The Killing Snows

by Charles Egan

  ‘But how…?’

  ‘How? Well you might ask, Luke. Yes, how? By visiting the houses where they’re dying, that’s how. It’s all in their faces – the faces of dead children. The pain is all in the dying, but Christ is with the dead. Maybe I’m hoping I’ll get fever myself. All the pain, all the agony, spare me nothing, just suffer and die. And then, when there’s no more living to be done and no more dying, then I might understand it all. Then I might see…’

  He stopped.

  ‘Then I might see…’ he repeated, but he choked on the words, and said nothing more.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Telegraph or Connaught Ranger, December 1846:

  Great Fall of Snow. We have not had for many years such a great fall of snow as that with which we are at present visited. On Friday it commenced to snow in Castlebar, and, with little intermission, it has since continued to fall. In some parts of the neighbourhood, the snow is from seven to ten feet deep. The Works under the Labour Act have been now checked, and thousands, whose only means of support depended on such labour, are left homeless, without fire, as fuel is so dear, none but the rich can think of buying it.

  An hour later, the rest of the family got up. Before they ate, the priest told them he would say Mass. He consecrated the house.

  ‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ Durcan said.

  ‘Oh, you can do it alright, Timothy. It’s just that it’s not often done.’

  They pulled the rough table to the side of the kitchen.

  ‘We’ve no wine,’ Mrs. Durcan said.

  ‘We’ll have water so. Christ turned water into wine, didn’t he?’

  ‘Did he?’ she asked, uncertain.

  ‘He did. Now do you all want Communion?’

  ‘Communion,’ Durcan echoed. ‘We only do that at Easter.’

  ‘No reason not to do it now.’

  ‘We haven’t been a day fasting.’

  ‘We’ve all been fasting enough this long time.’

  The family stood as he started to say the Mass.

  ‘Introibo ad altare Dei…’ I enter to the altar of God.

  For half an hour, he continued through the Latin liturgy. Then he stopped. He turned to Mrs. Durcan and asked for a small slice of brown bread. He broke it into separate parts and consecrated them. Then he motioned Mrs. Durcan to move forward. She did so, still carrying a small baby which had been suckling at her breast. She knelt.

  ‘Corpus Christi,’ the priest said. Body of Christ.

  He laid the grey-brown fragment on her tongue.

  She stood, and Durcan knelt.

  ‘Corpus Christi.’

  The three older Durcan children followed.

  ‘Corpus Christi.’

  ‘Corpus Christi.’

  ‘Corpus Christi.’

  Luke knelt last. The priest bent down to him.

  ‘Corp Chríost,’ he whispered in Luke’s ear.

  ‘Corp Chríost,’ Luke repeated, and stood.

  Next morning, Durcan shook him awake.

  ‘I’ll need a hand, we’ve work to do.’

  Luke sat up. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘We haven’t enough wood in. You’ll have to help me, it’s too much for one man.’

  Tired and groggy, Luke got up and put on his overcoat. He flinched as he stepped outside into the freezing cold. The storm had passed over, but there was still a strong wind.

  ‘Where’s the wood then?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s around the corner. I should have thought of it before.’ He handed Luke a shovel.

  They worked at shovelling snow for the next hour. The fresh snow was lying on top of a hard crust of ice. It was hard work. After an hour, the priest joined them. There were only two shovels though, and Luke insisted that Durcan should go back inside to warm up, while he and the priest continued the work. ‘I’ve never felt cold like this,’ the priest exclaimed.

  ‘No,’ Luke said, ‘and I think we’ve got it for the day. It isn’t going to warm up too much, that’s for sure.’ They worked on. The hard labour warmed them against the intense cold. They stopped at last, gasping.

  ‘Look,’ the priest said, after he had got his breath back, ‘I’m sorry about the other night. It was silly.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘Yes, it was. I want you to forget all about it.’

  ‘How can I forget?’

  ‘Now you’re the one’s being silly.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I can’t just order myself to forget, can I?’

  ‘I suppose you can’t,’ the priest said. ‘But you mustn’t ever tell anyone.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Promise me.’

  ‘I promise,’ Luke said.

  They worked on. Then the priest stopped again. ‘There’s something else I have to say sorry for,’ he said.

  Luke stopped. ‘You’ll have a lot of penance for all these ‘sorrys’ of yours. What is it this time?’

  ‘Your father.’

  ‘That’s not your fault.’

  ‘No,’ the priest said, ‘but I should have thought of it all when I was going on with all that nonsense about dying the other day. It wasn’t fair to you.’

  ‘Arra, don’t worry about it,’ Luke said. ‘I wasn’t even thinking that way.’

