The Black Snow (4 page)

Billy’s mouth dropped open as if the jawstrings had been cut. Goat turned in temper and began to step away and then he turned back quick and spoke. She says she couldn’t wash him, Barnabas. She says she couldn’t wash him.

He lay in bed curled sideways and nursed a cough and let his mind roam back to his earlier life. How he was one of the few
who had returned from America, the void that swallowed them whole. Bucked against the movement of history. Had returned aged thirty-three with a wife and child and the hard light of knowing in his eyes. Twelve years ago now that was. He knew then everything about steel but what he knew about farming was little but he had ideals and yearning and that was enough. To live again in this place that was once home. To build something up of this new country as he had done in New York. He took the boat to America as a youth cut off from all that he knew, carried great dark eyes that marked his face. You could catch in a rare moment a startle fixed permanent in his soul, a look he kept guarded, and perhaps what people saw in his eyes was the mark of grief. His mother succumbing first and then his father to tuberculosis. No brothers or sisters and when he was orphaned he was taken in by a childless sister of his mother’s who resented the intrusion. He didn’t last long, was sent to America on a boat with a letter addressed to a cousin, the year 1915, a time when some boys he knew not much older than him were travelling east across the water to fight the Hun. He lived with a cousin in Brooklyn who was a stranger to him and was put to work shouldering slack until his hands lost their white and he could not wash the dirt from his face and all he could do was sleep. And then the dark morning when he was sixteen and he rose silently to meet the shadows of the streets that did not return him.

He asked her how there could have been a fire, and she said, I do not know. And he said, these things don’t just happen, do they? There was nothing at all to start it. I just don’t understand. He was silent for a while and she watched him as he walked about the kitchen knuckling at his cheek and taking alternate sucks
of his cigarette. How in the hell can a fire like that take out a whole byre, kill off every living thing we own? All of our cattle? He clicked his fingers. Just like that. What did we do to deserve it? I did everything right so I did. I did what they told me to do for safety. I even moved that lime outside, that heap of it that I’d left in the byre. Matthew Peoples told me that under certain conditions it was combustible. The fucking joker. It’s lying there now up by the haggard cool and wet as mud. It weren’t dry enough for the hay to tinder. There wasn’t a bolt of lightning in that sky for I was out in it all day.

I don’t know, Barnabas. I just don’t know. It seems obvious to me it was some sort of accident. But there is no point thinking about it. What’s done is done. There is nothing we can do but move on.

He started coughing and when he stopped he continued and he said somebody must have started it, I just know.

She said, stop this now, Barnabas. You’re getting daft. What’s all this based on? She sighed. Barnabas, there’s nothing we can do to change this. As she looked at him she felt a tightness in her throat. We’ll make a claim for the insurance and we’ll build it all back again and it will be better than it was before.

He turned quickly to her. That thing with my not being invited back to the house, Eskra. After the funeral. You should have gone, Eskra, with the boy.

Not, Barnabas, after the way they treated you.

He stood staring at the wall for a moment as if it had opened before him to reveal some shining truth. Eskra, he said. They all think that I killed him.

The days wore on, the familiar noises of the farm playing only in their minds like the ghost of a thing they tried not to hear. Just
the wind that blew as if it had won its freedom to streel about the yard, a lazy drawl that skittered the dust on the flagstones and ruffled the feathers of the remaining chickens. Into the air went the black dust, catching on the breeze and flung blindly, onto the field, black spots cancerous on green that made the grass seem sick. Or it caught in the sills and put a smear on the glass obscuring the view so that looking out the kitchen window became a moment of memory, the day sliding back to the evening they kept trying to forget. Eskra staring out of the window with a crease in her brow. She took a bucket and filled it with soap and hot water from the kettle and washed the windows until they squeaked. She frowned as she worked, kept stopping to fix the drifts of hair that fell loose in her face, noticed how the water softened the scabs on her fingers. When she was done she took a newspaper and balled it and streaked it angrily across the window. Two days later the rims of the windows were dark again.

Every morning she would rise amidst the farm’s silence and leave him lying there in bed a sack shape. She would go to the fire and stir the coals awake beneath their ashy palls. Breakfast then and tea on the stove and she would resume cleaning. The more she cleaned the more she felt that what had been made unreal to her could be forced back into its old shape.

