The Black Snow (16 page)

That field of yours down the lane is taking the full run of the rain. You need to get that drainage sorted or it will be ruined. I’ll give you a hand digging it.

I lost a wee lamb this morning.

Drown, did she?

McDaid shook his head sadly. Naw. It were got by a dog.

Barnabas snorted. Did you get the gun to it?

McDaid nodded to a shotgun on the table. Maybe if I’d seen something of it.

He sat spooning broth from a bowl and then pincered his fingers into the soup, produced a small bone and sucked it. He reached towards a bottle and poured a dram into the same bowl and drained the bowl with his teeth. Wee sup? he said.

What is it?

Poitín.

That stuff will burn a hole through your head.

A wee slice of the black bread then?

Go on.

He watched McDaid saw the bread and then the farmer
turned conspiratorially and his voice dropped to a hush. Fancy a wee taste of something different, Barney, now that the butter is rationed to fuck?

As he looked at Barnabas his lazy eye was upon the door.

Like what?

A wee taste on the bread.

You’ve not been at Eskra’s honey have you?

McDaid went to the other side of the room where he had a simple kitchen laid out and he reached towards a shelf and took down a brown pot. He hunched his shoulders over it and began to smear something upon the bread, brought it over on the flat of his hand. A wicked smile lit his face and the bread he held out for Barnabas had a fatty smear on it.

Jesus fuck, Peter. What’s that?

Try it. It’s quare unique.

McDaid sat into a tattered, mud-coloured armchair and looked as if he was squeezing in a laugh. He held himself still and leaned forward eyeing Barnabas intently. His eyes flashed and he licked his lips. Go on taste it.

Barnabas put it into his mouth and ran his tongue over it. What he tasted was old and oily, came with a heavy tang of turf. Something else unknown, deep and rancid, and his face curdled and he stood up and began to spit the food into the fire. McDaid slapped his thigh and his face creased up with laughter.

That’s the funniest fucking sight so it is.

Jesus fuck, Peter. That’s sick as a dead dog.

It’s something different all right.

What is it?

You won’t tell no one?

I canny wait to tell the world about your great culinary discovery. What is it?

McDaid sat for a moment and then winked. It’s bog butter.

Barnabas looked at the man stunned. Jesus fuck, he said.

I was up with the cousin Willie Lafferty cutting turf last summer and we found this thing in the moss and dug it out and we figured it for one of them bog-butter finds they always be talking about in the paper. The damn thing old as the hills probably. I took it home and forgot about it till the other day and then I had a wee taste of it. Doesn’t taste so bad to me considering.

Barnabas stood and shook his head in disbelief. He took the jar and looked at it in amazement. Damn it. Peter. You must be gone in the head. Who knows how old this is? Most of them finds are about two and a half to three thousand years old according to what I read. Hold now. That must be a hundred generations.

I had it last night on me spuds.

There’s people in Dublin who’ll want to be hearing about that.

Arrah, fuck Dublin. Fuck the lot of them and the restrictions they put on us. All they’ll do is send some inspectors up who’ll not let us cut turf for a while. Who needs that? I’m doing everyone a favour.

McDaid leaned back into the armchair and swung his wellies up lordly onto a stool. Barnabas sat there ruminating. When he spoke he was staring at the butter in amazement. When you think about it, somebody churned that with their hands and put it in a place in the moss for safekeeping. Sat there all this time them thousands of years and them people long gone and everything with them. Not a trace of them but what’s in that jar. We’re an ancient race. What are you going to do with it?

McDaid slapped his thigh and began to laugh out loud. Sell it about as lard, he said.

When he was done laughing the men sat a while in silence. Then McDaid spoke. Ye look troubled, Barnabas.

Barnabas groaned quietly. Problems with the bank.

Aye.

Well. I’m rebuilding the byre anyway.

Good on ye.

There is a way it can be done.

Spit and sawdust?

The load-bearing wall is gone and a lot of them stones are ruined. So what I need are blocks. I’ve asked about but nobody wants to help.

Who’d you ask?

Fran Glacken. That Goat McLaughlin.

Sure you’ll get nothin off that Fran Glacken. That man’s been fighting with his own two brothers this last twenty year and none of them talking to one another. And all over some access to a field. For a while there his own two sons weren’t talking to each other and both of them under the one roof. And that Goat. McDaid shook his head. He’s too much of a thran cunt to deal with.

I’ve a few quid hid someplace to buy some animals again. But other than that it’s either rebuild or sell up. Eskra thinks we should leave. I’m not going to be selling nothing, so I am.

McDaid shook his head. Jesus Christ, sir. We canny be having that.

