The Black Snow (17 page)

A caress of lamplight held Eskra’s sleeping face and faded into dark up the wall. Her features weightless as a child, her skin made buttermilk. She sat on a chair resting her elbow against the deal table while she held against her head an enclosed hand. Her other hand open and so gentle upon the wax tablecloth it would
seem she came through this life without pressure or weight or any bearing against the world at all. The east outside came pitch against the glass and the night sat hushed so that when she slipped into dreaming the drifting images that came took her back to Vinegar Hill, and she heard the tones of her dead father’s voice, heard it bright in a way she could not while awake–his voice that came strong even in sickness, and she a little girl hugging him bone-tight and she saw in the shape of his eyes their true colour, saw pitted in his soul the sadness that shone an awareness of his coming death. And as she dreamed she saw the horse stood over them watching her with the eyes of a woman. Billy then stomping into the room in his boots and she fell away from her father, fell into the room with quickly opened eyes and a feeling that lingered of sadness. Yellow lamplight forming to make the shape of her son who stood pointing by the window. He’s back now so he is. Billy turned and was gone outside in noise and rush.

She stood by the side of the house with the west lit in its last embers. Watched the slow approach of a swinging lamp. Billy a fragment of the dark running down the road and she saw then what was coming towards him was not Barnabas on his own but Barnabas and another. Up the lane like slow-herded animals, the hulk shape of a cart behind them mountained with stones and she recognized then the particular walk of McDaid, the man’s forward lean with his elbows pointing out like he was walking into wind always. The wellying waddle. How Barnabas coalesced into the man she knew, his eyes yoked to the ground. She saw then it was not the horse and cart they were leading but McDaid’s cart and mule and they brought it to a groaning stop in the middle of the yard.

Where’s the horse, Barnabas? she said.

In the lamplight they began to unload the stones.

Barnabas turned. Billy, get up here and give us a hand.

The boy came forward and stood narrow against the thickness of his father.

Barnabas, she said. What’s going on? Where’s the horse and cart?

She watched him grunt and grab a stone off the cart, place it upon the flagstones. The billowing stone dust caught in the lamplight looked like ten thousand distant suns, born into glitter and dying there.

Barnabas, she said.

He turned to her dirt-faced and she saw in his eyes a great weariness and he did not speak but sighed at her. McDaid turned to her and spoke, his voice awkward and soft. Barnabas had a wee accident up on Moyle Hill, Eskra. The wheel came off the cart. Turned the whole thing upside-down so it did. Lucky no one got kilt.

Eskra’s hand went to her mouth and she stepped forward and put her hand on Barnabas. Are you all right, love?

Aye. I’m all right. It was the goddamn horse’s fault. Got spooked so she did.

He turned back to unloading the stones and she stood a minute watching till her voice became high with concern. What happened? she said. What happened to the horse? Where is she?

Barnabas did not answer and she pulled him by the back of his shirt and he turned to her dead-eyed holding against his chest a long flat stone.

Take it easy now, Eskra, said McDaid. The horse is up at my place. I put her in the barn to recover.

Eskra’s eyes widened in the dark and she bunched her skirt and abruptly made off, set off up the road calling for Billy to follow behind her.

The boy a fleet form running past her half-seen in the darkness. He merged with the moonless sky and the trees and the fields so that all became single dark matter. When she got to the shape of McDaid’s house Billy was almost whole again, stood with the horse in the middle of the road, the pair of them faintly visible against the sky’s obsidian.

She was in the barn, he said. I took her out.

In all the commotion I didn’t think to bring a lamp, she said.

Haul on. I’ll go into Peter’s and get one.

He came back out with a faltering lamp that would not burn any brighter. He held it close to the horse. She went towards the animal and began to feel all over, smoothed her flanks with long and slow and kneading gestures and the horse quaked when a hand came upon her hind leg. Eskra held still, the sound of the horse snuffling and breathing against her own breath nasal in concentration. She could see nothing else wrong with her, just pain flagged in a limp when they began to walk her forward.

She’s limping so she is, Billy said.

