The Black Snow: A Novel

by Paul Lynch

  THE SILENCE OF THE farm spread malignant into the house, laid itself upon everything a dense weight. In the evenings the gas lamps flickered and reached for the dark but could not light what gathered between them all that went unsaid. The clacking-tongued clocks commenting on the passing silence. Billy watching the distance thickening between his parents, watched the way his mother walled up her words, sat glazed over her food, left the dinner table early, did her chores with a distant stare. His father quiet about the place or grumbling to himself, a gliding shadowed thing that seemed happier outdoors.

  Eskra rose daily at sunrise and went as usual about her work. She fetched the water and mucked out the horse and fed the animals and the remaining chickens. At the start of the week she baked the rationed black bread. But something within her had changed. A wheel in the middle of her being was pulling tighter the strings that held every part of her, and she stared out the kitchen window and imagined what it would be like to let that wheel loose, to let the parts of her be flung upon the wind that came down wild off the mountains a hunter of souls. Billy ghosting about the far field of her vision and she did not have the energy for him. She noticed the settle within her bones of rancour. For days she could not look at Barnabas and then when his back was turned she began in her mind to speak to him. Just you turn around now you son of a gun. Talk to me and tell me how we are to survive. Let me hear it from your lips. You big lug you. How many fields we are to sell. If we are to give up this damned place. You and your big ideas. She watched him slope about the yard a stupid beast afraid of her, doing nothing at all now but making his clouds of cigarette smoke or carrying about a hammer and hitting things with it absentmindedly. The way he ignored the dormant farm as if pretending to himself things were otherwise. The dog ambling about the yard with his own concerns, lying out bold in the weak sun chewing cattle bones from the field, Barnabas roaring at the dog each time and pulling the bones out of the dog’s mouth as if the pair of them were stars in some futile comedy and the dog watching on with what could have been amusement as the man muttering to himself reburied the bones in the field. At times, too, the dog could be seen watching one-eyed the sward, as if he was looking for something or someone to arrive, for Matthew Peoples perhaps to come sauntering all slow and big boned.

  Dull-weather days put a hold on time and brought them neither wind nor rain and when the storm came Eskra was glad for it. She stood in the yard and watched the evening sky change–an angry bluff of cloud that rolled in low over a blood horizon. What came from the sea unmade the sinking sun and pulsed with distant flickers of lightning and she saw in its dark swell an inevitability of other things. She hutched the hens and put stones upon the lids of her hive. Took down the clothes from the washing line and walked with them heaped towards the house. The rain began to fall before she reached the back door and she looked up surprised, saw the darkening scrim had yet to reach overhead and that the rain was falling from white. Billy came running from the fields and stood in the kitchen soaking, his panting breath bellowing the secret reek of cigarette smoke. He stood over the stove warming his hands in his jumper and shorts. Eskra scolded at him. Would you look at you.

  The boy shrugged.

  You’ll catch your death of cold. Where’s your coat? she said.

  The world dimmed suddenly through the window, the yard and the fields and what lay as far as the hills, as if a pall had been strewn. He looked at her and pulled a face, chewed on his lower lip. I donny know, he said.

  Is it upstairs?

  Naw.

  Is it lost?

  I might have left it some place.

  Eskra’s voice rose. That was a new coat we bought you. How dare you lose it like that.

  I didn’t mean to loss it. I’m all right anyhow.

  Lose it not loss it. We won’t be able to get another one with the rations. Wait till I speak to your father.

  The boy stood silent a moment and then he raised his head and cast her a look of defiance. Goan and tell him then.

  The way his words leapt across the room caught Eskra by the tongue and she turned away from him, began to tidy the table. You’ll have to use for now your father’s old coat on the back door, she said.

  That auld fuckin thing.

  A look from his mother that could hurl stones.

