Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace:

  “It is a rare talent that can so vividly develop the people that inhabit a book. Richards brilliantly creates his characters with all their faults and shortcomings.”

  –The Malahat Review

  “A masterpiece.”

  –Atlantic Advocate

  “Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace bears out [Richards’s] singular status in our national literature. … Essential reading.”

  –Halifax Daily News

  “[Richards] gives us the voices of his characters and their complicated, fate-burdened lives intact. … Richards gives the impression of having walked every mile his characters walk, while at the same time maintaining a ruthless honesty.”

  –Books in Canada

  “Richards has an ability to outline the dynamic between actual events and what they grow into, the gap between our lives as they are lived and what they become through conversation. He is a solid artist. …”

  –Montreal Gazette

  “Richards is a singular voice in Canadian literature, a writer who has documented the endemic poverty of Maritime life with unequalled grit and authenticity. …”

  –Toronto Star

  “Powerful and unsentimental. …”

  –Ottawa Citizen

  BOOKS BY DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS

  FICTION

  The Coming of Winter (1974)

  Blood Ties (1976)

  Dancers at Night (short stories, 1978)

  Lives of Short Duration (1981)

  Road to the Stilt House (1985)

  Nights Below Station Street (1988)

  Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (1990)

  For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (1993)

  Hope in the Desperate Hour (1996)

  The Bay of Love and Sorrows (1998)

  Mercy Among the Children (2000)

  River of the Brokenhearted (2003)

  The Friends of Meager Fortune (2006)

  The Lost Highway (2007)

  NON-FICTION

  A Lad from Brantford, & Other Essays (1994)

  Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play (1996)

  Lines on the Water: A Fisherman’s Life on the Miramichi (1998)

  Playing the Inside Out (2008)

  God Is (2009)

  For all those who stand beside those who

  stand alone this book is dedicated.

  And those who longest should have met

  Are safe in each other’s arms not too late.

  Today the forsaken one of the fold is brought home –

  The tortured shall no longer know alarm

  –Malcolm Lowry

  But take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumblingblock to them that are weak.

  –Paul - 1 Cor. 8:9.

  I

  1

  Ivan Basterache had been married twenty months. But now he and Cindi were separated. The trouble had started because Ivan’s father had borrowed a thousand dollars from Vera, his next-door neighbour, and then had asked Ivan to intercede. So Ivan had taken Cindi’s money to pay the debt. A fight followed and chairs were broken, and the very money was torn to shreds. The RCMP had to come because of the shotgun, and Cindi ran outside in her underwear and went to Ruby Madgill’s.

  Ivan drove into town a few days later. He left the car and walked along the street, passed the old red-brick opera house, and moved along with his hands in his pockets.

  He found himself in the heart of town without realizing where he was. He went into the park and sat on a bench just in front of the bust of Lord Beaverbrook. Then after lighting a cigarette he got up and moved again. He had no idea where he was going, and seemed to be moving in circles.

  Of course you don’t always know where you are going – but for some reason all movements happen because they were meant to.

  Therefore he found himself at Ralphie Pillar’s shop at noon hour. Ralphie was Vera’s brother.

  The shop, in the back part of an empty cafeteria on a side street above the post office, was small and dark. A blind was drawn down over the white radiator that sat below the window and collected dust. There was an airplane engine against one wall, and a telescope on the table near the door. The whole place was cluttered with leftover parts of engines and typewriters, with coins and clocks – the clocks all ticking, and all telling a different time – but with no Paris, Vienna, or Moscow labelled beneath them. Where Ralphie had acquired all of this stuff Ivan did not know.

  Ivan walked right up to him, with a boldness he always had, his eyes very bright and yet always a little detached from the moment; the eyes, in fact, of a person who has survived and lived by himself, without much help in early youth from anyone – neither mother nor father.

