The Black Snow (11 page)

Eskra watching him at the window. Saw a shift inside him as if a mass of great weather were moving on to slub over distant hills not his own, took with it wind and pressure. Said to herself, finally, he’s back to himself again. He’s moving on from what’s happened. She saw him bending to lift what was left of the purlin beam, oak a century old made light as pumice from the fire, and then he was bending down again, came up with a white rock in his hands shaped like a skull.

That same evening he stood in the light of the hall laid out in its shaded evening tapestries. He took his coat off the hook and sleeved it, stood a moment searching his pockets. He went into the kitchen and she watched him take the car keys from a hook on the dresser.

Don’t tell me you are going to the pub, she said.

I’m not, he said.

We can’t even afford the rationed petrol.

His finger tapped his nose. Don’t worry about petrol. If we need any Peter McDaid can get his hands on some.

As he turned he stopped and stared out the window.

What is it?

He spoke as he was going out the door. Ah nothin. I thought somebody was coming in. Twas just somebody going past on the lane. A wee girl. Looked like one of Goat McLaughlin’s granddaughters. The one that always looks cold.

An acid evening in which the world wanted some kind of blessing or warmth and he stood in it and took a gill of air and released it from his lungs. Light in his mind beginning to press into the darker reaches as if he awoke to find some huge impediment had been freely rolled. The light of a future looming before him for his eyes to see it. He parked the car outside the cemetery and found the plot in the darkening light. The earth still raw and the brown earth night-shifting into shades of purple. He saw the plot bore a temporary wooden cross. He did not know how old Matthew Peoples was. Never even thought about it. He could picture the man running towards the fire and the living thing that was his body in movement and the mind housed within, all that was that made the man, and he stared into the heaped earth trying to imagine that man as bones. The light within him gone as if in that moment he was taken down the smoke made him instanter into dust. He stared at the earth sat loose and in clods and the grass beginning to grow unevenly, began to smooth out a large ribbed footprint on the graveside. Saw the shape of his hand on Matthew Peoples’ back, the flat of his hand that sent the man in. What rose inside him was great sorrow and he swallowed hard, felt wet on his cheek. To reach into the ground. To breathe life back into those bones. He wanted to
speak, to say he was sorry, but the words sat dumb in his mouth. Finally he spoke under his breath. It was my own responsibility.

He turned and found the path towards the gate, took note as he went of the differing markers, headstones and crosses some of them standing as tall as a man, sized as if they were made to cast replacement shadows. The sky vast and darkening above. The gnawing ageless spit-rain. He saw how time made even stonework perish, the torque of the earth slowly twisting the stones so that eventually even the markers for the dead would be tossed out and the earth would make itself clean. What are these graves for anyhow, Matthew, but for the living and not for the dead, and when the living have left this life all remembering will pass with them, and you and me and everyone else will lie forgotten and stoneless and the sky goddamn the same over it. So what’s the point of my saying sorry to you anyhow? Tell me what good will it do? Tell me who am I even saying sorry to?

The hinges on the cemetery gate squawked like a hungry gull and the sound soared sharp and was lost in the bruising sky. He turned around to latch the gate and his eye travelled to the sudden shape of Baba Peoples standing over the grave, as if she had taken form from the matter of evening itself, its darkening air and what it held concealed, or it seemed to him she could have ghosted from the thick stand of trees that huddled behind the cemetery wall in their perpetual sorrow, had sat there watching him as he stood over the grave, and he knew in that dim light her eyes were upon him.

