The Black Snow (3 page)

I need to be out with them.

The doctor walked him in. He pulled up a chair at the table and sat him down, saw amidst sweat and smokedirt the man’s frightened crying eyes, could hear his rent breathing. He leaned his cigarette in an ashtray on the table and helped Barnabas out of his shirt, put a stethoscope to the squall of greying hair on his chest and listened to the storm amplified. Eskra stood fidgeting and angry behind them. What were you doing with the gun, Barnabas? she said.

A knife-edge in her voice brought out the foreign notes in her accent and the doctor gave her a long look to leave the man alone. He nodded to her hands. I see your eczema had broken out again. Barnabas looked up at the outline of his wife, his eyes half closed, and he smiled at her a look she saw as blank and bovine. Leave him be for now, Mrs Kane. He’s taken in a lot of smoke.

Eskra dropped onto her knees, her hair loose about her eyes,
and she grabbed Barnabas by the hand, spoke to him sadly. Tell me what you were doing with the gun.

Barnabas continued his strange smile and then he let the smile fall and began to whisper to her but she couldn’t hear through his breathing. She leaned in closer.

I wanted to give them all a clean death.

Nothing they could do could stop the byre burning down, though the wind with a mind of its own turned before the fire reached the house. No one spoke about the dying sound of the animals and they kept silent to themselves the thought that a man’s bones were mixed up in it. The burning made the darkness that fell around them more compact and as the dark deepened the sounds of the animals quietened. The men began to stand in the comfort of women. Somebody made tea and steaming cups were passed around. The men slaked from the cups and wiped dirt-sweat from their eyes with blackened towels. Eskra encircled. Barnabas kept in the kitchen by the doctor, who sat with him. Everybody heard the sound of the collapsing byre like the last rattling breath from something huge now spent of its life force. Whatever beam was left standing collapsed with a shudder and that was it. It made a shiver of dark smoke and a glittering of sparks shot terrible amber into the sky that burned itself out into black snow. They heard what they guessed was the sound of a wall caving in and they took a step back and some of them gasped. Christ, a man said. The others followed to look. Every person had assumed that no animals could have survived, but they were met by the vision of dark shapes emerging from the byre, shapes indistinct but for the flaming that consumed them and turned them into ghastly silhouettes, the voices of the
animals weirdly silenced. Barnabas struggled past the doctor and came out of the house to watch. He saw whatever was left living of the cattle come pouring out through the broken wall, some of them tottering and then falling, others running blind, living things it seemed that had become the separate parts of some sort of slow explosion that sent them in different directions through the night. The flaming cattle ran into walls with a pathetic dull thud or came with a silent end upon a tree. Another cow collapsed upon a whin bush and the bush took light and winked at them an eerie yellow purple and when the bush burned itself out the animal still sedately flamed, while some of the animals did not run at all but dropped down under the silent sky, lay there with their burning hides. Barnabas turning around to the doctor, trying to speak, clutching at his arm. He whispered the words out of him. As if the black gates of hell have been cast open.

T
HE AIR NOW WAS
not air. To him it had changed, the shape of it made different. He saw atoms bent out of shape, tarred and burdened with weight and smell, nature a great violence wreaked upon itself. The smell sat about the farm too heavy to be displaced, sat about all sloth a tight and bitter stench. The place had become warped with it and he thought he could smell it as if what had occurred had become a part of him, seamed itself into his skin, living inside him like an infection. The great morning silence a cavernous thing to a mind that once woke with the animals, a mind that heard now the echo of its thoughts more shrilly. It heard too the silence left by the cockerel that had not been seen since the fire, a tattered old rust-feathered bird with a sickle of black plumage and perhaps cockerels too are affected by such things.

Barnabas could hardly draw himself out of bed and missed Matthew Peoples’ wake. He sent Eskra and the boy to the widow’s house instead. Eskra stood silent in the bedroom when he told her he wouldn’t go. She was bending upwards from a drawer and froze in the dresser mirror, a wan ribbon of light between the curtains catching her whitely on the neck. Just that long reverse look she gave him in the mirror and then she turned and combed over her shoulders her long hair in straight drifts, tied it into
a bun. She came over to him and smoothed his cheek and he coughed phlegm all colours of the bog into his hand to prove it. But he knew she could read him through.

I know you’re sick but I still think you should go, she said.

Tell them I’m still recovering, he said.

Matthew’s face. Not his features in particular, though those he tried to see and found he could not, the man’s face like a dream of sand. He could see parts but not the whole and began to wonder if he’d ever truly looked at him. A face like a lived-in map. The high terrain of his cheekbones and the spread of red veins on the pads of his cheeks like great rivers were written on him. Skin grooved by the wind. The way he’d half look at you. Those dopey blue eyes and thickened eyelids that hung heavy making him look half asleep, and the clod heavy foot and his hair gone white, a look that made it seem he was a man of slow reaction. As if you were bothering him from a dream. He could picture the settle of Matthew Peoples in a room, the hunch of him in the seat at the table, the hunger always as he leaned over the lunch plate shovelling hot spuds with his hands. Chewing quietly with a steady efficiency all sleepy eyes, and when the plate was clean the way he would lean out over the table all jaw for a second helping. But of the definite thing that was the man’s face he could not see. Just the nature of a look, a glimmer of something in his eyes—the man’s thoughts, perhaps. How the man shook his head not wanting to go in.

