Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

by David Adams Richards

  Now the house that hadn’t been a major priority before became one, and it was redone. Because she was pregnant, the whole idea was that she and Nevin knew all along that they would have a child – and that their child was wanted because it was planned for, was a common consensus.

  Only Vera seemed to realize that this wasn’t quite the way it happened. Of all the doctors they discussed things with, only Dr. Hennessey maintained that she might get pregnant, and the old doctor was the only one they didn’t take seriously. Nor did he care if they did.

  One night, a couple of weeks earlier, Nevin stayed out until morning. She knew he was now preoccupied with money, and making money. She waited up almost until dawn. When she woke, she was in the spare bedroom and he was sitting looking at her. Nevin had not been home all night – and here he was with his boots, which he prized so much, covered in mud, and his eyes glassy.

  “Good morning, Vera,” he said tipping a bottle of wine to his lips.

  “What do you mean?” Vera said. “Where were you last night –”

  “I joined Antony as partners.”

  “You what?”

  “I drank Hermit wine and joined Antony.”

  Then he reached down and stroked the ears of the rabbit that had followed him down the hallway.

  “Well, go to bed,” Vera said.

  Then he spoke so rapidly that she had trouble following what he said: “We’re going to get a big hose and suck every clam alive into it and sell them and make a million dollars.”

  He looked serious even though she laughed. Then he tipped the bottle to his lips and looked about the room, with its bright new paint, and its crib, as if he’d never seen it before.

  “And we will too,” he said.

  “Well, do what you can,” she said, smiling. “Go to bed–”

  “Bed,” he said. “Of course you don’t want to listen to me. You know nothing about it – how could you know.” He looked at her sadly while sunlight fell on his boots. “How could you know,” he said, cutting an imaginary line with his flat hand through the sunlight, and hiccupping, “if you paid ’tention to me.”

  “Well – I do,” she said.

  “No – you don’t,” he said solemnly, and he rose and wobbled down the hall, stopping now and then because of imaginary barriers.

  The night after the party at Ruby’s, people began to rock Ivan’s cuddy. So he went out onto the wharf. There was no one near the boat except the small dog he had been noticing there since he came. The dog followed him as he walked, looking at him with the inquiring look dogs have when they realize that things have changed in a person’s mood.

  “There’s a big-feelinged lad there,” Jeannie said, out of the dark. He couldn’t see her, but he knew her voice – utterly plain and yet with a tone unlike any other he had come across – her red hair pinched behind her. Then he did see her gradually standing in the cool air, which, though cool, had a host of mosquitoes hovering in it.

  “Ha, ha,” Frank said, as he always would answer his wife’s insults with a guffaw as if, if no one else in the world recorded them, he himself would. “Odd man out,” Frank said.

  “How’s Cindi?” Jeannie yelled.

  Ivan tossed a rock into the water, and looked through the dark, but he couldn’t see them any more.

  “How’s Cindi?” Frank said after. The sound however seemed to come from a different direction altogether.

  “Cindi’s just fuckin dandy – you dumb cocksucker,” Ivan said.

  That day another rumour had started – that Cindi had filed for divorce. Ivan, of course, had heard this rumour, the way all characters involved in rumours hear one, as if it were already true and he himself knew about it.

  He looked about and then turned back towards the boat. A group of high school kids had come onto the wharf to drink beer and were sitting there watching him. He didn’t notice them until this moment. He didn’t know them and they didn’t know him, but at this moment it seemed as if they did, and that everything that was said was said for their approval.

  When he walked by them, he could feel them staring at him. So finally he said, “You hurt this dog?” as if they were the ones to blame.

  “I never hurt the dog – is that yer dog?”

  Ivan said nothing but took the dog with him to the boat. Then he turned the spotlight on the water, and moved it in the direction of the shale bank.

  The only thing that looked back at him was one lone cow standing in mud, with the blank expression an animal has when caught in a beam of light.

  “I must be fuckin mad,” Ivan said, and he smashed the light with the flat of his hand and sent it sprawling onto the water.

  A few moments later, Antony drove along the wharf at ten miles an hour, waving to all the boys Ivan had just accosted, smiling and talking in a loud voice, and stopped just by The Simonie D.

  “You think he’d name the boat after me,” Antony said, “instead of that adopted twit.” Simonie was Allain’s adopted daughter and was one of the administration nurses in St. John – but whether this was the reason or not, Antony didn’t like her, and said she had “stole” his “mom’s” affection for the others. Ivan sensed a deep bitterness here, which had struck Antony’s heart – and seemed both comic and pathetic.

  But still, since Ivan always felt tricked by his father, his one thought was, what in hell does he want now?

  The visit was like getting phone calls from people whom you like, but who never consider you until they need something. Antony would never come just for a visit to an old cuddy – he had spent half his life in one, what did he need it for.

  Ivan had turned the radio on and had picked up a station in the Gaspé, a French station playing Paul McCartney’s “Ram” album – “Monkberry Moon.” The music seemed to expand through the little cuddy and across the whole wharf, which smelled of shells and tar and the rind of traps, the wharf being still pale in the night air. Against all parts of the wharf, boats were tied.

