The Black Snow: A Novel

by Paul Lynch

  Barnabas shook his head. That woman.

  He stood silent for a moment. Will you come in for a wee sup?

  I would but I’ve a huge shite in me that’s dying to get out and I donny want to do it in your outhouse. You’d need a bucket of Jeyes.

  The big dirty hole on you.

  The men laughed. Barnabas called out to Cyclop and saw the dog ignoring him. He turned and pointed. That useless fuckdog. Never does what he’s told. McDaid squinted, saw the dog snouting the field under a burst of ragwort yellow, and he turned and began to walk off. Barnabas called out thanks and McDaid waved a big dirty hand into the air as if the work meant nothing. He slung the shovel over his shoulder and began to march leg-high like a soldier. I’m off to take Berlin, he roared out, pulled the shovel off his shoulder and began to fire it like a gun. Barnabas roared out. Say hi to the Jerry for me. He turned and went back into the field and walked towards Cyclop, saw the dog holding something in his mouth. Come here to me, you, he said. The dog in plain sight ignoring him. Saw when he came up close what Cyclop held in his mouth was a cattle bone.

  Through the window she saw them. Three shapes roaming the yard, two men and a boy. The men were strange-looking, grey and hard as if they had stepped out of hills formed by intense heat and pressure, and when they began rummaging through the byre an invisible hand tightened around her heart. One of the men stood so tall and gaunt she saw something in the way he held himself that evoked in her an ineffable sadness. He moved through the rubble with his long arms swinging sadly, went at the stones as if his hands contained teeth, could have been some kind of peculiar ruminant, rummaging the byre’s remains for food. The other man was steady and stout, wore a porkpie hat, moved about the place with the quick feet of a goat.

  She called out to Barnabas upstairs but he made no answer and she shouted again and then she opened the back door and stepped out. She went towards them hesitant, each hand beaked birdly up her sleeves. Dark rust of hair on the boy and she saw he whispered something quick to the others when he saw her. The stout man turned, made a step towards her, took off his black-brim hat that wore an emerald feather clean as a blade. His voice was hoarse, came at her in strange, fast-talking cadences she could barely understand. No trouble at all meant to you missus just looking for some scraps from the burning, wild bad so it is. She heard in his voice notes of foreignness and colour. What she saw in his eyes was earnestness, and something else, a quality as if he was bearing up with fighting shoulders some ancient curse or weariness. Thick lips as he spoke and the flash of yellow teeth and the stubble on his face was dark and almost bearded. As he spoke the tall man turned around to look, held draped in his hand a piece of warped metal like a wilted flower that had died to his touch.

  Sure you know how it is missus, my own missus isn’t well and please be to God she’ll get better and we got through the winter tough as it was with God’s help and thank goodness for the spring, anything at all now from the burning might help us you’re very kind. Suddenly he produced a smile that reached up gibbous. The tall man kept his quiet and averted his eyes to the ground when she looked at him. The boy stood where he was and she found herself looking at him, saw that his clothes were threadbare like those of the others. The boy pure of face with crooked yellow teeth gapped widely, freckles that shone from his face like inverse stars. She saw a change come quick in the boy’s countenance, a worried look that flashed in his eyes and she heard Barnabas before she turned, saw him storming past her towards them with his arms rolling boulders. The short man rose a hand up in hello and went to speak, got the words out of him, howareya sir we meant no harm, but Barnabas was already upon them. Get to fuck off my land, he said.

  Eskra saw the boy and what was pure of spirit became a darkening thing as if he had witnessed the blooming of evil. She turned to Barnabas and cast him a look he read from her as a warning to back down, but he took no heed, and he said to the strangers, go on, get, pointing towards the gate. Eskra’s voice fell away from her. The men lowered their heads and the boy cast Barnabas a petrified look and the gaunt man began towards their horse and cart on the road. The stout man began talking. We meant you no harm so we didn’t no harm at all sir praise God and may the Lord look after your house and everyone in it, may there be a year’s blessing upon it and no harm meant to yous at all God bless.

  Later, she stood over the sink and noticed her hands were shaking. Through the bluing glass of sundown she saw the remains of the byre that sat to her like some kind of depravity. She let drop a cup into the water. When she spoke her voice came loose, a coiled spring that stung him where he sat. I did not marry the bastard you’re becoming, Barnabas Kane.

