Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (4 page)

They moved back up the church lane towards the highway. Ernie was singing Elvis’s “In the Ghetto,” and
when he came to the second verse, he broke down and started to cry.

Antony told them he knew where there was a party.

They went to Clay Everette Madgill’s house. Through the window they could see Ivan’s mother, Gloria Basterache. She had married Clay Everette six years ago.

“Toldja there was a party goin on,” Antony said.

“I don’t see Cindi there,” Ivan whispered.

Gloria walked about smiling – she seemed to be smiling at someone in the corner. She was standing in the glassed-in upper deck that rose on white pillars above the patio, which was still covered in a crust of hard snow, and housed a couple of wooden lawn chairs. Even to Ivan, her son, she was something of a goddess. He used to wait for her outside the church at Christmas time. He’d have his sisters with him, and have their hair brushed. Then their mother would come down from Clay Everette’s in her mink stole, with snow coming out of the glistening sky and falling, falling gently on the dark, cold trees on Bartibog Island and on the mink’s shiny glass eyes.

After a while, Ernie started to roar and yell. Then he threw a lawn chair and fell facedown in the mud.

They carried him back to the car. The moon was full and high above them. After some time driving about, Ernie got out and lost his teeth in a snowbank.

Then they were all out digging in the snow. Some trees snapped, for the wind was beginning to stiffen.

“Momma’ll be some grouchy if I lose my teeth.”

“Tell that sawed-off midget mother of yours to go fuck herself,” Antony said.

Then they all got back into the car and drove on.

“I’ll never take that Ernie out again,” Antony said after he and Ivan were alone. “He ruins just about everything–”

“Did you know?” he said as an afterthought.

“What?”

“It’s what Ruby told me – Cindi’s got one in the oven. And what the hell is she going to do with it!”

It was two nights later. Nevin, Vera’s husband, sat on a stool in the kitchen of Allain Garrett’s house looking through the door at the rest of them, who were in the living room watching hockey. He had come to ask Antony for their money back. Antony had figured that by this time it would have been polite for him to have forgotten about it altogether. He had borrowed it almost six months ago.

The living room was lighted up by the
TV
set. A planter sat in the dark atop a rickety metal bookshelf. A large, coloured picture of the Pope and a crucifix hung above the couch, with yellow palm leaves stuck in the picture frame. The whole room smelled of toast. The telephone table, directly in front of Nevin, was littered with crime magazines,
Two Girls and the Robbery Suspect
and
The Case of the Clever Cleaver
– which little Valerie continually snuck up to her room – and a big cardboard box filled with pieces of an old orange rug sat against the coffee table.

Antony lived at home with his parents, where the old woman could cook for him and his children. His
father, Allain, and his mother had had eleven children. Except for Claude, whose whereabouts no one knew, and Antony, who lived right at home, they had all done well.

The walls were dark, and a trophy of some sort, for 1930, sat in the hallway on the floor near the closet. The living room was dark but the kitchen was bright, the tiled kitchen floor scrubbed clean.

Valerie sat in the corner, eating toast with her nightie on. Her sixteen-year-old sister Margaret was sitting on the stairs with her physics book in her lap.

Antony’s parents realized that there was a falling out between Nevin and their son, and they were very worried because of it. And children react instinctively to how adults feel. So Valerie, who was wearing a training bra under her nightie, looked up at Nevin morosely as she bit into her toast. Margaret, however, spoke to him when he sat down as if there was nothing wrong at all.

Nevin had to turn about to speak to her, and every time he did he could see her kneecaps through the banister. Then he took out a package of cigarettes and asked everyone in the room individually if they would like one, even Valerie, who just shook her head. Then Valerie said something to Margaret in French and burst out laughing. She laughed with that giddiness eleven-year-olds have. Then she put both hands over her mouth, and in this way seemed to embellish every moment of her hilarity, which all seemed to be directed at Nevin.

Then Allain said three words in French to his granddaughter and she got up and went upstairs. Then he turned about and smiled at Nevin apologetically.

There was a stew cooking on the stove. Another short phrase came from Allain in French, and once
more Valerie appeared. She walked by Nevin as if it were his fault she had been subdued, and took a plate from the kitchen cupboard.

“Is Antony here?” Nevin said.

There was an unpleasant silence, so much so that Nevin was made to feel he shouldn’t have asked the question. Valerie, very carefully, so as not to spill any, walked with the plate of stew into the porch. She half closed the old porch door and Nevin could hear voices. He could hear her speak to someone, and he could hear Antony answer in a whisper:
“Non, non
– Val –” And then muffled laughter. Then he distinctly heard someone take a mouthful of stew and swallow.

Then there was a car on the highway, a truck, a tractor trailer. All of these seemed to roar past the house at once, as if some sort of indictment had been passed on Nevin with the noise they made.

Nevin stood and walked over to the door, and, standing there, said in a shaking voice:

“Antony, I know you’re there – I know!”

Nevin turned and smiled at the old folks. Allain’s dark fingers holding the cigarette Nevin had just given him, and the tufts of hair, sticking up on the little old man’s head, seemed also to be an indictment against Nevin.

“Antony, I know you’re there!” Nevin said again.

There was a long moment of silence, felt by everyone, and finally the sound of someone slurping tea. This bothered Nevin so much he buttoned his coat the wrong way and left the house.

As soon as he left, Antony came out of the room to get himself another plate of stew.

He didn’t speak to any of them, but assumed a look of having accomplished a great deal. Margaret, feeling
that he would order her to do something, stood and tiptoed upstairs. The only problem was that at the far end of the hall she turned left, by force of habit, and walked into the wall. There used to be a door to the bathroom there, but Antony had walled it up two days before and made the door next to his room.

Margaret swore and yelled out in French that she had just broken her nose, and Valerie burst out laughing – uncontrollably, as she had earlier in the evening.

Antony, shaking his head as if everyone should know that he had walled up the door, walked back into the porch.

There was a short silence.

Then Antony said something to Valerie, and it started her giggling all over again, so much so that they finally had to say “boo” to her and give her sugar.

A week later Antony walked down the path by the old sleigh for the Belgian horse with the tail he tied up with twine. He kicked at a block of wood, and threw it up on the back of the woodpile as if angry about something. Then he hauled his pants up and continued on his way. Ivan had gone up to town that morning, received his severance pay, and had finally gotten the money for Nevin.

Antony found Vera and Nevin sitting in the living room. Vera was three months pregnant. For a long time she had been unable to get pregnant – so that all the men on the road used to tell Nevin that they would come down immediately and help him out. But after all the doctors made all the tests, and they became
reconciled to the fact that they would never have a child, Vera became pregnant.

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.