The Tragedy of Eva Mott, page 1
ALSO BY DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS
FICTION
The Coming of Winter
Blood Ties
Dancers at Night: Stories
Lives of Short Duration
Road to the Stilt House
Nights Below Station Street
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
Hope in the Desperate Hour
The Bay of Love and Sorrows
Mercy Among the Children
River of the Brokenhearted
The Friends of Meager Fortune
The Lost Highway
Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul
Crimes Against My Brother
Principles to Live By
Mary Cyr
Darkness
NONFICTION
Hockey Dreams
Lines on the Water
Lord Beaverbrook
God Is.
Facing the Hunter
A Lad from Branford and Other Essays
Murder and Other Essays
The Christmas Tree: Two Tales for the Holidays
POETRY
Wild Green Light (with Margo Wheaton)
Small Heroics
A Fierce and Tumultuous Joy (2022)
Copyright © 2022 David Adams Richards
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of
Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The tragedy of Eva Mott / David Adams Richards.
Names: Richards, David Adams, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220196710 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220196729 | ISBN 9780385696296 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385696302 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8585.I17 T73 2022 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover and book design: Andrew Roberts, adapted for ebook
Cover image: Paul Taylor/Getty Images
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
a_prh_6.0_141474779_c1_r0
Contents
Cover
Also by David Adams Richards
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Acknowledgements
To the mimics who dig our graves.
PROLOGUE
I HAVE THOUGHT SOMEWHAT ABOUT THE STORY OF MY friend Eva Mott, and I even painted her from memory on a number of occasions. And perhaps the best introduction to her, to her tragedy and the tragedy of those who caused hers is the comment below:
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Gulag Archipelago
I am human and therefore nothing human is alien to me.
Terence
Heauton Timorumenos
No great fighter ever runs from the darkness.
(As said in honour of the late Johnny Tapia, featherweight champion of the world)
1
THE WEDDING TOOK PLACE SOME YEARS AGO, IN THE heat of the day, with the bride already pregnant, wearing a white dress. Mr. Ben Mott wanted to invite the same people who were at his brother-in-law’s wedding a few months before because he was jealous of his brother-in-law’s inordinate success, and also because he was a mimic. He wore a grey suit, with the sleeves too short, and the white shirt cuffs too long. His wife’s dress was too small now that she was showing the round mound in her tummy, that some guests throughout the night kept patting.
There were not enough tables and chairs but even so, many people did not show. They knew Ben was too stingy and mean to sprout for anything. As some people said, they had never seen the colour of his wallet. There were also for some reason a load of big flies on the small tables that had been set up with juice and buns.
Of his friends who showed that day, Clement Ricer acted as best man, and a widow named Toomey with three children waited on the tables.
Outside, men from the mine who were not invited but heard there was a party arrived in trucks and cars to the centre where the dance was to take place, and they began to mosey in about seven or eight at night. But the band had not arrived because they had not been paid up front, and there was no alcohol, only lemonade. So two men decided to set up a record player and get a sound system going.
The brother-in-law, a Mr. Bell, chief financial advisor for the asbestos mine, and his wife finally decided they must do something, and so phoning for permission they opened the mine’s mess hall far across the field and hired the cooks to make dinner for thirty-eight people.
The cook, Mr. Mountain, and two First Nations women, a Mrs. Francis and her young cousin Melissa Hammerstone, were hired to do so.
Mrs. Francis as we know cared for many people on the reserve and had studied as a nurse. She had tried to keep Melissa in her care. Melissa was still a child herself, a girl who when she was in the convent was an honours student and could play Chopin on the piano, but by this time had become, even at the age of nineteen, cynical and pessimistic about the world, and her beauty and happiness had been soured by certain men, and now she was almost never sober. People said her downfall came because of a man named Mel Stroud, and her young brother Gordon Hammerstone had tried to stop them from seeing one another.