She’s bruised and spooked but she’s whole and that’s good.

She began to walk the horse slowly towards their house, whispered into the animal’s ear voice kisses.

Barnabas returned two days later to the old houses in the mountains with Peter McDaid and his mule. The animal squat and still under a sparkling diamond sun that strung out shadows of the men in hinging shapes. Stone by stone they revoked the
claim of those two famine houses to the land, land that had let the hand of nature go to work in its wearing relentlessness. What was left of the walls came down and they loaded the cart, the pair working in unison, their hands and faces whitening from the dust. They stopped to drink water and chew on old apples and Barnabas threw into the bog an apple core, watched with amusement as McDaid chewed the core and ate its pits and stalk. In the afternoon he saw McDaid leap into an odd shape and then the man lying down on the moss.

What’s wrong with you, Peter? Barnabas said.

Me back is having spasms. Tis a hoor of a thing.

That’s the cyanide in them apples. That’s what it is.

McDaid lay tense with his hands by his side, lay staring at the cloud shapes, read into their natural forms things that he knew, dogs and cats and men’s faces and even items of furniture, saw the shape of his mother’s old dresser in the tall stretch of a cloud.

The last time my back spasmed like this I was at the far end of my fields. Raining like a total bastard. I had to lie down on me back and pull the coat over me head from the rain. Lie there like a dying animal.

He began to laugh at himself and stopped from the hurt. Ah fuck, he said.

When Barnabas had removed the last stone that would be needed he took a long slug of water from a bottle. He stood still for a moment staring at the ruined houses as if he could not believe what he saw. He proffered a hand to lift McDaid and the man rose like a corpse. McDaid slowly began to arch his back. Do you reckon you have enough? he said.

I’ve been keeping rough count.

McDaid walked slowly over to the cart holding onto the small
of his back and he began to push at some stones to test they were piled firm. He stood again on a mound of moss looking down at the loss of the two houses. Do you reckon we took from this place its history? he said.

Barnabas held in his mouth two unlit cigarettes and he sucked them to life with a match. Blue smoke ghosting about his face and he handed one to McDaid, knuckled at his cheek. I’ll bet there isn’t a single person in Carnarvan who could tell you a thing about the people who left this place. Just look at it. The people here are so long gone none of them at all are remembered. What’s left is just an idea of people. A folk memory. It is nothing real.

His eyes travelled the silent land around them, the barren slopes of the mountains that leaned up to the sky. They no longer have stories whoever these particular people were, he said. They might as well have never existed. All signs and sins erased.

If you could sit down and talk with stones. The stories you’d hear out of them.

I’d say there was nothing here but suffering. I’d say there was hunger and they died or left and went someplace else. That was the way of it.

C’mon, let’s get to fuck away from here. I think I’m starting to mistake the sound of the breeze for ghosts.

The mule held himself sure-footed and stoical down that hill and in reward the afternoon sun went to work on his shape. It took the animal’s long grey ears and made on the moss a rabbit’s head for him and it took the mule’s stout body and stretched him out upon the bog until he walked grand and noble, a horse pulling behind him a mountain.

The first days of April brought showers teasing and temperamental that made it too wet to start building. Each time the rain fell he would escape to the stable, stand in the doorway, his eyes adrip with loathing. The stones in their tidy piles graded into different sizes and in the new barn sat a mound of sand and bags of cement piled like loaves that McDaid had brought to him. That cousin of mine has fuck all use for them, he said, has them sitting there for years so I told him I needed em. Owed me a favour.

Dreams almost every night of his own agency and power and the byre rising up under a white sky and then those dreams turning to frustration where nothing got built at all, days running out in those dreams holding in his hands the useless stones, dreams that could have tired out even the interminable night’s patience.

The horse was still sickly and kept in the stable most days and he stood beneath the stone lintel with his back to her watching the rain, watching the sunken shape of the byre taking the full of another shower, watching the byre with a gluttony to get it built. An entire week of this kind of weather would drive a man mad so it would. He began then to stay indoors blowing smoke against the kitchen window, leaning his face against the glass, imagined it an invisible force holding him in.

