The Black Snow (5 page)

H
OURS WERE MADE LONG
by the void of empty days. He sloped about the yard like a man not bothering to look busy, so lost inside himself he no longer heard the farm, what was emptied out to silence, nor did he heed the weather that passed over it–the dry spell that stretched unusual for days making the ground firm and then the rain that came a dull sadness. And when he walked amongst his empty fields he was numbed to the changes around them, the spurting green that softened the crooks of the trees, nature a slow shifting thing heaving into spring. How the grass was greening and would grow unkempt without the mouths of cattle to feed on it. Just the goings on in his mind, trying to undo the knot of a long thread that led to dormant anger. A feeling in his mind he had been cheated. He wandered about by the blackened byre half seeing it or he went inside it and kicked through the tangled remains, looking for clues amongst the pen metal, some of them twisted like question marks to torment him.

Too many days he sat slumped in the kitchen chair drifting into the mesh of memory or shifting in unsettled sleep. She watched him doze with his mouth open, watched his face at peace and saw him different, how what was held tense in his face fell away from him weightless. She wanted to speak. A butterfly
of light from the hall caressing his stubbled cheek and she saw him young and how he was. How he began working as a youth of sixteen in high steel, hazardous work, like some kind of man-god he was, but he didn’t know it, took to it like a natural. Raw and dumb to the work and he worked with the Mohawks the most fearless of men and Irish who were foolhardy enough. The skyscraper boom of New York. They reshaped the sky with their steel, walked girders like gulls. New York below them like a pop-up picture book you could close with your hands. He would listen to the sky’s hush through the din of steel, the sibilant forces of the wind as if the sky was breathing. The clouds mute and drifting to lay their shadow slabs upon the city. The men worked like perilous angels and the sound they made was incarnate of hell, reached towards heaven a fiendish thing that warped the structure of the air, crazed even the birds. Gulls leaned against the wind to watch these strange creatures stride on narrow beams, or work in teams foursquare on scaffold strips sized hardly for two of them. He used to talk her through the movements, how a heater man put coal into a tiny forge and withdrew the steaming rivets, the man’s face scrunched against the heat, tossing the blushing steel into the air to be caught by another in a tin can while the third man pulled out the temporary rivet. The waiting beam with its eyehole gaping, waiting to be scalded shut. The hissing rivet pinched with tongs and inserted into the hole. How he worked relentless with a pneumatic drill, the rivet soft from the heat, turning the stem squat into a button. Kneeling over the earth like he owned it.

He awoke with red eyes and saw her looking at him. Jesus, can a man not get a nap in peace. Her mouth fell open but no words came out and she retreated from the room silent. He leaned
forward and stood up and walked about the kitchen and stopped and put his hands over the stove. He went into the living room to the cabinet, took out a bottle of whiskey and reached for a glass and the floorboard behind him squeaked. He felt the boring of her eyes into him as she stood at the door and he turned and put the bottle back.

The way you scared me when I awoke, that’s what I meant, he said. Standing over me like that you gave me a fright.

She turned without a word and went back to the kitchen. He stepped into the hall and took his coat. I need to go for a walk, he said.

The night was cold and dark and in the harsh winter of his mind wolves roamed openly the frozen tracks.

The day bright and she stood glad under it and she saw the horse in the field. The animal came towards her, canted her head and took last autumn’s wrinkled red apple from the flat of Eskra’s hand and listened to the woman’s words and nodded sagely as if the tone the woman took impressed some horse meaning. Eskra left the field in dew-kissed shoes while the horse walked over to the trough that held upon its rainwater a cylinder of light and when the horse dipped its head into that light it seemed to drink directly the sun’s luminance.