  The first time that Ralphie had seen him Ivan had been standing alone, in the snow, wearing a thin jacket, on Christmas night in 1972. Ralphie and his girlfriend, Adele Walsh, passed him by – the air was clear, they had come from church, and they were on their way to the apartment. And Ralphie was singing. Ivan, who knew Adele just slightly, began smiling in great satisfaction, as if he had been standing alone in the middle of the street just to hear that song, and then he began to trek through the light snow beside them, now and then dropping back when they kissed, and then hurrying on again to catch up. Every time Ralphie looked at him, he smiled and nodded in the exact same manner.

  Finally, he waited outside while Ralphie climbed the stairs to the apartment, suddenly realizing that he hadn’t the key. Ivan looked up at him from the doorway, the air seeming to lay against him in a perennial sort of winter delight, and glittering snow fell on his hat.

  “Well – this looks like a break-in scrape,” Ivan said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ralphie said, smiling in a worried way.

  “You want to show young Delly” – he was six months older than Adele – “yer apartment, then just wait.”

  It was dark and cold, and he was gone. But now and again Ralphie could hear a noise, just slightly it shuddered through the dark empty winter night, snow falling away, and the kicking of a boot.

  Then the door opened and Ivan looked out at them and said:

  “It’s not too bad a place at all – I’d put a waterbed in her though.”

  That was how Ralphie had come to know Ivan Basterache six years ago, and how Ivan had come to know him.

  Now Ralphie was stooped over, replacing a flywheel on a machine. It was a tiny little flywheel, and he worked for some time without knowing Ivan was there.

  One of his problems – besides his tremendous fallibility of tinkering endlessly at small jobs – was his refusal to collect on bills.

  Ralphie and Adele, now married, were living with his mother Thelma, because his mother wanted him near her, and because he made very little money in his shop, which Thelma was continually bringing up to him and telling him he should go back to university.

  Everything about Ralphie, from his cowboy boots, caked in mud, to his thin shirt covering an equally thin body, and his large head, with his broad white forehead, was somewhow, to Ivan, innocent. That is the only word he could think of, and he didn’t know why.

  “Well, I suppose you heard,” Ivan said, in sort of half disgust, not at all because he felt disgust or anything else, he was too upset to feel this, but because this was the attitude he hoped would betray nothing.

  Ralphie turned about, looked at him, and blushed.

  Of course, everyone had heard. Ivan’s horseplay would make most men turn pale, and everyone had been waiting for the marriage to fall apart.

  “Well, I want a divorce is what I want,” Ivan said, witho
ut knowing a minute before that he would ever say anything like this. “I want to get it over with,” he said.

  Ralphie was trying to keep his eyes averted but could not. And suddenly he broke out grinning from ear to ear.

  “A divorce,” Ralphie said.

  “A divorce – divorce – divorce,” Ivan said furiously.

  He said this with a sort of fierce judgement of his own stupidity.

  “Anyway,” he said, still not sure why he was saying it, “it’s best – she can find a lot bettern me.”

  “Oh, who says?” Ralphie said.

  “Everyone wants me to say that, and won’t be satisfied until it is said.” Ivan said heatedly, as if Ralphie suddenly had become another enemy. “And anyway,” he said, “who would want to put up with me?” He sniffed, suddenly satisfied with this statement. “And besides, I’ll be much more happier.” Then he added, “Look, Ralphie, I didn’t hit her as they say – well, not as they say – she took a seizure. We were having a big fight, she took a seizure and fell flat on her fuckin knob–”

  “I didn’t say you did,” Ralphie said. Ralphie was silent.

  “Do you think I should see a lawyer?” he said. “No,” Ralphie said.

  “I want to know if I need a divorce in this here racket and yer my friend,” Ivan said.

  “Why don’t you go down and talk to Cindi about it.”

  “If I ever see her again, I’ll kill her,” Ivan said matter-of-factly. “So I better not. She’s been on this big drunk – and she’s not taking her medicine either – so don’t let her kid you if she says she’s been taking her medicine.”

