The Black Snow (9 page)

As she spoke, her voice dropped down to a whisper and she glanced over her shoulder. Listen, Baba. I gave you money for your husband’s funeral. It was the least we could do. But now all
our money’s gone, Baba. I have enough savings to put food on the table to last us for a while and that’s about it.

The woman slowly swivelled her head, took a long look at the house and its adjoining fields, and then her lips wore that dead smile again. That being what it is, Mrs Kane, how can all this be nothing?

Eskra sighed loudly. A soft stamp of her foot. That’s the way it is, Baba Peoples.

The older woman bore upon her a look of judgement, held it unblinking until Eskra turned away for relief and in the silence that fell between them Eskra heard carry on the wind sharp peals–hammer blows on metal that came from Peter McDaid’s farm. She counted seven soundings before Baba took a step towards her and held her with her yellowed eyes, shook slowly again her head before making a quick half smile.

That is a wild shame, she said.

A piece of turf in her hand baked dry by the wheel of fifty suns and she laid it on the fire. The cheek of that woman. How brazen coming around here asking for more money and the trouble we’re in as if she didn’t know anything about it. Speaking of Barnabas like that an absolute disgrace. She climbed up off her knees and dusted angrily her smock and her gaze fell upon their wedding photo crooked on the wall. She leaned her hand against the chair to straighten it, saw it momentarily as if she did not recognize herself or Barnabas, the way she was sat with her hair fashionably short and Barnabas plain and strong beside her. The man’s striking youth. Those thick-fingered hands spread on his lap and in his eyes a faint look of incomprehension, as if the photograph had been a surprise to him. A cow-lick of dark hair
over his forehead. She tried to recall the room or the face of the photographer but was met with an empty space of mind until she recalled the smell of fresh lacquer on the stairway.

She stood by the kitchen window later and caught sight of Barnabas, the man standing in the yard staring at the byre as if he saw in it something other than what it was. The way he turned in profile and for the first time she saw his stoop, a faint bend in the back as if he had taken upon him fully the weight of recent events, and she saw in her mind Barnabas as he was at the time of the photo. The full blaze of him. His pure physicality. Teaching him to dance in her mother’s front room in Vinegar Hill with the street light reaching in to couple with the yellowing of the lamps, guiding him around the room in the space between the pushed-back furniture–the old horsehair couch, a tray-top table–and the man in her arms stiff as the table’s cabriole legs, his inner workings as ornate as its carved putti if she could only work him out. Barnabas exhausted but making the effort. In the stiffness of his arms she could sense all that power coiled within him while her mother pretended not to watch through the half-open door to the bedroom. Duke Ellington on the record player. She would listen for the hobnail thunder of him climbing the stairs and then she would make him dance in his socks. The stink of your feet. The state of you. This man who could work all day on a tiny piece of plank with barely nothing beneath him but the drop to his own death and the fall in her own belly just to think of it. And here he was now stumbling nervous in her arms as if he could fall any moment. You can dance the sky, she said, but down here you’re all left feet. The big brute hands on you.

The newness of another body in the plain sight of an evening. And the things you lose later on–the sense of space between
bodies. How aware she was of the spaces between them–at the other side of the room by the table pouring tea. One cushion apart on the sofa. Dancing, the heat of her palm pressed against his. Eye to eye so close she could just about see herself in the dark centre of his pupil, a shadowy thing trying to find form within him. And the way his tanned skin gleamed in that fading light was still impressed upon her as if that moment of him had been conserved in perfect form within her not subject to time or forgetting. And as she saw him now in the yard with his stoop it came to her in a vision, the span of his entire life before her, and she saw in that moment the coming of his old age, his fading splendour, and what she felt then came up out of her unexpected, a surge of pity strong and true, and something else, a moment of white love that escaped from her like a bird.

