The Black Snow (14 page)

Billy shook his head. Naw. You were dreaming.

Barnabas tilted his head. I wasn’t. I was only resting. He stood up out of the chair and looked towards the clock. Who would be calling to our front door at this time?

He went into the hall and opened the door and was met by the sullen dark, the hall’s lamplight uncertain on the steps against it. He called out hello, heard no answer. He stepped outside and
walked around the side of the house and called out hello again and he stood and listened. Swabs of covert clouds dimmed the moonlight and the night air met his lungs cold. Piano music softly through the walls. He rubbed his hands and went to the front door and stood. The webbing of night sounds hid to the eye. The nattering breeze-shift of the hedgerows and trees. Two dogs calling to each other in short sharp barks. Something else too. He listened and heard a distant drone, like insects, looked towards the North Star. Could guess what it was. He went back inside and Billy was looking at him funny.

There was nothing, he said. Nobody at all.

That’s what I said.

I heard just the sound of your airplanes. From the war. Far off in the north. Americans I reckon. A huge formation heading over to England probably. Couldna see nothing through the clouds. If it wasn’t for hearin them planes and the rationing sometimes I often think what’s going on in Europe is made up. The Emergency some big yarn we’re being spun to explain why nothin gets done in this country. Bunch of useless bastards in Dublin. The newspaper says the entire world is being reshaped but here in this place you wouldn’t know nothing of it.

He went towards the tea pot and poured it, put the cup to his lips. Damn tea’s gone cold again. What does a man have to do to get a hot cup?

She went outside to see to the horse and found the day uncertain. In the sky, dark and light like wary forces circled one another and a conciliatory grey hung in between. She found the top half of the stable door a quarter open and saw that wood and wall were newly met by spider web. The gossamer shined at her with
its own light as if it could trap the uncertain sun, work it brightly within its own fibres and shine it. She saw no sign of the spider. She took a twig and twirled the web free of the door and in that moment a spider scurried sudden and as fat as her finger. She did not flinch, took the flossed stick and its occupant and tossed them.

The horse had not risen nor eaten. It seemed to her from the way the horse was sitting that the animal was not sick but protesting, as if the poor creature was angry about something. Animals make it hard to tell but listen hard enough and they speak it to you in their own way. She shovelled out the horse’s manure and went to the pump for fresh water and pretended to the horse to change the feed. She bent down to the animal and spoke soft to her, produced a lump of sugar in her hand and held it flat under the horse’s nose. From the rafters there came a large ticking sound and she imagined for a moment some kind of bat sharpening its teeth and she smiled at the notion, remembered when she first came here how wind and silence and that pure dark of a winter evening could let loose all sorts of nonsense into her head. The horse’s eyes glossed and she wrinkled her nose at the sugar and Eskra drew her hand away from her. She put words soft into the horse’s ear, knuckled gently the withers, skied her hand down the horse’s nose. What’s wrong with you, sweetness? Since when don’t you like the sugar I could be putting in my tea? When she stepped outside she saw the previous sky was being torn up and a sheeting blue being hung in its place.

That clear sky took for a while, a rise in parts to a blue perfection that reached the eye to its limits. Trailing after it she saw rain. When the sky darkened with that coming rain she went outside with the washing basket and set it on the flagstones and
rolled up her sleeves, saw a gull high above the trees winging whitely. The gull sounded at the world like a cart sent downhill with a squeaking axle, a rolling squawk that reached a high point of agitation. She walked the basket at her hip around the house and it was then her face began to knit. The orange washing line tied between two poles was empty. Twice her eye travelled the length of it, clothes pegs propped like rabbit ears and parts of the line fraying like old wool but there was no washing on it at all. She set the basket down and looked at it twice, searched her mind as to when she hung the washing the day before. She began to look about, looked to the junipers and to the hedgerow and she went over to the fence and looked upon the empty field as far as any wind could take her laundry, not that there was any wind for it. She saw in her mind the new white sheets she had hung out dripping. She marched into the house, saw Barnabas walking about the kitchen with a fag hung on his mouth and grey smoke wreathing the air above him and that far-flung scheming look in his eyes. She began looking about the kitchen as if somebody could have put the washing there and she went upstairs and looked in the press and in the bedroom and she came downstairs with her hands on her hips.

