The Black Snow (8 page)

And then she was coming at him out of the chair and he stood and met it, the flat of her hand that caught him on the cheek and
the slap made his eyes water, could feel the sting as if her hand had been left in the fire to brand him. She took off out of the room but her voice reached him bitter as she mounted the stairs.

You thought everything could be good for ever. That you were made now, Mr Big Shoes. That all the work was done. In your mind nobody dies and nobody grows old and there is no sign of winter. What in your stupidity have you done to us?

He stood looking at the door, blinked dumbly. A door slammed upstairs. In the sink a trickle of blood threaded slowly across the white enamel, made a small bubble, slicked across the metal flange and slipped slowly, silent down the dark drainhole.

He slept self-imposed that night in the car and in the dream from which he has awakened he is asleep still in the Austin. He is parked somewhere he does not know for the windows are smeared against the greased light of the morning and he lies across the two front seats somewhat foetal, his knees tucked under the steering wheel and silence but for the leather that complains beneath him when he begins to sit up, his breath frosting the air, his arms tucked about his body for the cold has nestled into him while he was asleep and he can feel it now in his bones–old-man cold like a body about to be beaten–the window rivered with condensation so that he cannot see out and that smothering of grey light and something beneath it, distant like dark mountains, and he tries to start the car but it will not catch–the engine coughing like it is sick and then with a rattle it cuts silent–and he tries it again but this time it is dead and he decides to get out, see where the hell this place is, and he goes to open the door and pulls at the handle but the door does not open, puts his shoulder to it but it will not budge, and the
door on the other side proves the same, the car then feeling very small, feels as if it is cramping in upon him–and he sees then the far off dark and distant thing is not distant at all but upon him, upon the car and blanketing upon the windscreen, upon everything–and the door is stuck with it, and the sight of it sucks the breath from his chest and he starts coughing, finds he cannot breathe, clamours towards the window and wipes at the moisture furiously–the sky so thick with it, it seems like no sky at all–the car half buried–falling listlessly like a gentle thing to form drifts deep all around, burying him and everything around it–a black snow.

Down Tully hill I was speeding hard as fuck and then I’m free-wheeling, round the twisty bend into the long drop down to the road. At the bottom I see somebody watching me. The bike rattling like it was set to fall apart and I’m nearing the bottom and I see the figure with the eyes fixed on me is The Masher. He looks with his tongue out like a dog leaning over a bicycle. Jesus you’re some buck Billygoat he says to me when I pull up. He pulls a shoulder of poitín from his pocket and passes it to me and I take a swig and it near tears a hole out of me throat. Like drinking pure heat and him laughing at me. Jesus the wooze in my head straightaway I was all fired up and he says to me c’mon we’ll go for a spin. I followed him down the road and took a turn that took us up into Treanfasy. There’s a house settled quiet in amongst some trees and he goes to the front door and knocks. Whose is this place I ask and he says it belongs to a cousin Burt Ruddy and there’s no answer at the door so he strides up all brazen to the car out the front, a 1936 Austin 10 Sherbourne, and he squares up to it with an air of certainty like he’d been driving all his life. I could tell it were all show, something about him putting on an air of danger all the time but I could sense something else off him too, a fear to him like he was used all the time to being hit. Get in he says. The key’s in it already when I get in and he’s taking another slug and passing it to me every drink an act of violence upon myself but I pretend I’m used to it. What about your cousin I ask and he says that Ruddy Arsecheeks owns the car but he
never uses it cause he canny drive, leaves the key in for the neighbour to borrow. Won the car years ago in a raffle. The Masher couldna drive at all neither. The car jerking about the place like it were having a fit. We took it down the road and steered it into a field and began to rally her about making slow circles and trying to spin her but couldna get enough speed and then we got the car stuck in a mushy part at the end of the field. I get out and stand slushed to me ankles and start tryin to push and he gets hold of a stone and puts it on the pedal and the two of us start to heave. What happens then but the car frees up and takes away like it has a mind of its own, away like some headless person were driving it. Oh for a moment it were the funniest thing I ever seen only for the horror quick to sink in. The car is bouncing forward on the grass with the door hanging open and we run like fuck after it, The Masher catching up with it, his big long legs hinging up behind him and he jumps in, and I don’t know what he was doing but he couldn’t seem to lift the stone or maybe it were something else because next thing the car veers off rightwards as it nears the far end of the field and drives itself down into the ditch. The rear bucking up into the air like a horse, the two back wheels spinning muck about the place and the engine making a straining sound like a frightened animal. The door still open and I see him get out holding onto his head and he walks wobbling across the field and then he sits down and when I get up near him he is just laughing even though his head is cut. Big fucking whoops out of him. Ye stupid cunt ye I says, what the fuck now are we going to do with the car? And he just laughs, fuckin leave it he says. That Ruddy Arsecheeks will hardly notice. We leave the field and we grab our bikes from the ditch up the road and I says to him what are ye getting for Christmas, and he says to me, fuck all, and then who sees us as we’re startin to go down the road but wee Molly the Moss, and she stands at the side of the road the wee hussy that she is smiling at us as if she knows rightly what we just done and I start then to get the fear wild
bad she would go and tell on us. The Masher stares at her and I roar out at her, ye dirty wee bitch, and then I cycle off, take the long way around to get home to make it seem I were coming from another place. Afterwards I could hardly sleep. I imagined the auld bastard Ruddy going mad about the place and rightly so, for a few days later Sergeant Porter was up at our place asking questions saying somebody seen me on my bicycle up in the townland but I flat out denied it to him and I’m wondering if it was that wee hussy that told. The auld doll gives me the longest look afterwards like she seen right through me into the part of my mind that held quivering the lie but I held the look back at her. The thing is I don’t even know why we were doing it we were just doing it I suppose.