He stood and took the bog butter and sealed it and put it back on the shelf and he turned around and stood where he was, began to scratch at his blue jaw. His eyes lit with an idea. I know
a place where you can get a heap of good quality stone. As much as you like of it. And it won’t cost you nothing nor bother nobody at all too. It belongs to nobody at this point in time. All you got to do is keep quiet about it.

It were the Saturday morning before Christmas when John the Masher came up to our house with an iron bar in his hand. I seen him coming through the bedroom window frosted cold and before I’d even got a good look at him and the trouble he was carrying, some part of me knew not to go outside to him. I hid at the side of the window and watched him come into the yard and I could see he was funny, his cheeks all red like his face were flaming and his head were thrown back. Roaring out my name. Billygoat. Billygoat ya bastard. The sound of his roaring sent the ordinary day veering into someplace bad. My heart going off like a gunshot. I thought he was mad because maybe he had been found out about the car in the field and maybe he thought I told on him. And then there was that other thing too what it was we done to that wee girl Mary the Moss under the trees after we went to see her that I will not speak about. I was avoiding him since then and now he was outside, his voice full of violence, shouting all the while for me. Downstairs the auld doll was labouring through one of them piano pieces, ‘O Twine Me a Bower’ or some shite like that, and I heard the piano stop mid-tune. I walked slowly down the stairs afraid the creaking sound of the wood would give me away and then the auld doll comes out of the living room with her face all white and the look she gives me. She says that young Masher boy came up to the window while she was playing the piano and tapped the glass with an iron bar, looked into the room with a wild leer on his face.
Something god-awful in his look that frightened her. She says his eyes are rolling in his head like he was not right. She stood in the hall looking at me with her hand on her belly as if to hold it there would keep both of us from alarm and then she called out quietly for the old boy. I whispered to her that I’d seen him go outside. I followed her into the kitchen and what did she do but she went up and locked the back door and a good thing she did. The Masher comes round the back and peers in the window, the iron bar fat in his hand tap tap tap off the glass. And then he is at the back door trying to get in and he starts banging the door something terrible and the door shook and a strange noise came out of the auld doll’s throat. I went over to the stove and took a hold of the poker just in case, the door juddering from the wild kicking his boots were giving it. The Masher calling out the whole time Billygoat, ye cunt ye. I were wild embarrassed and worried he might say something that would ruin me and you could see the shape of his head a dark stain in the ribbed glass of the back door. And then I saw through the main window the old man coming quickly down from the byre, not quite at a run as if he were all calm and Cyclop beside him, and all we could hear then was the sound of a thump and the sight of The Masher been dragged by his hair up the yard. The old boy put him down on the ground and bent to him with his fist, put a right dent into him the best dinger of a punch I seen in a long while and The Masher just curled up into himself a useless heap, the iron bar rolling away by his side. He looked like a scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out of him and the auld doll she was white when we went outside and the old boy was looking up at us and not a bother on him. It’s all right he said. He looks over at me. This here’s Pat the Masher’s son isn’t it? He began to shake his head like he was sad for him. That boy’s lost his mind again, mad as a bag of crows. The auld doll tells me to go find Big Matty and the old boy tells her he sent him home early. He sends me then up the yard for rope and I go into the byre and take some off the wall where it’s hung on a big
nail and I’m thinking of the enjoyment I took seeing The Masher beat up like that, the cows looking stupid at me and snorting. The old boy, he ties The Masher’s hands behind his back in case he were going to offer up any more trouble and when I see him like that I began to feel sorry for him. Then he stands him up and leans him against the wall, the crazy look in his eyes was gone and he looked like a wee child uncertain and weak. The auld doll whispers, asks what he is going to do with him and the old man looks at her and says to her I’ll take him up to Sergeant Porter. She looks at him and shakes her head and says to take him to his father instead, you take him to the guards now and he’ll be sent away for Christmas and for who knows how long and those places are criminal. But the old man shakes his head at her. This is serious business Eskra he says. Somebody could have got hurt. The auld doll tells me she is still shaking from the shock but then I look at her and she looks fine to me. I stand there stupid in the yard not wanting her to ask me anything but she does anyways and I says to her I messed around with him for a bit but that was a while ago now and that he was acting wild strange so I stopped spending time with him and she stands there shaking her head at me. Stay away from him now you hear? All the time in my mind I seen terrible things, not the silly things we got up to before but that other thing we did with Molly the Moss. What we did with that wee girl I did not want to think about and it was all I could do because I was terrified now it had got out in some way. The white skin of the girl laid out, never seen such a thing so exciting nor exquisite and that look then in her eye. What it was we done.

