1

Ivan Basterache had been married twenty months. But now he and Cindi were separated. The trouble had started because Ivan’s father had borrowed a thousand dollars from Vera, his next-door neighbour, and then had asked Ivan to intercede. So Ivan had taken Cindi’s money to pay the debt. A fight followed and chairs were broken, and the very money was torn to shreds. The RCMP had to come because of the shotgun, and Cindi ran outside in her underwear and went to Ruby Madgill’s.

Ivan drove into town a few days later. He left the car and walked along the street, passed the old red-brick opera house, and moved along with his hands in his pockets.

He found himself in the heart of town without realizing where he was. He went into the park and sat on a bench just in front of the bust of Lord Beaverbrook. Then after lighting a cigarette he got up and moved again. He had no idea where he was going, and seemed to be moving in circles.

Of course you don’t always know where you are going – but for some reason all movements happen because they were meant to.

Therefore he found himself at Ralphie Pillar’s shop at noon hour. Ralphie was Vera’s brother.

The shop, in the back part of an empty cafeteria on a side street above the post office, was small and dark. A blind was drawn down over the white radiator that sat below the window and collected dust. There was an airplane engine against one wall, and a telescope on the table near the door. The whole place was cluttered with leftover parts of engines and typewriters, with coins and clocks – the clocks all ticking, and all telling a different time – but with no Paris, Vienna, or Moscow labelled beneath them. Where Ralphie had acquired all of this stuff Ivan did not know.

Ivan walked right up to him, with a boldness he always had, his eyes very bright and yet always a little detached from the moment; the eyes, in fact, of a person who has survived and lived by himself, without much help in early youth from anyone – neither mother nor father.

The first time that Ralphie had seen him Ivan had been standing alone, in the snow, wearing a thin jacket, on Christmas night in 1972. Ralphie and his girlfriend, Adele Walsh, passed him by – the air was clear, they had come from church, and they were on their way to the apartment. And Ralphie was singing. Ivan, who knew Adele just slightly, began smiling in great satisfaction, as if he had been standing alone in the middle of the street just to hear that song, and then he began to trek through the light snow beside them, now and then dropping back when they kissed, and then hurrying on again to catch up. Every time Ralphie looked at him, he smiled and nodded in the exact same manner.

Finally, he waited outside while Ralphie climbed the stairs to the apartment, suddenly realizing that he hadn’t the key. Ivan looked up at him from the doorway, the air seeming to lay against him in a perennial sort of winter delight, and glittering snow fell on his hat.

“Well – this looks like a break-in scrape,” Ivan said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ralphie said, smiling in a worried way.

“You want to show young Delly” – he was six months older than Adele – “yer apartment, then just wait.”

It was dark and cold, and he was gone. But now and again Ralphie could hear a noise, just slightly it shuddered through the dark empty winter night, snow falling away, and the kicking of a boot.

Then the door opened and Ivan looked out at them and said:

“It’s not too bad a place at all – I’d put a waterbed in her though.”

That was how Ralphie had come to know Ivan Basterache six years ago, and how Ivan had come to know him.

Now Ralphie was stooped over, replacing a flywheel on a machine. It was a tiny little flywheel, and he worked for some time without knowing Ivan was there.

One of his problems – besides his tremendous fallibility of tinkering endlessly at small jobs – was his refusal to collect on bills.

Ralphie and Adele, now married, were living with his mother Thelma, because his mother wanted him near her, and because he made very little money in his shop, which Thelma was continually bringing up to him and telling him he should go back to university.

Everything about Ralphie, from his cowboy boots, caked in mud, to his thin shirt covering an equally thin body, and his large head, with his broad white forehead, was somewhow, to Ivan, innocent. That is the only word he could think of, and he didn’t know why.

“Well, I suppose you heard,” Ivan said, in sort of half disgust, not at all because he felt disgust or anything else, he was too upset to feel this, but because this was the attitude he hoped would betray nothing.