He stood in his own dark, the night sky cloudless and bright with the distant beauty of stars that shone for him a measure of time impossible for his mind to see. To get away from all things. To slide out from under what was and disappear into the cool of the dark, reach the place of sound receding a soft and distant ping. The Austin was low on petrol but he took it anyway and drove it into town, parked it outside the saddler’s shop. Stood out of the car buckled darkly against the glass. Inhale of shoe leather and crinkled echoes of laughter from up the street. As he turned he saw a man coalesce slowly from a lane, the figure lopsided and coming towards him inebriate, some slop form of human that turned out to be the saddler. He watched the man come to a stop looking down upon his huge waist, trying slowly to belt his trousers. The leather long enough for four widths of him and Barnabas watched him in wonder, saw how he had to loop the
belt around his girth twice and then the long struggle to buckle it, the saddler making a low groaning sound all the while as if this single moment was not a man at his most ordinary but the lowest of him.

A chalk-dust moon lay scattered upon the street and Barnabas made towards The Bridge bar, heard rise from it an assault of loud laughter, knew it to be Fran Glacken. Three youths that hovered by the doorway looked at him. They held cupped in each hand a fag and their faces were hid under their caps. One of them spoke. Yes, sir.

Yes, boys, he said.

The youth stepped forward. Ye wouldn’t go in would ye and get us a wee naggin? He held out a note.

Barnabas shook his head. What makes you think I’m going in?

He walked past them up the street until he came to the door of another public house, a place called Tully’s. He stood and listened to its quiet for a moment. The place was crouched and dark and the air hung with turf must. In the corner glowed a sunken fire. As he came towards the counter a fat yellow candle guttered at him, stood in a solid pool of its own waste. There was standing room for no more than ten men and he saw two youngsters at the bar near hid in their own smoke. They talked quietly between themselves and he did not know their faces, figured them for farm labourers. The wooden stool complained when he drew it back and he nodded to the barkeep. Yes, Annie, he said. The old woman eyed him without smiling. He saw in her face an appointment with death, the impress of her skull through paper skin, cheeks like sundered sails from the loss of her teeth. Safeguarded in her eyes though was a fighting spirit. She slid off a stool to fix him a pint and watched him slake it in
two long drinks. He wiped his chin with his sleeve and looked at her. She took the glass and refilled it and put it back in front of him, took a chequered towel and began to dry glasses. When she was done she sat back down on the stool and hung a pipe from the wrinkles of her mouth. A side door opened and an old man slid out. His ears were red seashells and his chin bore sprouts of thick whiskers and he carried in his hand a hatchet. He stood to the far end of the counter that had a hole in it the width of a man as if something had risen to bite a piece out of it. He swung at the hollow with his hatchet and the grinning blade bit the wood with a wallop and Barnabas flinched. He watched the old man collect the flitches of counter wood and go back out the door. Barnabas sucked on the pint and lit a pre-rolled cigarette, blew a draft of smoke towards the low ceiling that hung there in slow turmoil. He looked at the old woman and nodded towards the counter.

I can see that being a problem down the line, he said.

Annie Tully lit him with a glare. Mind yer own business, Barnabas.

Her face changed as soon as she spoke and she leaned in towards him. I’m sorry, Barnabas. I didn’t mean that. It was a terrible thing happened to yous.

What’s that you’re talking about now, Annie?

She saw something in the look he gave her had the smell of trouble off it.

What happened up on the farm.

Oh that, he said.

He screwed his eyes at her and let her talk and as she talked he saw clearly the ancient scores in her skin as if she had been marked up in her old age for some benediction. Her throat a
cross-hatch of lines and the wrinkles around her mouth held within them the shadows of the pub.

And never mind what people are saying about ye. This town. People jabber on just to make sound for their ears. They’re always at it. I don’t pay them any heed. And neither should you.

He concentrated on her words and his breathing slowed up in accordance and he leaned in towards her, trussed her up good where she stood with his eyes. And tell me now, Annie. What is it people are saying about me?

She tried to retreat, found she couldn’t and he took a read of her face, saw she knew she had gone too far. She shrugged, withdrew back to her chair. You know how it is, she said.

I don’t, Annie. Goan tell me.

Annie picked up the towel again and began to fumble with it till she hitched up her voice. I don’t like your tone.

