Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (18 page)

Ruby was very upset with everyone these last three weeks. She tormented Lloyd. She came in at three in the morning and slept until noon – and the meticulous care of her horse this morning was just a part of the common thread of her dissatisfaction with the summer, her anger at Dorval Gene, and her refusal to look Armand Savard in the eye, when they passed each other on the road in their cars.

Off she rode to see her house. The day was very bright and the sky was glossy blue in the distance.

Ruby had hoped the fire would destroy her new house, but she had no such luck.

“It’s likely I’ll be living in the fucking thing yet,” she said looking at it. “What a cocksuckin monstrosity you are – ninety thousand dollars worth of brick shit-house if you ask me!”

The trouble was she couldn’t find the fire at all, and wearing her tight breeches, and high English-style riding boots, she rose and fell on the saddle, hoping that the fire would come out and destroy something so she could see it.

But there were only some puffs of smoke in the distant sky, and the leaves at the edge of the field were turning golden by the late-August nights. There was a smell of fall in the air.

She brought her right foot out of the stirrup and hooked it over the saddle, and taking an orange from her pocket, peeled it with her long fingernails, sucking at it as she did, and, looking towards the trees, rested the crop between her legs.

Now a column of smoke plummeted towards the south, far above her head – and a new, darker smoke billowed inside the greyish cloud.

She looked at it and sniffed the wind, found the stirrup, and holding the reins tight, jabbed the horse softly, so that Tantramar, already glossy with sweat, moved backwards, the sound of its hooves sharp on the stones beneath it.

Ruby kept backing the horse up, until it turned on the right lead and began to canter about the property, its head high because of her contact on the reins, and its black coat as glossy as the saddle beneath her. Because its head was held so high it stepped on loose
boards and planks, and cut its right hoof on a chip of cement that had a nail embedded in it.

She kept riding the horse like this, for twenty minutes, hitting it with the crop each time it slowed its pace, and surveying her property. After a while, she brought the horse back to a walk, and looked behind her with her hand on the horse’s rump. She saw a tuft of bright green grass just below her bedroom window. “I love you as the grass is green,” she remembered Missle Ryan say. “I love you as the grass is green,” she said now, to no one, it seemed, but the horse’s rump.

Then she went home, and not bothering to unsaddle or cool down the animal, left it in its stall, walked into the house, and sat in Big Clay’s cold black-leather chair in the den, with his gun collection in the rack behind her beautiful head, and tears in her eyes.

Cindi had gone with her mother to the station, leaving a note that she would meet Ivan there, and writing that she had taken all the bags, in her scrawl that was unreadable because she had never gotten over the habit that when she crossed a
t
, she crossed out the whole word. So the note was posted on the door, the cupboards opened, and the bathroom light left on.

And there, at the station, she began her wait in her new pantsuit, with the Elizabethan-collared blouse with long white sleeves, holding her gigantic house-plant on her lap, every now and then peering through it when the door opened, and blinking her albino-coloured eyelashes.

Nevin had lost control of himself completely and was terrorizing everyone. He had moved all of the furniture into the middle of the field, and waving a stick and shouting, made the little girls, who were sitting hugging each other, shake like leaves.

Although ten people dropped by to help him, and each one of them said that he shouldn’t move the furniture, he was determined to move it. He ordered Vera in to pack her china, and ordered Ralphie to help him carry the cabinet out.

And every time someone obeyed him, he would nod in an aggressive way, as if this was the best feeling he had ever had. Then, about three o’clock, all the furniture that they had piled in the field burned, but with the neighbours helping they managed to save the house.

The black smoke rising in the cloud of grey smoke Ruby had seen was the lumber that had been upset on the old bridge finally going up in flames. Ivan was walking chest deep in water beneath it because of his fresh worry – that the entire bridge, as old and as rickety as it was, was about to fall upon the horse. And Rudolf, sensing this, was looking behind him, and Ivan was trying to find ways to prop the bridge up.