Ralphie turned about, looked at him, and blushed.

Of course, everyone had heard. Ivan’s horseplay would make most men turn pale, and everyone had been waiting for the marriage to fall apart.

“Well, I want a divorce is what I want,” Ivan said, without knowing a minute before that he would ever say anything like this. “I want to get it over with,” he said.

Ralphie was trying to keep his eyes averted but could not. And suddenly he broke out grinning from ear to ear.

“A divorce,” Ralphie said.

“A divorce – divorce – divorce,” Ivan said furiously.

He said this with a sort of fierce judgement of his own stupidity.

“Anyway,” he said, still not sure why he was saying it, “it’s best – she can find a lot bettern me.”

“Oh, who says?” Ralphie said.

“Everyone wants me to say that, and won’t be satisfied until it is said.” Ivan said heatedly, as if Ralphie suddenly had become another enemy. “And anyway,” he said, “who would want to put up with me?” He sniffed, suddenly satisfied with this statement. “And besides, I’ll be much more happier.” Then he added, “Look, Ralphie, I didn’t hit her as they say – well, not as they say – she took a seizure. We were having a big fight, she took a seizure and fell flat on her fuckin knob–”

“I didn’t say you did,” Ralphie said. Ralphie was silent.

“Do you think I should see a lawyer?” he said. “No,” Ralphie said.

“I want to know if I need a divorce in this here racket and yer my friend,” Ivan said.

“Why don’t you go down and talk to Cindi about it.”

“If I ever see her again, I’ll kill her,” Ivan said matter-of-factly. “So I better not. She’s been on this big drunk – and she’s not taking her medicine either – so don’t let her kid you if she says she’s been taking her medicine.”

He said this as if Cindi not taking her medicine proved conclusively that he was in the right.

“I don’t want to get involved anyways,” Ralphie said.

Ivan shoved his hands in his pockets and nodded. “Oh.”

“Well – you know what I mean.”

Ivan nodded once more and shrugged.

“I don’t even know what lawyer to go to,” Ivan said, smiling guiltily. “What lawyer should I go to, Ralphie?”

“Well, there are lots of good lawyers,” Ralphie said.

Ivan scratched his head. His hair was curly and short, his eyes bright.

“If I go to any lawyer – they’ll say what were you doing, and I’ll say we were having this big fight over her money, and I had the shotgun out and she took a seizure. That don’t sound very good.”

Ralphie looked up at him and could not help smiling.

“But except when I threw spaghetti over her head – I didn’t touch her,” Ivan said. “There, I told you about the spaghetti – that’s it.”

Ralphie said nothing.

“That might have brought on the seizure, but she’s not taking her medicine – and don’t you think she is,” he said, pointing his finger at nothing in particular.

Ivan then went walking about the shop, picking things up and putting them back down.

“I come home – there she is. ‘Look, you son of a bitch,’ I said, ‘Dad’s in another big scrape, so where’s that money?’ And she runs to get it for me – and she had this apron on with deer on the pockets, and those big Sasquatch slippers on her feet, and she runs to get the money – and then when I see her sitting on the couch with the box and counting – and when she counts she moves her lips. Then she made a mistake.”

“A mistake?”

“She got to a hundred and seventy dollars and had to start all over. I yelled, ‘Yer at 170 – you dumb quiff – count!’ And she said, ‘170?’ and I saw her get scared. She said, ‘170-160-164.’ Then I picked the money up and tore it in pieces, and threw it across the room. ‘Fuck the money,’ I said. ‘And the hell with Dad – let him pay his own debts for once.’ And then she did what she always did, she folded her arms and looked at her shoes – and started counting to ten. And you know why she was counting to ten? Because she got mixed up. It was me who was supposed to count to ten. I had told her that if I ever got angry – and she’s scared of my temper – I would count to ten.