  Durcan came back out and took the shovel from the priest. Luke insisted on working on. Their path through the snow went over the manure heap where the snow was less deep. The manure was frozen solid. When they came to the gable, the snow was nearly the height of the house. As they dug through it, it kept collapsing, and there was more work in clearing it than there had been in front of the house. In the middle of the day, they came in, and Mrs. Durcan served them a thin meal of cabbage, turnip and gritty Indian corn.

  ‘We’re just about there,’ Durcan said. ‘All we’ve got to do now is to get the logs back.’

  After eating, Luke and Durcan joined the priest and the rest of the family at the fire.

  ‘Ye’d better heat yourselves up first,’ Mrs. Durcan said. ‘We don’t want you dropping in the snow now.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Luke said, holding the his hands in towards the fire. ‘Have ye ever seen anything like it though?’

  ‘Never,’ Durcan replied. ‘The cold’s bad enough, and there’s no sign of it stopping. But the snow is worse.’

  ‘It is,’ the priest said. ‘It’s like it’ll never stop. I heard an old fellow the other day saying it’s as bad as the year of the Great Frost, and that was a hundred years ago. If it goes on like this, it’ll be worse than they had then.’

  ‘I reckon it’s worse already,’ Durcan said.

  The three men went back outside and began throwing the logs back towards the front corner of the house. As a pile built up there, Durcan started throwing it half the length of the house. As darkness fell, they were building up cords of logs along the front wall on either side of the door.

  That afternoon the snow returned, blown on a violent gale. When Luke stepped out, his face was peppered with snow. The north end of the cabin had disappeared under a drift. Once again he relieved himself on the frozen manure heap, and fought his way back in.

  ‘We can’t be going out any more in this wind,’ he said to the family.

  ‘Sure why bother,’ Durcan said. ‘The cattle don’t.’

  Luke sat at the fire that evening, listening to the screaming storm. It brought back memories of the big wind of 1839 and Alicia’s horrifying death. Carrigard? Fever?

  At least the house was warm now. There was little extra work that could be done besides clearing out the manure from the cows’ end of the house, and this did not take the three men very long. Sometimes over the next few days, Luke sat at the table, adding up columns and finishing out the worksheets. When he had done that, he started preparing
the worksheets for the next few weeks. Again, there was little enough work involved, and he knew he was making work to keep his mind off other things.

  At last the wind died, and the snow stopped. As the sky cleared, the surface of the drifts turned slushy, but that night there was a heavy frost, and it froze hard again. Next morning, Luke discovered that the drifts were rock solid on top. Gingerly he started to climb, and found that they held his weight. Slipping and scrambling, he made his way towards the gable end until he was higher than the cabin itself. At the other end, the chimney was surrounded by snow, but the smoke still drifted skywards.

  To the west there was an unbroken blanket of snow all the way to the black ocean. He looked back towards Croghancoe. He could see no cabins at all, only tiny mounds in the snow. No smoke rose from the dead white mountain.

  That day, the priest started to refuse food. ‘It isn’t fair,’ he explained to Durcan. ‘It’s your food, you’ve got a family to feed, and ye weren’t expecting us to come in on you like this.’

  Mrs. Durcan protested, but he would not relent. ‘A little penance might be good for me,’ he said. ‘The Lord knows, I’ve enough reason for it.’

  That night, on Mrs. Durcan’s request, he heard confessions for the entire family, and absolved them from all sin.

  The next day, Luke too refused food. He reasoned that if the priest could fast, there was no reason he could not. He might have been less concerned about his eternal soul, but he too felt he could not take food from those who had little enough themselves. There were other reasons too. Pay back the debt and understand the suffering? Perhaps.

  He felt the gnawing pain of hunger again. It brought him back too to 1840. Now he was eating nothing. But he was determined about it. He knew his body could survive another week or two. After three days, it became easier as his stomach shrank, and he no longer felt hungry.

  The snow had returned, gentler now, infilling all hollows and climbing higher up the walls. Soon the house was covered, and only the heat of the fire kept the chimney open. Sometimes Luke would stare up to see if it was night or day. The silence outside was total. Inside, the air was a dank fug of smoke, sweat and the stink of cows, urine and manure.

  Often they sat around the table, talking quietly in the light of the fire. Sometimes it was about the hunger, the fever and the dying. Durcan and the priest would talk of those who had already died, the kind of men and women they were, and their role in the area around them. Luke hardly followed these conversations, he didn’t know the people they talked about, though from time to time he would remember some that he had met on the Works or in the cabins on the mountains.

  The priest started to question Luke about his time on the railways in England. At first this brought a welcome distraction to the whole family, and the elder Durcan children were fascinated by Luke’s stories. But as time went on their interest lessened, and he lapsed into silence.