She went for the laundry basket and walked to the washing line where she put her hand to the dry fibres of the towels that lay slabbed upon it. She unpegged them and broke their stiffness with her hands and folded them. She began to walk with the basket at her hip as if she could have been any woman from any of the past ages bearing what it is a woman abides and she saw herself as ancient and soul woman. She took the basket up the
stairs and went to the press and began to fold the towels and place them inside when she stopped. At the back of the press she saw heaped in a ball the white sheets that were hanging out the day of the fire. They were stuffed in carelessly on top of the folded sheets and when she opened them out she saw they were ruined with smoke. She scratched her head in wonder. She put her nose to the sheets and what came to meet her was the smell of corruption. She took the sheets outside, held them to the light and saw how they had absorbed the fire’s smoke as if they had taken an imprint of the day, a stripe of dark on one of them beside a stripe of near white, as if the wind had folded the sheet over to protect some part of it. She looked at one sheet more closely and paled at what she thought she saw, a face she thought she imagined, her mind seeing the outline of Matthew Peoples and his wide lips and the broad nose and the lined mark of a forehead. She dropped the sheet to the flagstones and went inside and swore at her herself for having such thoughts but later that morning when she saw the sheets on the ground she bent and picked them up and held them out. Saw again the face of him.

She took the sheets to the washboard outside and filled a bucket with hot water and added soap. When she filled the tub she leaned over the washboard, wondered again who had taken the sheets down in the first place, put them into the press like that, maybe it was one of the neighbours, that day all chaos and who was to know what went on. She abraded the sheets off the washboard’s corrugations until the skin on her hands from the water began to pleat and her scabs were softened and sore, worked until the sinews in her hands had stiffened and the water turned a grey grease. And when she took the last sheet out and
held it to the light she saw that the smoke still inhabited it in a way that could not be washed out, neither altered nor erased, and that the sheet she looked at still bore the face of Matthew Peoples.

A night like most other nights and he could sleep only in short drifts that dreamed up for him a howling dark that gave him images of fire. The shapes of flaming cattle. His arms reaching into a void of smoke. When he awoke his mind was bleared from sleep fog and he lay with his knees tucked to his chest and the blankets tight to his neck. A long while just thinking. He kicked a leg back to Eskra’s side of the bed, found it a lonely cold and sat up and saw the bedside clock. Ten past ten in the morning and the boy gone hours ago to school. When he left the bed he doused his face cold with the jug water and stared into the mirror dead-eyed, saw the sacks under his eyes pooling with storm grey and he sniffed dream-smell about him still, a thick lingering reek of smoke.

He put on his shirt and trousers and fixed loosely his tie and went downstairs in his socks. No sign of Eskra and he saw porridge left out for him in a bowl. He poured honey on top and watched it pool a golden ooze and he sat to the table, ate it cold looking out the window. The fleet shape of Cyclop across the front yard. He sat there thinking of thoughts he could not shake from the night’s dreaming, the way Matthew Peoples had morphed into somebody else, a man tormenting him now in the guise of a stranger, some dark-faced young man leering at him with features wild and full of perversion, an incarnation of Satan perhaps, if he had believed in such things. The notion he could not shake was the strange feeling he’d killed somebody else he
did not know about and that his dreams were awakening him to this fact and making him account for it.

He stared blankly at the day outside, a timid flat light and the trees wagging in modest conversation, and then what he thought he saw drew him from inattention. The shape of Baba Peoples. She stood half hid on the road watching the house between the trees, and when he slid the chair back and stood and leaned to see better through the glare of the window she was gone. He kept looking but could only see the communing of trees and he could not even be sure of what he saw. He went to the front door and watched the road but saw nobody on it and he cursed to himself his tiredness. He stood in the hall and rubbed his eyes and noticed then the smell about him still, how he could catch it when he went back into the room, the smell no longer part of his lingering dream but a thing that was surely manifest, a defiance of some kind. He rose out of his chair to meet it, put his shirt sleeve to his nose and sniffed it and found the fire’s smell was waiting for him in its fibres. He pulled at his tie and yanked the shirt over his head and balled it towards the floor. Outside the high yap of the dog and the stable door closing.