T
HE SILENCE OF THE
farm spread malignant into the house, laid itself upon everything a dense weight. In the evenings the gas lamps flickered and reached for the dark but could not light what gathered between them all that went unsaid. The clacking-tongued clocks commenting on the passing silence. Billy watching the distance thickening between his parents, watched the way his mother walled up her words, sat glazed over her food, left the dinner table early, did her chores with a distant stare. His father quiet about the place or grumbling to himself, a gliding shadowed thing that seemed happier outdoors.

Eskra rose daily at sunrise and went as usual about her work. She fetched the water and mucked out the horse and fed the animals and the remaining chickens. At the start of the week she baked the rationed black bread. But something within her had changed. A wheel in the middle of her being was pulling tighter the strings that held every part of her, and she stared out the kitchen window and imagined what it would be like to let that wheel loose, to let the parts of her be flung upon the wind that came down wild off the mountains a hunter of souls. Billy ghosting about the far field of her vision and she did not have the energy for him. She noticed the settle within her bones of rancour.
For days she could not look at Barnabas and then when his back was turned she began in her mind to speak to him. Just you turn around now you son of a gun. Talk to me and tell me how we are to survive. Let me hear it from your lips. You big lug you. How many fields we are to sell. If we are to give up this damned place. You and your big ideas. She watched him slope about the yard a stupid beast afraid of her, doing nothing at all now but making his clouds of cigarette smoke or carrying about a hammer and hitting things with it absentmindedly. The way he ignored the dormant farm as if pretending to himself things were otherwise. The dog ambling about the yard with his own concerns, lying out bold in the weak sun chewing cattle bones from the field, Barnabas roaring at the dog each time and pulling the bones out of the dog’s mouth as if the pair of them were stars in some futile comedy and the dog watching on with what could have been amusement as the man muttering to himself reburied the bones in the field. At times, too, the dog could be seen watching one-eyed the sward, as if he was looking for something or someone to arrive, for Matthew Peoples perhaps to come sauntering all slow and big boned.

Dull-weather days put a hold on time and brought them neither wind nor rain and when the storm came Eskra was glad for it. She stood in the yard and watched the evening sky change–an angry bluff of cloud that rolled in low over a blood horizon. What came from the sea unmade the sinking sun and pulsed with distant flickers of lightning and she saw in its dark swell an inevitability of other things. She hutched the hens and put stones upon the lids of her hive. Took down the clothes from the washing line and walked with them heaped towards the house. The rain began to fall before she reached the back door and she
looked up surprised, saw the darkening scrim had yet to reach overhead and that the rain was falling from white. Billy came running from the fields and stood in the kitchen soaking, his panting breath bellowing the secret reek of cigarette smoke. He stood over the stove warming his hands in his jumper and shorts. Eskra scolded at him. Would you look at you.

The boy shrugged.

You’ll catch your death of cold. Where’s your coat? she said.

The world dimmed suddenly through the window, the yard and the fields and what lay as far as the hills, as if a pall had been strewn. He looked at her and pulled a face, chewed on his lower lip. I donny know, he said.

Is it upstairs?

Naw.

Is it lost?

I might have left it some place.

Eskra’s voice rose. That was a new coat we bought you. How dare you lose it like that.

I didn’t mean to loss it. I’m all right anyhow.

