Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (13 page)

Armand was against that. It was here where his meticulous nature showed itself. It was always shown in a slightly perverse way, over seemingly mundane things.

“No, I’m not going to a store here,” he said.

And when they asked why, he said that he didn’t want others, especially in his family, to know their business.

And so they ordered a bike from the catalogue. And there began the wait. Daniel waited the whole summer for his bicycle to come on the bus.

He would go down to the small store where the bus pulled in every afternoon, and wait on the steps with his two sisters. But the bike did not come. Until August. And when it did come, it was not like other bikes.

It wasn’t like the bikes in the store window. It hadn’t been put together.

Jennifer was so outraged at this final wound to her child she refused to allow Fortune to put it together. The children had naturally run to Fortune, who had taken them fishing, who had helped them make kites.

But when he came over to put the bike together, Jennifer said, “No, his father will.”

And the boy stood in the breezeway crying. Fortune nodded simple-heartedly. He smelled of holy water, which his wife gave him to bless the bike.

Finally, in September, Jennifer and Teddy got the instructions out. The air was filled with the smell of heavy rain and already the leaves were blowing from the trees through the banging breezeway doors.

Then the youngster got on the bike, went round the lane as fast as he could, shifted gears, looked back, and waved to his mother, who stood alone at the side of the garage, watching him. Then the handle bars came loose, and the wheel wobbled, and they had to put it away.

Perhaps the psychiatrist learned that Jennifer thought Armand shouldn’t leave them alone so much, which showed in the summer when he spent time with his friends at the lodge far away from them in Doaktown and played golf fanatically, while they sat in a rented cottage in Shediac. Perhaps this is what the fights were about – about the veneer of life that Armand had rested his hopes on – which he took to be worldly.

Perhaps the psychiatrist had no answers for them. But after a while, they stopped going to her.

Now, Jennifer was sometimes seen driving her old Datsun station wagon through town, chain-smoking, with one or two of the kids in the back seat.

Because of the emptiness in their lives, the seeming emptiness, at any rate, Jennifer started to take the children to Mass. She looked helpless with her four children in church.

Not a Catholic herself, she did not know when to genuflect or bless herself – and two of the children had not been to church before.

Jennifer had lost her direction, and only wanted to do something for her children whom she loved.

The priest, Father LeBlanc, the same priest who had hit Ivan, had now reformed himself. It was a hard struggle – but that’s what life is finally about – and he had become a kinder, gentler man. He had not lost his temper in twelve years.

Perhaps at first he wasn’t meant to be a priest, as many priests perhaps aren’t. But over the years he realized that he had a God. He always had been an abrupt, short-tempered Frenchman, with dark blistering eyes. But he had seen the wounded, the ill, and the sick, and he found out he could help them by counting himself among them.

And there was prosperity also – he knew some ten millionaires who had made their money on what fascinated Antony so much, the snow-crab industry. But with their money came more problems, rivalry amongst the family members that was unheard of before. And he walked amongst them, carrying the stigma of his past, his bullying, his bigotry, like a rock up a hill.

He often thought about Ivan, whose name he did not remember, and whose whereabouts he did not know. But that was one of the regrets of life, the inability to atone to those sad contemplative faces, which visit you in the dark or when the snow is falling down.

Jennifer and her children helped him as much as he helped them. Because he laughed good-naturedly with them – all the children wanting to go to confession immediately because they had terrible sins to confess.

They seemed to cling to him, too, as if they were insecure birds.

But when Jennifer was making plans for Teddy’s confirmation she began to lose sight of what she wanted. After a while they didn’t come back. Where they stood, all about him near the altar that day, all ready to confess to great crimes, with Jennifer smiling on their behalf, seemed now to be an empty spot.

He didn’t see the children again unless they were driving with their mother in the old Datsun station wagon, the brake lights caked with mud.

He discovered that it was Jennifer herself. She had turned, bolted in another direction, looking for another way.