Did you take in the washing, Barnabas?

Why would I take in the washing?

Somebody took in the washing.

Why are you asking me about it?

Could Billy have done it?

Does anybody here know what that boy ever does?

Tell me then how the sheets are gone, Barnabas?

What sheets, Eskra?

Eskra sighed and shook her head, watched Barnabas walking
about as if he were resolving the parts of some inward puzzle and he stopped at the window and looked out at the darkening day. Fuck it’s going to rain. I was just about to head out, he said. He turned and looked at her and saw her with her sleeves rolled, the sheer white of her arms and the way she was picking at the scabs on her fingers in anxiety.

Why won’t you ever leave your hands alone?

She made quick stars of her hands like she was letting go quickly of something.

Barnabas. Somebody took down the sheets and put them somewhere. I hung them out yesterday and they’re gone. They’re not upstairs. They’re not in the kitchen. Where else would they be?

He shook his head and began to chuckle. How could you lose the washing?

Do you think I’m being funny, Barnabas?

I’m not saying it is funny. I’m just saying. He began to knuckle his cheek. Are you sure you put them there? He saw how her eyes began to spark with agitation.

Now you’re telling me I’m losing my mind?

I’m just saying that’s all. You can’t be blaming everybody else for you losing the washing. How can it be lost anyhow?

Where is it then?

He was silent a minute. Did you look in on the horse? he said.

What would the washing be doing there?

Naw. I meant did you look in on her? See is she getting any better?

Those are new sheets I bought after the old ones were ruined by the smoke. The new sheets. Are you playing games with me, Barnabas?

Why are you being so daft with me, woman?

The dapple and tap of rain against the window. They watched it persist against the glass as if asking softly to be let in, saw then in an instant how the rain in temper turned and began to slam and lacerate. The day took to an instant twilight and Barnabas shook his head. Arrah, I can’t be going out in that.

That rain came with a venomous slant to cut a man wide open. The wind circled and outburst as it pleased, took the sloping rain and ran with it in bladed drifts that riled the trees and sliced at them. He watched the rain relentless for two days, scratched his growing beard, watched it until his eyes were full of it, each liquid bead unique and fated to the terminal of its journey. Billy left the house to walk to school and he was drenched no sooner than he was out in it. Barnabas only leaving the house under his coat to get water or muck out the horse. The goddamned house and his thoughts trapped in it, taking on the suffocating shape of each room with the walls pressing in, no space to think. He walked about the house, picked things up and put them down again, sat in the range chair and stood again, got the screwdriver and turned the chair over and began to tighten the seat. She could sense his energy coiled and seeking release.

It was the afternoon of the second day when he stood and began towards the back door, a day that began with morning upended by an evening pallor, the rain unceasing. He put on his boots over his wool socks and sleeved his grey gabardine tying the loose tongues of its belt around his waist and he put on his hat as if he could put a lid to his thoughts. Eskra behind him, sighing.

You’re not going out in that, are you?

It’s in my mind to get started, so it is.

It’s going to rain itself out soon.

He went out into it, the rain slapping at his coat like they were old buddies born of the same fight, tyrants against their better natures. Flung from fists of wind came stinging ice-cold rain that blew northerly off the Atlantic. He visored his hat against it and he saw the yard overwhelmed, the flagstones slicked and by the side of the house how a drain held a piece of ruptured sky. He bent to the drain pool and put his hand into the water and fished out some grass and some twigs and saw it made no difference to the drain hole. Looked up and wondered about Cyclop, the dog somewhere hid like he knew better than the man not to be out in it.

