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.
“Get up those stairs,” he yelled. “Get up those stairs!”
Suddenly he started towards her. She backed away and then turned, saying something under her breath in French.
“What did you say?” he yelled. “What?”
He went towards her, but she ducked under him and then fell. When she did, he stood over her. His hands grabbed at her as she tried to kick her way up the stairs, and then he ended by ripping the pocket of her slacks. Old Allain tried to hold him by the arms, but Antony was too strong, and his mother kept saying that someone was in the yard, as she always did when she was frightened.
Margaret sauced him but not until she was alone. After a while he went to the supper table and ate. Every now and then he would put his fork down and shake his head at Valerie, as they listened to her cry.
Ivan spent his time working on the engine of his grandfather’s thirty-six-foot lobster boat. He had a wound over his left eye from Jeannie Russell’s crop.
Frank Russell and his wife happened to own the meadow on the upriver side of the wharf, owned the field on the left of the road and put their cattle out to feed. Ivan would see the cattle moving about. Sometimes he would not hear them and then look up and five or six cows would be looking at him from thirty feet away, standing up to their knees in fly-filled mud, chewing their cuds.
Now and again Jeannie would come down to count the cattle and look over at him, her coarse red hair pulled back behind her neck, her hearing aid visible, and her rubber boots flagging away doggedly as she walked across the muck.
She would shout at the cattle in that wild screech she had as she rounded them up, gumbooting herself across the muck with the determination of a small devil, insolent to everyone, and Frank coming down behind her; his fierce red complexion made more fierce still by his starched and weathered green work shirt. He, too, would glance Ivan’s way, and then look at his small wife and nod – which always seemed more spiteful from a distance.
“How’s Cindi?” Jeannie would yell after this nod. And Frank would stand beside her, grinning. “If you leave me, baby, can I come too,” Jeannie would yell.
Sometimes Frank would bring his twelve-foot motor boat up to the wharf while Jeannie stood on the shale bank, her rubber boots dug into her property line, watching with a sort of nasty grimace.
“Ask him how Cindi is,” she would yell.
Then Frank would walk up the hill while Jeannie walked before him, switching the cattle.
“Oh ha, oh ha,” Frank would laugh. “Out runnin the roads with that Ruby Madgill.”
Ivan usually went inside whenever he saw them. He’d sit on the cot in the murky heat of the cuddy and smoke a cigarette until he heard them leaving or at least walking out of sight, and then he would come out again and do his work. He parked his car as far away from their property as possible.
One day, while waiting for them to go, Antony came in, looking terrible and leaning forward with his hat in his hand. “You didn’t punch Cindi in the stomach when you were at the dance last week, did you?”
“Who in Christ told you that?”
“I was just wondering –”
“Who told you that!”
“It’s all over the river –”
“What do you mean it’s all over the river?”
And then Antony, with his mouth dry, said in a scared fashion: “Well, it’s just inescapable that it would be – you know – all over the river. If you go about poking a pregnant woman in the guts, it sorta goes all over the river.”
“No, I don’t know that it would be inescapable that it would be all over the river. It’s a lie, and so why should it be all over the river or anywhere else.”
Ivan looked at his father and folded his arms.
“That’s what people think,” Antony said.
“For fuckin sure they would,” Ivan said.
“It’s what Ruby told me –”
“Well, you can believe what you want, I don’t care. And that goes for Cindi as well.”
“It disturbs people is all I can say.”
“Well, people are going to say more than that about me,” Ivan said. “The cunts always have and always will.”
“Frank doesn’t like you,” Antony said, as if to affirm Ivan’s statement.
“Not too many people do,” Ivan said matter-of-factly.
“I told them,” Antony said suddenly, as if he realized he must take Ivan’s part. “I told Clay and Gloria and the whole crew of them. I said, I said, ‘The whole buncha ya is just turned right against Ivan, and I’m not gonna stand here and listen to that there.’”
Ivan turned about and got some Ben Gay down from the drawer to put on his hands. He had hurt his back when he fell against the floor, and was rubbing some on it.
The bay was rolling gently and a wave of heat lay over the buoys. Far up the beach, where the clay walls of the bank met the black shale, Jeannie had gone to get the gelding.
“Haven’t you seen Cindi?” Antony asked.
“I don’t see Cindi and she don’t see me,” Ivan said. And then under his breath, “Every whore I get mixed up with has rocks for fuckin brains – you mayswell take them all and shove a peavey up their quiffs.”
“Well, that’s where your mistake is,” Antony said. “You should see her – if you don’t, things will only get worse.”