In the field beside the byre, dark birds swooped and settled. A black-dressed parade that made circles above the field incessant. She saw carrion birds thicken the scene, not living things at all but dark smudges as if what was yielded by the flames in some dream had become animate. When the daylight began to fade, the birds seemed to swell in their hundreds, made their scratchy meat-hungry song that sounded to her like the tearing of sinew. The cattle had begun to rot where they had fallen dumbly in the
fields, propped strangely on the grass at the unusual angles of their dying, the rib bones of one animal beginning to show like a swell of teeth. The birds feasting. She watched them from the window, told herself it was only nature, but looking at them she could not escape the hand of horror in her belly.

The plough still in the tapered field, poised with the lean of an animal in the moment before attack, its teeth bared waiting to tear at the neck of the earth, but it sat with a dog’s patience through days of raw cold and then rain and he had not the strength to go back to it. In those days after the fire the sun would climb up to its highest resting place before Barnabas would get out of bed and emerge downstairs coughing. He paced about the house and paced about the yard, Cyclop with one-eyed curiosity watching the directionless pattern of his footsteps, and Barnabas stared into the sloping face of the horse with its dark glass eyes and saw just himself reflected back as if he had been hammered out of shape.

He watched Eskra scrubbing the windows. Eskra washing the white gable wall of its smokedirt. Eskra sweeping soot from the yard. Eskra placing lavender about the house that to him had no effect, no colour, no smell. This place that was dead. He just stood around, smoked like he hated it, the fag between finger and thumb and his unshaven face puckering up as he sucked, his lungs sending to him short sharp messages of resentment. The smoke burned into him, seared him afresh, and when he was done with one fag and heeling it into the yard he had already withdrawn his tobacco tin from the shirt pocket and was rolling another. Eskra calling out to him to stop smoking. A suck and a grimace as he moved about the place, kicked the dog out of the way, sat on the step, stood up again coughing. Eskra watching
him from the window as he walked under his own cloud like the man’s thoughts had become manifest, disappearing into himself beneath it, away into his own darkness where even she could not reach. And when she worked the long tear-handled arm of the pump in the yard and the pump yawned and began to mouth water, he didn’t see her at all as she stood watching him, and when she closed the door she began to cry, saw then how everything could be lost.

