The Black Snow: A Novel

by Paul Lynch

  Who was that woman? he said.

  What woman?

  Here, at the house. I just saw a woman leaving out the gate.

  Barnabas, I was in the bath. What are you on about?

  What are you bathing for at this time of day?

  She tightened her towel. I didn’t hear anybody, Barnabas, she said.

  He watched her carefully as if he could sense something was being hid, thought he saw her mouth tighten, and then he saw her in another way, the bare white of her ankles and the long delicate way her arms held onto the towel as if she was hiding from him the best part of her and she saw what was held in his look, stepped back so he could just see her face.

  I thought I saw a woman just now. Going out the gate, he said.

  I would have heard something, she said. The radio just died. The house is gone quiet.

  He gave her a long look. She unwrapped the towel from her head and let her long wet hair curtain loose and she turned for the bedroom, called down at him. Will you go and get the dry battery charged for the radio? The goddamn quiet of this farm fills me up with dread.

  Billy came through the backdoor and slung his leather schoolbag onto the table, took off his father’s old coat and threw it over the chair. Went outside again. Saw the horse a sack shape lying in the field and walked to her, bent down to take a look-see. What’s wrong with ye, wee doll? He lay down sideways on the grass face to face with the animal and pulled a clown smile as if to cheer the horse and then he pulled his mouth wide with his fingers and stuck his tongue out at the animal. They eyed each other in as close a thing as there was to understanding between man and beast which was not that much at all. I know how ye feel, horsey. Things have gone to fuck around here. He sat up on his haunches and rolled a fag and looked over his shoulder, sucked it to life, reached out and put the cigarette to the horse’s lips. Go on, take a wee drag. Ye know ye want te.

  Eskra in the front room playing quietly at the piano, a passage worked over and over again so gently it was as if the music could bruise and break at her touch. Barnabas sitting in the range chair with his head leaning back against the stove tiles, his eyelids shut and strangely twitching as if he was eyeing some strange flight in the vast sky of his mind. Billy took a heel of black bread from the tin and sawed it into two thick slices and stabbed the curving point of the bread knife into the butter. He stood against the stove watching the fluttering of his father’s eyelids and laughed at him. Yer eyes are going mental, he said. Barnabas opened a bellowing brown eye to him.

  Billy spoke again. Something’s wrong with the horse, he said. She’s lying in the field like a sack. Could be her leg or who knows what it is.

  I’ll look at her later.

  Da.

  What?

  What’s happening with the farm?

  Barnabas sat up. Jesus, son. He saw Billy flinch. Your mother and I are trying to figure out what we should do.

  Billy shrugged and went into the hall and saw his father’s tobacco upon the lacquered console table, stole a wiry pinch and put it in his shirt pocket. His heart skipped when his father called out. Would you ever bring me out the tobacco from the hall.

  Billy came in with it and Barnabas looked him up and down. I didn’t mean to shout. Here, he said, threw him a boiled sweet.

  The boy went outside to a sack of stored apples and took one and brought it to the horse, put it under her mouth. The skin of the apple had sagged under two seasons and the meat was soft and drying out and the horse wrinkled her nose at it. Billy lay the apple down in front of her and stroked a knuckle down the gullying dark of her nose, the horse watching him as if from a great distance.

  Barnabas stepped into the bank manager’s office and took a seat to wait. Murmured voices outside the room. A tonguing clock. When he turned in the chair he saw hung on the door the bank manager’s hat and coat. The desk a polished oak and free of ornaments but for a heavy marble ashtray that shined empty. He pulled it towards him, rolled a cigarette, lit it and satisfied himself in soiling the marble. There hung upon the wall a watercolour of a pewter lake and he blew smoke towards the painting and clouded the lake with fog. He grew impatient, loosened his tie, turned around in his chair to watch the door goddamn it and looked again at the clock. When the bank manager came in Barnabas stood to greet him with a look of great solemnity and the man offered a hand that was cold and limp and he kept his eyes off Barnabas. He nodded for him to sit down. Said nothing about being late. Barnabas looked into the man’s eyes and saw the man steal a look towards the clock, found he could not fasten them.

  Now, Mr Kane, the bank manager said.

  Call me Barnabas, Mr Creed.

  Creed bore a small tight mouth and his short hair gleamed like wet snow. A young man opened the door and put down a cup of tea before him but offered none for Barnabas and he watched Creed bring the tea to his mouth and take small sups. Creed watched Barnabas dirty his ashtray.

  Barnabas spoke his tale in the way he had intended to tell it and he told his story in full and spoke with all the feeling of what he had encountered and Creed listened and as Barnabas spoke he began to feel he was being pinned by Creed’s eyes as if there was some part of him he would prefer to keep hid that was being examined. The man before him did not once smile and he did not speak until the end of his essay and the request that came afterwards and when he did Barnabas knew the fate of his case alone from the way the man’s small mouth tightened.

  You cancelled your insurance, Mr Kane?

  Barnabas shifted in the chair and watched the man before him blink, waiting for an answer.

  How was I to know the byre was for burning? I thought the insurance was needless.