  The dark of the ceiling and all night Barnabas lay sleepless listening to the storm. Rain upon the window like the fingernails of some termagant prying the glass to get in. A voice in the sad skirling wind that could speak for his mourning. He lay thinking about the grim wind that had struck, the farm and the death of Matthew Peoples a total loss that had emptied him out, wondered what does a man do to deserve such a fate. Nothing but hard work and now ruin. His mind ruminating upon how the fire could have started and he could think of nothing else. He heard something smack upon the yard and he sat up in bed. The sound continued, a rolling clatter, and he swung out of bed into the icy room. He reached for his dressing gown, a slumped shape upon the door, and put his feet into the cold mouth of his slippers. He felt his way down the stairs and into the kitchen and lit a lamp. When he opened the back door wind-cold rushed past him like a wild animal seeking heat. The night was sealed black and he stepped out into it, a zone of dense and hidden forces, and he could not map the order of the winds. The pale spill of the lamp faltering and his cheeks stung by the raw-cold rain and he could see nothing at all through squinting eyes, could not see what damage had been done. Just his own wild imaginings of the wind as it blew around him and he stood for a moment and watched the sky, saw the moon had been cast out, that the stars were all voided and all to see was the world without form.

  He went inside and stood shivering, opened the stove door and rested his hands above the dimmed coals. A scant heat and he closed the stove door and poured himself a dram of whiskey. When he went upstairs his side of the bed was cold. He lay down afraid to turn into her, listened to her breathing. He could sense something wakeful about her, as if her mind was alert and roaming the room, and he could not help himself and he leaned in and whispered to her. I went out to look but it was too dark to see anything. I didn’t know what I was looking for.

  What he heard heave was the deep breath of sleep.

  In the morning nature ruled its fixed compass. The sky distant and inert and its lungs blown out. He saw all over the yard the debris of hay and twigs, found a dead sparrow lying on its back by the wall. How it looked asleep and so restful, the straight fix of the eye glassed dark, the regal drape of its wing as if in death it had dressed itself in its own dun colours. And he saw it asleep to the night in its nest, shook out of its tree, thrown about in fright by that death wind until it met its end on the wall. He scooped the broken sparrow onto a spade and slid it into a ditch. Further up the yard he saw what had made the commotion. A sheet of corrugated iron blown loose from the new shed roof. He took the ladder and climbed up to look and saw three sheets were lifted. Fuckdog, he said. He searched about and found one sheet aslant a whin bush in a field and the other behind the barn napping. He went for his tools and heaved up the iron and hammered them into place. He stood then lordly on the roof and surveyed this kingdom. It was as if the night’s disorder had been dreamed of, the mountains serene and the bog spread below them in its timeless nature and draped now in cloud shadow that drifted upon the heather as if some kind of behemoth animals were grazing. In a hollow in the pasture field he saw a newly formed pool of water and a broken tree limb sprawled there as if dumped by some person, wondered what strength of wind was needed to carry it there. Eskra pumping water in the yard. Without thought he waved at her and she did not look at him and he watched her go around the side of the house. Through the tops of the trees he could see McDaid’s farmstead. Saw the distant shape of the man in a far field bent to his fencing. He turned around and found himself looking at the house of another, a white building isolate against the distant bay, the long stretch of fields from his farm leaning down to it, the view clearly visible through the
trees. The house owned by Pat the Masher. He recalled the bother they had with The Masher’s son a few months ago just before Christmas. Fucking crazy-eyed kid. He saw smoke drift from the chimney and the way then he saw the house unlocked something in his mind, an unthought thing that moved forward into thinking.

  She was working water from the pump when she saw bird shadow fleet upon the flagstones, looked up and saw a big bird glide real low. The bird was solitary and flapped hugely to take rest upon the fence ten feet away, a creature with large dark eyes and a curving beak. A raptor of some kind she did not recognize and rare to these parts she guessed. It was the kind of bird that owned the air, took other creatures in its talons like skyhooks. Must have got lost in the winds. She watched the mechanical action in the way it bobbed its head, wondered if it was a falcon, and then the bird took wing. She tried to follow its flight path but her view was blocked by the house. She left the pump and walked around the corner to watch it further and she remembered then about the bees, walked over to the hive and saw they had been sheltered sufficient by the wall and the juniper trees.

