David Adams Richards - For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down

Invested with a passion and acuity that strip away false fronts of smug misunderstanding and ideological or moral comfort. David Adams Richards writes novels that are essential.

Canadian Forum

Richards is a writer of great talent and mighty vision. In Richardss marvelous characters we see ourselves.

Telegraph Journal

A distillation of powerful feeling, and an eloquent call for compassion. A remarkable book.

Quill & Quire (starred review)

Compelling. The fire in Richardss voice makes the action explosive.

Edmonton Journal

This novel is powerful: a wrenching subject is developed with skill and sensitivity. Richards has created a place for Jerry Bines in the pantheon of twentieth-century tragic heroes.

Calgary Herald

His writing seems to reflect the unflinching nature of man. He masterfully mixes tension and fear with a poignancy that is itself wounding.

Halifax Daily News

Richards wants us to avoid easy explanations, the ones that separate us from the wounded and just explain them away.

Kingston Whig-Standard

Richards is a painfully sharp observer, who possesses one of the most distinct and compelling voices in contemporary literature.

Toronto Star

FICTION

The Coming of Winter (1974)
Blood Ties (1976)
Dancers at Night (short stories, 1978)
Lives of Short Duration (1981)
Road to the Stilt House (1985)
Nights Below Station Street (1988)
Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (1990)
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (1993)
Hope in the Desperate Hour (1996)
The Bay of Love and Sorrows (1998)
Mercy Among the Children (2000)
River of the Brokenhearted (2003)
The Friends of Meager Fortune (2006)
The Lost Highway (2007)

NON-FICTION

A Lad from Brantford, & Other Essays (1994)
Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldnt Play (1996)
Lines on the Water: A Fishermans Life on the Miramichi (1998)
Playing the Inside Out (2008)
God Is (2009)

F OR RICK TRETHEWEY
and INGE STERRER
in friendship

And for JOHN THOMAS
with the love of my heart

The rifle kicks hard both ways.

Eric Trethewey
(from Killing Whiskey)

In 1981, during the interval between AA speakers at the meeting in the prison, a man was led in late. He was placed at the back of the crowded room.

It was an AA meeting that Joe Walsh chaired every week here because he felt he was duty-bound to do it.

But the man they had brought in that evening, who sat looking around cautiously, and at the same time impervious to other prisoners, was Joes nephew, Jerry Bines.

So after the meeting, feeling compelled that he should speak, Joe walked over to him. But it was Jerry who broke the ice.

How are you, Joe, he said. Doin good doing good right drivin tractor-trailer now thats what being sober will get you.

Yes, Joe answered. And he could not help but smile, because of how Jerrys face lit up when he saw him.

Good good

He thanked Joe for coming, and said that he would start to attend these meetings on a regular basis now.

You like them.

Dont like them, no no dont like them gives me a chance to get out a my cell out of my cell, Jerry said, smiling.

Then he asked about Joes family. And then he paused, as if trying to think of something to say.

Your daughter Adeles got herself a good lad now, Jerry said innocently. Ralphie Pillar, right I like Adele always have, he said. When I first went to Kingsclear she was the only one to write only one. He glanced away when he said this as if thinking of something. Dont blame those who didnt, he said.

How long are you here for? Joe said.

Christ, I dont know three or four years or so, Jerry said, and he looked around as if musing at this. Three years and then Ill be free. He stood up to go.

Joe remembered Jerrys father and his mother as he watched him go, and he wanted to say something kind, but, as always with Joe, words failed him. He only watched his nephew who, even when he moved in shackles, reminded Joe of himself.

A few years passed.

And the town grew up around them and became another town. And they grew older.

When Jerry got out of prison, he was twenty-three. He married a young woman from Lyttleton and had a son, who he called William Digger Bines, after his father. His past seemed to be gone, and often he attended AA meetings that Joe went to at the small schoolroom up on the highway. He wouldnt speak himself, and at the end of the night he would have a coffee in a styrofoam cup, before he left, alone. Now and then he would glance at someone coming in, or someone leaving whom he perhaps had confrontations with in his past, but he wouldnt say anything.

Joe helped Jerry and his wife out with money, and Jerry worked the boats. His wife, they said, was small and attractive and fervently religious and this is what happened to him (that is, the hope of change through the celebration of a positive female character).

You would see him standing beside Joe at AA meetings or passing alone through darkness along the street.

Thats Jerry Bines, someone would whisper.

Oh I always wanted to know what he looked like, someone else would say.

Well, there he is see, see, there he is.

He occasionally sat with Joes wife Rita at night, reminiscing. That is, Jerry would mostly listen to stories she knew about his mother and father, the dances they went to, when they were all firebrands of a sort and smouldering young.

Joe had brought a new kind of chair for Rita to rest upon because she was sick, and Jerry would sit across from her as she spoke with her head slanted down to the left. He would nod at her quietly as she spoke in the dark, the spring air through the opened windows smelling of soft earth and paint, the town chugging silently into the future. Jerry was always polite and respectful to everyone. Joe and Rita never had very much and Jerry knew this. Rita and Joe had taken care of him after his own mothers death in 1968.

Now and then when he wasnt working a boat Jerry went with Joe on his tractor-trailer runs. Joe never really knew how Jerry was doing, because Jerry would touch Joes shoulder a touch that by its very nature or the nature of the toucher seemed more compassionate than an ordinary mans: Good, Joe doin good dont worry about me.

His smile too was so infectious that it was like a lamp going on. How was this?

Joe talked incessantly about his son-in-law, Ralphie Pillar, about how intelligent and kindly he was, and Jerry seemed particularly interested in him.

I could never do that, Jerry mumbled one day when speaking about Ralphie being hired as a consultant for a government study. All them brains some smart, eh?

But he seemed embarrassed to say this, as if it were a world he did not understand.

Like Adele too always did

And Joe felt sad that he had bragged a little.

In the summer of 1986 Joes tractor-trailer was stolen and a month later Jerry was charged with the murder of Buddy Savoie, in a dispute at the Savoie house. No one could prove he was implicated in the tractor-trailer hijacking. No one could prove it was murder either, or that the gun would actually fire twice in succession, which seemed to prove Jerrys testimony that Buddy had a knife and so he had picked up the gun as a last resort.