  But even through their fasting, as he and the priest felt the effects of hunger, Luke continued to question the priest about his life and his beliefs. Some days they would sit on their stools nearer to the cattle, whispering. The priest started to talk of things that he would not discuss with anyone else. But he never again referred to what he had hoped to see when it was all over, and Luke was too wise to press him on the point.

  At nights Luke often lay awake, staring into the darkness. It was no longer the lack of food that worried him though. He could not keep his mind away from Carrigard and the horror of fever. Perhaps they would all be dead by the time he arrived back. He knew that he had no way of knowing this, but the uncertainty only made it worse. It created a new nothingness inside him.

  One night the foxes came again, this time with rats. He cried out in his nightmare, and bolted upright. The fear drained out of him, but he still sat, hunched over his knees, looking down to the glowing remnants of the fire. He thought of Winnie and a future when the snows and hunger would be gone. There was a way forward. There would come a time when life would be worth living again.

  The next day, the snow started to thaw. That night, the three men sat around the fire, talking. In the corner, Mrs. Durcan was crooning to the youngest child. Even without Luke and the priest, what the family was eating was little enough. The children were hungry too.

  ‘What will you do when the snow’s over?’ Durcan asked him.

  ‘What can I do? We’ll have to reopen the Works, you and me, as soon as the snow is gone. We just have to keep going.’

  ‘And don’t forget, you’ve got to go and see Morton,’ the priest said.

  ‘Aye,’ Luke said. ‘And a week late too. What will he think of that, the bastard?’

  Two days later, they dug their way out. Fresh clean air flooded the cabin. Outside the sun was shining, reflecting off the wet snow. Luke scrambled up to the top of the manure heap, and looked across to the mountains. The cabins and sceilps of Croghancoe were visible again. Smoke was spiralling from two of the cabins. From the rest of the settlement there was nothing.

  ‘Croghancoe?’ He spun around. The priest was behind him.

  ‘Yes. I was looking to see if they had fires burning.’

  ‘They didn’t have much money for fuel.’

  ‘That’s for certain,’ said Luke. ‘Nor any way of getting it if they had.’

  ‘God help them all,’ the priest murmured.

  As the thaw continued, Durcan and the priest organised men to bring the bodies down from Lisnadee. Luke rode down towards Brockagh. As he rode, snow slid off branches, and water dripped off the trees into the melting drifts. The trees were wet, their skeletal branches showing black against a grey sky.

  Mrs. Gallagher and Winnie helped him to dismount. He leant on Winnie’s shoulder as she led him into the cabin. She sat him on a stool by the fire.

  ‘We were worried about you,’ she said. ‘We’d heard there’s terrible weather up the mountains.’

  ‘The worst snow I’ve ever seen. We’ve had to stop the Works.’

  ‘Was it that bad?’

  ‘Terrible. Nine more dead, frozen to death on the Works. It’s just murder. Bloody murder.’

  He put his head in his hands, his body shaking. Winnie led him inside, She stood beside him, squeezing his shoulder as Mrs. Gallagher started to prepare corn and rice. Bernie and Frankie looked on in wonder. They had never seen a man cry before.

  ‘What happened?’ Winnie asked. ‘Tell me about it.’

  He put his hand on her hand, trying hard to stop shaking.

  ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t eaten for so long.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what’s wrong with you, it’d be enough to worry any man. But don’t worry, a ghrá, we’ll have food inside you quick enough.’

  ‘I know. But there’s other things too. Father has fever, Father Nugent told me. I just can’t get that out of my head. Who else will have it now? And I won’t be able to find out anything till I get down to Knockanure.’

  ‘Wouldn’t your brother know? Why don’t you send him a message to him.’

  ‘No need. I’ll be going down there tomorrow.’

  ‘Well then, don’t worry, you’ll be knowing soon enough.’ She sat at the table, and pulled him down onto the bench beside her. For a long time he said nothing, staring hard at the ground.

  ‘You’ve got more on your mind, Luke.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘go on.’

  ‘You’re right, it’s not just Father. It’s what’s been happening on the Works. I saw terrible things in the mountains, I never told you about that, I didn’t want to. But I never saw anything like the last few weeks. I was the one who was supposed to be in charge. I was the one that was supposed to stop it, but I couldn’t. What could I do? I couldn’t feed them food I didn’t have, I couldn’t stop the cold. When the snow started, I tried to shut the Works, but they wouldn’t have that. I th
ought it would be better for them, at least they could stay in their cabins, keep warm. But they were frightened. They thought I’d never come back. They had no money, and they thought they wouldn’t be able to buy food again. Nor wood to burn neither, they’ve only scraws of heather and turf, and little enough of that. It’s not just the fever and the hunger, it’s the cold too.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Father told me about Ardnagréna.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, but it wasn’t as bad as what you’re saying. One old woman died, and God knows, it’s one too many. But you’ll hear all about it soon enough. You go on, tell me what happened next.’