  He said this as if Cindi not taking her medicine proved conclusively that he was in the right.

  “I don’t want to get involved anyways,” Ralphie said.

  Ivan shoved his hands in his pockets and nodded. “Oh.”

  “Well – you know what I mean.”

  Ivan nodded once more and shrugged.

  “I don’t even know what lawyer to go to,” Ivan said, smiling guiltily. “What lawyer should I go to, Ralphie?”

  “Well, there are lots of good lawyers,” Ralphie said.

  Ivan scratched his head. His hair was curly and short, his eyes bright.

  “If I go to any lawyer – they’ll say what were you doing, and I’ll say we were having this big fight over her money, and I had the shotgun out and she took a seizure. That don’t sound very good.”

  Ralphie looked up at him and could not help smiling.

  “But except when I threw spaghetti over her head – I didn’t touch her,” Ivan said. “There, I told you about the spaghetti – that’s it.”

  Ralphie said nothing.

  “That might have brought on the seizure, but she’s not taking her medicine – and don’t you think she is,” he said, pointing his finger at nothing in particular.

  Ivan then went walking about the shop, picking things up and putting them back down.

  “I come home – there she is. ‘Look, you son of a bitch,’ I said, ‘Dad’s in another big scrape, so where’s that money?’ And she runs to get it for me – and she had this apron on with deer on the pockets, and those big Sasquatch slippers on her feet, and she runs to get the money – and then when I see her sitting on the couch with the box and counting – and when she counts she moves her lips. Then she made a mistake.”

  “A mistake?”

  “She got to a hundred and seventy dollars and had to start all over. I yelled, ‘Yer at 170 – you dumb quiff – count!’ And she said, ‘170?’ and I saw her get scared. She said, ‘170-160-164.’ Then I picked the money up and tore it in pieces, and threw it across the room. ‘Fuck the money,’ I said. ‘And the hell with Dad – let him pay his own debts for once.’ And then she did what she always did, she folded her arms and looked at her shoes – and started counting to ten. And you know why she was counting to ten? Because she got mixed up. It was me who was supposed to count to ten. I had told her that if I ever got angry – and she’s scared of my temper – I would count to ten.

  “‘Why are you counting to ten?’ I yelled. She wouldn’t answer. ‘WHY IN FUCK ARE YOU COUNTING TO TEN?’ She wouldn’t answer. Finally she said, ‘I’m angry so I’m counting to ten – so there.’ The poor little thing, as if ‘so there’ was going to solve everything in the world forever.”

  “I’m sorry that the money for Vera caused everything,” Ralphie said.

  “You don’t understand! That’s not the problem, Ralphie. I had to help out my dad. And it was no big deal – I mean, it was my Heath Steele Mine money anyway. But then I took the money and I tore it up. Why did I do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Ralphie answered.

  “Why did I do that – why did I tear the money up?”

  They were silent.

  “Then after a while, she got up off the couch – I’m sitting in the kitchen – and she went over to the money and got on her hands and knees and started to tape it up. That’s when I went crazy – told her not to touch it – and things happened. She went running outside – it was cold too – I got the shotgun –”

  Then, as if he had completely forgotten about his own problems, he asked Ralphie how his mother was, and if she still had pains in her left hand – something which she had seven months ago, and which Ralphie had forgotten completely about.

  Then he asked Ralphie about the things he was doing civically. That is, Ralphie had joined the Kinsmen and believed they were the best and most responsible civic organization in town, simply because he was sure he was supposed to feel this way.

  His mother, Thelma, had wanted him to be active about town, and so hung his older sister, Vera, over his head – that is, all as Thelma would have to say is: “Oh yes – I have Vera – now I have you!”

  And all as Adele had to say was: “I have no friends and I never get anywhere – and I’m nothin to no one in this here life – I mayswell have my tubes tied in a granny knot or even be dead.” So he joined the Kinsmen and the Toastmasters, and would work fourteen to sixteen hours a day.