  Barnabas in the range chair straightened up, folded over the paper, did not answer, did not look at her either.

  They were only good people. Poor is all. Tinker folk. What did you have to do that for? she said.

  She turned and faced him and he stood and turned his head as if he planned to leave the room but then his head snapped around to her, the look in his eye measuring the fight left in her. Them people? he said.

  There’s nothing out there but scraps of wood and metal and cracked stones. What would you be wanting with them? That thing staring down at us every day. An abomination. Why wouldn’t you want to get rid of it?

  Their kind are good for nothing, Eskra. They roam around living off others. These are lean times. We need what we have round here. That’s all there is to it.

  Why couldn’t you let them take what they need? That byre will be rebuilt without any of what’s there. Why did you have to be so rude to them?

  I’ll tell you why, Eskra. It’s because they’re insects. Parasites is what they are. None of them ever work. I’m sick of them traipsing around the countryside eating up everything with their eyes. Should be rounded up the lot of them. The smell off them.

  Eskra’s shook her head in disbelief. Many’s the time I talked to Matthew Peoples about them and he had great time for them. Said they were full of uses.

  Matthew Peoples was a half-baked fool.

  He saw her mouth and eyes open as if to let in more light against the darkness that came from his mouth. What do you mean by that? she said.

  That’s not what I meant.

  What did you mean then? He saw her eyes set down to disdain. Do not speak ill of the dead like that. Weren’t you the one after all who sent him in?

  Barnabas’s mouth opened like his tongue had been yanked out of him. Billy came into the room and asked what time it was and began to saw at the bread. Barnabas tried to speak, shook his head violently. After all the work I done yesterday burying them cows. You think that was easy? He pulled at the back door and left her standing, went up to the byre and took the snake-twisted metal that had been left lying on the ground by the gaunt stranger and threw it off the wall. The metal pinged a brief high note that rose into the evening silence and then dulled fast like it never was.

  He stepped out of the house and could not read the sky. The weather withdrawn into a nilness that was wan and made him tense with unknowing. Everywhere he saw foreshadows of rain and opposing signs of sun held in slivers and when he looked again towards what he thought were such signs, everything he saw could be read otherwise. Eskra was still sullen with him. She spoke one thing, told him to take the car on account of his lungs. He walked towards the Austin and saw the breeze dance detritus and dust at his feet in leaps little like a child’s playing. He drove determinedly, choked the car’s gears, leaned over the wheel into his thoughts, followed the main road in the direction towards the town for a half mile. The road skirted patchwork fields of cattle and sheep he saw if only by his refusal to acknowledge them. It seemed to him that spring should not keep.

  Strange these days to see a car on the road on account of the petrol rationing, and walkers or those in the fields turned to see who it was. They saw him hunched over the wheel and he wagged unseeing a finger at them. He took a turn-off where the land leaned down lazy like a barren a
fternoon and he turned then onto a lane. Gravel muttering under his wheels and he followed the way made dark by deciduous trees until the doctor’s house loomed before him. A two-storey house with a small extension that led to the doctor’s surgery. He parked in the lee of the gable wall, sat in the car and did not get out. Sat there and looked up at the wall. Upon it a tree made a shadow drama of lightning invert that fired darkly without sparks towards the roof. He looked for his tobacco and rolled a cigarette, coned the smoke out his nose without coughing. Took another drag and noticed the settle in his lungs. There you go, doctor. Not a bother on me. He rolled down the window and flicked the butt out onto the stones and watched it snuff out, heard the surgery door open. He started the car quickly, clanked the gears into reverse. An old woman bending over a boy came out the door.

  He drove towards the town that rose greyly into a ragged shape upon a hill. Two-storey houses lined each side of the road in rising uniform fashion. He made his way to the centre of the town and parked where the streets converged into the shape of a warped cross. He walked past the hardware store where an old man nodded to him, the fellow sitting on a chair with his legs spread out like he had groin pain, nursing in his mouth a limp unlit cigarette. Barnabas stopped and lit it for him, stepped into the post office, fished from his pocket a letter from Eskra addressed to her mother in New York. The small black script neat as calligraphy had smudged. Would be opened no doubt by the sister. He posted it and went towards the butcher’s, stopped outside, heard the bone-snap of a cleaver, stepped in. Gag of meat smell that hit him. He stared at the floral tiles on the wall and made his order and tried not to breathe for the meat smell that persisted and wove into him its reminder of death.

