Sheldon Currie

David Adams Richards: The People on the Roadway

David Adam Richards' fiction, like the Miramachi river, is large, moody and demanding. The unprepared or inexperienced reader will soon droop, nod, and lose direction, particularly with the earlier novels. Either author or editor has subjected the later work to rigorous and aggressive editing and the result is a clarity of structure, character, and theme sometimes lacking in the early novels.

On the other hand the experienced Richards' reader will miss the density, depth and the grainy quality of the early work. A reader new to Richards' stories might start with the short stories in Dancers at Night (1978), the first of which, "ARural Place," is amasterpiece, and demonstrates Richards'command of plot, characterization, and dialogue. The trilogy, his most recent work: Nights Below Station Street (1988), Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (1990), and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (1993) will delight anyone who likes fiction, and will prepare the reader for the pleasures of the long haul through the larger novels: The Coming of Winter (1974) Blood Ties (1976) Lives of Short Duration (1981), Road to the Stilt House (1985). All Richards' work requires close attention, a healthy tolerance for ambiguity, and an ability to get along without cheap novelistic tricks: silly sex, needless violence, fashionable ideas, au courant dialogue, and romanticized characters. And more than anything else the reader needs to bring the kind of intelligence and imagination necessary to discover meaning without the author's intervention, as well as the wit and sense of humour to see the comic in the tragic and vice versa; these are troubled waters, these Miramachi River stories, complex and profound, simultaneously comic and tragic, and the inexperienced or the inattentive might as well opt for a quiet, shallow lake where surface tension is enough to keep a body afloat.

Every novel asks the question: What does a person do between the womb and the grave? Richards asks the question on behalf of people who are without the consolations of middle class illusions, people whose visions, through no fault of their own, are restricted by firm horizons, people who are intelligent and talented, but who realize too late, if at all, that somewhere in the past, because of a lack of opportunity, or a deficient gene, or because of bad luck or bad management by themselves or by someone else, they missed a grade, or a beat, or an experience, or a fundamental bit of advice at the opportune moment, and what they missed was seminal; they missed getting to the part in the river of their lives that opens out into the ocean, and they are doomed until the grave, or some serendipitous luck, to an upriver existence. Little Simon in Lives of Short Duration calls them, the people on the roadway."

 And Lester Murphy - he remembered Lester 
 Murphy, all he could about him.  How he
 stood amidst a group of men, saying
 something in a low voice, and how all
 the men laughed and shook their heads. 
 How Lester Murphy would have com-boils,
 and lobster-boils, and invite some
 Americans, a few cottagers, into the
 back rooms of his tavern, but never the
 people on the roadway.
  "Let them have their Jesus corn," he thought

The foundation of Richards fiction is character. In two distinct ways. First, the characters are the novels' meaning. InLives ofShortDuration, the difference between Old Simon and his hospital roommate, Rance, is the difference between how to and how notto conduct alife. Old Simon, heroic in the medieval sense, leads a life exemplary and representative. He exemplifies the way to conduct a life. He represents the virtues of the culture that informed his life. Rance represents what happens to a life uninformed by the virtues of its culture. A boat on a windy river with neither sail nor oar.

"You know I was married once," Rance said...
"When were ya married?" [Simon] asked.
"I was married - I know one thing that'd make a man drink is a wife is that right or wrong?"
Simon didn't answer.
"Anyways - I got rid of her."
Simon shook his head.
"Yes,"Rancesaid. "Ridathatbitch-she was an undertaker's daughter..."
"I don't know - my wife an I were married fer 55 year maybe."
"Yes," Rance laughed. "But that's not the way she is today Simon maybe you hadda stay together."
[Simon] thought for a moment, sniiled. "Well I don think we hadda stay together - we were married 55 years about.
"Maybe," Rance said. "But I knew from the moment we were married that I was gonna have a good time, what dya say - right or wrong?" Rance said.
Simon didn't answer.
"Anyway," Rance said. "I'll tell you something - to extract the blood out of your body they make a slit under your armpits and legs - and have you strapped on a board. Then the old blood gushes. I found out a few things when we drained theblood out of a girl-say fifteen or whatever-nicepussy and everything, eh - the old man would bend over her and examine her, and then he'd pump her tits to get the blood out. Its true," Rance said. "Every word of it." He whistled.
"And the only time they were happy was when they had bodies in the house so I acted awful bad right from the start, stole their hearse. They weren't gonna get me in that business."