  Ivan held a bottle of rye in his hand, and Antony noticed it but said nothing.

  “Guess who wants to become like me,” he said solemnly.

  “I don’t know,” Ivan said.

  The radio-band light was orange, but only the bottom side of the dial was lighted. It glowed in the little dark cuddy, and the boat tossed more against the tires.

  “Nevin,” Antony said, “he asked me the other night if I could make him some money, and I said, ‘Sure I can make you some money – how much you need?’”

  Antony said this as if everyone knew he could make people a lot of money, and that it was a known fact, and the only naive thing about Nevin was that he had not asked him before.

  And as always with new partners, tonight Antony could do nothing but speak about Nevin – as always with Antony, the new partnership had already made all the money, and it was just a matter of picking this money up.

  As always with Antony, he was drinking to this new partnership and forgot that he’d been in partnership with Nevin before, and as always if anyone said anything about it, he would dismiss them as not knowing what they were talking about.

  “Nevin looks up to me,” he said solemnly. “I suppose he and Vera know that whatever I’ve done I’ve done on my own.”

  As the general smell of saltwater, rope, and tar filtered throughout the cuddy, as the radio played, and as there were still lights out in the bay, Ivan was thinking. Every time Antony strayed onto a wharf, he was like a man who one day suddenly grabs the halter of a disgruntled horse and backs it down off the trailer to the amazement of those there. On the wharf there was nothing Antony saw that he did not know, and there was no swell of wave or sound or shade of light that he did not feel or expect. And this was seen in spite of being away from fishing for twenty years. Antony, as a youngster, had fished with his uncle while Allain fished with Antony’s older brother.

  On the night of the Escuminac disaster, he and his uncle were out in the twenty-eight-foot drifter, The Margot.

 
At first they only thought of riding the storm out, but there were too many other boats in trouble. Ivan had learned that Antony, with a rope attached to himself, kept every boat in sight as long as he could, but they were continually battered away. The waves, at moments, were seventy or eighty feet high, and their boat was twenty-eight feet long, and their engine, too, seemed to take on a life of its own – unexpectedly heroic.

  His uncle, who would be Ivan’s great-uncle, was short and broad as he was tall, built as if he had been made out of darkened stone. He had been fishing since he was ten. His nose was huge and crooked, and he had a goiter on his neck, which allowed him to drive his car about without a licence because all the police thought he had cancer and were sorry for him. So he would pile his nine children into the car and drive from Legaceville to Caraquet, everyone sitting on everyone’s knees and singing, with the windows rolled down and their legs and arms sticking out, each one of them trying to hold on to their ice cream, roaring and yelling when they saw an out-of-province licence plate, and pausing to take licks.

  Once a wave picked him up, held him in the air, as the boat listed beneath him. Then it dropped him down again, and he stood exactly where he had been.

  They had tied themselves together, and had attached the rope through two steel hooks along the gunnels. The prow faced the waves and rose up towards them, and then vaulted down again, stern skyward, and hit the bottom of the bay, before it started its determined journey up against the next wave. Antony felt a sharp pain in his left hand when he tried to steer it towards his father’s boat. Most of this was forgotten now.

  Antony could make out his father’s boat behind them, off to the left but only on its rise. He could tell that they had given up trying to make it to the wharf, and were trying now to hold off and ride the storm out. But he knew they would not, and they would have to give it up also, and concentrate on making it to the wharf. Most of this was forgotten.

  When they saw the wharf in sight, Antony felt a delight and a sadness overwhelm him because it was not until then did he realize what was happening. Tears flooded his eyes because he saw lights on in the pink-and-white houses, and a pain came to his throat. They had made the wharf safely, and were about to tie.

  And then, because they saw the lights in the houses – or because of The Maralee, with its wide prow and proud name, which they saw sinking, or of the women waiting in those houses – or The Denise R. from P.E.I., so far from her own wharf and struggling to make it to theirs, with her nets tangled behind her and sinking her stern first, they turned The Margot about and went back to save whomever it was they could. Most of this was forgotten now.

  “Let’s go after them,” his uncle said, smiling broadly and patting the engine-housing, his smile making his face, covered in sweat and water, crinkle innocently, the same way it did when he piled his nine children into the car, with the little girls wearing dresses, all off to get an ice cream at the corner store.

  “Let’s go after them,” Antony said, his left hand already broken and swollen and burning, so he hid it from his uncle. The boat again chugged out into the waves, leaking oil, to where they’d last seen The Denise R. with her bulky nets.

  Ivan knew why Antony continually licked his big sapphire ring and took it off and put it on a while later. It was because his left hand ached continually, but he never mentioned why.

  Antony, now years later, and thirty pounds heavier, with sad eyes and big red ears, was sweating and pale. His breath was irregular as he puffed on his cigarette. He moved his shoes back and forth and looked out the cuddy window at the night. Every time his breath came up short it was as if he was about to speak. But he did not.

  There were lights twinkling out there under the stars, so peaceful, and there were lights on in the houses as well, and the church with its cross lighted up the night sky, and the sounds of honking horns on the main highway, and now and then someone breaking glass, and screeching tires.