“‘Why are you counting to ten?’ I yelled. She wouldn’t answer. ‘WHY IN FUCK ARE YOU COUNTING TO TEN?’ She wouldn’t answer. Finally she said, ‘I’m angry so I’m counting to ten – so there.’ The poor little thing, as if ‘so there’ was going to solve everything in the world forever.”

“I’m sorry that the money for Vera caused everything,” Ralphie said.

“You don’t understand! That’s not the problem, Ralphie. I had to help out my dad. And it was no big deal – I mean, it was my Heath Steele Mine money anyway. But then I took the money and I tore it up. Why did I do that?”

“I don’t know,” Ralphie answered.

“Why did I do that – why did I tear the money up?”

They were silent.

“Then after a while, she got up off the couch – I’m sitting in the kitchen – and she went over to the money and got on her hands and knees and started to tape it up. That’s when I went crazy – told her not to touch it – and things happened. She went running outside – it was cold too – I got the shotgun –”

Then, as if he had completely forgotten about his own problems, he asked Ralphie how his mother was, and if she still had pains in her left hand – something which she had seven months ago, and which Ralphie had forgotten completely about.

Then he asked Ralphie about the things he was doing civically. That is, Ralphie had joined the Kinsmen and believed they were the best and most responsible civic organization in town, simply because he was sure he was supposed to feel this way.

His mother, Thelma, had wanted him to be active about town, and so hung his older sister, Vera, over his head – that is, all as Thelma would have to say is: “Oh yes – I have Vera – now I have you!”

And all as Adele had to say was: “I have no friends and I never get anywhere – and I’m nothin to no one in this here life – I mayswell have my tubes tied in a granny knot or even be dead.” So he joined the Kinsmen and the Toastmasters, and would work fourteen to sixteen hours a day.

They had a child when Adele was just a teenager, and they had given that child up to Ralphie’s childless aunt and uncle, Olive and Gerald Dressard. Though they knew where it was, they decided it would be best not to see it, and though they said it was for the best (because his mother and his sister had both told them that it was), they worried about it and wondered what it was doing at any given moment. And sometimes when Adele heard Thelma talking about children, and how these little children were victims and should not be born – except maybe every once in a while, but not all the time, like rabbits – Adele would take it as a direct assault upon herself.

Other than that they never spoke of their child. But sometimes Thelma would become fond of saying: “Oh, there’s lots of time for you two to have children!” Or: “I can’t wait to have a grandchild – and now Vera is finally pregnant. You two just don’t know how important grandchildren are.”

And it was not that Thelma had forgotten, sometimes she was piously delighted at the instant she said it.

At these times Adele would stare straight ahead, and her eyes would become fixed on something. Adele, as yet, wasn’t spoken of as being a part of the family. She looked, to others, even walking with them to church, to be a sort of an appendage, a hanger-on.

It was a peculiar situation. She and Ralphie lived with Thelma because Thelma insisted – had pleaded that they do – and yet, since they did, neither of them were allowed to forget it. Sometimes Adele would pack her old brown suitcase and haul it down the long white-carpeted staircase (much like she had packed her overnight bag in 1973, the time she ran away from home) and, sitting in the den staring out the window at the oxidized maple leaves blowing across the large circular driveway, she would start to cry.

Thelma would then bring her daughter Vera into it, ask her opinion – as an older woman will, at times, ingratiate herself to the opinions of a younger one – to prove to others that she, too, can agree with such “morally challenging” opinions. Vera always said that Adele and Ralphie were not suited because of “class differences.”

These were the things that had been on Ralphie’s mind when Ivan came into the office.

Now Ivan patiently waited in the swivel chair by the phone. He was reflecting that Cindi might phone Ralphie to ask where he was – and that everything might solve itself.

Just then the telephone did ring. Ivan gave a start, stood up and went to the door, turned about, and looked at the phone again. He was in a state that so many people get into when they have their minds set on something terrible happening. He had trained his mind for the inevitable to happen, and now he perversely desired it to happen.

