On April 30, Adele drove down river to see what was going on.
She arrived at the apartment just after Ruby came in. Ruby was telling Cindi that her cousin Eugene was home for the summer and she wanted her to see him more often. She had always said that Dorval Gene and Cindi loved each other. “Everyone knows that,” she would say. She called him “Dorval Gene” because he was from Montreal.
As far as Ruby was concerned, Cindi should go out. She told her about the horse-hauling at the community centre, next week, and she should go to the dance and have some fun.
Ruby said what people always said on these occasions as if there never was a personal motive for saying it. When Cindi didn’t know if she would go or not, Ruby asked for Adele’s advice.
“Well Delly – what do you think?” she said, as she started to comb Cindi’s hair out with a brush, while Cindi kept wincing.
“I think Cindi can make up her own mind if she wants to go out or not,” Adele said, thinking that this was a very wise answer, and going over to hold Cindi’s head.
“Well, of course,” Ruby said, “we all know that,” and looked at Adele as if she wasn’t as bright as she had once thought.
Cindi sat in the chair looking from one to the other.
Ruby was very pretty. She also had a coarseness, which added to her beauty. She had been captain of the women’s hockey team at the community centre, before she went to university, and she knew how to take care of herself on the ice, to butt end, to spear, and to take a woman out in the corners. She used to sit in a faded T-shirt and jockstrap in the dressing room after a game, with a small diamond earring stud in her nose, putting her equipment away, her legs and throat covered in sweat, nonplussed at the coming and going of young men who could see over the partition. The diamond stud in her nose added to the sharpness of her eyes.
“We have to get her out of this hole now and again,” Ruby said to Adele when they left the apartment. “You should know that.”
“Yes,” Adele said, “of course that’s right.”
And, of course, it was. As Vera had said on the local television, and this was true as well, people like Cindi had the court of world opinion on their side. And so they should.
As they left the building, birds flew to the trees outside and gave sound to the late-April air.
Ruby had a stud horse called Tantramar, and a colt called Missle, after the boy she once almost married. Ruby fell in love and the boy had died. It was a long time ago. But when she smelled the leaves under the rock wall near her back lane, she thought of him.
He didn’t have very much – not like Ruby herself – nor had he ever had a girlfriend, something which Ruby had thought hilarious. Every summer it seemed to be someone new for her. Her boyfriends never lasted.
But she loved Missle. He didn’t drink – which was a drawback – but he didn’t take her credit cards. And he did love her.
One night, by the rock wall near the lane in back of her father’s house, she explained all about her boyfriends.
“I’ve had a lot of boyfriends,” she said.
He won’t never be back, she thought.
But he did come back.
He did come back. He looked like a private in the army, with his hair short, his mouth small, his eyes dark and wide.
She often told him she was spoiled.
“You’re not spoiled at all,” Missle said, and he could hardly get the words out.
“Well, all I ever want to do is party and have a good time,” she said. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to become a speech therapist,” he said.
He was so slight she felt that she had to protect him. She knew no one would dare bother him if he was with her.
She wrote about him to her cousin, Dorval Gene, and told her friends about him. Cindi would be her bridesmaid, and they would live in Halifax, and she would work and he would go to school.
He tried to do things, which would have exasperated her in any other man. But with him, she was patient, even parental. He had to get her to teach him how to ride a horse because she rode. He got up at five in the morning. He would go around the arena, she would watch him hopefully. Ivan Basterache would shout instructions and encouragement, and then he would just slide off, as if his hip bones weren’t big enough to support him.
He wanted to be a speech therapist because he had never learned to talk until he was nine years old. He had lived in his own world.
Ruby, who was always making fun of people, now learned not to do this in front of him.
He was so naive that she tried to protect him from everyone, especially from former boyfriends, who would ask sexual questions about her.
One day, she put on a top hat and her old tap shoes, and tap-danced for him in the living room.
“Look,” she kept saying, her face perspiring and her eyes closed shyly. “See – what I – can do,” she kept saying.
And she was using an old broom handle as a cane.
“I love you as the grass is green,” he said.
And tears came to his eyes, and she had to stop and put her arms around him, and comfort him, like a child.
He died two nights later, in his sleep.
She became more beautiful than ever after that, and lost herself in regret, tantrums, envy, and physical abuse from married men. Now she had a crush on Dr. Savard.
They had met for the first time the month before. She was wearing an old grey coat and a pair of work boots because she was down river with her father. It was raining, and the rain fell over the white hard hat she had pulled down over her eyes. She had an acetylene torch in her hand.
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.
5
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 daughte
r, 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.
“J
ust 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.”
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace Page 5
