Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace by David Adams Richards Read Free Book Online Page B

nose, putting her equipment away, her legs and throat covered in sweat, nonplussed at the coming and going of young men who could see over the partition. Thediamond stud in her nose added to the sharpness of her eyes.
    “We have to get her out of this hole now and again,” Ruby said to Adele when they left the apartment. “You should know that.”
    “Yes,” Adele said, “of course that’s right.”
    And, of course, it was. As Vera had said on the local television, and this was true as well, people like Cindi had the court of world opinion on their side. And so they should.
    As they left the building, birds flew to the trees outside and gave sound to the late-April air.

    Ruby had a stud horse called Tantramar, and a colt called Missle, after the boy she once almost married. Ruby fell in love and the boy had died. It was a long time ago. But when she smelled the leaves under the rock wall near her back lane, she thought of him.
    He didn’t have very much – not like Ruby herself – nor had he ever had a girlfriend, something which Ruby had thought hilarious. Every summer it seemed to be someone new for her. Her boyfriends never lasted.
    But she loved Missle. He didn’t drink – which was a drawback – but he didn’t take her credit cards. And he did love her.
    One night, by the rock wall near the lane in back of her father’s house, she explained all about her boyfriends.
    “I’ve had a lot of boyfriends,” she said.
    He won’t never be back, she thought.
    But he did come back.
    He did come back. He looked like a private in the army, with his hair short, his mouth small, his eyes dark and wide.
    She often told him she was spoiled.
    “You’re not spoiled at all,” Missle said, and he could hardly get the words out.
    “Well, all I ever want to do is party and have a good time,” she said. “What do you want to do?”
    “I want to become a speech therapist,” he said.
    He was so slight she felt that she had to protect him. She knew no one would dare bother him if he was with her.
    She wrote about him to her cousin, Dorval Gene, and told her friends about him. Cindi would be her bridesmaid, and they would live in Halifax, and she would work and he would go to school.
    He tried to do things, which would have exasperated her in any other man. But with him, she was patient, even parental. He had to get her to teach him how to ride a horse because she rode. He got up at five in the morning. He would go around the arena, she would watch him hopefully. Ivan Basterache would shout instructions and encouragement, and then he would just slide off, as if his hip bones weren’t big enough to support him.
    He wanted to be a speech therapist because he had never learned to talk until he was nine years old. He had lived in his own world.
    Ruby, who was always making fun of people, now learned not to do this in front of him.
    He was so naive that she tried to protect him from everyone, especially from former boyfriends, who would ask sexual questions about her.
    One day, she put on a top hat and her old tap shoes, and tap-danced for him in the living room.
    “Look,” she kept saying, her face perspiring and her eyes closed shyly. “See – what I – can do,” she kept saying.
    And she was using an old broom handle as a cane.
    “I love you as the grass is green,” he said.
    And tears came to his eyes, and she had to stop and put her arms around him, and comfort him, like a child.
    He died two nights later, in his sleep.
    She became more beautiful than ever after that, and lost herself in regret, tantrums, envy, and physical abuse from married men. Now she had a crush on Dr. Savard.
    They had met for the first time the month before. She was wearing an old grey coat and a pair of work boots because she was down river with her father. It was raining, and the rain fell over the white hard hat she had pulled down over her eyes. She had an acetylene torch in her hand.
    There was snow on the ground, and the wind smelled