Nights Below Station Street (29 page)

Ralphie at that same moment was tucked up in a dark hole, with his light out, smoking a cigarette. He was covered in ore and only the rims around his eyes were white. Because of his hard hat and dirt, his hair was flat on his head. The last thing he thought of was that Adele was pregnant. He himself knew nothing about it.

He was a mile under the earth and he was considering a calculus problem. That is, how does a person get to where he is from where he has been? Ralphie had no idea how, except he believed it was all natural once it happened. And that there was nothing unnatural or not supposed to happen. So he was now tucked up in a hole under the surface, with his feet on an old piece of pipe – that may have been left there seven months ago or longer – smoking a cigarette that he had rolled.

And Ralphie thought of it this way – at first he had no desire to go underground at all and had not intended to. He had intended to be in the lab. That was the job he’d applied for.

Now he was here, beneath the earth. So instead of collecting and analyzing soil samples and taking water samples of streams and ponds, he was carrying blasting caps in his pocket, shovelling ore and placing dynamite, playing pranks on other men – and sometimes crawling up into a chute with a ton of ore above his head. And all of this made him feel special, why he did not know, and since he had grown into it, it was something he would do.

And as he sat back smoking a cigarette, and hearing water drip, he knew he could be no place else. An object falls, it has no idea where it will land, but at every moment of its descent it is exactly where it is supposed to be.

Far above him, the storm howled, but here in a crevice of an old ore drift in a lonesome little pocket a thousand feet beneath the ground, he saw the lights of two men at the end of the tunnel, and the glow of cigarettes.

Joe drove toward his camp. It was snowy at the crossroads, where he stopped to think. He pulled over on the side of the road, and watched as the snow came down over his windshield, and danced in front of his headlights.

The truck engine and the smell of snow made him sleepy. He had taken the vodka, but he had not had another drink of it. Once just after he had stopped drinking, he’d gone to a party at Myhrra’s. Gloria Basterache had given him a mocha-ball filled with rum. Yet as soon as he had taken it, and had swallowed a sliver of chocolate, he spit the rest of it out. Gloria had apologized and said: “It’s just a mocha-ball – it’s not poison.” And she swung away from him and announced to Rita in the same way she always had when dealing with Joe that she had made some sort of mistake. Then Gloria seemed more angry with him than ever. Joe had to leave the party and go downtown. Walking about half the night, he felt as if he had taken a drink, and since he had taken a drink, what was preventing him from taking another one, and if nothing was preventing him, why didn’t he have one? All of
the
reasons why he might be able to get away with having a drink flooded over him. It was the same as at this very instant.

But why had he hurt his back in the first place? Because he had tried to do something when he was drunk. He had taken the tractor out after dark and had tried to cut the fire off by himself. He had almost done it too – at least on the section of road where he had been working, but the tractor rolled on him, and he was pinned under it, as the fire burned all about him. Joe lay there, while the fire burned toward him, trying to move the wheel back and forth to the right and left to get it off of his lower back.

Yet it was better to drink. No one bothered him. He had a good time, and caused no one any worry. It was a strong
man’s only weakness, and everyone knew that as a fact. Besides all the reasoning, when you came right down to it, it meant nothing. Why should he be concerned? No one else was.

At the crossroads the snow fell; fell gently over the porches and woodsheds of the five houses that sat near it.

Why he had come here he had no idea. He had started out toward the hospital but had turned onto this road. He rolled the window down, sniffed the cool air, and had a drink out of the plastic bottle. The woods were quiet. A sash of snow fell over the trees, and wisped in the opened doorway of a dry shed. It was good to have this place because it looked so much like the Christmas cards, Joe thought. He wiped his face and had another drink.

He prolonged his stay here another ten minutes by taking a sip out of the bottle now and again. Then, just as he was going to turn around, he suddenly had an impulse to drive further up the snowy road which he knew so well. It looked so still and peaceful that he could not help wanting to go up there. And, leaving the window down so he could feel the air on his face, he went further into the woods. He had every intention of going up to see his child and grandchild – and to be with them – and yet at every point on his journey he was doing other things. Once he got out of the truck and slammed the door, and stared at the sky. At another point he walked in off the road by forty yards to see a tree-stand he had built two falls ago. When he came out, two coydogs ran off ahead of him. Then a huge bull moose, with its back covered in snow, stood up and lumbered off in the other direction. Joe felt that everything was here, and everything here was exactly the way it should be.

Then he went about to the back of the truck and looked into some old cardboard boxes, some old tires, and under
some planks for his snowshoe harness, which he was sure he had.

Then, after fixing up his snowshoes, he got back into the truck, turned on the radio, and listened to some music.