Ralphie picked up the phone. In an instant Ivan knew (and reflecting later, he knew this by the way the telephone rang) that it wasn’t Cindi.

“I knew she wouldn’t call,” Ivan said when Ralphie hung up, and then he smiled.

And instead of waiting one more second, he went out into the street, cursing raw and bare words, leaving the door bang open behind him.

“Wait,” Ralphie said, “wait – we’ll phone her. …”

Ivan continued to stay out behind the apartment building in the woods for a number of days. It was April and the woods were very damp. But he was able to make out all right. It wasn’t the best of situations.

He could see Ruby and Cindi. On a warm day they would barbecue out on the patio. He moved back and forth in the woods, along well-worn deer trails and back pastures that were still snowpacked.

He knew that Ruby didn’t like him. He didn’t like her either – he thought she was spoiled. But that Ruby did not like him caused consternation now. He pretended, if only to himself, as he walked through the woods, that he didn’t know why she didn’t like him. But that was not quite the truth. The truth was more subtle. Ivan understood it only in a very shadowy way when he came up against it, and until now he had never had any need to face it. Ruby had always considered him puritanical, always trying to ruin either her or Cindi’s fun. Ivan, she supposed, did not have any idea of fun. Ivan had always seen that in her face when she spoke to him. And perhaps she was right about him. She had a beautiful face, too, a tiny stud ring in her nose, and her eyes as sharp as blue splinters. But he would pass her by morosely. She would talk loudly in his presence, telling Cindi about things they should do, things Ivan had no interest in.

Ivan saw in these few days that Ruby wished for Cindi to once again have this fun, to bring her into it, in a manner which would seem once and for all to exclude him. For if he advanced on them to stop it, it would only be proof of the puritanical, brutal strain Ruby was now convincing herself and Cindi that he had.

He did not know that people used words like shotgun blasts in the dark.

Once, a long time ago, Ivan went down to Vera and Nevin’s place to deliver a parcel for Ralphie. Vera, this first time they met, hearing that this young, jean-jacketed youth with dark lively eyes and a pug nose, and large hardened hands with tattoos on his knuckles, was about to be married, took him aside. And, as if she were being watched by the obscure matron of those ethics Ivan knew nothing about, Vera spoke reverently to him abut the position of women in society today. He caught only that glimpse of the hidden world where certain ethics were at war, which he knew, or Cindi knew, nothing about.

He could remember of that day the smell of the fine linen in her hand as she folded it against her stomach as she spoke, and this, along with her quiet, measured voice, left with him the idea of sincerity, which very few other people had ever done. This and the way her husband Nevin moved back and forth, trying not to intrude – much like a brother would not intrude upon a priest giving a lecture to an altar boy about the moral danger of masturbation – gave him a sense that they felt their duty was to instruct. He had no real idea of why.

He had a better idea of the motives of the police. But they had no idea about him, or the shotgun. The reason he had the shotgun out was to destroy the large oak cabinet in the living room. Since his father had continually for the last twenty months helped himself in one way or the other to those meagre savings of his and Cindi’s, Ivan, in taking his anger out on the oak cabinet, their favourite piece of furniture, believed he was reducing everything to its logical conclusion.

He tore the money up for a more obscure reason – but a reason the police would not consider. Nor would any legislative assembly, speaking, as they often do today, on family violence. Ivan could not stand that he had started this argument over something so shallow as money. It was better to be rid of it, tear it to shreds.

Yet he was still resolved to pay Vera and Nevin back.

Everything was suddenly looked at, not in this light, such as it was, but in the shadows he had been sometimes shown by the more obscure motives of others. He did not understand them as well as he should have, he was too certain of life to be bothered by them; he only knew that they were there.

The police had not charged him as yet, so it was a matter that was too insignificant for them to hurry over. This also gave him a sense of disquiet. He felt by this almost made light of.

