Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace Read Online Free

pulling himself over the bin, he walked away as if it hadn’t happened. He simply went to the cage and surfaced, got in a Jeep and drove to the dry, stripped off and showered for a half-hour. Then for the rest of the afternoon he worked on his car in the parking lot behind the warehouse.
    The parking lot was dry and empty, while the greying headframe sat heavy in the air. He had jacked thecar up and was under it, when suddenly he was being kicked on the boots.
    “What’s this, a fuckin floater?”
    “No,” Ivan said, “I had a scare.”
    “You had a scare – you talk to your shift boss – you don’t come out and steal my fuckin Jeep.”
    Ivan looked up and saw the man’s legs, and then rolled himself out from under the car.
    “Ya – well I had a fuckin scare,” Ivan said, knowing he was talking to the mine’s manager, and knowing instinctively that this was the one tactic that would save him. He simply turned, threw the wrench on the ground, kicked the jack out from under the car as if he was terribly annoyed, and walked back into the dry.
    He was given a pink slip, but he knew in actual fact he could have been suspended. But the one thing about this experience is that he could not tell Cindi about it, because even if he did, it would not be the same – that is, everything about it would be told differently than he would have told the exact same story when they were together. Everything was different.
    He left the mines the day after and never went back.

2
    The next night he met his father Antony at Dr. Hennessey’s. His father had arthritis in his left arm and was there to get a shot of cortisone. During the winter, Antony would use a small butane lighter to warm his left hand if he was out with the horses. His father was Allain Garrett’s son; Ivan, however, had kept his mother’s maiden name, Basterache.
    Ivan felt responsible, not only for his father, but for his two sisters – Valerie, who was eleven, and Margaret, sixteen.
    “I might seem to be a carefree individual,” Antony said to him one night. “And sometimes I might be something of a carefree individual – the way I can wiggle my ears – but I have nothin since your mother left me. You’d think a woman would come home after seven years.”
    Antony would get into conversations with people who stopped to buy Valerie’s worms in the spring. Valerie would sit out near the highway, a decent little girl of eleven, in a big hat, behind a huge cardboardbox with a sign which read WORMS 4 SALE : 2 4 1 ON WORMS!
    Ivan had noticed that Antony had gotten into what Ivan called “The World War Two Factor,” and he would occasionally blame his lot in life on the fact that there was a bias against him because he was French.
    “The only thing I was ever any good for was to bleed to death in a war – that’s all they wanted me for,” Antony said to a man, who was busy holding a night crawler in either hand. “And I went – I went – look at this here.” And he would show a scratch on his forearm quickly.
    “Where did you fight?”
    “Just about everywhere.”
    “Who did you fight?”
    “Almost everyone – I was at Dieppe – twice. I fought the Dieppenamese over at that place.”
    “Well, we all had to offer something during those years.”
    “Offer – I guess offer – but my kids are no good, and my wife took off with Clay Everette Madgill because he has money – so things are bad all around. No, I didn’t mind fighting – don’t get me so wrong on that – I believe in it–”
    “How old are you now?”
    “Forty-seven.”
    The man said nothing.
    Antony sniffed and picked up a handful of worms, looking them over, and then told Valerie to go get some fresh earth.
    “I look forty-seven – more closer to fifty-seven,” Antony said. “In fact, almost sixty.”
    “I was going to say if you were just forty-seven, you’d be kind of young for the war.”
    “Well, it was a long son of a whore of a war,” Antony said, as if the