Two days later. She hummed along to the melody on the radio, violins that had become sweeping and urgent and reached upstairs to the bathroom in spate. She poured hot water into the
great tin tub and put onto the floor the cast iron pot and ran her finger through the water. She stripped and stood naked and eased in her toes and then lowered herself into the heat that stung her all over softly as if she had laid herself down amongst nettles. The shut door dulling the sound of the music. It reached her now melancholy and distant like the rumour heard of a stranger whose life was cut short. Behind the music she could hear the dull pings of Barnabas beating metal free with a hammer. She closed her eyes and tried to dream but what coursed from her thoughts was bitterness. This goddamned place. She cursed the obstinate notions that brought them here and she cursed the poverty of the place that had not changed in one hundred years it seemed to her, people living with next to nothing and happy to live as if the world had not changed, a few cars and lorries now about the place but that was all, and the poverty that remained was like an unwillingness that shined out of them, a temperament more obstinate than rock. And that look they wore she saw was ingrained, the hard stare of suspicion, a look in the eye like some biblical judgement that summed you up as foreign and told that unless you were born there you were considered none. She dropped her head under the water and saw her family. When they first came to Carnarvan and how they spent Barnabas’s money easy and had within two years what it took others three generations to achieve. What was always in the air around here was something that would not be named by others but she would name it resentment. We do not deserve this after all that we have done. She hinged tighter her knees and slid deeper into the water until the echoes of the world began to lose their soundshape, the thud of her elbow on the tin, the staccato clattering of Barnabas, the start of rain. The noise it made on
the roof amplified through the bath into something huge and susurrus, like the earth had found form to speak its secrets about the meaning of loss and other such things if only she could understand its revelations. And she thought then she heard the sound of knocking downstairs and she opened her eyes to the ceiling, through the water the ceiling plaster a white quavery thing she saw like a different plane of existence, and when she broke the surface of the water to listen, the world surged full-sounded and there was nothing at all to the day, no sound of knocking while the violins on the radio had ceased.

He rewrote some strange dark letter for the sky with the leaking wheelbarrow, through the yard and out onto the grass around the back of the new barn a twisting shape like the single arm of a swastika. Of its char and detritus the byre began to be cleared, and the floor stood open to the weather with its soot colour. Behind the hay barn was a dry-stone wall and he saw in passing a rock in the grass that had fallen over. The knit-stone was built by the hands of men that probably knew his forefathers, stood now like some demonstration against time. He bent to the loose rock and refitted it, and the stones kissed with a satisfactory smack as the wall took again its endurant appearance.

A turned tap of rain. Through shirt to flesh the rain-cold leeched and it took him a minute to notice. When he did he walked across the yard to the cover of the empty stable. He rolled a cigarette and watched the tobacco ash fall an aberrant spring snow, bellowed smoke into the rain that became one with the all-grey. The blackened heads of the mountains gauzy in the rain and watching down upon him like some convocation of elders huddling in judgement. Where he stood he could see Cyclop in
the pasture field marching with an enormous bone in his mouth. His free hand clenched into a fist. Stupid fuckdog’s as stupid as it fucking gets. He threw the fag to the flagstones and heeled it and became one with the rain, marched into the field where Cyclop was sitting. The grass had grown to an unruly green and bore in patches sprouting thistles like ornaments of fleur de lis. Cyclop watched him coming with his nose to the earth and his teeth clamped upon the bone, a long femur twice the length of his head and his orange eye lit with satisfaction. Barnabas called out to the dog from the edge of the field and began slowly towards him and Cyclop sat up as if he had taken a perfect read of the man’s intentions, began to make a wary retreat towards the trees. The dog bit down twice on the bone to get a better purchase on it and Barnabas soon caught up and they stood under the canopy of a sycamore tree beside the old beech that sat the way it did in silent pleading. Barnabas saw the end of the bone was shaped as big as a man’s heart. He grabbed hold of the bone and began to pull, his hand around the heart-piece, you stupid fuckdog you, and Cyclop dropped down and splayed his legs, held tight onto the bone, his lips drawing back to reveal a swell of sharp teeth and glistening pink gums. Tussling shadows on the hard-rooted ground they became, Cyclop wagging his tail and his eye shining humorous until he took a boot to his flank from Barnabas and he dropped the bone, walked off as if he had it within his nature to be insulted. The bone slimed with dog spit and Barnabas took it and carried it till he reached a ditch and threw it towards the brambles. Made a slug trail on his trousers when he wiped his hand on them.

He began through the pasture field towards the house and it was then that he saw the far shape of a woman leaving through
the front gate. He marched upon the rain-speckled flagstones and went into the house, called out to Eskra, the room empty. He saw the teapot on the range and a single cup half full on the table and he poured the tea, stewed now into an approximation of bog water, drank it and wiped his lips. Why do I always get the cold tea? He called out for Eskra. The radio silent. Upstairs the floor creaked and there came the soft padding sound of his wife barefoot on the landing. He looked up the stairs and saw her looking down at him, her head and torso swaddled in towels, the blue and red of her agitated. What are you shouting for? she said.