Savard spent a good deal of time with Ruby. And for a while that summer he believed the reason he was free was because he was trapped. If he wasn’t trapped by his marriage, then he couldn’t possibly show how he was broad-minded enough to be free.

Savard felt estranged now from his own children. They all looked at him with wounded eyes, they all seemed to think he was a contributor to their unhappiness.

It was not just the bicycle. It was the light fixtures for the house. He had to argue with salesmen so much, and be so abrupt, that finally he didn’t buy any. And so the light fixtures did not come, and bare bulbs hung from the walls and ceilings.

Everyone talked about his car, but he hid it, and sometimes he would not park it in his yard, but in the garage down the street.

When Savard swung a golf club, one could see how impatient he was by his short, fierce little chops. And he would always look about after he swung the club, as if he had demonstrated something in his nature that he secretly disliked and was trying to improve.

He did not give his wife money. And at the grocery store they would stand together, and in front of people he would count out the tens and twenties she would have to use to pay for the food, with a golf tartan on his head, his hair curly. He was shorter than his wife by three inches.

Other men had done this, he had seen it all his life, and he would do it also.

His oldest boy was forty pounds overweight and took piano lessons at the Ecole Musique from Mrs. McGraw. And when Jennifer drove her children downtown, his huge head was seen in the back seat, in the middle of his siblings’ little heads.

Armand couldn’t give up his family – that is, his own brothers and sisters. Almost to a man, or woman, they envied him, so there were no light fixtures in his house, and there was no bicycle from a store, and there was no new car for his wife – and his wonderful car, which he couldn’t afford, sat in a garage down the street.

Except for Fortune, his brothers sneered at him, phoned him drunk in the middle of the night to bawl him out for giving them the wrong medicine, and then seeing him the next day they would be overcome with shame, apologize, and ask for money.

He hated it here and yet he wouldn’t go.

This idea that Ruby and he cared for each other came partly from this.

But gradually he found that she wanted to be seen and needed to do things that attracted attention to herself. One day she followed him about the golf course, laughing whenever he hit a shot poorly. She was wearing a short summer skirt and a loose top, so the nipples of her breasts were visible.

And, later that afternoon, when they were alone, he had to make up a lie and tell her that he was happy she had come. And she simply looked at him, and snapped a match to light her cigarette.

Armand liked to believe he didn’t consider these things wrong – the church he hated did. Yet once he found himself embroiled with Ruby, he was priggish, deep in his heart. This priggishness was borne out in tantrums at home and in his needless anger with Jennifer and the children.

His oldest son’s birthday was the day Cindi went to the office. Coming into the house he gave his wife and children a terrible lecture. That was brought on because of the nervousness he felt over the abortion. Why did they wait for him? Didn’t they know – what? Wasn’t he busy?

They had not wanted to cut the cake until their father got home, and yet he was angry and didn’t want any cake. Jennifer tried to be happy, but this only dampened his mood, and he callously derided his son for being overweight. Then he went to leave the dining room.

Only then Armand realized that his son’s friend – a little girl from the Ecole Musique – was standing behind him. Up until this point she had been smiling. But, when Armand noticed her, she looked frightened.

Suddenly she turned and tried to run away.

Before Jennifer got to her, she was at the back door. Armand could hear her trying not to cry.

He turned to go to the little girl to apologize.

Then he looked at his son.

“You shouldn’t have more than two pieces,” he said, trying to be brave and joke.

He felt ashamed. He went upstairs, and phoned the Moncton Hospital to see how Brenda Corrigan was doing. And at this moment he was deeply concerned and wished he could have acted better towards her. He remembered how Brenda spoke, with such a twang, and suddenly he loved the memory of her voice because it reminded him of all things that were innocent.

“Tell her husband to phone me,” he said.

He put the phone it its cradle and sat all night in the dark.

After Ruby brought Cindi to his office – a small, slow girl with a damp face – whom he for some reason (he did not know why) did not like and could not look in the eye – the summer was finished for them both.

