Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (5 page)

Now, after telling his ex-wife that he was trying to straighten their son Ivan out, and looking at her for a sign that she might be pleased with him because of this, she lay on the chesterfield with her eyes half-closed, he was sad once more.

“Do what you want, Tony – I’ve sacrificed enough,” she said.

Her face looked pale, which always showed she was in a bad temper.

“I got Valerie out in the truck,” he said.

“Ya – well tell her I’ll see her,” she said.

“When?”

“When – when – when I do. Every time you come here there’s a problem.”

Gloria had decided three years earlier that she wanted to bring Valerie to live with her. Valerie came to Clay Everette’s carrying her own suitcase and a big doll. They enrolled her in gymnastics and swimming, and Gloria always did her hair.

One time she crawled in under the hay in the back of her father’s truck and was found sleeping in her small bed the next morning, and another time she ran away and stayed with Ivan. Then she fell at gymnastics and loosened three teeth. Gloria bought her a puppy and her own horse, Smurfie, and then, finally, Gloria took her back to Antony. The little girl walked into the house, made herself a molasses sandwich, and sat at the table. This is what she had been about to do when Gloria had come to get her four months before.

Now Gloria lay with her housecoat on, which seemed to be designed in the fashion of some Eastern tapestry, and she settled one bare leg over the top of the couch’s arm, with her hand behind her head.

Antony did not know what to say, and as always he seemed to say the wrong thing.

“It’s just that the doctor is beggin me for some fill, and I was wonderin if I could get some topsoil from Clay,” he said.

Gloria rolled on her side and punched the pillow.

“Beggin me for some fill,” Antony said to himself.

Gloria looked up at him and said: “Clay won’t refuse you anything – take it.”

And Antony knew this was true.

Then, suddenly, feeling he had to say something, he said: “That Ivan is gonna be the death of you, isn’t he? Wife-beatin cocksucker.”

“He’s already been the death of me,” Gloria said, yawning.

“That’s what I told him – I said, ‘Don’t think of me if you don’t want, but yer gonna kill yer mother.’”

There was a silence. Then his voice shook. “I said, ‘I put yer mother through hell – so for Godsakes, don’t you too.’

“You should go to the doctor,” he said after a moment. “If I see Clay Everette, I’m going to give him a piece of my mind about getting you to Armand for a good check-up.”

Armand Savard was the doctor a lot of younger people went to, and Gloria as well. He drove a Porsche and was at the beach most of the summer, had a chronic tan, and was known, all of a sudden, as the best doctor on the river.

Then Antony said: “I bet if you sent Ruby over to look in on Cindi – and see that that Ivan stays the hell away from her –”

Ruby was Clay Everette’s daughter from his first marriage, and Antony suddenly looked upon her as fondly as any of his own.

“Yes – yes, I’ll send her along,” Gloria said.

When Antony walked back to his truck, the day was getting colder. Shadows came down on the patches of mud. There were grey shadows on the inside of his truck and on Valerie’s tam.

“You know you should have come in to see Mommie,” Antony said.

The girl, with her skinny legs covered in red leotards, and her tam pressed down onto her small ears, looked at him and shrugged.

For some reason Antony blushed, and as he drove home tears came to his eyes.

Cindi had always been considered slow, although she was always perceptive enough to the care of herself. She was an epileptic – a petit mal, though a bad petit mal. She had spent two years in grade ten and two years in grade eleven, and finally graduated because of the policy of grace. She went at night to a tutor and worried over every Algebra equation, and every page of history.

She had stayed at the apartment after Ivan had left. It was an apartment building below Big Cove turn. Its windows looked glib in the winter and scorching hot in the summertime. It had the appearance of a prefab school for elementary grades, without the advantage of grass or shrubs.

There was one shrub out back that she had planted, which had been covered with burlap all winter. Below her the road went straight down river, narrow and calved with frost heaves. She could see the nearest light of Loggie’s wharf when she stood upon her tiptoes.

She still had a swollen eye and some bruises. She had gotten them when she had fallen down the night
of the fight. Ivan had put an ice pack on her eye, had taken off her clothing as he did after all her seizures. When she woke up she ran. She ran about the building four or five times and then went to Ruby’s to spend the night.

She was pregnant. She did not want to bring another child home to her mother. And now, because of what had happened, she was scared she would have to. She was resolved never to rely upon her mother or anyone else ever again. Like some people who are considered slow, she could be quite stubborn. Her mother was frightened for her. Everything her mother feared had come true – because her mother had always believed the worst about her.