He leaned into her and his voice rose up like he didn’t give a damn. Is it that they’re saying I’m responsible for a man’s death? Is that it? Is that what they think? That I went out and deliberately killed a man? Sent him in to do my dirty work? That I stood there like some cunt and sent Matthew Peoples into the fire? I was in there too you know. I went in there after him. I was nearly kilt by it too only for Peter McDaid. That man just about got me out so he did and he didn’t make no decision about who he was choosing for there were no choices to be made. That smoke in there was thicker than hell. I might as well have died, Annie, because I lost it in there and went black.

The young men to his side began to look around and the old woman cut them a dangerous look. She relit her pipe and was silent a while as she toked on it and then she spoke. How is Eskra taking it?

Barnabas took a long drink. I’m beginning to think that fire was started deliberate. Things like that just don’t start on their own.

The old woman eyed him and shook her head, turned to the stall of drinks and poured a glass of whiskey. She put it down softly in front of him. Hearken to me here now, Barnabas. This one’s on the house. I know you’re down on yourself but there ain’t no point trying to blame others for what happened even though it’s natural. What’s done is done. It happened the way it did even if you don’t know what caused it. If I were you I’d be careful of trying to find blame for things for I know only too well it can lead you up the wrong path.

She sucked on her pipe and saw it had gone out again, leaned forward and sparked a match to it. If there’s one thing I know from my long years on this here earth it is that people can’t stop making up stories about things. We are natural speculators. We dream stories in our dreams and are convinced there is meaning there for us. We see our own lives as something from a book with beginnings and endings. We tell ourselves that everything that happens to us is part of our story. It’s a devil in us, this making things up. All the time people don’t know what causes things but we go on as if we do. And here’s the thing, Barnabas, we don’t even know we are doing it. Ask yourself, how often when you were sick did you tell yourself with certainty what caused it? Or where you picked it up? Or who gave it to you? As if you are privy to such information.

She watched him staring at her. All this jumping to conclusions is dangerous business if you ask me. I’ve seen so many times that there are things in this life that are outside our purview. Yet that doesn’t stop us reaching into the dark for answers and telling ourselves they are true. You’d be better off, Barnabas,
staying away from that kind of thinking. It’ll lead to nothing but trouble so it will. Ask yourself, how many times have you been totally wrong about something? How many times? All the time, I’m sure, and yet I’ll bet you don’t remember. I’ll bet you only remember the times you were right. But a stopped clock gets the time right twice a day too.

She took a suck of her pipe.

If I’d known I was going to get a lecture, he said.

Unless you have hard information before you, Barnabas, there is no point trying to pin the cause of that fire on people, or ghosts, or any other things. It can only lead to pure trouble so it will.

Barnabas sat there eyeing her intensely, but behind his tight lips he was grinding on his teeth. Oh right, he said. You’re saying just to forget about the burning down of my livelihood. That it was some sort of accident was it? And leave it at that? An act of God? Nature’s diddling thing?

He took the glass and swirled it until it stormed circular and he sunk it whole and put the glass back down. He leaned slowly towards her, scald of whiskey down the back of his throat, and he held her eye until he saw the melt of her hard stare and in the folds of her neck a quiver.

Let me tell you, Annie. You can tell a wild lot, a wild lot from people. The way they behave. Or the way they don’t behave. It’s in the not behaving when things are going on around them that is telling. Isn’t it? Don’t you think that’s so?

The old woman stared at him and blinked.

All I know is there’s some cunts behaving what I’d call strange. And there were people who didn’t come to help put out that fire even though they could see it good and rightly. People who would have good reason to hurt me so they would.

The woman kept her silence and Barnabas stood suddenly. He shook his head and put coins on the counter. I’ve had enough for tonight, he said. I’m going home to me wife.

She travelled the yard with her arms to her chest, her fingers smelling of apples. He did not hear her come behind him when she cornered him at the new shed, spun around to meet her as if she were the bearer of malice. She saw how he tensed and his breathing tightened, his eyes fixed quick to the points of a knife.