H
E STOOD OUTSIDE TRYING
to guess the coming weather, saw a fault over the earth that rived the morning sky. Over the sea and the western reaches of the world sat a ridge of low cloud like dirt snow sided on a road. What it met shined from over the hills, an eternal blue that spoke the world could be perfect if it wanted to. He mucked out the horse’s stable and fed her and when she had eaten he walked her into the yard. Watched the sclerotic way she walked, screwed his eyes at her, could see nothing strange nor obvious upon examination. Just the way the horse held her head as she wambled, spoke again that reluctance. Is it that you’re getting old on me? he said. As he spoke he heard the words of Matthew Peoples telling him about the horse that day of the fire, could hear the ring of the man’s voice, heard the man’s words in snatches, that strange and sleepy tone, and he stared at the man before him in his mind but he could not get a fix on his face. He began to harness the horse and when he drew over the noseband the horse threw her head into the air and snorted, an instruction perhaps in horse-talk to leave her be. Now, now, he said. He whispered further encouragement to her and led her slowly up the yard to the new shed, parked her beside the cart that leaned its long shafts upon the flagstones. He turned the horse around and had begun to fasten her when
he saw Eskra step outside. She held in her hand a meat-stripped bone for the dog. She saw Barnabas and the horse and began up the yard all rush through the skitter of chickens.

Can’t you see she’s unwell? she said.

Barnabas sighed at her. I’ve a heap of stone to get for the byre.

And what about the horse?

Do you want me to get this done or not?

Of course, Barnabas. But the horse is sick. Could you not borrow one?

McDaid only has that auld half-donkey.

Cyclop ambled over curious to the conversation, lay down between them. He behaved before them like some kind of lion-heart returning from war, his dark and thick coat vined with thorns that hung from his neck like a garland displaced, the whites of his ankles mudded. He sat watching the entertainment with his front paws stretched lordly out while thumping his tail and waggling the dark triangles of his ears. He watched with one eye the slinging voices in the yard, looked at the woman when she hitched up her voice and he looked at the man when his voice rose to meet hers, unrolled a wobbling half yard of tongue that told of his appreciation. And then he shared a look with the horse as if they were above such things.

Eskra sighed and turned with the bone and waved it at the dog. Don’t you want this or not? The dog appraised the woman and the bone with a cursory glance and he turned his one eye towards Barnabas and the horse. Sometimes I wonder about that dog, she said. The horse and the dog looked at each other again. Eskra lobbed the bone up the yard and the bone rolled to a stop on the flagstones beside a cylinder of chopped wood. Cyclop stood and stretched out his back a mute and keyless accordion and
brought himself back into shape with a yawn. He walked towards the bone and took a sniff and left it where it was, returned to his flagstone seat. Barnabas watched Cyclop make that saurian yawn that could make it seem the dog housed within him an entire other nature, some berserk violence waiting to be unleashed, and then he quit looking at the dog and spoke to the horse, you’re a good girl, now come on would you. Saw the withdrawal of Eskra and her plum shadow from the flagstones.

He took a turn off the main road that led up long and slow into bog and dark hills, no more than a grass-humped track. The better nature of that sky before him. From far off he heard schoolchildren’s voices skirl on the wind like sirens, screams like some fragment of a dream. He watched the horse take to the hill with no sign of trouble. The way she had loosened up out past the house made him think she was being temperamental, and she walked now at an easy gait, her head nodding as she walked to the cart’s softly squealing axle. The days of rain had given some life to the land and he saw the wild grasses reach up eager out of the earth like teeth tearing at the sky for the sun’s fleeting rays. He saw everywhere the ferocity of spring, the upswing against death that held within it an unfurling bass power that brought bud into leaf, bulb into flower, felt within himself a measure of that same ferociousness, could hear against the sky the sound of his soul singing.

As the road rose deeper into the hills, nature in its appearance seemed fouled to him. The fields losing their green to become wan and toothless. This bog a tattered place ruled by an aberrant nature that denuded itself of any markings of man, shook off his sheuchs and stone-wall perimeters, set sawtooth briars
to grow where they pleased. The distant white smears of lone sheep occasional as if they had been scattered by wind. The road bending gently up the steepening hill and when they reached halfway and the road levelled briefly he allowed the horse to rest. He rolled a thin cigarette and turned to the land below him and lorded chugs of blue smoke over it. The townland of Carnarvan with its scattering of houses, and further to the east the town on the hill like some dull shrine to the living. He thought about when he first returned to Donegal with Eskra and the boy. How he saw this land with marvel. The sea and the sky and the hills pressing themselves newly upon him. The play of light in its ceaseless shape-shifting. He saw the way light could sway in the rain like a dancer, shimmer like a swished skirt, foot itself elsewhere. And he saw the place for how old it was and watched the countenance of the hills in their ever-changing solidity, as if the place could re-imagine itself at any moment, these mountains ancient creatures shifting in their sleep, dreaming their own myths.