Old Simon is as gentle and patient with Rance as he is with hi s own adrift grandchildren, Little Simon, Packet, and Lois. He is in despair because he cannot teach them his values because there is no longer a context creating structure in which those values can exist. His world is gone and has been replaced by no world at all, has been replaced by discrete and meaningless forms of inessential pleasures and entertainments. All he can give them is love and they are beyond the help of love. They thrash around in their lives like grilse in an overcrowded fish hatchery gobbling pellets thrown at them by their wardens, their only urges, to survive and to spawn.

Old Simon is, as they say, no saint, but he is outraged that the world he is preparing himself to leave, to his children, and to the rest of humanity, is a world in which sainthood, or heroism, is no longer possible and consequently the concept of bad behaviour is barely perceptible. He is disgusted as he watches Alewood's inept, cowardly, and sloppy behaviour in the woods. And he is disgusted with Daniel Ward for going along with him, for the sake of a drink.

"That was a good shot," Daniel Ward said. And Simon hated them both and turned away. And he couldn't stand the soft Micmac tones of Daniel Ward nor the shimmering happiness of Randolph Alewood...

He'd hit the calf in the left hind leg
with the first shot and belly shot it three
times ... And the man began telling Daniel
Ward about the organs - pointing outthe
white intestinal tract and the liver and ward,
hunting moose since he was ten, kept saying,
"Oh das it," and Simon thought, The fucker
wants a drink.

After Old Simon escapes from the hospital, he travels the woods where he spent most of his working life and from a summit looks down on a disappointing world that has more and more taxed his infinite patience.

Down below him now the hospital, dimly
lighted with its giant stack and to the
left of that the room where Rance slept.
'Mere wasn't a moon or stars to follow.
The streetlights had a haze over them and
scores of white houses sat with cement
steps and proper gilded railings - each
with some immaculate priority the old man
disliked but didn't understand - as if all
those houses had been beaten out by the
same hammer for the same unsatisfying purpose,
and the cars they rode in sat in the doorways.
"Jesus Christ anyways," Old Simon thought.

Richards work is characterized by the author's unwavering loyalty to his characters, which is the second way character is the foundation of his work. And his loyalty to his characters works in tandem with his respect for his readers. He seldom tells his characters what to think, and they speak for themselves; nor does he try to explain his characters or tell the reader what to make of them. He makes big demands of the reader who is required to makejudgements about what's going on in the story, as in life, with no help from author, God, daddy and mummy, or tragic violin music. For many readers, no doubt, Richards' fiction is a river without shores.

The grandfather of modem fiction is En-iile Zola. Since his extraordinary novel Germinal, the best fiction has been written about ordinary people, 4 1 people on the roadway." In the 20th century Graham Greene and Flannery O'Connor are the most notable British and American novelists in this tradition. Although Richards' stories are more subtle and comprehensive in meaning and technique, and more demanding of the reader's attention and wit, he clearly belongs to this tradition of storytelling.

Fiction in this tradition is about ordinary people, but not as they ordinarily are. It is about ordinary people in their extraordinary selves, their extraordinary humanity , its goodness and badness. In Old Simon, Joe Wash, Miffed, Adele, Irene, Lea, Cathy, Kelvin and many others we see ordinary people and their extraordinary dedication to love, hope and faith as they ferret about in life trying to find ways to get it to make sense; and in Rance and George and others we see human failure, lives degraded by weakness, frustrated by ignorance, throttled by dimwittedness and bad luck. But, good or bad, Richards characters are never ciphers, or literary examples of something or other; always they are complex and mysterious, always behaving in a human way, be it a good way or a bad way. Even the worst, the mean, the violent, the crass, the cowardly, the inept are behaving with some dim vision of a virtue, are trying, against the brutal tide, for something.

Even Jerry Bines (For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down), a man with a wire loose near the parieto-occipital sulcus, excluded by his many deficiencies from a social reality he dimly perceives and earnestly longs for, an inept but eager saviour, tries desperately to pry the lid off his rigid horizon, to open up to a world of virtue and freedom, another world, where, he suspects, other people live; even Jerry Bines manages a tragic success. And Bines is like many of Richards unlikely tragic heroes. They wear their wounds like workmen wear smudges on coveralls, a bit of wet sawdust, a smear of grease, a streak of muck, to be looked after, if they can ever get around to it, after the ob is done, if they ever get it done.

Richards' fiction is all about the wounded in a wounded world.

The Place was nevermeasured in any way.
The scene was are dundancy of sharp broken
trees cast into the naked sky, the earth cast
up the thousands of acres clipped and broken,
the roads twisting here and there, winding
their way through what was previously dugup
and rooted out. Far away the trail of smoke
ebbed like a fingerling in the cold blue sky.
His wife's house stood back from a road,
naked and white with pink curtains in the
upstairs window, as nondescript as a thousand
other houses in the rural areas of the provinces.