Driving again, he came to the new logging road that had been made last fall, and he had a sudden inspiration, so he took it. He wanted to know if he would be able to drive right out to the brook by this new cut. The brook he and Milly camped near. He did not know that this was the brook Myhrra had met. The truck engine valves ticked, there was a smell of gas in the night air, and the snow got deeper. He stopped again – checking to see if he had his comealongs. He knew he had them but he just wanted to be safe.

He went over to the path and walked down to the lean-to and lit a cigarette. Here he hunkered down for a minute and looked about. Far behind him he heard the same moose crashing and he smelled the wind. He heard the coydogs too, and then everything was silent.

He went back to the truck, put on his snowshoes, and went down to the brook with the vodka bottle in his hand. Snow came down and landed on his face. Here the brook spread under some dark alders. The tree stumps had been ploughed back, and the snow rested upon the stumps and alders. To his left was a pond, where an old beaver dam sat eerily in the darkness.

His camp at Brookwall was two miles above the pond. And he turned in that direction. Walking along the brook in the night he disturbed a small animal, perhaps a weasel, who went hopping blindly over the snow and down quickly into some shrubs. At a point above the pond he crossed the brook, which put him onto the old logging roads. And it was on one of these roads that he started off toward his camp.

Looking down at his feet, every now and then he saw an indentation, almost buried in new sifts of snow. He looked at them, and wondered who would be in here, and then decided that it was probably just the way the snow had formed in the blizzard. And he left it at that.

Lighting a fire at his camp, he rummaged about for a little while, lit a lantern and looked over the walls, to see how everything was wintering. Then, without knowing he was going to, he looked at the bottle of vodka, and suddenly he poured it out into the snow.

He lay down and drifted off to sleep. A log cracked in the fire, and embers burned away.

He woke an hour later with a start, as if there was something that he had to do immediately. Yes. He had to get to the hospital. He put on his coat, put his snowshoes back on, and started out. The storm had lifted. Some dry snow scuttled along the drifts of deep snow, and the moon was just coming over the trees which the wind still tossed and tormented. The wind was fresher and colder, and his eyes watered.

He felt good, happy for the first time in a long time, and he was thinking of nothing in particular.

He happened at that moment to cut along a side log road that ran diagonally to the road he had come up on and to the brook which he had crossed. Therefore he would meet the brook further up but sooner. And as he moved along, with the moon now above the trees, he saw those same indentations in the snow. He stooped down and looked more closely at them. He saw how they crossed this logging road in a hurry, and zigzagged off into the woods. It was either someone in lifting traps or else someone lost.

It took Joe a while to track and mark the trees, and to realize that whoever it was had been walking in smaller
and smaller circles. Once he had figured this out, Joe went back out onto the logging road again, and made an imaginary line to the centre of the circles, and started in. He walked in, down over a hill, and there, at a place about fifty feet from the brook, he saw Vye huddled up against a stump with his hands up over his face.

Vye looked up at Joe at that second and said, “I lost my gloves, Joe.” And he smiled, as if losing his gloves would be what Joe would be most concerned about. And then he seemed to drift back to sleep.

Joe took his coat off, and put it around him. He lifted him to his feet and kept shaking him to wake him up.

Then he crossed the brook, with Vye on his back, and made his way up through clear cut and slag and moved toward his truck. His back pained only slightly but he did not feel it so much – not knowing the processes of how this had all happened, only understanding that it was now irrevocable because it had.

David Adams Richards is the author of thirteen novels, including
Hope in the Desperate Hour, Mercy Among the Children
, co-winner of the prestigious Giller Prize;
The Friends of Meager Fortune
, winner of a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book; and, most recently,
The Lost Highway
. He is also the author of the celebrated Miramichi trilogy:
Nights Below Station Street
, winner of the Governor General’s Award;
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace
, winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award; and
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
, winner of the Thomas Raddall Award.

Richards has also written Gemini Award-winning screenplays for the
CBC-TV
adaptations of his novels
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
and
Nights Below Station Street
. “Small Gifts,” his original screenplay for
CBC-TV
, won a Gemini Award and the New York International Film Festival Award for Best Script. His books of non-fiction include
Hockey Dreams
, the Governor General’s Award-winning fishing memoir
Lines on the Water, Playing the Inside Out
, and, most recently,
God Is
.

Copyright © 1988 by Newmac Amusement Inc.

Cloth edition published 1988
Emblem edition first published 1997
This Emblem edition published 2009

Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Richards, David Adams, 1950-
Nights below Station Street / David Adams Richards.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-310-2
I. Title.

PS8585.117N53 2009    C813′.54    C2009-901623-0

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