“This is a terrible time in her life, and she has nowhere to turn. But there will be no child if she doesn’t want it – you just mark my words,” she’d overheard Ruby say to Dr. Savard. And this, somehow, gave her a shivery feeling and made her feel important. “There will be no child if I don’t want it,” she whispered.

The outrage of others made her feel important. It was impossible not to feel this way, with so many people concerned about her and visiting her, and Ruby saying: “Leave her alone – let her rest for a while.”

Margaret Garrett had tried to visit, and Gloria had come over. Adele had phoned and said she would be down. A woman’s group had phoned to see if she needed money. There was a talk show on local television about a transition house, and her case, but not her name, was brought up by a woman with close-cropped hair whom she didn’t even know. (This woman happened to be Vera.)

But the people who rushed in and out of her life at this time, and made her, suddenly, as Antony would
say, “The most important show on the road,” had no idea that they partook in humiliating her. In fact, if they had been told this, they would deny it with that tumultuous anger that liberal thinkers often mistake for concern over human rights.

And yet she felt also that she had finally become important to people she had always looked up to, who had never liked her.

Even Antony went to see her. He came in one Saturday morning.

“Well – how are you?” he said.

“I’m all right,” Cindi said.

“You don’t look beaten up too bad,” he said. (As if he wanted her to be more beaten up for effect.)

“No,” she looked at him and then looked at her fingers and wobbled them together. The day was cooling off, and a mute sky lay flat against the water. She had tried to comb out her perm that Ruby had gotten for her, and now her hair was curly in one place and straight in another. Her eyelashes kept blinking.

“An awful thing,” he said. He sat down on the edge of the couch and took a deep breath.

Every now and then she would look up at him and blink, and then look down again.

“Cup of tea?” he said after a long moment.

Cindi, who had always tried to show everyone that she was useful and could do things like her friends, jumped up and literally ran out to the kitchen to make him tea.

He drank some tea and looked at her. He looked very closely at her, but he couldn’t see any marks. She sat with her knees pinched together.

“So,” he said, “you got a hot cross bun in the oven.”

Cindi smiled, and again folded her hands on her lap. Then she tried to tell a story about what she and Ivan had planned to do, and where they would live. “But then,” she said, in a whisper, “we got in a fight.”

Antony then told her he remembered that fifteen years ago the Defoe boy was born with his right ear inside his brain, and his left ear deaf.

Cindi looked at him, blinking, and tried to think.

“Was it sticking out?”

“Was what sticking out?”

“Its ear?”

Antony shook his head. “Turned side on in its skull, I heard.”

He drank his tea as his eyes wandered over the apartment. In the twilight, the apartment empty, the evening light cast on the bar stool in the corner with the poignancy of spring. Some birds complemented it by a twitter or two, and there was a smell of slush in the lane.

Cindi, like many people when the first warm weather comes, was wearing a sleeveless blouse and now shivered.

“What does Ivan think of it?” Antony said.

“I don’t even think he knows,” Cindi said. “I wasn’t sure until a week ago.”

Then with a voice that startled even himself, Antony said, “Ho, ho – he knows – don’t you kid yourself on that. I was up at the doctor’s the other night, and he was there.”

“What did he say?” Cindi said nervously, as a person who only wants people to say kind things about them.

“Dr. Hennessey asked me to speak to Ivan about you, but of course Ivan was all worked up about gettin drunk with me.”

“Drunk?”

“Well – I tried to speak to him aboutcha, and being pregnant, and he said, ‘Don’t you worry about her – I need to get some booze and that’s what we should be talking about!’”

Cindi didn’t speak, and the napkins she had brought in with the tea and cookies added character to her little body.

“Don’t you worry about Ivan though – I’ll take care of him,” he said suddenly. “I can handle that boy.”

“I don’t want anything bad to happen to him,” she said. And in spite of herself, she smiled self-importantly.

“I told them when you announced the wedding,” he said, under his breath. “Clay called me over and said he was going to get you some furniture. I said, ‘Furniture them all you want, but that little girl is going to marry the wrong man.’”

Cindi stared straight ahead blinking. Then she picked up a cookie and took a nibble.

She felt sad for everyone suddenly.

Antony then said that he took responsibility for his son, and when he did he spoke in a resigned way.

And Cindi was uncomfortable on his behalf.

On April 30, Adele drove down river to see what was going on.

