The Black Snow: A Novel

by Paul Lynch

  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 te
sted, 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.

  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 bel
ly. 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.