He wanted to act kindly to his family but he did not know how. Jennifer painted the kitchen cupboards. She was obsessively painting. The air was scalded with paint, which Armand was allergic to, so it was like a bright yellow hell.

And Ruby flew zigzagging into the dark once again.

Though both Eugene and Cindi were scared of Ruby, both of them pretended to themselves and to each other that they weren’t. He did not know why he felt he musn’t disappoint Ruby, but he knew he was certain of doing it sooner or later.

The very idea that he was from Montreal allowed Ruby to control everything by saying: “Well you understand – you’re from Montreal.”

And so he would walk about understanding things, being from Montreal.

In fact, all about him was proof that things were just as accessible here as they were anywhere else. And within everything, within the parties, the lobster boils, and the convertible rides at night, within all of this, from the Mateus wine he got sick on to his spontaneous acceptance that he was from Montreal and therefore was cosmopolitan enough to agree with things – within all of this was a falseness about his position that he understood, and he knew that everyone else did too.

He was also, as many men are of women they know, frightened of Ruby’s temper. When she got angry he witnessed some terrible scenes, in the house and at work. She had taken her last car, a Pinto, and had driven it through a tavern window because her high school boyfriend was sitting with someone she didn’t like. And when she got angry, as all people, she was compelled to continue and delighted in her ability to lose control.

By now the hot flagging days, the retarred roadways, the dust-covered leaves, the shapes and smells of flat tires hanging down from silent backyard branches, made everyone in the group tired of one another. Dorval wanted to go home, back to Montreal.

“You have to stay with me and help me out,” Ruby said. “Besides, what’s in Montreal?”

Cindi would stand between them, looking up at one, and then at the other, as they argued.

“What’s in Montreal?” Dorval would say. But then he would shrug, look out the open window with its chipped paint ledge, and stare down at a few dusty small sparrows twittering near a puddle in the dirt parking lot.

“You don’t have to stay on my account,” Cindi would say. “I’m fine.”

Her mother had come down finally to visit her, and kept hoping that Cindi wasn’t causing all kinds of trouble for them. Cindi sat rigidly at the other end of the metal table and watched everyone with eyes of terror. Her mother was still trying to look like an actress out of the fifties. She was good-natured and only wanted to be part of the good time everyone seemed to be having here. Now and then she put her hand on Dorval’s thigh, and patted it maternally.

“I had a baby, Mom – but I lost it,” Cindi said.

“Yes,” her mother said, lighting a cigarette and dropping the lighter back into her purse. “Well, I’ve heard that – haven’t I.” And when she raised her eyes to stare at Cindi, Cindi looked about the table as if searching for a kindly face, and then sat with her head down. Now and then she moved one of her fingers along the tabletop. When she looked up, her mother was just turning to look towards her again, and her head dropped as if she had a weight on it and her eyes closed, with her bottom lip turned out.

Ruby wanted a larger group but Cindi did not want to go anywhere. She was tired of meeting people and just wanted to stay by herself.

Ruby bought her ice cream, talked of taking her to the shrine at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre because Cindi wanted to go there, but the morning they got ready to go, Cindi said she didn’t feel like it.

Dorval then bought Cindi a puppy.

It had brown ears and a white tail.

Every once in a while Cindi would put her hand out and the puppy would lick it.

But then one morning she said that they should take the puppy back.

So they packed the puppy, and its flea collar, leash and rubber bone, in the box it came in and took it back to the pet shop in the mall. All it did was wag its tail against the box when it saw Cindi, and try to nuzzle her dress with its nose. Sometimes when they walked through a mall, Cindi would drop back twenty or thirty paces, and stare down at the floor. Ruby would have to go back to get her. And Cindi, wearing a
pantsuit the colour of a lima bean, would, in the illogical stubborn way slow people have to protect themselves, start to argue with her.

“No, you don’t have to come back.”

“No – I’m all right.”

“No – I don’t have a problem, Ruby – you are making a scene.”