My hands are itching to work, he said. I feel like I’m twenty-one again.

Eskra behind him in the room folding clothes. It’s an unfortunate time to start, Barnabas. It’s the same every year. Why don’t you wait another month?

I want to take Billy for a week out of school.

What for?

She paused in the middle of the room and saw the way he
leaned his fists upon the counter as if his entire will were directed into those fists and he could at one push remove from the house the kitchen.

Just for one week, Eskra, to help me get started. Mixing that mortar and lifting them stones on me own will be slow and heavy work.

She shook her head to the unseeing back of him.

Listen to you. Always complaining about your lack of schooling and having to learn everything you know out of books. Always saying you could have done more with your intelligence. Is that what you want for your son? I’m not going to have him like those other children round here that treat school like it’s not important.

Just one week. It won’t hurt him.

No.

Look, the bastarding rain has stopped again.

He stepped out into a dry and matinal dark that concealed all signs of coming weather. A lamp placed on the flagstones that lit around him a pale corona and put everything else to dark. No rain during the night and he sensed the morning might hold, churned at the mortar with impatience. Laid the byre’s first stones down. As the morning swung over him he turned and watched the bluish light push over the mountains and it seemed to him like the final movement of some old and weary creature that had travelled overnight the full circumference of the earth, while the daylight that came hesitant behind it could not hold all the creatures within its kingdom radiant.

Hours later he looked up over the low rise of a new wall, saw sunshine sparkle upon the pump. He washed his hands and went
to the house for breakfast. Caught sight of Eskra through the window. She stood by the stove half lit in that bright morning light, motes of dust adrift and lit in their strange and softly orbits, and the light that held her as she rubbed at the webbing of her fingers made her look pained and beautiful. To kiss her with the reach of his eyes. He tapped at the glass and she came towards him and he pointed towards the byre. Would you look at that. She smiled.

When he went inside she poured him porridge and she rubbed at his shoulder and they ate their food together.

Later, after Barnabas went back out, Eskra stood to the stove and stirred again Billy’s porridge, poured it bubbling into a nut-brown bowl. The bang of the boy on the ceiling and she called out to him again. By the kitchen window she heard a rogue bee’s drone as it smacked itself off the glass and she walked over to let it out, saw the shape of Barnabas walking across the yard, his sleeves rolled and the skin to his wrists already caulked grey. What rose then to meet her was a wasp, came straight towards her face, and she took a step backwards and batted at it. The wasp dipped low towards the sill and turned and swung up towards her fast, all black-bunched thorax, its abdomen long and sickle curved, and she saw the sleek poise of its stinger. Her stomach tightened. She did not like to harm any creature under the light of the sun but in the countenance of the wasp she saw a sightless and dangerous aggression. She reached for a tea towel and swiped the insect towards the window, heard behind her the trudge of Billy down the stairs. She reached for a glass and cupped the insect against the window, watched it launch itself angry against the container as Billy came into the room. Get me the newspaper, she said. He went to the table and picked it up and came towards her rubbing
his eyes with sleep and she took the paper and sealed the glass and told him to open the door. She let free the wasp, watched it take high into the air like a speck of soot, disappear over the stable roof. The head of Barnabas popping up from behind the low wall. If that boy is up send him out, he said.

She came towards him. I was going to ask him to come with me to the beach, she said.

Arrah, Eskra.

It’s Saturday, Barnabas. We’ve been cooped up here all week like animals.

Barnabas looked up at the sky and muttered a long curse.

Billy sitting at the table stirring honey into his porridge. She saw her own blue eyes in him as she spoke. Let’s go to the beach for a walk, she said. When they went outside to fetch the bicycles, Barnabas hunched up red-faced from the byre. That boy’s staying here, he said. Billy stood awkward with his hands in his shorts and looked towards his mother with an intense look of pleading until she nodded to him. Go and call the dog, she said. She turned to Barnabas. Can I not have some company on the beach? He can help you after lunch.