Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (12 page)

“She went into shock in the case room,” he said softly, as if Hennessey would be won over by this.

“Well,” Hennessey said, “if
you
can’t help her, get an ambulance ready. Get – who will we fetch – Rose
Wong – get Rosy Wong with her and we’ll send her down.”

And with that, Hennessey started to give orders to two nurses at the station across the hall, who were pretending to be busy with forms but who had been listening to everything.

Within ten minutes there was an ambulance, the R.N., Rose Wong, a driver, and Dr. Hennessey – and though Savard helped with all of this, prepared the woman who was twenty-two years old, he felt that it was a useless token, and that she wouldn’t be able to make the trip.

Just before Cindi had arrived, he had found out that the woman was now doing fine. And for some reason, people are irritated when they are wrong. “I’m glad,” he said. But secretly he was not.

Ruby felt she had to let Savard know that she also was here and so she continually touched, patted, and kissed Cindi. And Cindi kept saying, “Phew – don’t smother me Rube – go way.”

But suddenly when the procedure started Ruby started to laugh out loud and Savard looked over at her with the perplexed look of a young boy. Then she felt embarrassed by this and left the room. She shook, and felt cold and frightened. The idea of attracting attention to herself was gone. She sat in the waiting room. Suddenly, from behind the door, she could hear Cindi sigh, as if she was being hurt. Cindi sighed, and said, “Oh, oh.” Ruby put her hands over her mouth, and then she went for a walk.

She walked along the road to the Dairy Bar and bought herself an ice cream, and sat out on a bench in the yard. She waved now and then to some people who
drove by whom she knew, and felt a strange sudden glee, which she tried to deny that she felt.

Cindi wanted to go home almost immediately. She kept looking out the window because she couldn’t look at Dr. Savard. No more anger had ever come over her than at this moment. She was angry with everyone, especially Ivan and herself.

“How do you feel?” he said finally. He was wearing a short-sleeved summer shirt. This, plus his tan, seemed to make a tremendous impact on her. He was reading a magazine at his desk. The first time he had asked her that question it sounded to Cindi very different. That was because the emphasis on the word “feel” was different – it had a very different meaning. This time, in spite of, or because of, Savard’s gentle way of asking it, it did not mean, how do you feel physically, but how do you feel in some other deeper more poignant way. And Cindi nodded, averted her eyes, and tapped her foot as if impatient with something. “Sure,” she said suddenly, “I’m fine.”

Ruby returned with ice cream for them.

Savard didn’t seem to know what to do with his ice cream. He squinted as he held it, with a napkin about the cone, but didn’t take a lick. Nor did Cindi want hers, until Savard said it might be good if she ate it. They spoke, all of them, about the variety of ice cream flavours now available, and teased Cindi when she said she liked vanilla. All the talk was appropriately low-key.

Then Savard locked the office and they went outside. The day had turned windy, and small typhoons blew about the parking lot, scattering dust and sand.

They all stood together talking, and Savard smiled
at Cindi. But she felt the smile a half-hour before was much different.

The sun was falling on the trees in back of them and Cindi was shivering, her ice cream melting on her dress.

Ruby was excited, but when Cindi looked at her and smiled clumsily, she didn’t look back. Then for some reason she started to curse and swear over nothing at all, turning for some reason violently angry that her car wasn’t clean.

Armand Savard was the thirteenth child of nineteen children, and the only one who saw high school or university.

His father worked himself to death, and looked like a ghost at forty, and they ate porcupine all one summer and gave their money to the Catholic church. This is what Armand remembered about his youth.

He trembled whenever he told this story. All his brothers and sisters in the tar-paper shack in summer, while Mr. Bellia stood at the door in his suit, and asked his father to take some friends of his from Sherbrooke fishing out in the bay.

He saw his father smiling without a tooth in his head, and his mother pregnant and sitting on a chair in the corner, while the whole dusty little kitchen smelled of flies and rancid butter. And contrasted to this, the bay looked so blue and clean outside their door.

Sometimes, walking home in the summer, there would be beautiful smells of food coming from the house. His mother would be baking bread for the Feast of the Assumption.

Savard hated these memories, and he was ashamed of his family. He never drove his Porsche there, and he never took his wife there. He was also frightened of his older brother, Fortune, who was a drunk. But it was Fortune who knew that Armand was ashamed of them, and he couldn’t look Fortune in the face.

Fortune, one time, brought him over ten bottles of pickled herring that his wife had done, and then he found them in the dump the next week. Fortune never spoke of it, and when Armand spoke about how good the pickled herring was, he looked over Armand’s right shoulder into the distance.

Fortune had paid for Armand’s education. Armand, on the surface, became a meticulous and sophisticated teenager – the kind that only an Acadian can be, with a worldly outlook even though he lived in a shack – while his sisters got married at sixteen and seventeen and his brothers worked in the woods.

He married a woman from Sackville, and he had always felt superior to her, and, as people noticed, superior to women in general. They had four children.

Fortune was a huge, ignorant man, who had hardly learned how to read and write, who was frightened to go into restaurants, and yet Armand had secretly always looked up to him and tried to impress him.

Armand remembered a group of English kids one day had surrounded him at the beach, and how Fortune had come over and had willingly taken the beating to protect his younger brother. And though he was ignorant and went to church just like his father and mother, and blessed himself every time he passed the big church down river, and had his wife bake for the Feast of the Assumption – just like his mother – Armand always felt that he had to prove himself to this
man, who so willingly had taken a beating for him when they were youngsters, and had paid for his first suit in 1966.