Finally, after five days, Ivan went back to the apartment and packed his clothes, took his buck knife and rifle, and moved onto his grandfather’s old lobster boat.

“So you are leaving her,” someone said.

“She has left me also,” he replied.

Living together and married, their life was, for that short time, never boring.

In the winter Ivan would get home after dark. Then, after supper, he would go out and take long walks up behind the high line – where Adele’s father, Joe Walsh, had his camp, or in the fall he would take a bucket of apples and put them out at the edge of a field, or he would put a salt-lick down somewhere, or have his back pockets filled with carrots or lettuce.

Once he said: “Well, Cindi, there’s a dry doe coming out behind Ruby’s paddock in the morning – and that little buck is there as well – but I don’t think he’s going to last too long with the poachers about.” It made no difference to Ivan that he was a poacher himself. “I have to work tomorrow, so I want you to take a walk, and take that road up to the left of the high line behind there, into Joe Walsh’s – Joe knows me – I’m a big friend of his, so he won’t mind. And if he does mind, too bad about him.”

“And what am I spose to do, Ivan?”

“I’ll tell you what yer spose to do,” Ivan said, as if he just this moment thought of it. “You have to see if the deer are crossing the road. Just check for signs up to the big puddle – or,” he said, brightening up again, as if he just thought of this as well, and now it had become indispensable to his train of thought, “you could take my waders and put them on – of course you’d look like Popeye’s son Sweetpea in them – and try not to get stuck in the middle of the puddle or you’ll get all puddled up and drown or something – and watch out for moose. On your left on the other side is a little path which goes down to Joe’s camp at Brookwall. Better yet,” he said, brightening up once more, “take a barrel of apples – as many as you can – saddle Troy, tickle the back part of his mouth to get the bit in, and take those bunch of apples I got down there by the laundry basket, just hang a bucket of them off the horn – or, better yet, tie the bucket to the horn and then through the back split where the show girth is spose to go – so then you won’t have to worry about it –”

“The show what?” Cindi said, blinking at him and moving her knees together and the toes of her sneakers so that they touched one another.

“Show girth,” Ivan said lackadaisically. “And make sure you watch all the time, for there might be someone who mistakes you for a moose and shoots you – we can never be sure who’s out there in the woods with a rifle. It’s usually Dad. But don’t be scared of them – better yet, you may as well take the rifle – not my .306, because it’ll knock your shoulder off – take the .30-30.”

“Which one is which?”

“I’m not going to answer that because I’ve told you a thousand times which is which – and I’ll probably never be able to tell you – you’ll just have to figure it out sooner or later, but I’ll give you just a small hint – it’s that one right there.” He pointed. “You used it last summer when we went target practising – dontcha remember?”

Cindi nodded and tapped her sneakers together.

They were silent for quite some time.

Then Ivan, sitting at the small round table with the flowered plastic table mats, noticed Cindi talking to herself.

“What?”

“I’m just trying to remember all you told me to do.”

“Well never mind – just do what you can remember, when you remember to do it.”

Then the telephone rang and Ivan answered it and yelled: “What’s goin on! Oh hello, Doris – you old dog. How’s your mustn’t-touch-it? What? No problem – if I can get the car started – ya, ya, ya –”

Then he hung the receiver up gently, mused over something, and put on his boots, untied. His eyes looked both gentle and wild, and his tattooed hands were scarred from climbing trees to throw raccoons to the ground. The raccoons would tear at his hands as he threw them out of the trees, and when they landed on the ground they would all run away. “Don’t tree them if you can’t handle them,” Ivan yelled, swaying from the top limb, forty feet in the air.

Then he went over to Doris’s to tear down a nest the wasps had built just above her porch. When he came back he gave sugar lumps to the horses – being extra nice to Troy, and Ruby’s horse, Tantramar.

When he got back into the house, he said to Cindi: “She yelled at me not to drop the nest, so here I go and get stung by fifty of them or maybe a hundred.” He lowered his shirt collar to show the welts on his neck. For a moment he seemed to reflect on this.