Lose it not loss it. We won’t be able to get another one with the rations. Wait till I speak to your father.

The boy stood silent a moment and then he raised his head and cast her a look of defiance. Goan and tell him then.

The way his words leapt across the room caught Eskra by the tongue and she turned away from him, began to tidy the table. You’ll have to use for now your father’s old coat on the back door, she said.

That auld fuckin thing.

A look from his mother that could hurl stones.

The dark of the ceiling and all night Barnabas lay sleepless listening to the storm. Rain upon the window like the fingernails of some termagant prying the glass to get in. A voice in the sad skirling wind that could speak for his mourning. He lay thinking about the grim wind that had struck, the farm and the death of Matthew Peoples a total loss that had emptied him out, wondered what does a man do to deserve such a fate. Nothing but hard work and now ruin. His mind ruminating upon how the fire could have started and he could think of nothing else. He heard something smack upon the yard and he sat up in bed. The sound continued, a rolling clatter, and he swung out of bed into the icy room. He reached for his dressing gown, a slumped shape upon the door, and put his feet into the cold mouth of his slippers. He felt his way down the stairs and into the kitchen and lit a lamp. When he opened the back door wind-cold rushed past him like a wild animal seeking heat. The night was sealed black and he stepped out into it, a zone of dense and hidden forces, and he could not map the order of the winds. The pale spill of the lamp faltering and his cheeks stung by the raw-cold rain and he could see nothing at all through squinting eyes, could not see what damage had been done. Just his own wild imaginings of the wind as it blew around him and he stood for a moment and watched the sky, saw the moon had been cast out, that the stars were all voided and all to see was the world without form.

He went inside and stood shivering, opened the stove door and rested his hands above the dimmed coals. A scant heat and he closed the stove door and poured himself a dram of whiskey. When he went upstairs his side of the bed was cold. He lay down afraid to turn into her, listened to her breathing. He could sense something wakeful about her, as if her mind was alert and
roaming the room, and he could not help himself and he leaned in and whispered to her. I went out to look but it was too dark to see anything. I didn’t know what I was looking for.

What he heard heave was the deep breath of sleep.

In the morning nature ruled its fixed compass. The sky distant and inert and its lungs blown out. He saw all over the yard the debris of hay and twigs, found a dead sparrow lying on its back by the wall. How it looked asleep and so restful, the straight fix of the eye glassed dark, the regal drape of its wing as if in death it had dressed itself in its own dun colours. And he saw it asleep to the night in its nest, shook out of its tree, thrown about in fright by that death wind until it met its end on the wall. He scooped the broken sparrow onto a spade and slid it into a ditch. Further up the yard he saw what had made the commotion. A sheet of corrugated iron blown loose from the new shed roof. He took the ladder and climbed up to look and saw three sheets were lifted. Fuckdog, he said. He searched about and found one sheet aslant a whin bush in a field and the other behind the barn napping. He went for his tools and heaved up the iron and hammered them into place. He stood then lordly on the roof and surveyed this kingdom. It was as if the night’s disorder had been dreamed of, the mountains serene and the bog spread below them in its timeless nature and draped now in cloud shadow that drifted upon the heather as if some kind of behemoth animals were grazing. In a hollow in the pasture field he saw a newly formed pool of water and a broken tree limb sprawled there as if dumped by some person, wondered what strength of wind was needed to carry it there. Eskra pumping water in the yard. Without thought he waved at her and she did not look at him and he watched her
go around the side of the house. Through the tops of the trees he could see McDaid’s farmstead. Saw the distant shape of the man in a far field bent to his fencing. He turned around and found himself looking at the house of another, a white building isolate against the distant bay, the long stretch of fields from his farm leaning down to it, the view clearly visible through the trees. The house owned by Pat the Masher. He recalled the bother they had with The Masher’s son a few months ago just before Christmas. Fucking crazy-eyed kid. He saw smoke drift from the chimney and the way then he saw the house unlocked something in his mind, an unthought thing that moved forward into thinking.

She was working water from the pump when she saw bird shadow fleet upon the flagstones, looked up and saw a big bird glide real low. The bird was solitary and flapped hugely to take rest upon the fence ten feet away, a creature with large dark eyes and a curving beak. A raptor of some kind she did not recognize and rare to these parts she guessed. It was the kind of bird that owned the air, took other creatures in its talons like skyhooks. Must have got lost in the winds. She watched the mechanical action in the way it bobbed its head, wondered if it was a falcon, and then the bird took wing. She tried to follow its flight path but her view was blocked by the house. She left the pump and walked around the corner to watch it further and she remembered then about the bees, walked over to the hive and saw they had been sheltered sufficient by the wall and the juniper trees.