  “She had a fit,” Antony said suddenly, while looking through the window and puffing on his cigarette, the cigarette spark flickering in the dark room, with the smell of oil on an old blanket, where the little dog lay peacefully watching both of them with his eyes open.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Ruby – she knows all about it.”

  He had been resolved not to mention it. But he was at Nevin’s telling him to be up at five in the morning – to start their business. And since Vera and Adele were there, he mentioned it to them.

  “She had a fit,” he said to Vera. “And,” he added, looking quickly at Adele, “I think it’s all this trouble-making by certain people that are causing the problem.”

  The one concern Vera and Nevin had was if this seizure had produced a miscarriage. Although it would probably be best if Cindi had an abortion, they thought that a miscarriage would be a terrible injustice.

  Adele refused to speak. She had told Ralphie the day before that she was through with ever speaking about Cindi or Ivan again. If she saw, she said, a bomb coming through the roof, “or one of those Sputniks or something like that there, Ralphie – I’d sooner let us all die for openin my gob about it. I’d just go out and pick blueberries and forget it even happened – ’cause I’m no good to talk to. Everyone says I’m so mixed up and need a sociology course.” She was dead against sociology now because Ruby was majoring in it – though she did not know exactly what sociology was. But just as Antony was about to change the subject – he wanted to tell them how much Valerie made on her worms – $23.95, and he figured that was pretty fair for worms – Adele spoke up:

  “Well, the best thing for her to do is have a goddamn miscarriage – and then none of ya will have any fucking thing more to say about it. There’ll be no more tears – just like the little doll, ‘No More Tears’ – well that’s what there will be.” Then she sniffed and lit a cigarette and then tiny little puffs of smoke came from her nose.

  Antony thought she was making fun of him because of his “No More Tears” doll venture of the Christmas before. (In fact, Adele knew nothing about this.) He had gotten thirty boxes of regular stuffed dolls that “couldn’t cry with their nose to an onion,” and had passed them off down on the Indian reserve as the authentic “No More Tears.” So all the Indian children had the “No More Tears” doll that really had no tears.

  He looked at Adele, startled that she knew about this, and Vera said, “DELE,” like that.

  Nevin looked up.

  “I don’t fuckin care,” Adele said, “let everyone do what everyone does and I’ll stay out of it because I’m going to leave this family. I’m going to leave Ralphie – I’m going to leave home. I’m going away – walking fast – maybe then I’ll have all this cocksucking racket figured out.”

  “You must admit,” Vera said, smiling naively, “that we have her best in mind.”

  “Oh, of course,” Adele said. “Of course, it’s all poor Cindi and such.”

  “Let’s not get all worked up,” Vera said.

  “Well, then I’m all wrong and stupid, I know,” Adele said.

  “No one says you’re stupid,” Vera said.

  “Oh, for sure, but things are not always as they always seem!”

  Then her eyes flashed, and she looked at Antony, who only stared at her. Then Nevin stood up and walked about the room.

  Just as Nevin had never looked angrily at Vera until that moment a few weeks before, when he felt that what was deadly serious was taken lightly, so Adele, who always flew off the handle, went into rages, and kicked her husband – for something to do – now became calm.

  “It won’t matter, think whatever you will,” Adele said. “No one profits from this.”

  III

  10

  Cindi’s life this summer was like a movie, where all her friends were tantalized by and hoping secretly for more stories to come out of this affair, while telling each other they were not, and hoping it would end. Everyone from Ruby to Vera to Adele was listening and wa
iting, wondering what was going to happen – as if she were not a person but a character in a movie they were watching. Often, when it ran down a little, they were impatient for something more to happen – and something more had to happen to continue on watching. And every one of them, from Cindi herself to Ruby to Adele, watched this film, from a variety of different places in the theatre, holding on to the idea that they hoped for the heroine, and not knowing that the greatest visual effect was the one in which she was crucified for them.

  This idea that she was being crucified, drunk and silly and vacant as she had been in her life, never entered their heads as they were pushing her in that direction. She had been, of course, as far as Vera and certain of the more educated women about, a Christ figure because of her brutal marriage – but in no way because of their own pride and philosophy concerning her.

  The more attention had been placed on her, the more Cindi felt part of the collective structure and morality of the gang. Circles revolved about a loosely defined oracle, which she had never belonged to before, and now suddenly belonged to – she had passed that litmus test.

  Yet it was a small gang, and shrinking for some want of excitement. But people had come up with the idea that since the Levoy brothers were home they should go and “see to Ivan.” And people got excited over this.

  The Levoy brothers were distant relatives of Cindi.

  They hated Ivan because alone they were no match for him. The second brother was the man Ivan protected Ralphie from at the mines. But these were the people – the Levoy brothers who attacked verbally their old nemesis, and had gained the respect of those who had always more or less been frightened of them.

  “The Levoys’ll take care of him,” Lloyd said, for instance. He said this because he was scared of the Levoys. “Yes, they’re the lads for him.” And psychologically this seemed to help Lloyd. Praising the Levoys he had become part of the great moral significance of the group.