Ruby would have to make sure Cindi took her phenobarbital – but she herself kept forgetting to give it to her, and then would wake her up in the middle of the night to take it.

Ruby did not understand why, but there were always terrible arguments after they went to bed.

“Well, I don’t like you today, Cindi.”

“No – you never liked me, Ruby. You always said things about me.”

“No – I never did – you are all mixed up and gone bonkers again. I never disliked you, but I do today, young lady.”

“You called me retarded – so howdya like that?”

“My God, woman, I never did in my life.”

“And told Dr. Savard I was slow – like I didn’t graduate or something like that.”

“I never said a thing. Who told you that –”

“I could tell by his questions.”

Ruby would say nothing.

“No one could think I could tell by their questions. …”

(Pause.)

“No one could think I could tell – I could tell by their questions. …”

(Pause.)

“And I didn’t like Dr. Savard either.”

“Well that’s not up to me, is it?”

“You thought I’d like him.”

“I didn’t say that–”

(Pause.)

“Ha.”

“No, I didn’t – it was always up to you, so don’t point the finger of blame.”

(Long pause.)

“And I’m not in love with Dorval Gene and you think I am.”

“I never said you were,” Ruby would say.

“You told Dorval Gene I was –”

“I never said anything so ridiculous –”

“Ask Dorval – he thought I was – he bought me a pin for my blouse.”

“Well la-tee-da to that.”

(Pause.)

“That’s what you think.”

“Cindi, go to sleep it’s late, dear.”

“And you think everyone’s not as smart as you.”

“There’s lots of people a lot smarter than me,” Ruby would say in the late-at-night resigned tone brilliant people have about the limitations of their own brilliance.

“Ha.”

Ruby would be lying in her sleeping bag on the far side of the living room, Cindi in her blanket and cushion on the other side. The shadow of the wharf light would just reach them through the long window. The maple would wave in the dark. There would be a long pause.

“You only like Dr. Savard because he reminded you of Missle Ryan.”

Ruby wouldn’t say anything. She would open her eyes and look at the wall.

“And I’m going to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre – I’m going by myself.”

She paused. “Some time soon.”

Ivan had taken the day to scout where the coyotes were behind the fields. Then, having decided where he would place his traps, he walked through the woods – this was just at dark – and came out on a dirt road. The air smelled of heavy leaves and sandpiles on the side of the road. Limp telephone lines hung in the dusk on lime-coated poles, and the air seemed to tick and fill with pleasant sounds.

He had to walk back to the car, found it when it was pitch black, and went back to the wharf. The evening then turned cold and a rain started falling. The waves beat against the boat and the old tires scraped the side of the wharf. There was a smell of wood and tar in the rain, and the bay was fogged in. Ivan went into his cuddy and saw his father sitting on the cot.

“Cindi lost her baby,” Antony said looking at him.

“How?”

“I don’t know,” Antony said, blowing his nose. “It beats me.”

“Well, what happened – where is she?”

“Oh, she’s at the apartment there – big-feelinged Ruby won’t let me see her.”

There was a pause, and Antony looked up at him.

“Some people say you beat her so bad she lost her child.”

“Who said?”

“Oh, all that Jesus crew. They were here an hour ago to get you – Frank and Jeannie Russell – with her cousins – the Levoys.”

Ivan sat on the old bait box. He was wearing a jean jacket that his arms looked very tight in, a big buckle on his belt, and work boots that were still covered with blades of grass and one small daisy from walking in the woods.

Antony neglected to tell Ivan that he had come onto the wharf with everyone else – saying the same things everyone else did, and feeling that he, too, could generate the same amount of self-important disdain as everyone else. In fact, Antony, in spite of his good intention, had pretended to Frank Russell that he had just heard of this mix-up and wanted to get to the bottom of it. He kept touching Jeannie’s little shoulder and shaking his head. The small dog Ivan had adopted had tried to keep them off the boat by running along the gunnels and barking, driving its paw into a nail. Cindi’s cousins, the Levoys, were furious because they had just heard that Ivan had beaten Cindi – they had just come home for the summer, and this fact alone made them feel justified.

