” on his forearm. He had a few homemade tattoos on his knuckles that he had scratched out in defiance to Father LeBlanc – a short, untempered, colicky priest who had the charge of him for a year and a half in Tracadie. His friends at the boarding school in Tracadie had called him “Jockey.” However, no one else did.

  He bathed and wrapped the horse’s hoof.

  “You should have the vet over,” Ivan said.

  “No, God, you got her good,” Antony said.

  Antony then said, with unbridled pride and affection, “Valerie’s got a training bra now. So she’ll probably show it to you – she’s been walking about the house with her chest pounced out for two weeks – she won’t (even wash it.”

  Then he smiled, and was silent. A strong short gust of wind came up over the yard.

  “So – I was thinking we should go pick up Ernie and drink some booze,” Antony said. “No sense in it going to waste – having it dry up or something.” Antony’s face broke into a big grin, and he did what he always did since Ivan was a child – he wiggled one ear up and the other ear down at the same time, faster and faster. “Yer some cute, Ivan,” he said, “with tha
t little prick-topped haircut.”

  When they went out, Antony shut off the light in the shed. Then, as if he had to show fastidiousness in front of his son, he went in and straightened an old studded collar and bridle. Ivan remembered the first time Antony had gone into Clay Everette Madgill’s barn, he was standing beside him. His father’s face beamed with joy at such a barn and the beautiful quarter horses, and he kept saying: “Someday now I’ll have a barn like this.”

  Now Antony fidgeted carefully with his faded, studded bridle.

  And Ivan felt sad as Antony walked towards the house.

  Now there were three in the car. Ernie was with them. They had gone to his house to get him.

  “I’d like to know why yer grouchy mother won’t let you out of the house more,” Antony said.

  “I don’t know either,” Ernie shouted over the sound of the worn-out muffler. Ernie’s whole appearance was grey. His hair was grey and combed straight back, his cheeks were sunken. He wore black pointed cowboy boots that came over the top of his grey pants. His knees were bony, and cigarette ashes fell on the zipper of his polished black leather jacket that allowed him, at age forty-four, to retain the demeanour of a teenage boy. “I don’t know why she don’t let me out to town,” he said.

  “Well, come to think of it, perhaps it’s because yer a fuckin nuisance,” Antony said.

  Ivan said nothing. He shook his head. It was going to be a long night.

  They parked behind the church to drink. An hour passed. Then two hours.

  The priest looked in the car window at them. They were silent.

  “Boys, I’ll tell you this – you shouldn’t be here pissing in my graveyard.”

  “I wasn’t pissing, Father,” Antony said. “Ernie was.”

  Ivan looked over at the church, which retained in the dark its bulked whiteness.

  “I’ll fight,” Ernie said to the priest. He was sitting in his black leather jacket in the back seat. It looked to the priest as if the jacket was filled with impounded air, and only the head of a grey-haired whizzled teen-aged boy poked out of it. “I’m Cindi’s uncle – I’ll fight–”

  Ernie was not Cindi’s uncle but he had known her as a child, and it seemed appropriate now, because they had been talking about her, that he be her uncle. “You got no right to bother those who’ve lived on the Gum Road!” Ernie roared at the priest. Then he said, “Let me out of this car!” “We’re going,” Ivan said.

  They moved back up the church lane towards the highway. Ernie was singing Elvis’s “In the Ghetto,” and when he came to the second verse, he broke down and started to cry.

  Antony told them he knew where there was a party.

  They went to Clay Everette Madgill’s house. Through the window they could see Ivan’s mother, Gloria Basterache. She had married Clay Everette six years ago.

  “Toldja there was a party goin on,” Antony said.

  “I don’t see Cindi there,” Ivan whispered.

  Gloria walked about smiling – she seemed to be smiling at someone in the corner. She was standing in the glassed-in upper deck that rose on white pillars above the patio, which was still covered in a crust of hard snow, and housed a couple of wooden lawn chairs. Even to Ivan, her son, she was something of a goddess. He used to wait for her outside the church at Christmas time. He’d have his sisters with him, and have their hair brushed. Then their mother would come down from Clay Everette’s in her mink stole, with snow coming out of the glistening sky and falling, falling gently on the dark, cold trees on Bartibog Island and on the mink’s shiny glass eyes.

  After a while, Ernie started to roar and yell. Then he threw a lawn chair and fell facedown in the mud.

  They carried him back to the car. The moon was full and high above them. After some time driving about, Ernie got out and lost his teeth in a snowbank.

  Then they were all out digging in the snow. Some trees snapped, for the wind was beginning to stiffen.

  “Momma’ll be some grouchy if I lose my teeth.”

  “Tell that sawed-off midget mother of yours to go fuck herself,” Antony said.

  Then they all got back into the car and drove on.

  “I’ll never take that Ernie out again,” Antony said after he and Ivan were alone. “He ruins just about everything–”

  “Did you know?” he said as an afterthought.

  “What?”

  “It’s what Ruby told me – Cindi’s got one in the oven. And what the hell is she going to do with it!”

