Darkness by David Adams Richards

Author:David Adams Richards [Richards, David Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

“Over time the book, the launch party, the boy were forgotten. But one valuable connection was made. Vale received a brilliant fan letter about this early novel from Ms. Eunice Wise. She saw herself as the book’s heroine, for she had, she said, taken all the same steps in order to free herself from a disaster. Thank God she had done so.

“Then, after years of no one hearing from that writer, a manuscript arrived at the university’s English department office. It was addressed to Professor Milt Vale.

“It arrived three days before Christmas, when there should be some jubilation about things arriving—that is, it arrived probably two days before that writer ‘of some promise’ (a statement I read about the only story he had ever published) was killed in that house fire where Orville had saved those children. By some fluke, the tin box with all the writer’s work remained unscathed.

“I found out,” John continued, “that after Ida went into the hospital, the writer took the children in. In fact, a local man—her last boyfriend, a man who lived with her while they drank her welfare cheque each month—brought them to him, holding Gaby by one hand and carrying their suitcases in the other—one under each arm, and one in his right fist. He waited a moment, thinking he would get a tremendous lecture for having sopped up so much of the welfare cheques in liquor, but received none at all. In his pocket was twenty dollars he had received from Ida for the children. He told himself that he had forgotten about it, told himself that he was in a desperate fog after he left the hospital, and did not remember that he had zipped it up carefully in his pocket. He spent it later that night at the tavern. Cursing later and getting into a fight out on the snowy white street, yelling that he would defend Ida’s honour to the death.

“The writer brought the children in and sat them down at the table for lunch. There were times the writer had to scrape together enough to buy milk. And they did love him—all of this was in his book.

“Milt Vale would someday claim that book, and what is worse, by implication their adoption, without suffering a night of pain on their behalf. He would assume the reins of the book, and those children, and therefore take credit for what he had never done. Vale would never hunt moose—he would have been terrified to hear a bull moose grunt or a cow moose bellow—but in the book written about a wild world he did not know, he would claim to have hunted them down himself. Milt Vale would do all that. He would never hunt or fish with his boys, but in the book he did. I mean, he would steal all of that, he would filch compassion and love and sacrifice for those children from a writer who published one short story, wrote one true work of genius and died broke at thirty-five.

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