The Black Snow (2 page)

The different smells of the barn wiped out like nothing in it had existed. The catalogue of smells–the way grass and dung and feed knit into an odour of their own making. The weighted must of hay. The damp smell of an aged building. Now just the rank smell of burning and the air smoked to the nullity of a dream. What terrified the two men most was the sound of the animal’s frantic thunder. The cattle locked in their pens clamouring on top of one another to get out. One dark autumn day Barnabas had seen them rattled and stampede as if they were a single thinking thing, fleeing towards the byre during a break of thunder under clouds that had come down to meet them. Now they gave off a dismal bellowing that no person would want to hear. He felt Matthew Peoples’ arm upon his shoulder but could not see him, felt the arm let go, the impress of the man’s hand still upon him. The faint outline of things, his eyes rawing to the smoke, his breathing shallowed as if he had taken a kick to the belly. He coughed and bent to his knees, and what he heard then was the issuing of the fire’s own sounds, the deep purring of contentment, as if fire was something that sat compact and waiting in a coiled malevolence and revelled being let out. He had to replay in his mind the layout of a byre he knew backwards but wherever he crawled he could not find the pens, could find nothing at all, his hands upon the ground yet the surface yielding no clues to him, no marks nor points of reference, as if what had been was erased, and when he tried then to find the door nothing at all was visible, not the walls nor the light from outside nor the man who went in with him, and he called out
to Matthew Peoples, could barely hear his own voice as if he had been wadded at the mouth, and the panic then that seized him was like the bursting of light in his mind.

A pair of hands huge on him. A hank of his shirt noosed about his neck and he felt himself being pulled backwards, out the byre door and then into the yard where he was laid upon his back. His eyes stung shut from the smoke and the daybright hurt his eyes to see it. He lay there on the flagstones with his head turned dumbly and slowly he began to see, the world a thin blear, a patch of sky empty as a vale of snow until he saw it stain with dark smoke. The weft and warp of his breathing undone to a ragged stitching.

He looked up towards Matthew Peoples to thank him but who he saw was another. The hard-nugget eyes of his neighbour, Peter McDaid, one strabismus eye upon him and the other staring past his head as if he saw the shade of another there to disturb him. The laughter lines that made a marionette of his mouth had collapsed now altogether and a terrible frown was etched into his forehead with smokedirt in the creases of it. He began to shake Barnabas. Are ye kilt? Are ye kilt? Eskra leaning over him and then she helped Barnabas to sit up. The air was rank and yet in that moment he caught a linger of soft and ordinary smells off her, jasmine in her hair, a trace of the lavender she liked to place about the house in small bottles salvaged from the garden, flour dust from the hand she placed upon his cheek, and in that moment though he could not speak it he felt for her an eruption of no greater love and gratitude. And then as his eyes took full view of the byre he could smell nothing else but the smell of the world corrupted. He saw McDaid run towards the byre and saw
him beaten back by smoke that corkscrewed towards him, the man going at it again and standing at the door helpless with his hands to his head. When he turned around Barnabas saw in McDaid a childishness that spoke of the man being stripped of all action and power in the quickening then of what was. The struggling of Barnabas’s tongue and he leaned over and tried to spit, his voice scratching out of his throat as if the greater part of it had been ripped out and left behind in the byre, a scream upon the floor shapeless and mute. Trying to sound the words to them.

Matthew Peoples.

What kind of day it was afterwards those who talked about it hardly remembered. A temperate yellow evening with no rain was made forgettable. The fire had forged its own weather, wind-smoke that burled and circled like demons unleashed, one woman said. The way the evening heated up seemed as if the fire had boiled the air. Soot softly like snow that fell a brittle powder to the skin. The event impressed itself so strongly it consumed them like a folktale. The sound of the fire’s hunger was like some enormous force let loose upon the world–an epic thing that held within its violence the fierce, rolling energy of the sea. Human shapes rising up against it, their smallness pressing forward in waves only to be beaten back. Later, Barnabas could not even remember the difficulty they had with the horse. Or the things he had done that morning–the egg with the two yolks he had cracked open into a bowl and noted how it had happened twice that same week. And when darkness had sooted all but the smouldering byre’s embers, he did not remember about the horse that had been left hitched in the field until Billy reminded him of it. Must have stood for hours in discomfort. Sent the boy
out to get it, an oil lamp bleary against the swamping darkness and then that warped communion of shadows coming back in.