  She dressed in her protective sleevelets and wore her bee-veil bonnet and lit the rotten wood in the tin cylinder of her smoker. To the bees she brought the opium of smoke and poured them some sweetened water. In her mind she saw the way they awoke energetic to the spring each year as the purest kind of purpose, an intensity of living without any awareness of such a thing. The wind sloped the tips of the grass and a curl of smoke drifted up over the hive, swung back towards the junipers. It took for a moment the shape of a coil and then untwisted, mapped out peculiar forms. What she saw then was a shadow on the grass leaning towards her. A person. It stopped in her mind the hum of a song and she watched the shadow shape into a steeple. She would not turn around for him. The wind took the drifting smoke and swirled it into her eyes but she kept her back turned, would give him no satisfaction. The shadow lingered, grew taller as it came then towards her, and when she snapped around what she saw was the face of another in smoke half hid, the face of Baba Peoples. The woman wearing widow black and her face under her shawl was starched and hairless as if she had been sloughed of her sex. Baba moved her baby feet towards Eskra, the air around her thick with bees, waved her hand for Eskra to come to her. Eskra made a gentle motion for the woman to step back, spoke to her. Don’t go waving your hands like that or the bees will go for you.

  Baba continued to walk forward. I wouldn’t feel nothin of it, she said.

  Eskra stepped forward and took the woman by her elbow light in her hand as a bird’s wing, began to guide her away from the hive, but Baba shook the grip off, stood defiant. Show me your eyes, Eskra Kane, she said. Eskra sighed and undid the safety pins that held the veil to her coat and rolled it up her face. Not yet ten o’clock in the morning and she could smell drink off Baba, leaned back to get away from her rank breath, that husband of hers was so simple and sweet and this here woman shameless and sluiced with the drink.

  How are you doing, Baba?

  The woman looked at her through yellowing orbs that were shot with spicules of red and her mouth pulled a smile that was dead on her face as soon as it was upon it. And then the light in her eyes seemed to brighten, a strange kind of pleading look she gave Eskra but there was something false about it and Eskra saw something flash in the woman’s eyes before the woman was able to conceal it, a note of contempt. The woman tiny before her yet Baba placed her hand on Eskra’s wrist, began to hold it tight as if to impress greater meaning to what she said. Her voice scratched and childish.

  Isn’t this a lovely place you’ve got here, Mrs Kane? You’ve got it well kept. Aye, you with your foreign ways, your bees and all, and I suppose you be making honey with it too to sell. Aye, you’ve a good place going, good land and you did well of it. And how’s your boy? Matthew was very fond of him so he was, talked about him all the time like he was his own. And that was it, Mrs Kane, we were never able to have any of our own. The bonesetter said I wasn’t fixed for it. No weans at all in the world so we had and you can imagine now what a time I’m having of it left on my own.

  Eskra felt the woman’s grip tighten.

  Aye, God rest his soul, Matthew Peoples, there never was a kinder man, nor more hard-working neither. And he was a kindly soul to the boy and a dedicated man to that husband of yours–I will not say his name.

  The woman leaned over and made a dead tree of her face to hawk tobacco spit.

  Aye. I’ll tell you it was that man who left me with nothing in this world, Mrs Kane. Took from me everything I had in it that you have here. No husband now and nothing coming in to help me mind myself. And it was that man who made my husband go in. I know it. My Matthew would not have gone in there of his own accord, twas not the like of him. He wasn’t that stupid.

  She looked at Eskra as if daring her to look away and Eskra flinched and held the look before shaking her wrist free. She rubbed the place on her wrist where the woman’s phantom grip remained.

  You know I’m sorry to hear that, Baba. Truly I am. But I won’t hear of you talk about my husband that way. What happened was beyond terrible, it was a tragedy. It has affected badly everybody here—

  I can tell it in your eyes you’re sorry, Mrs Kane. Such kindly eyes you have. What I’m wondering here and now is what you want to do about it. To make things better for me.

  A bee curved the air between them and swung to land on Baba’s cheek, began to walk brazen, came up near her eye, and Baba did not blink with it. Eskra waved the bee away and looked nervously at the hive and rolled the veil back down her face.

  Baba. We lost everything, all our cattle. We don’t know how the fire started and we don’t know how we’ll get the farm back. I just found out we had no insurance. I married a man, Baba, who thought all his battles were won, that nothing bad could ever go wrong. He wasn’t prepared for it. I don’t know what we are going to do.

  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.