Ivan turned and went out through the cuddy door into the sunlight. He went to the end of the boat and threw a bucket of potato peels into the water, and stood watching the black tide rise against the tar planking.
6
Ralphie had done all things in order to make others happy. He had moved into his mother’s house on her request. He had opened a business downtown, he had joined the Kinsmen; he was not happy. And as he turned twenty-six, it seemed to him that he could be thirty-six or fifty-six and it wouldn’t matter at all.
He knew his wife Adele wasn’t happy either. She wasn’t happy in the large house with nothing to do.
He knew Ivan would do anything for him or Adele – he knew, in fact, that Ivan looked upon him as a brother. There was an incident in their lives which Ralphie never forgot.
When he and Ivan worked back at the mines Ralphie was bullied by one man. Every day the man hid Ralphie’s lunch, or filled it with ore, and made light of whatever Ralphie said or did.
One day Ralphie came to work in a new work shirt, and the man looked at the top button and said: “Do you want this?”
“Yes,” Ralphie said, smiling.
So the man pulled it off and handed it to him.
“Do you want this?” the man said, touching the next button.
“No,” Ralphie said. So the man pulled the button off and threw it away.
He continued until all the buttons were pulled from the shirt. Ralphie had to pretend that this was a joke that he himself appreciated, and that all the other men and he laughed at this in the same fashion.
It was not until a month later that Ivan learned about this. Ralphie did not tell him, or complain to him, but Ivan finally saw what was going on. He never once said that Ralphie should be ashamed for not standing up for himself, and he never mentioned it to him in any way. But Ralphie was frightened of getting hurt in some way, and every time the man teased him, he instinctively weighed the alternative.
One afternoon, when Ralphie was in the dry, the man walked towards him, his pale blue eyes unfocused – and as soon as he realized Ralphie was there he turned immediately and went in the opposite direction.
“He’ll not bother you again,” Ivan said on the way home that night. “Gutless fucker.”
Ivan said nothing else and Ralphie never had to thank him.
Ralphie had almost forgotten this incident. Until now. Now he tried not to think of it. But last week when Ivan pulled up in his car in front of the shop, Ralphie pretended to be out.
When Ivan couldn’t find Ralphie, he went to see Adele to ask her if she had talked to Cindi. It was the first time they had met in a year, and Adele was sitting in the den when he drove up in his car.
“Who is that?” Thelma asked. The car’s fender was smashed, and the window had a pebble crack in it. The tires were almost bald. It was as if he had come out of another world entirely and entered theirs through some other, heated atmosphere.
“Oh, that’s a friend of ours – you know him – Ivan,” Adele said.
“Ivan who?” Thelma said, in the same immediate and accusing voice she always had when dealing with her daughter-in-law.
“Ivan Basterache,” Adele said.
“I don’t know him,” Thelma said. “I have only heard bad things about him.”
“Of course you do,” Adele said. “You met him at Ralphie’s apartment a long time ago, and he came to our wedding.”
Ivan had gotten off work late on the day prior to Ralphie and Adele’s wedding. He was working in Port Hawkesbury and had no way to get home, unless he hitchhiked. And he began to hike late that night, and arrived at the wedding – it was a bitterly cold January day – wearing his suit under his coveralls and carrying his shoes.
The reception was at the house, and as soon as they arrived it became apparent that the furnace was shut off – the oil-tank line was frozen. Ivan put his coveralls back on and went out with a torch and unfroze it, coming back in, his ears raw, and smiling. Thelma, though she remembered this, still pretended she did not.
This pretence persisted when he came in. She pretended she didn’t know who he was, and then looked severely at Adele, not for any particular reason except that she had an opportunity to.
“Dontcha member the time I come for the weddin,” Ivan said, smiling.
But Thelma, though her eyes registered that she remembered this incident very well, had gone too far in her testament of denial to back down.
“No,” she said, smiling the exact same way Adele saw her smile at her when others were present.
Ivan nodded at her in the dark hallway. Then he looked quickly at Adele to show that he knew exactly where he stood.
“Come in, come in,” Adele said grouchily, almost as if to protect him by grouchiness. They went into the den, and Thelma, with her back to them, set up her ironing board in the hallway.
The den window faced the southeast and overlooked a field of tangled bushes on the far side of the street. Ralphie and his sister Vera called that the “gully” and they had made a fort there when they were children.
Although the night before Ivan had been very determined to see Adele, he now had nothing to say because Thelma was standing five feet away. He didn’t seem to know why he had come, or care about the outcome of it.
And Adele did not want him to talk about Cindi at all because she felt Thelma would get into an argument with him. So every time he mentioned something about it, she would mention something else and then look towards the hallway.