The weight of his hand upon Matthew Peoples’ back.

What remained of Matthew Peoples was put into the ground on a day of cold weather. An assembly of bones they thought to be the
man but mixed up too with the bones of the cattle he died with, bones charred and warped by heat. The coroner who did the work was a drinker and his nerves were shot and he just wanted done with it. Jesus fuck, he said when he saw it, and he looked away and folded his hands.

A late frost two days previous had iced the earth with a weave almost spectral and put a reverse on spring. It sleeved the buds on the trees and made the plot resistant like rock, the hardest grave dug that year. The two gravediggers who shovelled it worked their way through another pouch of tobacco. They breathed smoke like dragons, cursed the dead man with their slate-blue faces for the bother he brought to them, though in their quiet way each man remembered him fondly. Matthew Peoples, the big slow man who sat in the corner with Ted Neal, the two of them easy drinkers. Just the tops of the gravediggers’ hats visible as they dug deeper into the earth while cigarette smoke would sidle upwards like phantoms cut loose from the grave.

He sat beside Billy and Eskra with his hands balled. Whatever heat there was from those assembled in the church was cast out of them, fled into the granite walls and was made waste by the fleeting down-draughts that came upon them as if to flay them cold for their sins. Peter McDaid arriving late for the Mass, drew up alongside the pew opposite and genuflected, the man mucked to the knees in his welly boots and Barnabas looked at Eskra and nodded towards McDaid. Would you look at him, he said. She stared ahead into the pillared shadows that leaned solemn upon the tiled floor and swallowed the light that came pale through the windows.

That thing nesting in Barnabas’s chest had settled inside like
blight. It rawed the back of his throat and hollowed him brittle and he coughed through the sermon like a man carved out, as if a great wind were rattling his bones and they would have to carry him out in such pieces. The sound of his coughing echoed off the stone walls and was amplified into a coven for the sick that drowned out the sibilant words of the priest. In person he had smelled out the priest’s uncertainty, had met him once or twice in McElheny’s pub where he took a drink and eye to eye it was the priest who was hesitant. Wax-paper cheeks on the young priest and the word of God wet on his lips. The earth and the sky fled from his presence and there was no place for them. I saw the dead, the great and the lowly, standing before the throne, and scrolls were opened. Hearing those words Barnabas ground down on his teeth. The earth and the sky to fuck. He saw the world for how old it was stretching back in geological time that was for the most part without human beings on it at all and he saw Matthew Peoples’ life as a flickering instant of light burnt out. No fucking scrolls. No judgement on this here earth but our own.

Eskra turned when she heard Barnabas muttering and he turned from her, watched McDaid across the aisle, saw how he prayed a litany of supplementary words, worked his hands as if he could mould penance. He could hear Billy crying. Eskra weeping openly with her hands hid. The skin broken out bad again. She must have fed the dead man three thousand dinners.

They walked solemn up the long line of people to offer their condolences, their hands clasped in front while a guttering candle snorted. Matthew Peoples was a childless man and his brothers and sisters were lined alongside his wife, five siblings, all of them bearing some resemblance to him but for a youngest brother who Barnabas looked at and saw wasn’t right at all. A
face frozen in youth and hitched into a permanent smile as if nothing could deter him from finding all that he met in the world beautiful. The man shook everybody’s hand with a buoyant two-handed hello while the rest of them were quiet. Barnabas shook each person’s hand and said he was sorry and none of them knew who he was and he saw in their faces variations of Matthew Peoples, Matthew as a more elderly man with a similar terrain, those red-rivered cheeks and a mountain-peaked nose. Matthew’s eyes in a woman with hands a soft mink and her eyes alert to what she could see inside him. Matthew incarnate with no hair at all, the same eyes all rheumy and eyebrows thickened like slugs, and he tried to picture these together into an image of the dead man. When he came to Matthew Peoples’ wife, Baba, she bore him no face at all, stared right through him as if he were invisible. His hand unmet before her and faltering while the word sorry sat frozen on his lips. The woman was diminutive, like a little girl that never grew up and had begun twisting into old age with a face like bad fruit, her breath soured long ago from whiskey. She worked sometimes as a seamstress and was losing her hair and wore the remainder of it long and grey like a schoolgirl that came early to decrepitude. Matthew never spoke of her and Barnabas could not picture together the two of them, and though a gentle soul Matthew was he knew that it was she who doled out plentiful the hurt. He stared at the sheen of her scalp, a bad job she made at hiding it and he wondered why she was balding, and he thought of how stupid he looked with the hand outstretched and then Eskra came alongside him with her sore hands open to the world and she took in both of them the woman’s hand wholly.

