Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace Read Online Free PDF

seemed appropriate now, because they had been talking about her, that he be her uncle. “You got no right to bother those who’ve lived on the Gum Road!” Ernie roared at the priest. Then he said, “Let me out of this car!” “We’re going,” Ivan said.
    They moved back up the church lane towards the highway. Ernie was singing Elvis’s “In the Ghetto,” andwhen 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!”

3
    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. Hisfather, 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