This left Ivan with nothing much to say.
Though Ivan was small of stature, his hands were large and he rested them clumsily on his knees. He had worn his spring jacket and his new pants and shirt. He sat very stiffly on the brick ledge that ran along one side of the den, while Adele sat in the chair with her back to the window – so it looked as if this huge halo had circled her head. And there was something about his tea and how cautiously he tried to drink it. Adele then decided to admonish him to let him know that friendship had limits, and so whenever he said something she found herself disagreeing with it, and looking angrily at him, for the first time in her life. (She, too, knew how he had protected her husband but had suddenly forgotten this.) She was not as skinny as she was as a teenager, but all her movements were the same, which made Ivan look extremely delighted at one moment, and then suddenly frown because she was determined to undercut what he said.
And Adele realized this also. She realized this but couldn’t stop – not until he left. After he drove away she became very glum. She walked about the house believing she had betrayed someone, and was not certain who.
After Ivan’s visit, Thelma did not speak to her for a month.
“Why is she seeing people like that?” Thelma would ask Vera.
Vera would explain to her the crisis Cindi was now engaged in, which Thelma pretended suddenly not to know anything about.
“Oh my God – oh my God.”
Vera would nod in silence.
Thelma, like many of us, often drifted between posture of knowledge or posture of ignorance.
“Those people – drunks and dope addicts – coming into my house and slurping tea.”
She told Vera she did not want Adele to have anything to do with that “epileptic” girl. Other reasons could be perceived in her as well, however, by Ralphie who had to listen to a lecture every time he came home. Thelma held him personally responsible for even knowing a man like Ivan.
“Well, we’ve seen your friends, Ralphie, haven’t we – swear words cut into his hands – fine. And Adele likes him, does she – fine. And his wife is having a baby – that retarded girl – just the type to populate the world. Fine, Ralphie. That’s the type of people to get to know – of all the good, decent, hardworking, law-abiding people on the river – you drift into the gutter. That’s where they come from, Ralphie – just the gutter. People like to always talk about those people as being from here. People even write dirty books about them. So when we go anywhere, it’s always those people who’ve given us a terrible reputation – poachers and murderers and criminals – so we have to lock our doors at night. But you like them – like those people – I see. And I’ve seen them before, greasy-looking people, you know, with big muscles, always going out of their way to kill somebody. I thought you belonged to the Kinsmen.”
Yet underneath he could see that she was glad Adele was involved because it gave her an excuse to be upset. It was in these perverse double standards she was most at home.
For Adele, it wasn’t Thelma’s abhorrence of sexuality that came through, but a particular type of sexuality. Not the nice discuss
ed sexuality of those who pretended they weren’t prudes. And were of course “concerned” about “children.” That type of sexuality, the embalmed learned response to the last twenty years, would go right past Adele. But it was the immoral sexuality of a person like Cindi, that brown-headed sexually epileptic, and, worse, of Adele herself that distressed Thelma.
“All having babies and on welfare too – and our taxes supporting the lot of them.”
This was one reason why Adele refused to see her child, why she hated most children, and why she believed that Ralphie had betrayed her, because they still lived with his mother.
Whenever Olive and the little girl came, Adele would look out the window, sniff so loud her nose closed completely, and say, “Hum – sure has her dressed funny – gonna look like some little faggoty ballerina.” Then she would go up to her room and sit in the corner. Every time she heard the little girl laugh or screech or cry, she would turn up the radio.
“Hey baby baybby-bayyybyyy baby I love you,” the music ironically would yelp, drowning out everyone downstairs.
On occasion she would have to see Olive, who dropped in after work. Adele would sit there very politely for about a minute. She knew Olive didn’t like her, but she could also tell that Olive knew she was the outcast in the family and no one paid attention to her.
Adele would sit there broodingly quiet and unhappy, scratching a mosquito bite on her foot, or, in defiance, blowing a larger than usual bubble and having it explode over her nose. Then, trying to peel the gum away, she would say, “Hey you?”
“My name’s Olive, Adele.”
“Right – got any dental floss – or what?”
Olive’s face was smooth except for some white hair that sprouted from her chin. And she was a good enough person, Adele supposed, at least that is what she was always telling herself: “Oh, she’s a good enough person, I suppose.” But in reality every nice thing Olive said only intensified Adele’s feeling that she was being left out.
One day Olive made the mistake of mentioning children to Adele. Adele said, “Don’t mention them – don’t want to know them – hope never to see them. Hope I never have to take care of them. We should abort them all!”
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace Page 6