In the space of a few minutes neighbours came to help. Three McLaughlin brothers running through riven fields, the three of them near-alike. They charged like racehorses with their chests out and their shoulders backwards slung, chestnut hair fluttering behind their ears. Shadows from the failing light made stern countenances of their sloping hard faces and they came to the house with their clothes thorned and burred like men who had climbed through all of nature to get there. One of them scratched red from the wrist all the way to his rolled sleeves. They saw Barnabas lying foetal in the yard, Eskra bending over him helping him to sit up. Peter McDaid standing there helpless with his hands to his head. The boy skulking back by the house like some animal wild-eyed and confused trying to remain hid. They saw too Peter McDaid’s bicycle where he had dropped it in the yard, the back wheel spinning slowly to a stop like a rickety wheel.

Soon more people came. A neighbouring farmer called Fran Glacken appeared stout-faced from an adjoining field with his two grown sons beside him, their wine-bald heads wet with sweat. Later, the wives and children who made their way to the farm began clutching at each other’s arms as if upon each other they could find resilience. How they stood together like a fortress.

Eskra ran about the yard but her mind in its violent thinking would not allow her to see. Fran Glacken grabbed a hold of her shoulder and shouted at her, his face held inches from hers and his eyes fit to bursting. Woman. Where are the buckets? The man
before her an ageless beast, hairless and red like he had been skinned raw by weather after years of service to it and was left hardened like a lobster. She pointed towards the byre and froze till Glacken shook her again. She turned towards the stable and said you’ll find some more in there, swiped at the hair on her face that fell upon her vision like a curtain. Glacken moved towards it with his feet hid by smoke, a huge-limbed gliding thing, and he came out with buckets and went to the pump. He began to work its gasping mouth and nodded for one of the McLaughlin brothers to give the bucket to the men lining up in file. Saw Billy beside him wearing a look of confusion. Billy saw how the man’s face was smoked and his eyes were burning as if some kind of lunacy was let loose in them and perhaps it was, for Glacken reached out then with the flat spade of his hand and struck the boy in the face. Wake up there, he shouted. He sent Billy into the house for towels and the boy ran stunned into the kitchen. He stopped at the window to look, saw his father broken in the yard, three clocks ticking and then the slow lolling sound as each one belled five o’clock. He went upstairs to the cupboard and tumbled everything out and it came upon him then what it was and it shook itself loose, a great heaving thing inside him, and he became helpless to its forces. He stood staring at the wall and took a deep breath, took a heap of towels and went to the hall mirror and rubbed his eyes dry until it looked like he had not been crying.

Smoke lingered in the kitchen and nestled catly in the corners. It thickened the air of the back yard like a wall. He pushed through it towards the pump where he saw the outline of Glacken as if the man was half-being and he came close and wary and saw the man’s forehead split by a swollen vein. Glacken
took the towels without looking at him and sluiced them and passed them up the line telling the others to tie them about their faces. Eskra came alongside him then, tried to push him without a word away from the pump. He moved her away with one arm and a shout. Yer not strong enough woman. He saw igneous in her eye and outstared her, thrust into her hand a full bucket. You’d be better off, Eskra, if you were passing buckets in the line.

Nobody saw Goat McLaughlin appear in the yard, the father of the three McLaughlin brothers. He sidled through the smoke with quick small steps, a prophet face fiercely bearded save for brilliant blue eyes that shone out of him as if he carried within him a conviction more righteous than all others. His muscles were waste on his bones and dewlaps of skin hung off his sinew and his quick-seeing eyes picked out Fran Glacken at the pump. He stepped silently into the chain and pushed one of his sons to the front so now there were three men throwing buckets of water upon the roof, water coursing into the air and firewind spraying some of it back upon the yard and upon their faces, a lurching carousel of limbs that began and circled back to Fran Glacken.

