Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (3 page)

The parking lot was dry and empty, while the greying headframe sat heavy in the air. He had jacked the
car up and was under it, when suddenly he was being kicked on the boots.

“What’s this, a fuckin floater?”

“No,” Ivan said, “I had a scare.”

“You had a scare – you talk to your shift boss – you don’t come out and steal my fuckin Jeep.”

Ivan looked up and saw the man’s legs, and then rolled himself out from under the car.

“Ya – well I had a fuckin scare,” Ivan said, knowing he was talking to the mine’s manager, and knowing instinctively that this was the one tactic that would save him. He simply turned, threw the wrench on the ground, kicked the jack out from under the car as if he was terribly annoyed, and walked back into the dry.

He was given a pink slip, but he knew in actual fact he could have been suspended. But the one thing about this experience is that he could not tell Cindi about it, because even if he did, it would not be the same – that is, everything about it would be told differently than he would have told the exact same story when they were together. Everything was different.

He left the mines the day after and never went back.

The next night he met his father Antony at Dr. Hennessey’s. His father had arthritis in his left arm and was there to get a shot of cortisone. During the winter, Antony would use a small butane lighter to warm his left hand if he was out with the horses. His father was Allain Garrett’s son; Ivan, however, had kept his mother’s maiden name, Basterache.

Ivan felt responsible, not only for his father, but for his two sisters – Valerie, who was eleven, and Margaret, sixteen.

“I might seem to be a carefree individual,” Antony said to him one night. “And sometimes I might be something of a carefree individual – the way I can wiggle my ears – but I have nothin since your mother left me. You’d think a woman would come home after seven years.”

Antony would get into conversations with people who stopped to buy Valerie’s worms in the spring. Valerie would sit out near the highway, a decent little girl of eleven, in a big hat, behind a huge cardboard
box with a sign which read
WORMS
4
SALE
: 2 4 1
ON WORMS!

Ivan had noticed that Antony had gotten into what Ivan called “The World War Two Factor,” and he would occasionally blame his lot in life on the fact that there was a bias against him because he was French.

“The only thing I was ever any good for was to bleed to death in a war – that’s all they wanted me for,” Antony said to a man, who was busy holding a night crawler in either hand. “And I went – I went – look at this here.” And he would show a scratch on his forearm quickly.

“Where did you fight?”

“Just about everywhere.”

“Who did you fight?”

“Almost everyone – I was at Dieppe – twice. I fought the Dieppenamese over at that place.”

“Well, we all had to offer something during those years.”

“Offer – I guess offer – but my kids are no good, and my wife took off with Clay Everette Madgill because he has money – so things are bad all around. No, I didn’t mind fighting – don’t get me so wrong on that – I believe in it–”

“How old are you now?”

“Forty-seven.”

The man said nothing.

Antony sniffed and picked up a handful of worms, looking them over, and then told Valerie to go get some fresh earth.

“I look forty-seven – more closer to fifty-seven,” Antony said. “In fact, almost sixty.”

“I was going to say if you were just forty-seven, you’d be kind of young for the war.”

“Well, it was a long son of a whore of a war,” Antony said, as if the person had offended him and he no longer wished to talk. Then he looked so quizzically and angrily that the man decided it was time to leave.

“And don’t be back,” Antony said. “We’ll sell our worms to those who know how to treat them!”

Now Antony was sitting on a chair with his feet up on Dr. Hennessey’s desk. Aunt Clare, the doctor’s sister-in-law, had let Ivan through the side door, so Antony didn’t know he was there.

Ivan stood at the door, watching his father as Hennessey gave him the shot. There was a moon over the dark, stubbled lane, and hard snow still piled in the yard.

Antony rolled up his sleeve because he knew he was going to have his blood pressure taken. His arm was quite white, surprisingly to Ivan, who had hardly seen him with his shirtsleeves rolled up. And his shirt was opened, and his undershirt was the old-fashioned type with straps.

Ivan knew intuitively that Antony had been discussing him and the marriage that had fallen through. Dr. Hennessey took no interest in such talk.

But Antony had always told Ivan that Cindi was as “stupid as a fucking boot on a two-year-old. …”

He looked at his father’s huge back, and the way his head was bent, and the way the room’s shadow played on the back of his reddish neck. His father had marvellously sad eyes, and Ivan could forgive him almost everything because of that.

Doctor Hennessey looked bored with the talk and stood in salt-and-pepper slippers and his old khaki
pants that were held up by a gigantic belt, and wearing a big red bow tie that seemed to wrinkle his Adam’s apple more than usual. He was standing off in the darkness of the study. The darkness rested on the table and on the brand-new table lamp, which glowed greenly in the late-evening room.