“What we gotta do, Rudolf, is find out a way to haul her in the other direction when she goes – and that might be the fuckin ticket all around.”

Then Ivan went beneath the water to get a look at things. The horse’s outside hind leg was stretched back and caught up under the runner, and probably broken.

Ivan came up, took a finger and wiped his nose.

“You got yourself in one fuck of a mess here, Rudie,” he said. “How did you let the old man talk you into this,” he said, as he walked in front of it. Ivan, for the first time, felt feeble in his efforts to do anything, and in his sudden anger he took to beating the horse to make it lunge. “Come on you son of a bitch, come on,” he said, “you fuckin cocksucker – move.”

The old horse made three or four great lunges, tearing up the mud and roots beneath it, splashing itself up to the blinkers, wheezing and showing its blackened teeth. And after Ivan’s fury, settling down seven inches from where it was before, with the bridge on fire just above its head.

“Ah, ya poor broke-up son of a whore,” Ivan said, looking at the horse’s tarnished studded collar, and its flags and two little bells. “If I had half an I.Q., I’d be on my way to Sudbury.”

Stepping away from the horse and shaking his fist, he yelled, “Sudbury, Sudbury, Sudbury – where you can’t find me to get you out of fuckin scrapes like this here. Because you are a dumb horse –
TROY
is a smart horse, and right now he’s in his stall eating hay. And where are you? Answer me that!” he said, crying suddenly.

Then he walked furiously across the bog and into the woods, wiping tears from his eyes. He came out a minute later dragging a pole three times as long as he was. He was going to jar the bridge the other way. Once he did that, he felt he would have much better luck moving the sleigh.

The horse wheezed and coughed, and watched him with the pathetic stoic eyes seen so often in beasts of
burden; the little flags on its blinkers, crooked, and the coarse twine unravelling from its bobbed tail.

Ivan, tears still in his eyes, laughed when he looked at the flags, and got upon the horse’s back to straighten them out.

Then suddenly, out of the blue, the old horse’s ears caught on fire as sparks flew in a great billow, snapping at the air.

Ivan, furious at this, put them out with his bare hands, yelling: “I’d rather you die of smoke than flame.”

Then he laughed because of the way the ears smoked, and then cried for the same reason.

“You know what I’ve just been thinking, Rudie,” he began to say, “that goddamn Cindi is probably at this moment –”

But just then the bridge unceremoniously tumbled upon them both.

By November there was snow on the ground. People could walk on the icy fields through the woods and not see a living sign of an animal, only the eerie, indefinable, and somehow calculated design of ice webs in the burnt-out trees.

One day a little coyote padded out across the field, with a small body but great big paws and ears. It walked into old Allain’s yard and stole a chicken.

Antony came out with the .30–.30, fired at it four times, but missed it every time. Then he walked back into the house and sat down.

Then, sticking his tongue into his cheek to puff it out, he got Valerie to kiss him, and without looking at her, hauled his last Extra Big chocolate bar from his pocket.

Then he took a walk to see Vera and Nevin and their new baby girl.

He would come over every day now to talk to them. It didn’t matter what he talked about. Sometimes it was the weather – the storm that might come, the planet might explode, something was going on in Lemec with
the snow crabs, or he had heard Clay Everette had finally been put in his place at a horse-hauling in Napan – and he would sit there and drink tea.

He said nothing about the past summer. Once in a while when someone mentioned the past summer he would look at them, with casual interest, as if he were a stranger that had just been informed about events that were unknown to him.

He found that it was best not to mention Margaret to them, so he did not. And he sensed that it was true that Nevin was going to go away for a while, and Vera was going to move to town.

The birth of Hadley – for this is what the little girl was called – happened at night. Just as Vera could not have foreseen that she would become pregnant, and then believed it was her moral choice that she had, she did not foresee the events of the birth either. Two weeks before her due date her water had broken when she was visiting Thelma, and so it was convenient to cross the road to the hospital, where the baby was born in the delivery room, and because it was going to be a dry birth and inducing didn’t work – they were forced to do a Caesarean.