“I’ll put some ice on those,” Cindi said.

“Yes, ice me down for Christ’s sake – or I’ll go into shock or something. That’s the last wasp nest I’ll ever take down from her porch.”

He folded his arms resolutely and tapped his feet.

“That don’t matter for poor old Doris,” he reflected, smiling, and lighting a cigarette quickly, as if to hide this tender reflection.

The next morning Cindi tried to think of all the things he had told her, and, going out to the edge of the paddock, she shifted the bucket of apples from one arm to the other, and, wearing a pair of huge waders that were tied about her neck, she stared gloomily off into the distant high line. And after walking twenty yards or so, feeling the wind at her back, blowing against the long, cold furrows of a muddy field, with the sun lukewarm in the greying sky, she began to back up again. Little by little, she backed up until she reached the spot where she had been. Then with fierce resolution she turned and walked back to the apartment.

“What did you manage to do?” Ivan asked at supper that evening.

“I managed to get your waders on – but I had to tie them up with that friggin old garter belt that was left down in the basement – by that woman.”

“That’s the very best – did you take the apples?”

“I took some apples, and I went out to the field –”

“That’s the very best – you saddle Troy?”

“No, I didn’t think of it.”

“No, that was a bad idea. Thought of that at work and came to the decision that it was a bad idea anyways –”

“So anyways, I didn’t take the rifle because you have two kinds of bullets –”

“Ya – that’s right, as I was thinking I wouldn’t want you to blow your head off anyways. So did you see if they were crossing the road?”

“I didn’t see them on the road.”

“Where did you put the apples?”

“Pardon?”

“The apples?”

“Well, I left them out by the paddock as you said the doe comes out there anyways.”

“Okay – apples right by the paddock.”

“Except Candy ate most of them.” (Candy was one of the draught horses.)

Ivan said nothing, reflected on this, and then gave a sigh.

“But,” Cindi said, “I saw some tracks –”

“Saw some tracks. Good, where did you see some tracks –”

“I’ll show you,” Cindi said, smiling in self-delight.

After supper they walked out into the field. Behind them, snorting now and then, was Troy, plodding the cold earth.

“Here,” Cindi said, in triumph. “The tracks!”

Then, seeing the look on Ivan’s face, she put her head down, as if she had been accused of something.

Ivan often noticed this about her and decided it must have come from her epilepsy.

“Those are good tracks,” Ivan said, sitting on his haunches. “And everything like that there, except they’re rabbit tracks – but no matter – we know where the rabbits are. I was wondering if there were any left about here – so now I know – well, mister man, she’ll be a different story this winter than last – because we have found our rabbits, Cindi.”

“Found our rabbits,” Cindi said, her nose running from the cold. “Yes, we have found our tracks,” she said.

But now everything had changed. At work he had a pink slip. He had moved out of the apartment. Some nights he would go for long walks, but what did that matter? And people whom he didn’t know looked at him, as if they knew all about him, and smiled.

There were other things also – those people whom he did not like seemed ready to express a gaiety when he himself was miserable.

It was true that he had seen Ruby’s cousin Eugene visiting Cindi three nights ago – this was just before his pink slip. At work there had been some ore clogging the shute to the crusher. Men jabbed at it, and poked at it with no result, so Ivan, sweat and water running down his face, and his left ear seeming to be permanently twisted under his hard hat, stood upon it, jumping up and down.

The foreman told him twice to climb out of the bin, and he twice told the foreman that he would.

“Ya, ya,” he kept saying.

Then, just when he was about to climb out, he took a final kick at a small piece of ore under his boot – to the left of his boot – which, in fact, he did not see as he kicked – and the tons of ore let go immediately beneath him. Now, when the ore let go, it seemed not to be under him, but, in fact, over his head, and he reached up and managed to catch a chain at the side of the shute and hold himself. Then, 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 the car 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.