When Antony noticed Ivan, he winked.

Then he said to Dr. Hennessey: “Now you did this here, and helped me out – I’m going to come over tomorrow with a load of fill.”

“Well, I don’t believe I need fill, Tony,” the doctor said.

“What – of course you need fill,” Antony said. “You could use some on your front yard.”

Antony turned, his heavy black wallet linked to a chain on his belt and protruding out of his back pocket. Then he stopped by the door and grabbed Ivan by the shoulder, saying for some reason with tears in his eyes:

“Now this young lad just beat the shit out of his wife – so I have to go straighten him out.”

The old doctor, puffing on his pipe, turned away furiously. Ivan said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Once outside, Antony was angry about the fill.

“Well – why did you offer it to him then?” Ivan said.

“Well, you know how he relishes what I do for him – first I have to ask him, and then I have to do all the dirty work.”

So with that, Ivan didn’t say anything else.

Tonight Antony had a plan – in fact, he always had a plan – he couldn’t go without a plan of some kind, and like people who are always watching out for themselves, this plan might change in midstream if any other direction suited him. As Ivan, who was always a
loner, noted about his father, his father couldn’t do without a plan, or a partner. His partner in the last few months was Gordon Russell, whom he happened to be selling porno movies for – which he didn’t think Ivan knew about, except Ivan had found them under his father’s bed, and in his suitcase. Ivan wouldn’t care except he did not like Gordon, because Gordon was one of the men who had had his mittens on Cindi.

The day before, Antony had cut his horse’s hoof and wanted Ivan to take a look at it. He had cut Rudolf’s left hind hoof. Rudolf had been Ivan’s horse, but Antony had beat him at a game of horseshoes when he was eleven and took it. Antony had bet him the sleigh for the horse.

It was the only horse Ivan ever owned. However, he gave riding lessons at Madgill’s and had broken Tantramar for Ruby Madgill last year.

Rudolf was a Belgian. Antony had bobbed its tail so tight that when Ivan was young, he thought it would cut off blood to its head. So he used to sneak out at night to look at it. There Rudolf would be all alone, its one pile of manure looking lonely in the centre of the floor.

Antony worked it day and night. He hired it out for sleigh rides, with twenty screaming, mittened children aboard, and with a pair of deer antlers attached by a strap to its head, while Antony was dressed in a red suit with black buttons.

“Are you a Santa?”

“Fuckin right.”

He took it into the woods – and whenever he got drunk, which was almost continually, he tried to sell it down river. He would kick it, and then order it to bite his ear off to make people respect him. Though a
strong horse, it was small, and Antony had tried to pass it off as a quarter horse to a young girl from the air base who wanted to take riding lessons. Ivan had heard about this in time, just as Antony was about to sell it, and came down and had to put his father in a headlock right in front of the girl.

“Yer squeezing my fuckin ears off.”

“Tell her what it is.”

“No.”

“Tell her.”

“No.”

In many ways Antony had lived by his wits his whole life through.

“Give us a ride home – I want to show you Rudolf,” Antony said.

“Why?” Ivan said. He was looking up the road, almost as if he expected Cindi to pop out of the woods and come running to him with her black eye. They were standing at the bottom of the doctor’s lane, in the middle of a long turn, tangent to some small bare trees.

In the car going down river, Antony tried on a bunch of watches that he was supposed to sell. As soon as they got into the car he hauled them out – he had a whole pocketful. He held them up to his ear. Then he held them up to Ivan’s ear.

“Go way,” Ivan said. “I’m trying to drive the cocksuckin car.”

“Don’t tell me I don’t know my watches,” Antony said.

“They’re all about a hundred dollars a piece – I imagine,” Ivan said.

Then Antony berated all of his family, starting with Ivan, for not listening to his experiences over the years – that he had at least two-dozen experiences that
no one listened to. This was not a new charge that he levelled. He had always felt that his family did not care for him – except for Valerie, whom he doted upon.

Their situation was this. Ivan’s mother, and now Antony’s ex-wife, Gloria Basterache and he had boarded Ivan out as a boy. He had beaten the snot out of him, and now Ivan was a man. They did not know one another.

“So,” Antony said, after some reflection, looking out towards the bay, “you and Cindi are on the outs, I hear.”

“I don’t want to talk about it –”

“Just being parental.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Very best.” There was a silence. “She’s a dumb quiff anyhow.”

The moon was high over the trees. Its light cast over the yard. From the shed, Ivan and Antony could see one upstairs light on in the middle of the house. Ivan looked at Rudolf’s hoof. Then he found a nail and cleaned the horse’s hooves.

