Nights Below Station Street Read Online Free Page B

glum.
    Savard and McCeachern thought the old man was likethis for a variety of reasons. They supposed he was like this most of all because no one paid any attention to him anymore – not like they paid attention to themselves. The treatments he prescribed a lot of times were no longer valid. And their lives were so much better organized than his. Besides, Armand felt the old man was prejudiced against the French, and often waited for him to show his hand in that regard. Savard would look over at McCeachern, or someone else, and say: “The war – the war.” And amid muffled laughter, he would tap his forehead.
    When he went home to his sister-in-law Clare, whom he could never tell he loved so she’d ended up marrying his brother, he complained to her that everything was different and he may as well retire. And then in the same breath, as if holding it against himself, he would berate all people who retired, and he would say also that retirement was only the mandate of the young, which she, sitting in her plaid skirt and bobby socks, did not understand. Since his brother had died, they lived together in the same gigantic old house, built like many of the other old farmhouses, below Madgill’s garage. It sat back off the road, on the left of the power-line, with green shutters, and an old porch that had three or four faded wicker chairs. There was a barn. There was some wood. There was a nailed-down coal chute, with metal stripes crossing it. The doctor’s office was on the right-hand side facing the road. He had treated the whole roadway for thirty years.
    Nothing was the same now, he would tell her, and yet he would say everything was the same and not one thing was different. Was it not the same thing with his nephew Ralphie as with him, and was it not the same with Vera, his niece, as it was with everyone else. Ha. Then almost spitefully he would shake his head so you could see the space between his grey hair and the collar of his shirt, and thelight casting off from the snowbanks relegated to the evening air. He would take some chewing tobacco and clamp it down between his back teeth, and then he would spit.
    “How do you mean?” Clare would ask.
    “I mean, everything is the same and always has been and always will be,” he would say, walking away.

Adele had begun to dye her hair and wear the tight jeans and shirts she had seen her friends wear. Yet she was never happy with how she tried to look. She felt she didn’t look as good as other kids, and she was continually trying different fashions and then abandoning them. She would walk about in tight jeans showing her skinny bum, and then just as suddenly she would go a week or two without wearing jeans at all, but only dresses or skirts.
    One of the memories she had of her family was that her mother picked blueberries, standing in her skirt against the background of trees that had been seared by a forest fire, and one of the men said her father couldn’t lift a boulder out of the ground. Joe stood in his blue suit, coming from church, his shoes hidden, his shoulders catching the shadows of the tree’s waving motion on his back and hair. Joe lifted the boulder, put it on his shoulder, and then with the other hand picked up her mother, and Rita started crying.
    She often criticized her mother for being foolish enough to live with him. It seemed to her that if her mother wanted to be a fool now, and wanted to keep kids for other people – thisto Adele was an insult – and wanted to make her life like she did, then that was fine, but she herself would not have any part in it, and when she grew up she would be quite different from her mother, and by being quite different, she assumed she would be better.
    Therefore at home everything depressed her. The idea of Rita and the children depressed her. That Milly was off the wall, and needed to be tied to the mattress so she wouldn’t run outside at night, depressed her. That her father had three tattoos on him,