  He went back to the car and put the meat on the seat and rolled down the window. As he reversed the car, rain came with a sudden temper and he looked at the window and left it open. As he drove the rain sprayed his face and put a slick upon the road. Soon the surface shined and made the reflection of the car passing over it a sleek tremulous thing, the shadow of an animal fleeing half seen. In the film of rain everything that was held in it shimmered as if the shadow image of things were themselves alive—solid-stiff trees made trembling and buildings quivering as if that which was solid of the earth was not solid any more.

  He took the turn off the main road and followed the track for the half mile towards his house, parked and put on his cap and got out. He stood under the rain and listened to it make music with his hat. His eye followed the downpour towards the mountains and he saw their dark countenances near hid behind cloud. He reached into the front seat and took out the grease-paper with the meat cuttings inside and stepped into the house. He did not note the strange settle of the place, how the radio that usually hummed with music or chatter was hushed, how even the clocks seemed careful. He hung his coat on the coatrack’s curling tongue and his hat on a hook. As he lifted the package off the bureau he noticed a trickle of thinning meat blood leak towards the floor. Fuckdog, he said. He hurried with it into the kitchen and walked past the shape of Eskra in the range chair, put the meat into the Belfast sink. Said to her, the meat’s leaking all over the place, goan get the mop for me.

  She did not answer, sat where she was. He saw she was sitting with her hands flat on her thighs, the way she was staring blankly at the wall. What’s the matter? he said. No answer came and she did not move her head to meet his eyes and he wondered then if she knew he had not visited the doctor. Billy not yet back from school. What’s the matter? he said again. He walked towards her but she averted her eyes from him and pointed. He looked towards the deal table and saw on it a letter opened, knew then what it was, felt his stomach sicken and the veer of an abyss unseen came suddenly towards him. He stood looking at the letter as if by not moving he could put a hold on time and the event in the room that was unfolding, but the mantel clock took opposition to that thought and began to unfold the mechanism for the bell that would chime for quarter past, a preparatory stretching sound and then it clicked and the clock made note of the time passing, and he knew he would have to say something.

  She spoke then. I wrote to them not knowing. Asking them for the forms. Writing to them all kindly like some kind of stupid woman I am. They must have laughed at that letter all right. Must have passed it around in there. Laughed at me like I was a fool.

  Eskra—

  You cancelled the insurance last year without telling me.

  His legs grew heavy like he was stood in manure to the waist and he turned slowly on the ball of his foot and his chest began to tighten, could feel the manure pooling towards his throat. He took a deep breath and his mind roamed but was unmet with answers and his eyes swung wildly to the brown-tiled floor, to a fly resting still against the window, to the place that was newly wallpapered, anything but the shape of her. The shriek of her eyes. He tried to speak and he had to clear his throat and then the words turned solid and he spoke. I never thought we would need it so I cancelled it. It was a waste of money at the time. We needed it for other things.

  And then she was coming at him out of the chair and he stood and met it, the flat of her hand that caught him on the cheek and the slap made his eyes water, could feel the sting as if her hand had been left in the fire to brand him. She took off out of the room but her voice reached him bitter as she mounted the stairs.

  You thought everything could be good for ever. That you were made now, Mr Big Shoes. That all the work was done. In your mind nobody dies and nobody grows old and there is no sign of winter. What in your stupidity have you done to us?

  He stood looking at the door, blinked dumbly. A door slammed upstairs. In the sink a trickle of blood threaded slowly across the white enamel, made a small bubble, slicked across the metal flange and slipped slowly, silent down the dark drainhole.

  He slept self-imposed that night in the car and in the dream from which he has awakened he is asleep still in the Austin. He is parked somewhere he does not know for the windows are smeared against the greased light of the morning and he lies across the two front seats somewhat foetal, his knees tucked under the steering wheel and silence but for the leather that complains beneath him when he begins to sit up, his breath frosting the air, his arms tucked about his body for the cold has nestled into him while he was asleep and he can feel it now in his bones–old-man cold like a body about to be beaten–the window rivered with condensation so that he cannot see out and that smothering of grey light and something beneath it, distant like dark mountains, and he tries to start the car but it will not catch–the engine coughing like it is sick and then with a rattle it cuts silent–and he tries it again but this time it is dead and he decides to get out, see where the hell this place is, and he goes to open the door and pulls at the handle but the door does not open, puts his shoulder to it but it will not budge, and the door on the other side proves the same, the car then feeling very small, feels as if it is cramping in upon him–and he sees then the far off dark and distant thing is not distant at all but upon him, upon the car and blanketing upon the windscreen, upon everything–and the door is stuck with it, and the sight of it sucks the breath from his chest and he starts coughing, finds he cannot breathe, clamours towards the window and wipes at the moisture furiously–the sky so thick with it, it seems like no sky at all–the car half buried–falling listlessly like a gentle thing to form drifts deep all around, burying him and everything around it–a black snow.