“So you were out on the road with him,” Ivan said, cleaning the left hind hoof carefully and looking at the cut.

“I had him out for a little bit,” Antony said.

“You didn’t cross over the old bridge by the bog?”

“How did you know that? You been spying on me?”

“He’s picked up a three-inch square nail. So how would he do that – I figure you were out on the cock-suckin bridge.”

“He won’t haul right – he never learned anything,” Antony said, going about the horse and kicking it now
and then. The horse started to move back, but Ivan said, “Whoa boy.”

Then Antony sat on a bale of hay. Then he stood up, and smoothed the hay out carefully and sat down again.

“That bridge is going down someday – you shouldn’t be putting a horse on it,” Ivan said.

The door had been left open and moonlight came in on the old stall. Some sawdust, as white as fine powder about the edges but hard and yellow at the top, was piled behind the half-opened door that had a broken hinge. Some fox mash sat in the wheelbarrow, and now and then Antony’s few ginger-coloured foxes yelped. Both Antony’s thumbs were taped where the foxes had bitten him. They bit him almost every day of their existence. And by the time fall rolled about, his fingers were usually too sore to skin them, so he had to get Ivan to do it.

Ivan wore his jean jacket, the sleeves rolled up near his elbows. Though small, his arms were very strong, and he had the tattoo of his nickname “Jockey” on his forearm. He had a few homemade tattoos on his knuckles that he had scratched out in defiance to Father LeBlanc – a short, untempered, colicky priest who had the charge of him for a year and a half in Tracadie. His friends at the boarding school in Tracadie had called him “Jockey.” However, no one else did.

He bathed and wrapped the horse’s hoof.

“You should have the vet over,” Ivan said.

“No, God, you got her good,” Antony said.

Antony then said, with unbridled pride and affection, “Valerie’s got a training bra now. So she’ll probably show it to you – she’s been walking about the house with her chest pounced out for two weeks – she won’t (even wash it.”

Then he smiled, and was silent. A strong short gust of wind came up over the yard.

“So – I was thinking we should go pick up Ernie and drink some booze,” Antony said. “No sense in it going to waste – having it dry up or something.” Antony’s face broke into a big grin, and he did what he always did since Ivan was a child – he wiggled one ear up and the other ear down at the same time, faster and faster. “Yer some cute, Ivan,” he said, “with that little prick-topped haircut.”

When they went out, Antony shut off the light in the shed. Then, as if he had to show fastidiousness in front of his son, he went in and straightened an old studded collar and bridle. Ivan remembered the first time Antony had gone into Clay Everette Madgill’s barn, he was standing beside him. His father’s face beamed with joy at such a barn and the beautiful quarter horses, and he kept saying: “Someday now I’ll have a barn like this.”

Now Antony fidgeted carefully with his faded, studded bridle.

And Ivan felt sad as Antony walked towards the house.

Now there were three in the car. Ernie was with them. They had gone to his house to get him.

“I’d like to know why yer grouchy mother won’t let you out of the house more,” Antony said.

“I don’t know either,” Ernie shouted over the sound of the worn-out muffler. Ernie’s whole appearance was grey. His hair was grey and combed straight back, his cheeks were sunken. He wore black pointed cowboy boots that came over the top of his grey pants. His knees
were bony, and cigarette ashes fell on the zipper of his polished black leather jacket that allowed him, at age forty-four, to retain the demeanour of a teenage boy. “I don’t know why she don’t let me out to town,” he said.

“Well, come to think of it, perhaps it’s because yer a fuckin nuisance,” Antony said.

Ivan said nothing. He shook his head. It was going to be a long night.

They parked behind the church to drink. An hour passed. Then two hours.

The priest looked in the car window at them. They were silent.

“Boys, I’ll tell you this – you shouldn’t be here pissing in my graveyard.”

“I wasn’t pissing, Father,” Antony said. “Ernie was.”

Ivan looked over at the church, which retained in the dark its bulked whiteness.

“I’ll fight,” Ernie said to the priest. He was sitting in his black leather jacket in the back seat. It looked to the priest as if the jacket was filled with impounded air, and only the head of a grey-haired whizzled teen-aged boy poked out of it. “I’m Cindi’s uncle – I’ll fight–”

Ernie was not Cindi’s uncle but he had known her as a child, and it seemed appropriate now, because they had been talking about her, that he be her uncle. “You got no right to bother those who’ve lived on the Gum Road!” Ernie roared at the priest. Then he said, “Let me out of this car!” “We’re going,” Ivan said.