He turned and flicked the cigarette into the ditch and began to lead the horse upwards. What flickered then into his mind was an old memory, to the tongue the fresh-picked taste of raw jam from the bramble. The hills rising up as if they were another realm of time he was walking into.

He didn’t see the old man on the road until he was almost upon him. An ancient face tongued by wind and rain. He saw what lay beneath the man’s papery skin was not bone at all but bog wood as if he had risen ageless out of the moss, contoured and shaped by the land’s slow heavings. The old man’s eyes were half lidded pinkly and his head was held back as if to see out the peeps of
them but Charlie Cannon was blind. He’d often given Charlie a lift into town in the days before the petrol rationing, and even then his was one of the few cars on the road amongst the horse and traps. Now the man did the long walks on his own, could be seen eyeing the long hill up to church in the town with his cane. He saw how Charlie walked now with the cane slung under his arm, his body an all seeing thing, the land become a part of his nature. The blind man stopped when he came close to the ensemble and he held his head up curious. Barnabas waited till he came close and said, how are you getting on, Charlie Cannon? saw with amusement the man’s puzzled face trying to get a latch onto his voice. Owling wild eyebrows shaped sensory to the wind like palps and then the old man’s brows fell and his voice was heard softly. That you, Barnabas Kane?

Charlie Cannon, you’ve got eyes in your ears or is it ears in your eyes, who knows. And you don’t even need your cane. Look at you. There was me thinking you were blind all this time. How you’ve been fooling us.

Charlie Cannon let out a soft laugh and his left hand fluttered.

I don’t need no eyes to see what’s on this road. Aren’t I on it all this time?

Would you not live someplace easier?

They say an ancestor of mine called Ranty lived up here with his eyes gouged out. That some mean bastard took them out with a knife. Kept living up here anyhow as blind as the eternal night. Once you know a place you know it.

As the blind man spoke he gestured with his left hand to give shape to his words, as if he did not trust what he said because he could not see how it registered on the face of another. When he spoke his left hand shook and when he listened it lay restless by
his side. The men talked more, about the farm and the fire, and when Charlie Cannon asked what caused it, Barnabas spat on the road. Well, Charlie, I’ve lost long nights of sleep trying to figure it. I haven’t ruled out in my mind it were started deliberate. Time will tell, won’t it?

The blind man was silent a while and then he pointed to the deadland around them. What brings you up to Blackmountain, Barnabas? Yer too early I fear for the cutting of turf. Unless you want to get soaked out of it. He laughed softly.

Barnabas found himself pointing up beyond the hill to show where he was going and then he lowered his hand and let it waver as if he was suddenly uncertain the man was blind at all. I’m bringing the horse for a walk. She’s been unwell. I need to build her strength up, he said.

He heard the lie as bare as the land around him and it had a worse taint. The old man nodded slow and said, aye, but when he spoke again Barnabas saw the jittery hand had stopped moving. Sounds to me that horse is spavined so she is. You’ll make her lame taking her all the way up to this place.

She doesn’t seem that way to me.

Maybe so. But when they’re sore like that they get spooked wild easy. You should beware taking her up this hill. Listen to that wind. It carries nothing but the ghosts of the dead long gone from out of here. You’ll get the horse spooked so you will.

You’re a wild man for the superstitious talk, Charlie Cannon. And what are you doing so happy in their company?

Sure I’m nearly an auld ghost myself.

Goan, would you.

The old man laughed quietly and he nodded to Barnabas goodbye. Barnabas found himself waving back, watched the
blind man continue down the road without need for the stick. He slapped the haunch of the horse and began to laugh and shake his head. Ghosts, he said.

The steepening road tired out the horse but soon they reached the pass. A different world then amidst the tops of the hills and the view of the land fell away behind them. A place called Drumtahalla and he knew not much about it and to his right the lonely green of the Meeshivin forest. Used to be that forest sprawled everywhere. The breeze came emboldened, whistled and hissed, took on a knife edge. Deadskin scree upon the slopes of the mountains and just beyond the pass he could see the white of Charlie Cannon’s cottage nestled into the hills and an old ruin beside it.