She arrived at the apartment just after Ruby came in. Ruby was telling Cindi that her cousin Eugene was home for the summer and she wanted her to see him
more often. She had always said that Dorval Gene and Cindi loved each other. “Everyone knows that,” she would say. She called him “Dorval Gene” because he was from Montreal.

As far as Ruby was concerned, Cindi should go out. She told her about the horse-hauling at the community centre, next week, and she should go to the dance and have some fun.

Ruby said what people always said on these occasions as if there never was a personal motive for saying it. When Cindi didn’t know if she would go or not, Ruby asked for Adele’s advice.

“Well Delly – what do you think?” she said, as she started to comb Cindi’s hair out with a brush, while Cindi kept wincing.

“I think Cindi can make up her own mind if she wants to go out or not,” Adele said, thinking that this was a very wise answer, and going over to hold Cindi’s head.

“Well, of course,” Ruby said, “we all know that,” and looked at Adele as if she wasn’t as bright as she had once thought.

Cindi sat in the chair looking from one to the other.

Ruby was very pretty. She also had a coarseness, which added to her beauty. She had been captain of the women’s hockey team at the community centre, before she went to university, and she knew how to take care of herself on the ice, to butt end, to spear, and to take a woman out in the corners. She used to sit in a faded T-shirt and jockstrap in the dressing room after a game, with a small diamond earring stud in her nose, putting her equipment away, her legs and throat covered in sweat, nonplussed at the coming and going of young men who could see over the partition. The
diamond stud in her nose added to the sharpness of her eyes.

“We have to get her out of this hole now and again,” Ruby said to Adele when they left the apartment. “You should know that.”

“Yes,” Adele said, “of course that’s right.”

And, of course, it was. As Vera had said on the local television, and this was true as well, people like Cindi had the court of world opinion on their side. And so they should.

As they left the building, birds flew to the trees outside and gave sound to the late-April air.

Ruby had a stud horse called Tantramar, and a colt called Missle, after the boy she once almost married. Ruby fell in love and the boy had died. It was a long time ago. But when she smelled the leaves under the rock wall near her back lane, she thought of him.

He didn’t have very much – not like Ruby herself – nor had he ever had a girlfriend, something which Ruby had thought hilarious. Every summer it seemed to be someone new for her. Her boyfriends never lasted.

But she loved Missle. He didn’t drink – which was a drawback – but he didn’t take her credit cards. And he did love her.

One night, by the rock wall near the lane in back of her father’s house, she explained all about her boyfriends.

“I’ve had a lot of boyfriends,” she said.

He won’t never be back, she thought.

But he did come back.

He did come back. He looked like a private in the army, with his hair short, his mouth small, his eyes dark and wide.

She often told him she was spoiled.

“You’re not spoiled at all,” Missle said, and he could hardly get the words out.

“Well, all I ever want to do is party and have a good time,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

“I want to become a speech therapist,” he said.

He was so slight she felt that she had to protect him. She knew no one would dare bother him if he was with her.

She wrote about him to her cousin, Dorval Gene, and told her friends about him. Cindi would be her bridesmaid, and they would live in Halifax, and she would work and he would go to school.

He tried to do things, which would have exasperated her in any other man. But with him, she was patient, even parental. He had to get her to teach him how to ride a horse because she rode. He got up at five in the morning. He would go around the arena, she would watch him hopefully. Ivan Basterache would shout instructions and encouragement, and then he would just slide off, as if his hip bones weren’t big enough to support him.

He wanted to be a speech therapist because he had never learned to talk until he was nine years old. He had lived in his own world.

Ruby, who was always making fun of people, now learned not to do this in front of him.

He was so naive that she tried to protect him from everyone, especially from former boyfriends, who would ask sexual questions about her.

One day, she put on a top hat and her old tap shoes, and tap-danced for him in the living room.

“Look,” she kept saying, her face perspiring and her eyes closed shyly. “See – what I – can do,” she kept saying.

And she was using an old broom handle as a cane.

“I love you as the grass is green,” he said.

And tears came to his eyes, and she had to stop and put her arms around him, and comfort him, like a child.

He died two nights later, in his sleep.

She became more beautiful than ever after that, and lost herself in regret, tantrums, envy, and physical abuse from married men. Now she had a crush on Dr. Savard.

They had met for the first time the month before. She was wearing an old grey coat and a pair of work boots because she was down river with her father. It was raining, and the rain fell over the white hard hat she had pulled down over her eyes. She had an acetylene torch in her hand.