Barnabas sat on his haunches with his head in his hands, his breath a ruined thing. He looked across the yard and met the eyes for a moment of his wife, the woman swivelling her hips to pass backwards an empty bucket, wasn’t sure she even saw him, her hair now hanging loose over her face like she did not give a damn to see. He eyed the burning door of the byre and could hear the dying of his animals. The body of Matthew Peoples in amongst them. Jesus fuck. What have I done? In his mind he saw Matthew Peoples reaching out for the pens, blind and grasping
through smoke as if you could get a handle on such a thing, the smoke scattering in his hand like dream dust. A big man like that brought down. He could see him lying there, his lungs full as if he were drowning. Matthew Peoples’ mute face. He felt then an urge to run back in for the man even though by now Matthew Peoples would be dead, thought again of that smoke welling in his own lungs, and it brought to him a perfect terror.

At first, stunned word went through the line that Matthew Peoples had not come out of the byre, but then they grew quiet, wore it in their faces. It was if they were afraid of acknowledging it to one another, a glance told that would speak of some communal guilt that only one man amongst them had gone into the fire and he could only bring one man back out. They knew too the dangers without having to talk about them. The way the buildings were laid out. The new shed fattened with hay. A small mountain of turf under a tarpaulin. The way the firewind made towards the house. They wondered if the fire would reach it, saw the way the smoke mapped the wind’s movement so that the shape of it became visible, a calligraphy of violence that rewrote itself with a capacity endless for its own pleasure. Peter McDaid dropped out of the line and ran to the turf and began to move what he could but the heat became too much for him. He swatted at it as if it were a horsefly bothering him, held his elbow up beside his face until he was forced to turn. The chickens long scattered from the yard to the back fields while Cyclop ran about the yard barking at the commotion and then he turned and retreated to the back step.

Goat McLaughlin saw a drop in the wind and told his eldest the weather was granting favour. The house will be saved, he said. He
pronounced it like a sage and the son turned and spoke behind him to his brother. The fire humming with its own satisfaction while every person there blocked from their mind the noise of the cattle–the mournful slow sounds of their dying that cut through the air like bassoons.

Nobody saw Barnabas as he leaned himself up and began to walk slowly towards the house, a dread thing with torn breathing. A wheezing in his chest as if something had nested itself inside him. He noticed how smoke had pressed into the house so that everything stank of it and he went to the kitchen cupboard and took down a box of cartridges. He walked slowly towards the door and took the break-action shotgun that leaned behind it, a twelve-gauge Browning, and sat down on the chair with a slump. He put the gun flat on his lap and hinged it open and fumbled with a shaking hand for the cartridges, fed them into the gun’s mouth. He stood and filled his pockets with the remaining cartridges and held onto the deal table, sucked air through a rasp in his chest as if he had been holed by the gun, saw through the window the way the smoke had unmade the farm into the remainder of some dim dream.

Nobody saw him drift up the yard, the way he walked slowly like a man footing thick sand. At the west end of the byre the heat was less intense. They heard the sound of two gunshots and some of them thought it was an explosion. Then Peter McDaid saw Barnabas by the side of the byre trying to reload the shotgun. He ran towards him and Barnabas raised the gun and aimed it through the window. McDaid ducked when he heard the third shot and he saw Barnabas squaring to fire another. McDaid upon him then, seizing the gun. Jesus Christ, Barnabas.

Eskra came running towards them with her hands hid by her sleeves. Her lips parted when she saw the shotgun. They propped him under each arm and walked him through the yard and she saw the look Glacken gave them, a look of pure disgust. A car came into the yard as they walked towards the house. Out of it stepped Doctor Leonard, the old man tall and stooped with a thicket of greying yellow hair. He came towards them with his bag and a cigarette perched at the end of long brown fingers. He smoked undeterred, smoked as if to seal his lungs from what plumed around him, looked with concern at Barnabas, saw he was infirm and reached for him under the elbow but Barnabas weakly shook himself free. Naw, he said.

The doctor took hold of him again. Come inside now, Barnabas.