The air outside bore the same chill as the church and the dimmed sun not even a smouldering coin. The mourners travelled on foot to the graveyard on a road that slanted southwards from the church, passed under a poplar tree that trembled as if it had a memory of leaves. They walked behind a carriage led by solemn stallions, the two horses risen out of slicks of oil all dark majesty with their black coats gleaming and their heads held haughty beneath a fan of raven plumage. Behind them on high sat two undertakers and they bore a solemn bearing more upright than Christian crosses and Barnabas watched them until he saw one of them lean over and sneeze. Eskra walking beside him red-eyed holding tightly onto Billy’s arm, the boy strapped with a sullen face. The wheezing in Barnabas’s chest had settled as if the creature inside him had gone mute and lay hunched, waiting. The dull music of shuffling feet and the brighter percussion of horse hooves ringing the silence while the wind blustered about them like an animal craving affection. Barnabas buttoned up his coat. People on the street stopped and stood with their heads bowed as the procession went through the town though the world went on as it was–a column of choughs in from the sea made aerobatic shapes above for anybody to watch, while a motorcar made a distant but purposeful whirr. From a room above the street could be heard a radio with a song and then a voice that had news of the war in Europe, news that seemed to every person there an event that was more rumour than truth, and the radio was switched off and then the bells of the church began to ring to the silence, sounded to him as if they were straining to be heard over an impossible distance, as if they were pealing to make sound to the dead.

Later, some people stood near the graveside speaking quietly while others drifted away and Barnabas met in passing Fran Glacken who stopped and searched him with his shooting red eyes, searched the man as if he were seeing over one of his animals. I see yer fixed up then, Barney. He turned to his two sons and motioned for them to follow. I must be heading on, he said. He called to his sister, Pat Glacken, who stood talking to Eskra. Pat was square and sexless, a spinster with a density about her frame as if her bones were made of thick wood and that density reached as far as her face. It knit her small eyes together behind glasses that slid down her nose. She was nodding solemnly to Eskra, while Eskra’s eyes flitted to watch Billy who was with some girl.

Barnabas turned and stood a minute watching the sky laid out in white cold sheets and the way of the swallowed sun and he saw there was no promise of the day warming. He heard someone step towards him and he turned and saw Goat McLaughlin resting his fierce eyes upon him as he approached rolling one of his talon hands through his beard. He dropped the hand out of the white floss and proffered it towards Barnabas and Barnabas took it and felt the skin like old wax paper.

Yes, Barnabas.

Yes, Goat.

The old man stood looking up at Barnabas and Barnabas reached into his coat and produced a rolled cigarette and Goat watched him take a soak of it, watched Barnabas cough and catch his breath again, and Barnabas watched him watching. Goat looked to the sky and nodded. Tis a cold day for it.

A heap of shit so it is.

Yer back up on your feet.

Someways.

Have you figured out yet what caused that fire?

Barnabas shook his head. Naw. I just canny figure it. Canny figure it at all.

You’re lucky that house of yours didn’t catch. The Lord in heaven in his mercy choose to spare you that.

Barnabas sucked on his cigarette and held inside him a cough, eyed the old man long, the rivering beard and the pink shine of bald head glimpsed under his cap. The Lord in heaven in all his mercy thought it just fine to kill all my livestock and take away my living and me with a family to feed. God of mercy and all that, he said.

The old man pulled at his white beard as if he was working free further thoughts for consideration and the corner of his small mouth tightened. And the life of Matthew Peoples, he said.

Barnabas glared.

Goat continued. There is a time in our lives Barnabas when all of us are tested, he said.

He leaned towards Barnabas and took a pinch of his coat and pulled him closer, leaned up to put a quiet word in his ear.

We all saw what Baba Peoples did to you up there.

Aye. What of it?

Well. I’m told to tell ye that the affair afterwards is a private house as far as it concerns you.

Barnabas straightened up and smiled but the smile was false and then it fell away again. The old man still held onto his coat. What kind of joke is that you’re saying to me?

I reckon you understand what I’m saying to ye. I’m told Eskra and the boy can go.

Barnabas pulled his arm free of the man’s grasp and stood to his full height.

But I was a friend of the man. His employer.

This is what I’m told. To tell you. That is all.

A crow alighted on the cemetery wall and tested the air with a quick fan of its wings. Out of its black-feathered coat it flashed metallic blues that shimmered spectrally, as if it bore other colours from an incorporeal part of its being. The bird turned and faced the crowd and cawed to them its birdspeak message but the thoughts of it were not heeded nor understood and with that the bird took wing. Barnabas cut the Goat a mean look like he wanted to skin him, parade around in that skin and then cut out of it with a knife. He sucked on his cigarette and drew it down into him harder and Goat watched as whatever it was housed inside Barnabas awoke and asserted itself with a movement that shook vex in his lungs and sent Barnabas violently to coughing. Barnabas saw the look of curiosity on Goat’s face and it was then that Billy appeared beside them, his skinny arms held loose. Jeez, I’m wild hungry so I am, he said. Barnabas hinged himself up out of the cough and glared at his son and tossed the cigarette, held himself still a moment as he summoned his words, and he leaned in to Goat and took two sniffs of air. Jesus, Goat, there’s a wild awful stink off you of pig shit.