Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace Read Online Free PDF Page A

powder about the edges but hard and yellow at the top, was piled behind the half-opened door that had a broken hinge. Some fox mash sat in the wheelbarrow, and now and then Antony’s few ginger-coloured foxes yelped. Both Antony’s thumbs were taped where the foxes had bitten him. They bit him almost every day of their existence. And by the time fall rolled about, his fingers were usually too sore to skin them, so he had to get Ivan to do it.
    Ivan wore his jean jacket, the sleeves rolled up near his elbows. Though small, his arms were very strong, and he had the tattoo of his nickname “Jockey” on his forearm. He had a few homemade tattoos on his knuckles that he had scratched out in defiance to Father LeBlanc – a short, untempered, colicky priest who had the charge of him for a year and a half in Tracadie. His friends at the boarding school in Tracadie had called him “Jockey.” However, no one else did.
    He bathed and wrapped the horse’s hoof.
    “You should have the vet over,” Ivan said.
    “No, God, you got her good,” Antony said.
    Antony then said, with unbridled pride and affection, “Valerie’s got a training bra now. So she’ll probably show it to you – she’s been walking about the house with her chest pounced out for two weeks – she won’t (even wash it.”
    Then he smiled, and was silent. A strong short gust of wind came up over the yard.
    “So – I was thinking we should go pick up Ernie and drink some booze,” Antony said. “No sense in it going to waste – having it dry up or something.” Antony’s face broke into a big grin, and he did what he always did since Ivan was a child – he wiggled one ear up and the other ear down at the same time, faster and faster. “Yer some cute, Ivan,” he said, “with that little prick-topped haircut.”
    When they went out, Antony shut off the light in the shed. Then, as if he had to show fastidiousness in front of his son, he went in and straightened an old studded collar and bridle. Ivan remembered the first time Antony had gone into Clay Everette Madgill’s barn, he was standing beside him. His father’s face beamed with joy at such a barn and the beautiful quarter horses, and he kept saying: “Someday now I’ll have a barn like this.”
    Now Antony fidgeted carefully with his faded, studded bridle.
    And Ivan felt sad as Antony walked towards the house.
    Now there were three in the car. Ernie was with them. They had gone to his house to get him.
    “I’d like to know why yer grouchy mother won’t let you out of the house more,” Antony said.
    “I don’t know either,” Ernie shouted over the sound of the worn-out muffler. Ernie’s whole appearance was grey. His hair was grey and combed straight back, his cheeks were sunken. He wore black pointed cowboy boots that came over the top of his grey pants. His kneeswere bony, and cigarette ashes fell on the zipper of his polished black leather jacket that allowed him, at age forty-four, to retain the demeanour of a teenage boy. “I don’t know why she don’t let me out to town,” he said.
    “Well, come to think of it, perhaps it’s because yer a fuckin nuisance,” Antony said.
    Ivan said nothing. He shook his head. It was going to be a long night.
    They parked behind the church to drink. An hour passed. Then two hours.
    The priest looked in the car window at them. They were silent.
    “Boys, I’ll tell you this – you shouldn’t be here pissing in my graveyard.”
    “I wasn’t pissing, Father,” Antony said. “Ernie was.”
    Ivan looked over at the church, which retained in the dark its bulked whiteness.
    “I’ll fight,” Ernie said to the priest. He was sitting in his black leather jacket in the back seat. It looked to the priest as if the jacket was filled with impounded air, and only the head of a grey-haired whizzled teen-aged boy poked out of it. “I’m Cindi’s uncle – I’ll fight–”
    Ernie was not Cindi’s uncle but he had known her as a child, and it