The wise, Old Simon, Miffed, Adele, Irene, observe the mismeasured, cacophonous, unbalanced chaos with exasperation, disappointment, and frustration. They offer it, when they can, the consolation of love, or a glass of rye, and they bleed, endure, andjoke and tease each other. To the old, like Old Simon, it's like hockey night in Canada, it ain't what it used to be. The structured violence of nature is usurped by the random violence of the dispossessed. Denuded of all but the rudiments of emotional and economic culture, the unwise, like Lois, like Andy, like John, screech and scream and wait for the big win on the lottery the proper authorities have so kindly provided for their hope, faith, and charity. The forest is usurped by alders. The river is full of fertilizer. The deercalf is shot in the knee and three times in the belly. The people, disheartened, refuse to grow up.

Lois threw the hat and caught it on her
head, and she yelled as the hat came down.
The light in the doorway came on and the
woman came out again. "Listen we didn't
invite you here," the woman said. "We don't
know you - and we don't have to have you
yelling and screaming around here."
"Am I yelling and screaming?" Lois said, yelling.
"Please go away," the woman said.
"Don't screw around with me," Lois said screaming.
"Just please go home," the woman said. "You'll wake my children."
"Give the buggers my love," Lois said. But the woman slammed the door again.

Lois is one of the more tragic pieces of flotsam bobbing along the eddies of the river's shore. Driven by unhamessed energy, intelligence and love, she has nothing to guide her but the winds and the tides. Many are like her, some not so lovable, like rudderless boats twisting and turning in the bay, knocking into each other, bearing away nothing but the scars of their encounters.

Richards is a master of the novel as social history. The economic and cultural plight of his country is embedded in the behaviour of his characters and is scattered effectively like grace notes in the rhythmical dialogue of these frustrated victims, who see through the spectacles of their wounds, the needless empty spaces, the unnecessary cultural, social and economic deserts between them and there amblyopic frontiers.

Particularly pathetic in the history of deprivation is the depressing spectacle of victim blaming victim, the last refuge and final creative strategy of the totally colonized personality.

"Trying to scare us into helping at
the picnic. Sure he's too old, sure he
is but who gets the good priests around
here? Not us - the Indians, the Indians
and the French. The Indians down there
on the reservation and we pay taxes to
keep them alive and mosta them never even
go to church mosta them don't believe in
God or nothin - Indians and French get the
goddam good churches and the priests. Look
at any French town ya go to, look at it ya'll
see churches higher and better than the one
up town - ya don't even see the roads paved
around here unless an election."
( Lome in Blood Ties pp.80-81.)

Even the Catholic church, the last non-addictive comfort of the economically dispossessed, where Scots, Irish, Acadian and Micmac, deprived of their traditional music and literature, unable any longer to understand even their own languages, could at least listen to the music of the great masters and stories from the Old and New Testaments; even the Church, where instead of Pachelbel's canon or Bach's Mass in B minor, or the majestic hymns written by the great poets in Latin, French, German and English, the helpless parishioners must listen to reborn charismatics singing pious ditties celebrating Christ as Santa Claus, while they grope over their capos for chords with awkward fingers; even the Church, the refuge of the dispossessed, is confused and bankrupt.

"Miffed over there eating now, so you
better show them you're here," she said.
He [Orville] looked at her; Rance staggering
in the dry heat and the church behind them,
its tall ancient cross pointing into nothing.
(Blood Ties,P.87)

Lome's criticism of the Church is superficial and self-serving, but Orville'sproblemisfundamental,acrisisoffaith, andpointstoafundamental problem in the Church itself. Orville is an altar boy who has a natural predilection for religious ceremony which normally would lead to a vocation to the priesthood. But he is at odds with the priest, who later catches him stealing altar candles, which he was taking home and burning in his room, presumably to satisfy his instinct and need for ritual, a satisfaction not availa',)Ie to him in the church building in spite of his position as altar boy.