And this is what Vera spent her time talking about to Antony, believing that she alone was responsible for everything that had happened – and therefore more content than at any time in her life.

Antony didn’t talk too much about his own family any more. Sometimes he would mention Valerie’s marks on a test at school. And on occasion when someone mentioned Gloria, he would look at them and nod seriously.

He seemed unsure of himself now and didn’t do too much outside any more. For instance, he didn’t go
down river and drink beer. Nor did he go up to Madgill’s to get his alimony cheque. It came by mail now – always a little late, and signed by Clay Everette.

They had heard that Tantramar got sick and had to be put down. But the news from the family was that Ruby had gotten married to someone one night at the church in Chatham Head. But he didn’t talk about this. It seemed natural, it seemed inevitable, and it seemed pointless.

Antony would return the conversation to the snow crabs in Lemec, or to a weather balloon he saw drifting high in the sky, so high in fact that he thought it was a spaceship – and then look at them with the hope that they would believe him.

He told Vera he could get her another piano, but they didn’t seem to believe him – until he arrived at three in the morning with it loaded on a truck. Antony stood in mud up to his knees, with the lights on and the truck motor throttling in the dark, and with a song playing on the radio in the cab, which smelled of pine freshener. He refused to take money for it, telling Nevin it was for his summer’s work.

Then he got Jeannie and Frank Russell to help him unload it and carry it into the house. Frank, his red, freckled hands showing in the porch light, and Jeannie standing in behind, with her gum boots to her knees, and her hearing aid turned up full volume.

So there was an atonement of a sort, the red hands under the porch light, and Jeannie’s decisive nod to Vera when she entered the house, wearing her husband’s long brown coat, walking squat on her thin sturdy legs, her gum boots squeaking, and her hands clutching the rim of the piano like some little Tasmanian devil, while Vera stood in her nightgown and
could do nothing more than offer them hot chocolate – for that was the only luxury in the world Vera allowed herself.

Whenever Antony left Vera’s, he would go home through the field and out behind his shed. He would walk into the house and up the stairs slowly. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he would stare glumly at the dresser. Then, lying his head on the pillow, with the clock ticking beside him, he would listen as the wind rattled the window and people moved about downstairs.

A year passed before Cindi got married again. Her maid of honour was a girl from Welshford, who was a friend of the groom, so she had moved out of the sphere of people surrounding Ivan’s case, moved away from it – and into a new life and mythology, which caused the standard speculations of how it would differ from her previous life.

What was unfortunate, some people said now, was that she would ever get married again. Thelma only sighed. She sighed, because she believed the sigh made her look concerned and understanding. And then she looked at Vera and Olive – who she hoped would approve of her sigh.

The whole idea, especially from Olive, was that if Cindi had only talked to her, or to somebody like “her” (and here she cast a kindly look at Adele who was not, of course, like “her”), then she would not have jumped right into another marriage. The whole idea that she was pregnant again was awful. The idea was again fostered that she was a simpleton, and was
taken advantage of – and another idea complemented it – she was a simpleton who took advantage of others – those who last year had tried to help her, and straighten her about.

The only one of them who went to the wedding was Adele. It looked so eerie. Cindi was more than a little pregnant and was already showing. A band played outside the church with a set of bagpipes. Confetti was thrown, and all was the same as before.

Cindi went past Adele without recognizing her. She had gone into another group, another life. The car door was opened and she waved, caught Adele’s wave, and blinked in the sunlight.

Adele went into the graveyard, which was sectioned in two.

The section near the bay was the graves of the first settlers, and the graves nearest the woods were the newer ones.

At one of the newest graves Adele stopped. Her lips trembled, and then she shrugged. The granite marker in the earth simply read:

Ivan Basterache
A Man
1957–1979

It was quite a famous marker for a while. And then it was overgrown and forgotten altogether.