He lifted his vest to his nose and could smell the fire in it too, ripped it off and bent down to take a sniff of his trouser leg. He unleashed the belt and it came loose into the room a snake’s testing tongue and he kicked out of his trousers, threw them across the room towards the other clothes, goddamn nothing fucking clean in this house, and then he was moving certain, the curtains now in his sight and he could smell in them too the burning, the curtains that were the first thing Eskra had made when they moved into the house, a deep red velvet he tore down ripping the railing out of the wall and he hurled them
towards his clothes. He put his face then to the wall and could smell the burning in the wallpaper, scratched at it with his nails, turned around and went to the dresser drawer and removed from it a knife. He daggered it and began to cut at the seam of the wallpaper, watched it come loose in strips that fell to the floor a sad thing with the taut life force gone out of it, and then behind him he heard Eskra’s shout. She stood by the door, saw he had gone mindless, the man near naked and a lunacy in his manner she had never seen, and when he turned to look at her she saw his eyes had narrowed down into a look of unseeing, saw the knife in his hand, and she went to him and reached out and took the knife from him, and it seemed to her then he awoke from some dream, began moving towards her, fell like a child into her arms.

She held him and brushed her hand through his wire-dark hair and saw in him the little boy she was holding, saw full and clear the measure of his distress. When his breathing had calmed she led him upstairs and sat him on the bed and watched him curl childly, went to the curtains and closed them. His voice small in the room. I’m just so tired, he said. She sat on the chair and watched him fall asleep, daylight pressing through a gap in the curtains to light a daguerreotype jellyfish upon the wall, while the rest of the room became an ocean of unlit depths, like the inscape of his mind she was fearful for. How he had aged this past while she saw, the dark of his hair beginning to whiten at the sides and it seemed to her that life had worried more lines into his eyes. Before she left the room she leaned over him and saw in that dim light those lines now smoothed as if only in sleep he could find repose.

Later, the sun hid while a marble-grey sky let loose rain with insistence. She saw the rain speckle and leap from the flagstones, saw through the cataract of rain towards the mountains where a wash of light had brazened itself and made everything that was dim and dun under it brilliant. She brought him vegetable soup and tea and he sat up with the pillow to the small of his back. She drew open the curtains and settled on the bed, saw a rare look in his eye. He leaned towards her and coughed. I didn’t mean to, he said.

We should take you to the doctor.

I could still smell it, Eskra.

Smell what, Barnabas?

The fire.

Barnabas, the smell is all gone. There’s nothing left of it. I’ve been cleaning like a char woman. The wind took the smell all away.

I could smell it in my clothes. Buried in the fibres. I want all them clothes tossed out, Eskra.

Those clothes have been washed pure clean. You didn’t smell it yesterday in the same clothes when you were wearing them. Where do we have the money now to get new ones?

He sipped on his tea and grimaced.

What’s wrong with you now? she said.

This tea is only lukewarm.

She shook her head at him as she spoke. It might help if you got yourself busy, Barnabas. Get yourself ready for when the insurance comes in. Get you out of your funk. It’s natural so it is for a man to feel down on himself after what’s happened. But there’s so many things that need doing around the place. You need to get going again.

He said nothing and shifted and gathered a heap of blanket in his fist. Then he looked at her, those blue eyes that had their vice-hold on him. Eskra, he said, but she began to talk over him and what he heard sounded like bone in her voice, as if she had grown new strength having to bear up the extra weight of what was for all of them. You need to start fixing up outside, she said. That byre needs to be cleared out and made ready for the rebuilding. There are broken walls that need fixing. The farm is going to waste. The fields are a disgrace. The land needs to be maintained till we get it to rights again. It is time now for you to put your mind to it. And don’t worry about the vegetables. The early cabbages are near ready and I’ve already planted the rest.

Eskra.

Do you hear me now, Barnabas?

He sighed. Aye. All right.

And, Barnabas.

What?

I can’t look any more at those dead animals.

He had come to her, he used to say, like an angel from the clouds. Saw you first from five-hundred feet in the air. Through the noise of riveting steel that could bend the sky out of shape. I watched you above that bellyache of traffic. Heard on the concrete the press of your footsteps. From that height you develop eyes for seeing. You stood out from the crowd. Your eyes glittering up at me. The swan sheen of your neck. I was only waitin for you.