  They had a child when Adele was just a teenager, and they had given that child up to Ralphie’s childless aunt and uncle, Olive and Gerald Dressard. Though they knew where it was, they decided it would be best not to see it, and though they said it was for the best (because his mother and his sister had both told them that it was), they worried about it and wondered what it was doing at any given moment. And sometimes when Adele heard Thelma talking about children, and how these little children were victims and should not be born – except maybe every once in a while, but not all the time, like rabbits – Adele would take it as a direct assault upon herself.

  Other than that they never spoke of their child. But sometimes Thelma would become fond of saying: “Oh, there’s lots of time for you two to have children!” Or: “I can’t wait to have a grandchild – and now Vera is finally pregnant. You two just don’t know how important grandchildren are.”

  And it was not that Thelma had forgotten, sometimes she was piously delighted at the instant she said it.

  At these times Adele would stare straight ahead, and her eyes would become fixed on something. Adele, as yet, wasn’t spoken of as being a part of the family. She looked, to others, even walking with them to church, to be a sort of an appendage, a hanger-on.

  It was a peculiar situation. She and Ralphie lived with Thelma because Thelma insisted – had pleaded that they do – and yet, since they did, neither of them were allowed to forget it. Sometimes Adele would pack her old brown suitcase and haul it down the long white-carpeted staircase (much like she had packed her overnight bag in 1973, the time she ran away from home) and, sitting in the den staring out the window at the oxidized maple leaves blowing across the large circular driveway, she would start to cry.

  Thelma would then bring her daughter Vera into it, ask her opinion – as an older woman will, at times, ingratiate herself to the opinions of a younger one – to prove to others that she, too, can agree with such “morall
y challenging” opinions. Vera always said that Adele and Ralphie were not suited because of “class differences.”

  These were the things that had been on Ralphie’s mind when Ivan came into the office.

  Now Ivan patiently waited in the swivel chair by the phone. He was reflecting that Cindi might phone Ralphie to ask where he was – and that everything might solve itself.

  Just then the telephone did ring. Ivan gave a start, stood up and went to the door, turned about, and looked at the phone again. He was in a state that so many people get into when they have their minds set on something terrible happening. He had trained his mind for the inevitable to happen, and now he perversely desired it to happen.

  Ralphie picked up the phone. In an instant Ivan knew (and reflecting later, he knew this by the way the telephone rang) that it wasn’t Cindi.

  “I knew she wouldn’t call,” Ivan said when Ralphie hung up, and then he smiled.

  And instead of waiting one more second, he went out into the street, cursing raw and bare words, leaving the door bang open behind him.

  “Wait,” Ralphie said, “wait – we’ll phone her. …”

  Ivan continued to stay out behind the apartment building in the woods for a number of days. It was April and the woods were very damp. But he was able to make out all right. It wasn’t the best of situations.

  He could see Ruby and Cindi. On a warm day they would barbecue out on the patio. He moved back and forth in the woods, along well-worn deer trails and back pastures that were still snowpacked.

  He knew that Ruby didn’t like him. He didn’t like her either – he thought she was spoiled. But that Ruby did not like him caused consternation now. He pretended, if only to himself, as he walked through the woods, that he didn’t know why she didn’t like him. But that was not quite the truth. The truth was more subtle. Ivan understood it only in a very shadowy way when he came up against it, and until now he had never had any need to face it. Ruby had always considered him puritanical, always trying to ruin either her or Cindi’s fun. Ivan, she supposed, did not have any idea of fun. Ivan had always seen that in her face when she spoke to him. And perhaps she was right about him. She had a beautiful face, too, a tiny stud ring in her nose, and her eyes as sharp as blue splinters. But he would pass her by morosely. She would talk loudly in his presence, telling Cindi about things they should do, things Ivan had no interest in.