Ivan knew he was in a terrible position. He couldn’t rely on anyone at the moment – and his perception had always served him well. He knew very well that, no matter his own part, he had become a scapegoat in some larger affair that he had no control over, until it ran its course. Frank or Jeannie Russell or his father had no control over it either. And he looked at his little dog – with the brown ears, sitting on its mat, licking its cut paw – proudly believing that his barking and running along the gunnels had kept the men away, when the men had gone away simply because they believed they could find him somewhere else.

In the cuddy light, in the damp, with his hair wet and hanging across his forehead, Ivan looked like
Cindi. Instead of feeling ashamed – as Antony was expecting (and somehow hoping) – Ivan looked tremendously proud and defiant.

“She lost her child,” he said, after a long time. “Well, then she’ll have another one with someone someday.”

Ivan tried to think back to the night of the community centre dance. It was true he had gone there with his buck knife on – but that was because he had been in the woods for most of the day. And he hadn’t used it anyway. But now there were those who said he went there with the clear intention of using it. Some would say it because they had heard others say it, others would repeat it.

“One person you’ve got to admire though,” Antony said, looking at him and huffing and puffing as if he was out of breath, “is that Dr. Savard. You know he was brought up in a tar-paper shack – and now tonight I saw him going along in his Porsche –”

“I’ve seen it,” Ivan said.

Antony shook his head, as if to show by physical movement the admiration his words couldn’t.

“Of course he pulled over when he saw me, the big wave and ‘How are you, Antony.’ I used to take Gloria down to him – not like Clay Everette. I was over there last month and Gloria was on the porch lying on the couch, so I went out to the office and saw Clay. I told him, ‘You get that little girl to a doctor before she dies,’ and Clay looked at me and hung his head. I threw my arms up in the air and said, ‘I’m some sick of the whole lot of ya. You’ve got a spoiled rotten girl in Ruby – who the first year at university had affairs with this married professor – a half a dozen affairs with this married guy – and then because she gets her snit up,
you build her a house or something like that. But I don’t want her around my Margaret,’ I said to them. Clay said, ‘Ya, and when was she ever with Margaret?’ And I just said, ‘That jeesless Dorval Gene and her are going around with all the young pussy on the road – and Margaret is too young to be with the likes of them – and if I see her with them any more, I’ll come right over here.’

“After that Clay says to me, ‘Look, do you want yer old job back,’ and I give him a look. ‘No,’ I said, ‘you keep yer job, and every job like it.’

‘“But we want you back,’ Clay said. ‘Yer the only man who can handle a grader.’”

The truth was, Antony was a magnificent tractor and grader operator.

“Yes,” Antony said. “Asked me in front of Lloyd to come back and take over – and I went over to Lloyd and touched him on the shoulder – he was hanging his head too. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘the job’s yours as long as you want it, because I won’t come back to work here.’

‘“But how will you live?’ Lloyd said, and I said, ‘I’ll live because I don’t bow to no one and stay true to myself.’ And with that I turned and walked back to my truck with Gloria watching out the window at me. Then she comes to the door and runs down in her housecoat. ‘Tony,’ she says, ‘Tony,’ and, hanging on to my arm, she tries to drag me back for a big reconciliation with Clay. ‘Ya’ve gotta talk to big Clay,’ she says. ‘He’s offerin you a job –’

‘“Don’t take it,’ Valerie yells out to me – she was sitting in the truck. ‘Don’t take it, Daddy – please don’t take it.’ And with that Gloria looks at Valerie and starts to cry.” Antony finished up, and he, too, had tears in his eyes.

Just as a story had been fashioned that the woman they took to Moncton had almost died because Dr. Hennessey was her doctor, so, too, did certain people believe that Ivan had beaten Cindi and she had lost her child. And though Antony spread this rumour all over the river, whenever Ivan was in at the house to see Margaret, Antony would convince himself he had only Ivan’s interest at heart.