Yes, it was the most unusual wedding, with the groom standing in line with men he didn’t invite to get food he didn’t pay for, with his wife in her white dress four months pregnant—the same as her sister, Mrs. Bell, who was married six months before her—standing behind him as the sky became dimmer and dimmer. There was, however, a good deal of wine hidden by the men, and soon Oscar Peterson, a man named after his uncle and not after the great Canadian musician, just as our own Winston Churchill was named after his grandfather and not the wartime prime minister, was roaring drunk and badmouthing the Dews. The Dews went at him outside and one of them hit him over the head with a bottle, and the policeman Constable Furlong tried to get Oscar in a police car to take him home, as Oscar raked them all with his feelings about the Arron Brook Dews who were not at all like other Dews, who were nicer and, he said for some reason, cleaner Dews.
At the same time Mrs. Wally and Mrs. Ricer had set up the accordion and fiddle and played old reels and jigs, and soon a few of the asbestos miners who had been alone in the old building built as a bunkhouse were trying to take advantage of certain married women. So soon jokes turned bawdy and then rebellious.
A young man, perhaps about twenty, who some girls said was full of the devil arrived. He drove a small convertible and wore sunglasses though it was almost night now, and small wild bats flew over the bunkhouse. Still women, certain women at any rate, cared very much for his dark curly hair, his unsettled terrible eyes, his high cowboy boots and strong body. He was the aforementioned Mr. Mel Stroud.
He grabbed a man’s wife, and when the man intervened he threw him against the wall, and laughed. Then when two miners came at him he flashed a knife, and othe
The only way they could settle things down was to get Mel Stroud out of there, and they had to call Constable Furlong again, who when he heard it was Mel Stroud said he was busy.
Then the raffle was drawn and Mrs. Wally won the expensive silver watch, perhaps, they said, worth two weeks’ pay, and Shane, Mel’s younger, wilder, imitative brother, said she cheated and maybe he should have the watch, though he hadn’t bought a raffle ticket and did not know there was a raffle.
So then they had to get Oscar Peterson back, and he was driven back by Furlong. He came into the hall and told his distant cousins they had to go. The cousins laughed, and Shane picked up a glass to fight him with.
But just as this argument was about to take a more physical turn, the lights dimmed so the music stopped. The groom far on the other side of the hall said his best man Clement Ricer wanted to make a toast. The light was turned on. The bride looked scared to death. Clement got emotional, told people Ben was his best, lifelong friend and had many stories that he shouldn’t tell here for it would be embarrassing:
“But remember when we went to the Gaspé—hey, remember that, yes, well that is what I want to say—he’s a good man. I toast the bride.”
By then, for some reason there were tears in his eyes.
And just as Shane was going to insult the bride—for he was even more obtrusive than his older brother, and loved to torment when his brother was there to protect him, and had all his life a desperate hatred for women, something happened.
Everyone turned, and there was Byron Raskin, the nephew of the Raskin brothers, owners of Raskin Oil and Mine. He was the person Mr. Bell had phoned. He stood with little expression watching the crowd of people. No one spoke. He had been a hero in the second war, and he had disappeared for some time. It was only recently that people had discovered he had fought at Dien Bien Phu, the last stand of the French in Vietnam. The French had fought back from one desperate position to the next, each position named after someone’s girlfriend. In that battle Raskin had fought alongside French and German solders, the Germans members of the French Foreign Legion, many of them soldiers who had fought with von Paulus at Stalingrad. Most of them died in this battle of Dien Bien Phu. Byron Raskin who wanted to, did not.
Now he stood watching the festivities, and his eyes lighted on Mel Stroud.
“You had better go,” he said, “and leave this celebration to those who wish to celebrate.”
“I just came to see Melissa Hammerstone—she’s working here. I’ll see her before I go.”
“No. You will go now,” Byron said, without ceremony.
And Mel Stroud and his brother Shane did exactly that. They did it because Mel respected both bravery, which Byron had, and wealth, which the Raskins certainly enjoyed.