Horse and man came through that pass and then the road dipped and he saw it lean long and lonely stretching it seemed into the forever of dark and distant shapes, other mountains unknown to him, the bog’s expanse of endless browns within brown. They were following that lonely road when the horse stopped suddenly in protest. He pulled at the animal but the horse did not budge and she rested her dark eyes upon the land sullenly. What the fuck’s wrong with you? In the breeze, the horse’s mane fluttered but the animal held still and he went to the cart and took a bucket. He stepped into the bog and bent to a nearby stream and filled the bucket with bronze water. As he bent, his eyes fell upon the roots of an ancient tree left exposed agonizingly close to the stream, the trunk long gone and the roots hung out useless over the shifting land neither met by earth nor water. That tree probably as old as five thousand years. He saw how this place was once forested and full of men and
women no doubt who walked about an ancient race with similar concerns, the need to eat, the need for shelter, the need to keep warm their children. And he watched a bird wing blackly over the barren turf, let from its mouth a forlorn call.

He put the bucket under the horse’s mouth but the horse showed no interest. He produced an ash-plant from the back of the cart and began to whip the animal but the horse did not budge and he lost his temper, began to beat her with his fist. He punched her in the shoulder and slapped her on the withers and then he turned in frustration. Stood thinking. Behind him the animal began to move slowly forward into the bladed wind.

He came upon the place as he had been told it, saw two stone cottages alongside a stream. They stood forsaken beside three dead and twisted trees that once stood sentry over them while beside one lay a lamb’s skull grinning up at him. All that stood of these houses now were their walls like old teeth bared to the wind in some sardonic grimace, and he saw how one of the walls had fallen in as if time were something huge that fell against it. Who had lived here he could not know but Peter McDaid told him it was the famine some hundred years ago that drove them out and that people were long past caring.

Each house open to the sky and he stepped inside one, the ground sprung with a carpet of heather and he looked at it and tried to imagine that somebody once lived in this place, once pressed bare feet to its floor, maybe weans were born here, who knows, grew up here, were loved here, died here, or were driven out from hunger to who knows where else, and he tried to imagine the sounds of their living but instead he heard the silence of the years passing over it. He looked at the walls
two foot thick and packed with earth and he began to loosen a stone.

Later, he unhitched the horse and turned the cart around and fastened the animal again. Upon the cart he began to make a grey mountain of stones. He reduced one of the old houses to a low wall, heaped upon the cart as many stones in weight as he guessed the horse could carry, the cart fit to take more but for that damned beast of a horse. When it was time to leave the animal was reluctant and he looked at her, saw a skitter in her eye, the flip of an insect on the surface of still water. What’s wrong with you? he said. Is it that you’re angry? He whispered to her encouragement and apologized for hitting her earlier and then he shouted at her until she strained forward, pulled the cart into a squeal of protest under the dead weight of those stones. She took to the road slow and he walked alongside her while the wind rose to their backs and harried them. The day dragging what light there was to the west in heavy chains and it cast upon the land its monolith shadows. They made their way amidst the groans of the cart that sounded in unison with the wind and they travelled slowly through the pass till they met the land and the road twisting downwards, lumps of rock like jut bones and far off grassy fields. He turned an eye to the load to make sure no stones were coming loose and he walked alongside the horse holding onto the harness. The road steepened and the cart made another groan and the horse made a strange squeal to accompany it. He looked at the animal and didn’t like what he saw and he told the horse to steady, took a tighter hold of the harness. The horse squealed again and the sound of it bore clean through the wind like a blade. He pulled the horse to a stop. They
stood a minute like that facing downhill and what winged then in front of them was a butterfly, a crimson Peacock with peering blue eyes on its wings, and it shook itself up into the air before them and dived again, came to rest upon the horse’s nose. In that instant the horse took fright, reared up her head and screamed, began suddenly to move. Barnabas roaring out at the horse but the animal moving regardless, picking up speed now until he was running alongside her shouting, what’s wrong with you, would you hold on, and he pulled at the bridle but could feel the animal pull easily beyond his strength. As he ran he saw the road lean dangerously downwards and he pulled at the horse but the animal paid him no heed, and he began then to shout out words, words that in another place or circumstance could have raised the dead, but here they could not put a stop to a horse that came under the influence of gravity. The spiral of the road and the speed of the animal and the sun dimming quickly as if it could not dare to watch, and he found he had to let the horse go, watched what happened with horror. The rear left wheel of the cart wobbling and then disintegrating as the wood buckled and broke, shot spokes into splinters. The cart took a quick lope dangerously to one side as if it were some kind of stone mastodon being brought down by hunters, toppled towards the earth in what seemed to him a miraculous slow arc of movement and it took sideways with it the harnessed horse a shrieking brown blur.