He went out onto the altar, bowed
instead of genuflected. It was dead.
Here, the candies unlit, high in theiriron
holders, the gold cross, the gold covering
stained and spotted, which he removed and
folded in his hands. Instead of what was
inside - in the vestry, in the quiet of some
enclosed dark wooded room, here was something
barefaced and open.
If the altar smelled like the room and
the room like the altar it would be all right
- it would be the way it was to be, and now
it was the way it wasn't to be. He lit the
candles. It was seven o'clock
................
... and the grunting, mumbling of Latin
from the bent back of the withered priest
and the mumbling of his own answers that
he didn't hear; and then the priest stopping
and spitting into the spot stained handkerchief
that he pulled from his sleeve, and then
crumpled it again and shoved it back, and
when his sleeve went back, the white hairless
underside of his hairless arm.
(Blood Ties,pp. 158-59)

While walking through the graveyard of the same church, Orville's sisters Cathy and Lea reveal to the reader that the corruption of the Church is nothing inadvertent and can be traced back to an original flaw, embedded, like a cancer-giving gene, in the very foundation of the building and the institution it stands for. They are discussing the grave stone of Josiah Murphy [1836-18521] "the first in the graveyard, nearest the water... It said: Leaves his wife and seven beloved children. 'As if a boy sixteen could have seven children,' Lea said.... It was the cracked tombstone nearest the water, water on the autumn shore. 'He musta had one dancin cock,' Cecil said. 'Will you shut your Jesus mouth?' Lea said. Cathy said nothing." (Blood Ties,p.84)

The printing mistake on the gravestone is inadvertent and of no importance to anyone outside Mr. Murphy's family but, it stands in juxtaposition to a usurpation of power which Lea points out to her companions moments earlier.

They went into the centre of the
ground, where most of the people were.
The sun was glinting upon the church,
making it glare white, making the dark
stained-glass windows shine in an
intelligible pattern in their eyes.
They said the foundation was hard stone
and it took a year to dig under it deep
enough to lay it out, where the chaffed
bones of Indians were found, that the
workers threw up with the stone and dirt
and shale, the bone no more part of
anything but of the dirt itself, no more
than the shale itself Sometimes a bursted
skull that the workers found. And the
priest then, which was a hundred years ago
or more, blessed the workers as they dug
yet blessed nothing of the bone because
the bone was more shale and dirt that they
threw with their picks and shovels than
anything else in existence."Yet it was
their sorta church before it was our
church," Lea said.(Blood Ties,pp.83-84)

No writer more clearly delineates the terrible consequences that follow when people are deprived of power, economic power essentially, but quickly followed by political and personal power. Few writers understand so well the comic/tragic postures of the people who inhabit the disenfranchised frontiers of the country. Indeed, is there any writer who so adequately illustrates the details of the side shows that play in the provinces while Quebec and Ontario occupy the main stage contesting for whatever power defaults from our European, Asian and North American neighbours.

You know, I've lived to see long
rafts on this river - I've lived to
see long logs on this ri ver - I've
lived to see pulp drives on this river
- and now I've lived to see nothin on
this river. (Annie, in Blood Ties, p.256)

But for all the tragic history of misery, for all the economic deprivation, the loss of proper work, the loss even of the river itself and the fish it provided, the loss of the forest and the food it provided; despite the loss of culture, of music, of language, of literature, Richards creates a bountiful world of heroic survivors, endurers, and prevailers who transcend their pain, live admirable lives, and provide the world with the one thing they have left, their love for their families, friends and neighbours.

And for all Richards' lack of sentimentality, these novels and short stories will make you cry, not for the sadness of it all, not for the waste of human and natural resources, not for the pain of loss, but for the beauty of it all, the tragic and coniic beauty. The beauty of the language. Richards offers an astonishing variety of well crafted vignettes describing the emotions associated with simple human activities, with hunting, caring for the infirm, with men and women working and talking together, with dancing, with conflict and resolution between parents and children, with the struggle for power in sexual relationships, and with the frustration of confronting people who live in a reality inconceivably different from their own.

But the most poignant beauty of Richards' novels and short stories is the beauty of the love and power of his heroic characters, Joe Wash, Irene, Old Simon, Miffed, Cathy, Pamela and a myriad of others. The final scene in Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace brings together two of Richards' most admirable and most emotionally and thematically charged characters. The scene is one of many that illustrate Richards' skill in the fusion of character and meaning.

Adele went into the graveyard,
which was sectioned in two.
The section near the bay was the
graves of the first settlers, and
the graves nearest the woods were the
newer ones.
At one of the newest graves Adele
stopped. Her lips trembled, and then
she shnigged. The granite marker in
the earth simply read:
Ivan Basterache
A Man
1957-1979

It was quite a famous marker for a while. And then it was overgrown and forgotten altogether.

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The Antigonish Review is a quarterly literary journal published by St. Francis Xavier University. The Review features poetry, fiction, reviews and critical articles from all parts of Canada, the US and overseas, using original graphics to enliven the format.

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