Who was that woman? he said.

What woman?

Here, at the house. I just saw a woman leaving out the gate.

Barnabas, I was in the bath. What are you on about?

What are you bathing for at this time of day?

She tightened her towel. I didn’t hear anybody, Barnabas, she said.

He watched her carefully as if he could sense something was being hid, thought he saw her mouth tighten, and then he saw her in another way, the bare white of her ankles and the long delicate way her arms held onto the towel as if she was hiding from him the best part of her and she saw what was held in his look, stepped back so he could just see her face.

I thought I saw a woman just now. Going out the gate, he said.

I would have heard something, she said. The radio just died. The house is gone quiet.

He gave her a long look. She unwrapped the towel from her head and let her long wet hair curtain loose and she turned for the bedroom, called down at him. Will you go and get the dry
battery charged for the radio? The goddamn quiet of this farm fills me up with dread.

Billy came through the backdoor and slung his leather schoolbag onto the table, took off his father’s old coat and threw it over the chair. Went outside again. Saw the horse a sack shape lying in the field and walked to her, bent down to take a look-see. What’s wrong with ye, wee doll? He lay down sideways on the grass face to face with the animal and pulled a clown smile as if to cheer the horse and then he pulled his mouth wide with his fingers and stuck his tongue out at the animal. They eyed each other in as close a thing as there was to understanding between man and beast which was not that much at all. I know how ye feel, horsey. Things have gone to fuck around here. He sat up on his haunches and rolled a fag and looked over his shoulder, sucked it to life, reached out and put the cigarette to the horse’s lips. Go on, take a wee drag. Ye know ye want te.

Eskra in the front room playing quietly at the piano, a passage worked over and over again so gently it was as if the music could bruise and break at her touch. Barnabas sitting in the range chair with his head leaning back against the stove tiles, his eyelids shut and strangely twitching as if he was eyeing some strange flight in the vast sky of his mind. Billy took a heel of black bread from the tin and sawed it into two thick slices and stabbed the curving point of the bread knife into the butter. He stood against the stove watching the fluttering of his father’s eyelids and laughed at him. Yer eyes are going mental, he said. Barnabas opened a bellowing brown eye to him.

Billy spoke again. Something’s wrong with the horse, he said.
She’s lying in the field like a sack. Could be her leg or who knows what it is.

I’ll look at her later.

Da.

What?

What’s happening with the farm?

Barnabas sat up. Jesus, son. He saw Billy flinch. Your mother and I are trying to figure out what we should do.

Billy shrugged and went into the hall and saw his father’s tobacco upon the lacquered console table, stole a wiry pinch and put it in his shirt pocket. His heart skipped when his father called out. Would you ever bring me out the tobacco from the hall.

Billy came in with it and Barnabas looked him up and down. I didn’t mean to shout. Here, he said, threw him a boiled sweet.

The boy went outside to a sack of stored apples and took one and brought it to the horse, put it under her mouth. The skin of the apple had sagged under two seasons and the meat was soft and drying out and the horse wrinkled her nose at it. Billy lay the apple down in front of her and stroked a knuckle down the gullying dark of her nose, the horse watching him as if from a great distance.

Barnabas stepped into the bank manager’s office and took a seat to wait. Murmured voices outside the room. A tonguing clock. When he turned in the chair he saw hung on the door the bank manager’s hat and coat. The desk a polished oak and free of ornaments but for a heavy marble ashtray that shined empty. He pulled it towards him, rolled a cigarette, lit it and satisfied himself in soiling the marble. There hung upon the wall a watercolour of a pewter lake and he blew smoke towards the painting and
clouded the lake with fog. He grew impatient, loosened his tie, turned around in his chair to watch the door goddamn it and looked again at the clock. When the bank manager came in Barnabas stood to greet him with a look of great solemnity and the man offered a hand that was cold and limp and he kept his eyes off Barnabas. He nodded for him to sit down. Said nothing about being late. Barnabas looked into the man’s eyes and saw the man steal a look towards the clock, found he could not fasten them.