  3

  It was two nights later. Nevin, Vera’s husband, sat on a stool in the kitchen of Allain Garrett’s house looking through the door at the rest of them, who were in the living room watching hockey. He had come to ask Antony for their money back. Antony had figured that by this time it would have been polite for him to have forgotten about it altogether. He had borrowed it almost six months ago.

  The living room was lighted up by the TV set. A planter sat in the dark atop a rickety metal bookshelf. A large, coloured picture of the Pope and a crucifix hung above the couch, with yellow palm leaves stuck in the picture frame. The whole room smelled of toast. The telephone table, directly in front of Nevin, was littered with crime magazines, Two Girls and the Robbery Suspect and The Case of the Clever Cleaver – which little Valerie continually snuck up to her room – and a big cardboard box filled with pieces of an old orange rug sat against the coffee table.

  Antony lived at home with his parents, where the old woman could cook for him and his children. His father, Allain, and his mother had had eleven children. Except for Claude, whose whereabouts no one knew, and Antony, who lived right at home, they had all done well.

  The walls were dark, and a trophy of some sort, for 1930, sat in the hallway on the floor near the closet. The living room was dark but the kitchen was bright, the tiled kitchen floor scrubbed clean.

  Valerie sat in the corner, eating toast with her nightie on. Her sixteen-year-old sister Margaret was sitting on the stairs with her physics book in her lap.

  Antony’s parents realized that there was a falling out between Nevin and their son, and they were very worried because of it. And children react instinctively to how adults feel. So Valerie, who was wearing a training bra under her nightie, looked up at Nevin morosely as she bit into her toast. Margaret, however, spoke to him when he sat down as if there was nothing wrong at all.

  Nevin had to turn about to speak to her, and every time he did he could see her kneecaps through the banister. Then he took out a package of cigarettes and asked everyone in the room individually if they would like one, even Valerie, who just shook her head. Then Valerie said something to Margaret in French and burst out laughing. She laughed with that giddiness eleven-year-olds have. Then she put both hands over her mouth, and in this way seemed to embellish every moment of her hilarity, which all seemed to be directed at Nevin.

  Then Allain said three words in French to his granddaughter and she got up and went upstairs. Then he turned about and smiled at Nevin apologetically.

  There was a stew cooking on the stove. Another short phrase came from Allain in French, and once more Valerie appeared. She walked by Nevin as if it were his fault she had been subdued, and took a plate from the kitchen cupboard.

  “Is Antony here?” Nevin said.

  There was an unpleasant silence, so much so that Nevin was made to feel he shouldn’t have asked the question. Valerie, very carefully, so as not to spill any, walked with the plate of stew into the porch. She half closed the old porch door and Nevin could hear voices. He could hear her speak to someone, and he could hear Antony answer in a whisper: “Non, non – Val –” And then muffled laughter. Then he distinctly heard someone take a mouthful of stew and swallow.

  Then there was a car on the highway, a truck, a tractor trailer. All of these seemed to roar past the house at once, as if some sort of indictment had been passed on Nevin with the noise they made.

  Nevin stood and walked over to the door, and, standing there, said
in a shaking voice:

  “Antony, I know you’re there – I know!”

  Nevin turned and smiled at the old folks. Allain’s dark fingers holding the cigarette Nevin had just given him, and the tufts of hair, sticking up on the little old man’s head, seemed also to be an indictment against Nevin.

  “Antony, I know you’re there!” Nevin said again.

  There was a long moment of silence, felt by everyone, and finally the sound of someone slurping tea. This bothered Nevin so much he buttoned his coat the wrong way and left the house.

  As soon as he left, Antony came out of the room to get himself another plate of stew.

  He didn’t speak to any of them, but assumed a look of having accomplished a great deal. Margaret, feeling that he would order her to do something, stood and tiptoed upstairs. The only problem was that at the far end of the hall she turned left, by force of habit, and walked into the wall. There used to be a door to the bathroom there, but Antony had walled it up two days before and made the door next to his room.

  Margaret swore and yelled out in French that she had just broken her nose, and Valerie burst out laughing – uncontrollably, as she had earlier in the evening.

  Antony, shaking his head as if everyone should know that he had walled up the door, walked back into the porch.

  There was a short silence.

  Then Antony said something to Valerie, and it started her giggling all over again, so much so that they finally had to say “boo” to her and give her sugar.

  A week later Antony walked down the path by the old sleigh for the Belgian horse with the tail he tied up with twine. He kicked at a block of wood, and threw it up on the back of the woodpile as if angry about something. Then he hauled his pants up and continued on his way. Ivan had gone up to town that morning, received his severance pay, and had finally gotten the money for Nevin.

  Antony found Vera and Nevin sitting in the living room. Vera was three months pregnant. For a long time she had been unable to get pregnant – so that all the men on the road used to tell Nevin that they would come down immediately and help him out. But after all the doctors made all the tests, and they became reconciled to the fact that they would never have a child, Vera became pregnant.