No matter what Armand did, he could not impress him and the fault lay in the fact that he tried to impress him, with talk that Fortune did not care about or understand. Fortune would only shrug, and even pick at his nose with the flat of his finger and stare morosely about, as if wanting to be impressed left him disappointed.

Fortune didn’t understand things about his brother. He didn’t understand about the pills he gave out – Fortune never had a pill in his life – or the operations. But he still thought the world of his brother.

One day he was told that his brother performed abortions, and all the young women would go to him and have them.

It was a spiteful old woman who had no children of her own, who had always hated their family, who told him, but Fortune was upset. He went home and asked his wife about it. First he had to know what an abortion was. His wife told him.

For Fortune, this was the worst thing in the world. He didn’t understand it. He couldn’t understand it, and the more he tried, the more it worried him. He did not want to tell his mother. His father had died years ago – a horse had kicked him in the back.

“No, I won’t tell Mama,” he said, and this seemed to relieve him.

There was still sun on the ground and he went out for a walk.

He walked by Armand’s office – which before had seemed so important to him. But now, to him at least,
it only seemed lonely and entirely insignificant, with sunlight on the window – as if it had been always meant to be there, but Armand himself did not know this.

“It’s better,” Armand told him, when he asked about it. Fortune was so shaken up he could hardly ask. He didn’t understand it. But Armand really didn’t know how to explain it and only could say: “It’s better.”

“It’s better,” Fortune nodded in a peculiar way. He thought his brother would deny it. But Armand, looking up at him over the top of a magazine, only said: “It’s better.”

He told him that there were lots of young girls now who got pregnant, and had no other recourse – some were raped or molested, or unmarried. But at any rate they did not want to bring unwanted children into the world, and anyway, it was better – he had always agreed with it. Besides, he only did fifteen or twenty a year.

“Fifteen or twenty,” Fortune said, his broad ignorant back, in a woollen shirt catching the sun. Armand looked at his brother. Fortune’s eyes showed that he was in disbelief. He sat there, with his hands folded together. Two of his big brown fingers were missing. He had lost them with an axe, when Armand was fifteen.

“Fifteen or twenty.”

“Oh, you’ll understand,” Armand said, smiling and trying to be reasonable. “Of all people you should know how Mom suffered with all of her children. It’s a good thing if they are unwanted and an unneeded burden.”

Armand had been premature. When he was born they put him in a shoe box near the stove. He was so
tiny. Even now his eyes were weak, which made him appear more meticulous than he actually was, and he had allergies and caught colds. Fortune was always asking about his health, and every Christmas Fortune’s wife knitted Armand a sweater.

“And that’s the problem – they are unwanted,” Armand was saying. “And will end up as a burden, in jail or something, and you take how many kids are abused – or things like that.”

Fortune sat with his head down, as if he was being scolded. The big shoulders were still, and Armand could not help remembering how men had jumped on those shoulders when Fortune was protecting him, while he himself was frightened, and only managed to run away.

And Armand looked at those strong burdened shoulders, and felt sad when he remembered how the men had hit his brother with a stone over the head.

Strange how men see things. Mrs. Savard, who had a pale-reddish complexion, and deep lines under her eyes, whose hair was too long, and hung down her back when she pushed her shopping cart with her four children, took pills.

And that’s why Fortune thought their lives were so above his own, and why he thought Jennifer Savard was so beautiful.

If she was not frail, if she did not laugh at the wrong time because she was nervous, if she did not get tired, Fortune would not have thought this. And each of her kids had a problem of some slightly indefinite nature. One was hyperactive and had painted his entire body
silver and walked to school. The oldest girl, who was twelve, still sucked her thumb.

There was also a problem with their education. To Fortune, they always seemed to be bussed somewhere. They just did not go to school like everyone else – which Fortune’s wife mistook as being very grandiose. But because there was a fight between Mr. and Mrs. Savard about where they should go to school, the children were sent one place and then another with no real foundation. The youngest, a boy who looked so much like Armand, went to a French kindergarten.

Armand and Jennifer lived in a huge brick house near the edge of the village – two miles down the road from where Armand had grown up, and, in fact, quite near the local dump. His wife hated it there. It smelled of burnt embers in the dying autumn sunlight, smelled of the ghosts of fishing nets, and the pale empty sky.

But Armand could think of nowhere else to go.

One day last autumn the oldest girl, Teddy, had pooped herself at a recital at school. Armand and Jennifer had not known there was a problem. But now they did all the things other middle-class families did. They got her to a psychiatrist, in Moncton, three times a month.

Jennifer was the one who took her, and paid for it. She drove the long monotonous tortured way, through Rogersville – in the spring it didn’t seem to be a road at all but just a grey ugly marker.

Jennifer had her own bank account. Armand never gave her any money and they were in debt, but still and all she managed to save fifteen hundred dollars – and this was the money she used for Teddy.

Teddy sucked her thumb and stared out the window as they drove back and forth.

What the psychiatrist doubtlessly found out was what Fortune had seen. Their large house was empty. There were one or two pictures on the walls, but Armand didn’t collect art like people thought. He’d only seen two pictures that he’d liked, and thought that he should collect them. Other than that the house was large and barren, and certain parts of it seemed to crack. The worst of it was it was entirely new. The psychiatrist likely found out from Teddy that Jennifer hated it, especially in November before the snow – when the ground, and the windows were raw, and the whole sky seemed to bleed into the earth.

And the psychiatrist might have found out about the bicycle. All last summer Daniel, the boy who’d painted himself silver, wanted a bicycle. But they just couldn’t go to a store.