Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace Read Online Free Page B

tight that when Ivan was young, he thought it would cut off blood to its head. So he used to sneak out at night to look at it. There Rudolf would be all alone, its one pile of manure looking lonely in the centre of the floor.
    Antony worked it day and night. He hired it out for sleigh rides, with twenty screaming, mittened children aboard, and with a pair of deer antlers attached by a strap to its head, while Antony was dressed in a red suit with black buttons.
    “Are you a Santa?”
    “Fuckin right.”
    He took it into the woods – and whenever he got drunk, which was almost continually, he tried to sell it down river. He would kick it, and then order it to bite his ear off to make people respect him. Though astrong horse, it was small, and Antony had tried to pass it off as a quarter horse to a young girl from the air base who wanted to take riding lessons. Ivan had heard about this in time, just as Antony was about to sell it, and came down and had to put his father in a headlock right in front of the girl.
    “Yer squeezing my fuckin ears off.”
    “Tell her what it is.”
    “No.”
    “Tell her.”
    “No.”
    In many ways Antony had lived by his wits his whole life through.
    “Give us a ride home – I want to show you Rudolf,” Antony said.
    “Why?” Ivan said. He was looking up the road, almost as if he expected Cindi to pop out of the woods and come running to him with her black eye. They were standing at the bottom of the doctor’s lane, in the middle of a long turn, tangent to some small bare trees.
    In the car going down river, Antony tried on a bunch of watches that he was supposed to sell. As soon as they got into the car he hauled them out – he had a whole pocketful. He held them up to his ear. Then he held them up to Ivan’s ear.
    “Go way,” Ivan said. “I’m trying to drive the cocksuckin car.”
    “Don’t tell me I don’t know my watches,” Antony said.
    “They’re all about a hundred dollars a piece – I imagine,” Ivan said.
    Then Antony berated all of his family, starting with Ivan, for not listening to his experiences over the years – that he had at least two-dozen experiences thatno one listened to. This was not a new charge that he levelled. He had always felt that his family did not care for him – except for Valerie, whom he doted upon.
    Their situation was this. Ivan’s mother, and now Antony’s ex-wife, Gloria Basterache and he had boarded Ivan out as a boy. He had beaten the snot out of him, and now Ivan was a man. They did not know one another.
    “So,” Antony said, after some reflection, looking out towards the bay, “you and Cindi are on the outs, I hear.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it –”
    “Just being parental.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “Very best.” There was a silence. “She’s a dumb quiff anyhow.”
    The moon was high over the trees. Its light cast over the yard. From the shed, Ivan and Antony could see one upstairs light on in the middle of the house. Ivan looked at Rudolf’s hoof. Then he found a nail and cleaned the horse’s hooves.
    “So you were out on the road with him,” Ivan said, cleaning the left hind hoof carefully and looking at the cut.
    “I had him out for a little bit,” Antony said.
    “You didn’t cross over the old bridge by the bog?”
    “How did you know that? You been spying on me?”
    “He’s picked up a three-inch square nail. So how would he do that – I figure you were out on the cock-suckin bridge.”
    “He won’t haul right – he never learned anything,” Antony said, going about the horse and kicking it nowand then. The horse started to move back, but Ivan said, “Whoa boy.”
    Then Antony sat on a bale of hay. Then he stood up, and smoothed the hay out carefully and sat down again.
    “That bridge is going down someday – you shouldn’t be putting a horse on it,” Ivan said.
    The door had been left open and moonlight came in on the old stall. Some sawdust, as white as fine