I could hear the old man shouting at me from the byre that he needed help with the cattle but the Christmas market was on so I sneaked past him as if I were not there. I’m up the town then nosing about the stalls when I get talking to John the Masher, fucking pain in the hole so it was—there was me having a smoke thinking no one would give a shit and then someone comes behind me and yanks me by the lughole. It was that bastard teacher Broc so it was and he takes the fag out of me mouth and squashes it with his boot and then he lets me off giving me ear a twist. The Masher was watching the whole time and when teacher lets off The Masher sidles up and produces a fag for me from behind his ear. Hey sir he says. I’d heard The Masher was a bit funny in the head and there was an old story about him that when he were a squirt he took his wee infant sister for a walk and he let go of the pram and the pram went into the river and she were drowned. And he were never right in the head again. And when I asked the auld doll about that she said it weren’t true but that he probably went funny when his mammy died wild young and that his father was difficult. He seemed fine enough to me no smell of crazy off him at all but for his eyes one of which was flecked with a different colour of grey that did make him look a bit strange. And he didn’t really seem to be four year older. We went down the back lane and he climbs up over a wall and disappears into the back yard of Doherty’s Hotel never minding the dog that was in it and he comes back over with two bottles of Guinness.
We drank the two of them and the taste was bitter like bog water so it was but I kinda liked it made my head all dreamy. We got the giggles wild bad and then he says to me did you know we’re neighbours and then he calls me Billygoat and then he burps right after it. He starts to laugh and the way he laughs was like he was gurgling. His hair was curling wild like dark ferns off his head and his eyes could never settle on anything for a minute. I says to him aye Billygoat surely and I kick like one too. He didn’t seem to give a fuck about anything and straight off I knew he was more interesting than those other bucks my own age and he was able to get drink wild easy. Then the other day he calls around to the house and the auld doll has her hands in a bowl making the Christmas pudding and she looks at him like he were a dunty calf, gives me a pointed look when I went outside with him. Fuck her anyways the auld bitch. I can hear the old man in the byre shouting to the cattle and Big Matty Peoples is coming out the byre door and I put my finger to my lips to tell him to shush and run off quick before the old man sees me. We fucked off down to the Glenny river and I took Cyclop with us on a rope. Masher, he produces this big fuck-off knife a six-incher all curving like it were from an exotic storybook and he lets me hold it and I get my initials good into a tree. I ask him where he got it but he wouldna tell me and then he begins to dam up the river. It were only a stream really and he stands above it like he were lord and all over it and he slaps down moss-slimed stones and one of em falls out of his hands and splashes him. He rubs his hands dry on his trousers and leaves streaks of muck on em and leans back and laughs. He were off then and I followed and I took to wearing a fag in me ear like he were doing. I ask him where we were going and he just laughs again and says take the dog with us. I says that dog sure in hell will come with us anyway like it or not. We went off across the fields and the sky was growing dark and I kept Cyclop on the rope beside me. It were strange going up into the hills in the purpling light and I kept looking at the sky.
If you looked at the clouds a certain way they became like islands all misted and far away at sea and I imagined I was the captain of a ship travelling on a voyage towards them on an adventure. There was an auld twisty dirt track and we followed it and saw the darkening shape of a house just off it, I think it mighta been McClure’s place but wasna sure and there was a dog barking from the place but no lamplight to be seen. Cyclop going mad on the rope and The Masher leans over and takes the dog off me. We stay clear of that place anyhow, the pair of us blowing smoke towards those islands in the sky. The bog is so different at night. No fields at all just the roam of the land like no one ever set foot upon it and we got high enough to look down on all below, Carnarvan getting darker and the town far off and the last light on the bay. I’d heard there were old caves up there used by moonshiners and I wondered if that were where we were going. There was an energy off The Masher like something was wound up inside of him, like he could do anything and then he just starts shouting, roaring out curses at the sky and I begin to roar out too until he starts making up curses that make no sense at all and I tell him so and then we just laugh our holes off. Our voices rose upwards into the sky and for a moment we owned all what was of the world and took for ourselves purple heaven and its stars and when we stopped we heard how our voices were swallowed up by a silence that was total as if we never were. We walked on and then we came upon them. Fucking stupid things and in the light there were a kind of indigo and I could see Cyclop begin to change, sharpened up then like a wolf on the end of a rope, like he were awakening to a deeper nature. I seen him draw back his lips to reveal his teeth and the dog became a fuckin beast. The Masher lets go of the rope and shouts to the dog to go and get em and Cyclop goes off like a shot as if he didn’t need fuckin telling. It were hilarious watching the sheep stand there all stupid watching us and then scattering the way they did with the sweet fucking Jesus scared out of them. There was a sound like low
thunder made by their hooves on the heather and Cyclop goes after one of them and then begins making zigzags as though he needs the other eye he’s missing to help him make up his mind. The Masher ran after the dog shouting and hollering and the way he ran made his legs look like loose hinges without a door, and he were roaring and laughing the whole time. The dog snaps at the heels of a sheep and then turns for another and I was laughing at the mad sight of it and then the dog swings for one that came straight at him confused and he leaps at it and pulls it to the ground by the neck. The Masher came running with his arms flapping and he came up behind the dog and he made that big wobbling laugh like gurgling. There was more wind up where we were and when the scattered sheep stopped to watch us from a distance you could hear the wind whistling softly. That dog a yours is half blind but he’s a right wolf so he is says The Masher and he lets out into the air a great whoop. I realize then The Masher ain’t sick in the way they were saying he were sick, he is just wild as the wind is all. He has no stones tied to his feet like most others do. And I went up to the sheep to have a look and then wild quick I felt funny about her, the way she was lying there tamed and her eyes looking up at me like sometimes you see in a dog that’s cowering after a beating but I knew that sheep was dying for the throat was got out of her. And I went down low to her I donny know why but I put my hand on her belly. This one’s pregnant I said. I felt a sudden feeling sink inside me and saw Cyclop had lost interest and was walking about in circles sniffing at the air a true beast of the wild and not the plain dog at all we thought he was. The darkness now was more complete and the atmosphere of the place had changed to us. The Masher’s face was hid in the dark and when he came towards me I was wondering if he felt the same as I did but when I saw him up close I saw the same spirit in him pure as the dog. Just hunger in his eyes for more wildness. C’mon he says, let’s do it again and I says naw, I have to go home for my tea or the auld doll will kill me. We
stayed there a while all quiet. The sheep lying there being blown by the wind that gave it the appearance of shivering and I turned and saw then The Masher had started talking to himself real fast and I begin to wonder what the fuck is wrong with him and I canny make out a word he is sayin and next thing he just tears off running at full pelt. I stand up and look at him running down the hill and realize then he isn’t right in the head one bit and I turn and take another look at the animal, saw the way she was lying there useless with the throat torn out, the weirded angle of her head and her eyes lookin at me as if she were asking me for something, some kind of grace in her dying moment that I could not give her, and I could see her blood souse darkly the moss. The wee lamb inside her I nearly saw. I figure when I’m an old man I’ll read this here story I wrote and laugh at all the stupid things I done.