The old hills stood dark and waste and over them passed cloud shadow that looked to him as if something huge and inborn to nature was winging overhead, an intimation of some great bearer of violence unseen. Just the need now to get the byre done and in a way that was as swift as possible and he did not want to stop the momentum he was building inside of him. Deeper down the road and the rain made mist in the fields. He looked up and saw the drained disc of the sun had been broken into flitches that strained through the churning canopy. The smudge of McDaid far off in his back field oblivious to the rain, the man hinged and hauling what looked like a lamb, and he wondered if the animal had drowned perhaps. He watched the man as he walked and it seemed McDaid was standing very still in that rain until he realized the man was walking slowly back towards his house, considered for a moment helping him but marched on.

The lane met another that veered left and he followed it up a gentle hill. These pasture fields belonging to Fran Glacken and
he had his cattle already out after the winter. That man too hard on his animals and the ground couldn’t be ready for it yet. The cattle stood huddling under trees, swung their tails and shunted at the air in front of them with their breaths. He came upon the drive of Glacken’s farm, his hat soaked and the rain trickling cold over his ears and down his neck and to his wrists his sleeves were cold and sodden. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and blew on them and warmed his cheeks. He saw Pat Glacken at the window facing him, Glacken’s house a white farm bungalow, and he waved to her but she did not see him through the rain. He saw then Glacken walking across the yard and the man saw him and stopped, squinted his pop-eyes at Barnabas as if he were an apparition, watched him approach up the hill, Barnabas moving through the teeming rain like a man passing through moments of his own life and whatever traces of him left were washed clean behind him.

Barnabas half shouted. Yes, Fran.

Yes, Barnabas.

Soft day.

Aye.

Glacken wore dungarees and a tan shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal freckled lobster arms. The rain rolled off his flesh and darkened his cap and he stood blinking against it. C’mon up, he said. Meself and Martin are skulling.

The yard mudded in the rain and a squat pig walked in front of them greaved with mud and Glacken booted it, sent the animal half scuttling as if it were used to such things. The swallowing dark of the barn and his eyes had to adjust to the light that pressed meekly from a small back window and he saw then the shape of Glacken’s son Martin take form out of that shadow like
a younger vision of his father, the same body and bald head, and he slunk forward shepherding a calf in the gulf between his legs.

Yes, Barney, he said. How’s about ye?

Yes, Martin.

I see that new beard has shielded you from the rain.

Aye. And how’s the new wife?

What new wife?

Barnabas nodded to the animal.

Martin let out a small laugh. Well, she don’t talk back, he said.

His father motioned with his head. C’mon now.

Barnabas watched, knew well the procedure. Glacken leaning over the calf all sable and milk and Martin with a chain around its neck. The pink snout of the animal quivering between Martin’s thighs as if it could take from the air a sense of what was coming. The man’s strange odour and his huge hands around the animal’s flanks. Glacken leaning dangerously as if he was intending for it violence though in his mind what he was about to do to the animal was good for it. He came at the calf with a yellow cup dehorner and he put it to the animal’s head where the soft fur had been pared back to reveal the jut of first horns. Come here to me, sweetheart. Martin holding the animal with a look of concentration, his father going down upon the skull, cutting through the protuberance with the tool, the animal kicking up something fierce, the language of suffering translated simply into movement and then it let out a bawl. Jesus fuck, hold her steady. Martin roaring at the animal. Hold still, ye bold bitch. His father leaning over again, going at the second horn, the animal shaking now, the son trying to hold her still. Take a hold of her for fuck’s sake. What in the hell are ye? The crunch sound as
he worked the dehorner. He stood up when he was finished and pushed the bawling beast away from him.

Jesus, I hate the skulling of them, Martin said.

None of us likes it, said Barnabas.

Glacken nodded to him. How’s everything up at your place?

Have you got a minute?

Glacken turned and motioned for the two of them to stand by the edge of the door and Barnabas stuck his boot out into the rain, watched it spatter. Glacken nodded. What’s up with ye, Barney?

I’m setting out to rebuild the byre, Fran. Have to do it mainly from nothin.

Glacken frowned. Did you not have insurance, Barney?