She dressed in her protective sleevelets and wore her bee-veil bonnet and lit the rotten wood in the tin cylinder of her smoker. To the bees she brought the opium of smoke and poured them
some sweetened water. In her mind she saw the way they awoke energetic to the spring each year as the purest kind of purpose, an intensity of living without any awareness of such a thing. The wind sloped the tips of the grass and a curl of smoke drifted up over the hive, swung back towards the junipers. It took for a moment the shape of a coil and then untwisted, mapped out peculiar forms. What she saw then was a shadow on the grass leaning towards her. A person. It stopped in her mind the hum of a song and she watched the shadow shape into a steeple. She would not turn around for him. The wind took the drifting smoke and swirled it into her eyes but she kept her back turned, would give him no satisfaction. The shadow lingered, grew taller as it came then towards her, and when she snapped around what she saw was the face of another in smoke half hid, the face of Baba Peoples. The woman wearing widow black and her face under her shawl was starched and hairless as if she had been sloughed of her sex. Baba moved her baby feet towards Eskra, the air around her thick with bees, waved her hand for Eskra to come to her. Eskra made a gentle motion for the woman to step back, spoke to her. Don’t go waving your hands like that or the bees will go for you.

Baba continued to walk forward. I wouldn’t feel nothin of it, she said.

Eskra stepped forward and took the woman by her elbow light in her hand as a bird’s wing, began to guide her away from the hive, but Baba shook the grip off, stood defiant. Show me your eyes, Eskra Kane, she said. Eskra sighed and undid the safety pins that held the veil to her coat and rolled it up her face. Not yet ten o’clock in the morning and she could smell drink off Baba, leaned back to get away from her rank breath, that husband of
hers was so simple and sweet and this here woman shameless and sluiced with the drink.

How are you doing, Baba?

The woman looked at her through yellowing orbs that were shot with spicules of red and her mouth pulled a smile that was dead on her face as soon as it was upon it. And then the light in her eyes seemed to brighten, a strange kind of pleading look she gave Eskra but there was something false about it and Eskra saw something flash in the woman’s eyes before the woman was able to conceal it, a note of contempt. The woman tiny before her yet Baba placed her hand on Eskra’s wrist, began to hold it tight as if to impress greater meaning to what she said. Her voice scratched and childish.

Isn’t this a lovely place you’ve got here, Mrs Kane? You’ve got it well kept. Aye, you with your foreign ways, your bees and all, and I suppose you be making honey with it too to sell. Aye, you’ve a good place going, good land and you did well of it. And how’s your boy? Matthew was very fond of him so he was, talked about him all the time like he was his own. And that was it, Mrs Kane, we were never able to have any of our own. The bonesetter said I wasn’t fixed for it. No weans at all in the world so we had and you can imagine now what a time I’m having of it left on my own.

Eskra felt the woman’s grip tighten.

Aye, God rest his soul, Matthew Peoples, there never was a kinder man, nor more hard-working neither. And he was a kindly soul to the boy and a dedicated man to that husband of yours–I will not say his name.

The woman leaned over and made a dead tree of her face to hawk tobacco spit.

Aye. I’ll tell you it was that man who left me with nothing
in this world, Mrs Kane. Took from me everything I had in it that you have here. No husband now and nothing coming in to help me mind myself. And it was that man who made my husband go in. I know it. My Matthew would not have gone in there of his own accord, twas not the like of him. He wasn’t that stupid.

She looked at Eskra as if daring her to look away and Eskra flinched and held the look before shaking her wrist free. She rubbed the place on her wrist where the woman’s phantom grip remained.

You know I’m sorry to hear that, Baba. Truly I am. But I won’t hear of you talk about my husband that way. What happened was beyond terrible, it was a tragedy. It has affected badly everybody here—

I can tell it in your eyes you’re sorry, Mrs Kane. Such kindly eyes you have. What I’m wondering here and now is what you want to do about it. To make things better for me.

A bee curved the air between them and swung to land on Baba’s cheek, began to walk brazen, came up near her eye, and Baba did not blink with it. Eskra waved the bee away and looked nervously at the hive and rolled the veil back down her face.

Baba. We lost everything, all our cattle. We don’t know how the fire started and we don’t know how we’ll get the farm back. I just found out we had no insurance. I married a man, Baba, who thought all his battles were won, that nothing bad could ever go wrong. He wasn’t prepared for it. I don’t know what we are going to do.