Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace Read online

  Antony came in and looked at them a moment. “I’m having one hell of a hell of a time,” he said quickly.

  “What’s wrong?” Nevin asked.

  “Oh, I been talking to that Ivan,” Antony said as he sat on the corner of the couch, “and I think I’ll have to move outta the house and move in with him – to straighten him around – for if I don’t straighten that man out, he’ll be dead.”

  “Dead,” Nevin said.

  “All he wants to do now is party – out partying all the time – while he has a retarded girl sitting in her apartment twiddlin her thumbs.”

  Then Antony, who if anyone in the world had asked him when he was walking down the path what he was going to say would not have been able to tell them, sighed and moved his sapphire ring about on his left hand.

  “Why – what’s going on,” Vera said.

  “He slaps the snot out of her and everything else like that there,” Antony said. “And she as pregnant as a butterball. I told him – I told him, yer diggin yer own grave, making yer own bed, if you’re going to hear the music you have to pay for the tune, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and lie down with dogs you’ll wake up with fleas – but he listens to nothing.”

  Vera and Nevin still believed that Antony had been in the war – and a war hero – as he told them when they first moved here. He fought “the Dieppenamese,” as he had told them, and had been wounded. “At Normandy – a hunk of times.” He walked into Brussels in 1944 where he was “shot and left for dead.”

  When they had first moved here, he had been the first to visit them. Because of his advice, they wouldn’t buy mackerel from one fellow, or have their garbage picked up by another. “Don’t buy mackerel from that son of a bitch,” he would say. “He’s out every day robbing other people’s nets. Garbage – I guess he picks up garbage, and he has a dump filled with chemicals and all of that that is killin us all off – it’s in our well and I hadda rush Valerie to the hospital to have her stomach pumped up. Garbage,” he said suspiciously, “I guess it’s garbage – well, you know yerself I ain’t saying nothin new under the sun.”

  So they paid Antony to pick up their garbage and bring them mackerel.

  “Is there anything we can do to help?” Vera said.

  “Ha – is there anything we can do,” Antony said, as if suddenly angry with them both. “What do you guys think I been trying to do? The priest is no good whatsoever – he won’t listen to reason – balded me out – Ernie and I went down to see him about it – the other night, as a matter of fact.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well,” Antony said, “he just told us to get off his property–”

  “I don’t care for priests,” Vera said. “How can they counsel anybody?” Vera liked to think she had a more humanistic vision than the one offered by the Catholic church.

  And, sensing this about her, Antony said, sighing, “You think I do? Most are fruits.”

  “I didn’t know you were having a bad time,” Nevin said apologetically, “or I wouldn’t have bothered you about the money.”

  “Bad time,” Antony said. “Don’t worry, boys and girls – it’s nothing more than I went through all my life with no one to help me out, so I can manage once again, don’t worry about me.” And he laughed good-naturedly here because he suddenly believed everything he had just said.

  “I brought you yer money back,” he added, looking into his huge black wallet.

  Nevin looked at him, then over at Vera.

  “Well look, why don’t you give us what you can and keep what you need,” Vera said.

  “Well – I can give you all except fifty to seventy-five dollars,” Antony said, counting it out. “How’s that?”

  “That’s all right,” Nevin said.

  Vera and Nevin both nodded to him, and then at each other.

  “You were over the other night but I couldn’t see you,” Antony said. “I couldn’t bring myself to come outta the room, and Daddy give me an awful time when you left.”

  Nevin didn’t know what to say, so he only nodded again.

  Again, Antony believed that everything he had said was true, when, ten minutes ago, he hadn’t known what it was he was going to say. But it seemed that everything he said was said for a reason, all of which would become clear.

  He walked back home, feeling somehow discontented with himself. He had planned to just give the money back and go away, but, as always, his nature to talk and to show himself in the best possible light no matter which direction it took, had overcome him, as it always did with people he secretly felt inferior to. And as always he felt discontented with himself afterwards.

  “Well – I don’t care what they think,” he said to himself, as a man who always cares what people think will say. “I had to do everything since Gloria left – I always did.”

  He lowered his body to go under some brush and walked into his father’s yard.

  Valerie, who’d just gotten off the school bus, came into the house behind him. She took her tam off and folded it and put it on the table, and took her book bag and hung it up behind the door.

  Antony’s mother was peeling potatoes. The day was warm and Antony was walking about with his coat open, which was a sign of a warm day for everyone. Music came from the radio and old Allain was on the couch in the living room with his hand over his face. His head looked frail and tufts of grey hair stuck here and there, a final call for justice it seemed for a man who had worked by brute strength for seventy-five years.

  Antony stopped and turned about in a complete circle, as if expecting somebody. Then he looked out the window at the highway.

  “Where is Ivan?” he said.

  His mother shrugged.

  “Well, there’s another big scrape he’s into,” he said. His little girl, who had poured herself a glass of milk and had a milk moustache, was busy sorting out which drawings she was going to pin on the fridge, and which of her last week’s drawings she was going to take off the fridge and throw away, with the equanimity of a person who controls her own destiny.

  “Beats up Cindi, who’s knocked up as high as the proverbial kite, and then leaves her for me to take care of,” Antony said.

  As soon as he sat down, Valerie put her milk down and went over to the counter. She climbed up on it and got a cup. Then she walked on her knees along the counter to the oven mitts, which she put on, and picked up the huge glass teapot. Then after she had poured the tea, she jumped down and walked very carefully towards him.

  He took the tea and blew at it, deep in thought. Then, without looking at her, he took out an Extra Big chocolate bar and handed it to his daughter. He stuck his tongue in his cheek to push it out and leaned into her for a kiss, all the while not looking her way.

  “I gotta go up and see Gloria,” he said.

  And, after adjusting his ever-present welding cap, and with his hands in his pockets, he motioned with his head for Valerie to grab her coat and follow him.

  They backed out of the yard in the truck and proceeded up the road, past the bootleggers’, past the church lane, by the woodchop and the black spruce trees.

  Every month Gloria gave him two hundred dollars, and every month he scrupulously took not a penny for himself but put it aside carefully for his daughters’ needs.

  There were teeth to be fixed and clothes to be bought, and allowance, and he scraped and saved and penny-pinched to get all of this done.

  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?”

  “Wh
en – 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.

  4

  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.