  Down Tully hill I was speeding hard as fuck and then I’m free-wheeling, round the twisty bend into the long drop down to the road. At the bottom I see somebody watching me. The bike rattling like it was set to fall apart and I’m nearing the bottom and I see the figure with the eyes fixed on me is The Masher. He looks with his tongue out like a dog leaning over a bicycle. Jesus you’re some buck Billygoat he says to me when I pull up. He pulls a shoulder of poitín from his pocket and passes it to me and I take a swig and it near tears a hole out of me throat. Like drinking pure heat and him laughing at me. Jesus the
wooze in my head straightaway I was all fired up and he says to me c’mon we’ll go for a spin. I followed him down the road and took a turn that took us up into Treanfasy. There’s a house settled quiet in amongst some trees and he goes to the front door and knocks. Whose is this place I ask and he says it belongs to a cousin Burt Ruddy and there’s no answer at the door so he strides up all brazen to the car out the front, a 1936 Austin 10 Sherbourne, and he squares up to it with an air of certainty like he’d been driving all his life. I could tell it were all show, something about him putting on an air of danger all the time but I could sense something else off him too, a fear to him like he was used all the time to being hit. Get in he says. The key’s in it already when I get in and he’s taking another slug and passing it to me every drink an act of violence upon myself but I pretend I’m used to it. What about your cousin I ask and he says that Ruddy Arsecheeks owns the car but he never uses it cause he canny drive, leaves the key in for the neighbour to borrow. Won the car years ago in a raffle. The Masher couldna drive at all neither. The car jerking about the place like it were having a fit. We took it down the road and steered it into a field and began to rally her about making slow circles and trying to spin her but couldna get enough speed and then we got the car stuck in a mushy part at the end of the field. I get out and stand slushed to me ankles and start tryin to push and he gets hold of a stone and puts it on the pedal and the two of us start to heave. What happens then but the car frees up and takes away like it has a mind of its own, away like some headless person were driving it. Oh for a moment it were the funniest thing I ever seen only for the horror quick to sink in. The car is bouncing forward on the grass with the door hanging open and we run like fuck after it, The Masher catching up with it, his big long legs hinging up behind him and he jumps in, and I don’t know what he was doing but he couldn’t seem to lift the stone or maybe it were something else because next thing the car veers off rightwards as it nears the far end of the field and drives itself down into the ditch. The rear bucking up into the air like a horse, the two back wheels spinning muck about the place and the engine making a straining sound like a frightened animal. The door still open and I see him get out holding onto his head and he walks wobbling across the field and then he sits down and when I get up near him he is just laughing even though his head is cut. Big fucking whoops out of him. Ye stupid cunt ye I says, what the fuck now are we going to do with the car? And he just laughs, fuckin leave it he says. That Ruddy Arsecheeks will hardly notice. We leave the field and we grab our bikes from the ditch up the road and I says to him what are ye getting for Christmas, and he says to me, fuck all, and then who sees us as we’re startin to go down the road but wee Molly the Moss, and she stands at the side of the road the wee hussy that she is smiling at us as if she knows rightly what we just done and I start then to get the fear wild bad she would go and tell on us. The Masher stares at her and I roar out at her, ye dirty wee bitch, and then I cycle off, take the long way around to get home to make it seem I were coming from another place. Afterwards I could hardly sleep. I imagined the auld bastard Ruddy going mad about the place and rightly so, for a few days later Sergeant Porter was up at our place asking questions saying somebody seen me on my bicycle up in the townland but I flat out denied it to him and I’m wondering if it was that wee hussy that told. The auld doll gives me the longest look afterwards like she seen right through me into the part of my mind that held quivering the lie but I held the look back at her. The thing is I don’t even know why we were doing it we were just doing it I suppose.