Now with the dinner almost over, and the band playing again, Byron Raskin whispered to Mr. Bell to go to the house and get a case of champagne that was there. And to tell the uncles to come to toast the bride, and to bring greetings from the asbestos mine, and to bring the beer that was in the porch and give the bottles to the men who had come to celebrate. He told him to give twenty dollars extra to Melissa Hammerstone, for he knew and had affection for her as a child.
There were another twenty deer steak in the cooler, inside the kitchen, he said. Take them out and give them to the cooks.
Then he went over and shook hands with the groom, and asked the bride to dance. The champagne came, the steak was cooked, the beer was cold. The dance went on, and the night was a night of great celebration, for the Bells, the Petersons, the Toomeys, the Motts, the Dews, the miners from the asbestos pit, for Mrs. Wally, the Raskins themselves and yes, for young Melissa Hammerstone, who Byron asked to dance.
Just before eleven the old men themselves arrived from their large house far in the trees above, and stood together at the entrance as if unsure they were welcome in their own building. They had no present to give, but they did have five hundred dollars in their pockets that they handed over to the groom, who looked flabbergasted that this wonderful shindig had gone forward in his behalf.
Everyone danced and drank, and the bride and groom did not leave until after midnight. It was a celebration to celebrate two people who were not so popular in our community but who deserved this one night of grace.
Only the next morning did the bride, the newly minted Mrs. Mott, realize that this great man Byron Raskin had been dead drunk through all of this, and would not remember a thing about the wonderful evening he had managed to create.
2
BYRON RASKIN WAS IN THE OFFICE EARLY THE NEXT DAY to rearrange his percentage of the business and to deliver the reports his uncles had requested . He had taken a pint of Scotch into the bathroom with him, and poured a drink into a glass that sat on the sink. The sink was stained with a kind of golden and rust discolouring and he looked at it as if in the still moments between the pouring and the drinking he could fathom a future for him and his wife.
He and his wife—or he at least—believed the marriage was futile. He had married her when she was alone with her young son, and had taken them in, in the same expressive way he had shown just this night before. That is, in the exact same way, no more, and no less. And that was his ultimate mistake. This was in his nature, but it at times blinded him to himself.
She was a Goya. She was a widow with a young son. He had researched her, in a way, too, that showed he was cautious. He had heard she was vain. Well who wasn’t? That she had manipulated her own younger sister. Well who didn’t? That she had married a man after forcing him away from his wife—that he in turn had run his motorboat into Bartibog Bridge and was nothing more than a smudge. And that this smudge should allow Byron pause. But it didn’t.
She had gone to the Raskin mines after her first husband died, found herself working part-time, and going to a company picnic which was where he first saw her. Of course he had known about her before. The Goya woman, the woman who turned heads without being terribly pretty or vivacious. And yet her idea of herself, her narcissism and sense of entitlement, was well known. That is why he was attracted to her. Her very flaws made her desirable to him. She knew who he was, and in fact had known he would be where he was when she was there as well. She had been a widow five or six months when they met.
He remembered it now, while staring at the golden stain in the porcelain sink and listening to the first early birds sing outside the clouded window. He remembered her legs, her skirt, her perfume, her longish fingernails all in an instant, and realized how everything complemented her face, shaded from the afternoon. It was as if he knew he was lost at that moment—like a man who has heard of a dangerous turn on the road takes it anyway. Didn’t they say she robbed her own sister? And didn’t he feel—at least in a small way—that if he looked too long upon those legs, that skirt, and then to that expressive face he too would be lost? And yet he did not turn away. Now after all these moments he thought of her only as a heavy weight upon him, and of course he, one upon her.
Then turning his back to the sink he stared at the grey paper towels piled on the small white table like shrives of a damp and pedestrian world, and saw the scratches of time on the black bathroom door.
All in time to the dripping of the faucet.
The asbestos they mined was under scientific scrutiny, and he had made it explicitly clear to his uncles that the mine should turn its attention to copper and zinc, whose loads might be in abundance further into the mountain, or from the tailings of the asbestos they could recoup their losses with magnesium. He had discussions with the Indigenous council about this, knowing here in mid-century how left out they had been. Some had agreed and some had disagreed with any proposal.