  But isn’t that the nature of insurance, Mr Kane?

  Creed loosened and retightened his small mouth and leaned back in his seat and seemed to pause in thought and then he hinged forward on his hips with his hands in pyramid fashion. Something in his tone when he spoke, of knowledge that could not be contested like some self-appointed oracle, or what Barnabas heard was the tone of a teacher. The way I see it, Mr Kane, is you have plenty of land. Sell it. Pay the bank back. Then you can come and talk to me. For now, regarding the new barn I will charge you just the interest. Sell the land, Barnabas. Then we can talk. It’s a logical position.

  Please, Mr Creed. Would you not listen to what I’m saying? I’m a good farmer.

  I fear that is irrelevant, Mr Kane. Like I said. You know what you have to do.

  Barnabas shifted like he was sitting on loose stones that had begun to roll out from under him. If I sell up the land I won’t have a farm to rebuild. Where’s the logic in that?

  You don’t have to sell all of it.

  I don’t have all of it to sell. If I did I wouldn’t be able to buy none of it back. As if anybody anyhow in these times would buy it.

  Creed looked again at the clock and began up out of his chair.

  Mr Kane, he said.

  Barnabas stood slowly screwing up his eyes, leaned over the desk to the proffered hand, took the man’s eyes and threw them some malice. You’re some kind of fellow, aren’t you? Tell me. What’s your use? You with your papery hands.

  Creed stood very still and held his eyes upon Barnabas, looked like some weirded reptile, old with grey eyelids holding so very still in great heat–not a muscle on his face was moving, and Barnabas felt the man’s eyes enter past his own, bore deeper into him, begin to move about as if the man had the power to roam inside his head and find the place of his own agency and take that agency from him and do what will, and he wanted for the man to stop but could not speak for it, seemed the man had taken from him that power also, his voice, his warrant, his fate, and he bowed his head and turned.

  Creed then gliding towards the door. Like I said, Mr Kane.

  The sun flared bullion onto the street and burst starlight upon the door of the Austin. He did not see the world as it was but saw instead the darkening scrim of his thoughts. The fan of his fingers tightening into fi
sts. He sat inside the car and looked blankly at the window. What was building inside him he could only hold at bay for a moment, as if a man alone could become sea wall, fend off the starless ocean that came relentless and all consuming, and when the sea rushed in it took him total. He beat and beat the wheel with his fists and the walnut dashboard shuddered from the shock of it and the knuckles on his right hand burst. He began to weep and he looked down at the mush of blood that was his hand. Knuckles then into his mouth and licked, blood’s salt iron to the tongue. Worn myself to the bones so I have. People like me putting their back into this country. A place to live for our families. My wife and my boy goddamnit. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, rolled a cigarette, sucked a long soothe, filled the car with smoke. He turned quick when he heard a timid knocking at the window. Smoke leaning thickly against the glass and a woman’s hand that led to Pat Glacken. He rolled down the window.

  Did you get the side of beef, Barnabas?

  He dropped his burst hand onto his lap to hide it.

  Oh I did, Pat. And wasn’t it delicious.

  I knew you’d like that now, Barnabas. You can’t beat a good side of beef. A man like you. And where’s Eskra today?

  She’s at home. The usual.

  And how are things with you. The chest all better?

  Aye. I’m grand, Pat. Nothin wrong with me now. Back to normal.

  She held him in a look for a moment, saw the pallor of a man wanting sleep, under his eyes the silver dust of a moth’s wing. Things pass, Barnabas, and then they’re right again. You’ll see. You just have to set your mind on getting past it. Mind what happened when Fran’s wife, Ellen, died in childbirth, there was no talking to him. But look at him now. Reared them two boys near by himself and though I had a small hand in it, it was only a small hand for a sister canny be a replacement for a mother. And look at his farm now and them two boys turned to men.

  He looked at her and nodded and let her talk and the words kept coming out of her mouth and he looked at the steering wheel and back at the glasses she wore, the thick lenses that insected her eyes and he wondered was she aware of herself, her glasses sliding off her nose as she spoke and the way she kept fixing them with a fat digit. The non-stop blathering. He put the cigarette into his other hand and sucked on it and leaned out the window and blew smoke away from her but it breezed back into her face. She waved at it with her hand. Anyhow, she said. Tell Eskra I was asking for her and tell her I’ll be around in the next week or so with another good side of beef.

  He looked at her and smiled. Anytime, Pat. That’s wild nice of you.

  He put his hand up to wave and realized he had presented his bloody knuckles and she saw the hand and the way he dropped it back down quick. She turned and he watched in the mirror the back of her as she waddled down the street. He sat staring out the window and blinked twice and he stood out of the car and began to walk, began towards the sweet dark of Tully’s. Annie nodded to him and without a word pulled him a pint. Barnabas stood standing at the counter rubbing the hand. A wedge of skin flapped loose like a lid. The secret raw of his knuckle.

  Sit yourself down, Barnabas.

  Barnabas nodded. Aye.

  The back door to the outhouse opened and a man came into the bar ushering before him the waft of stale piss. He closed the door behind him and with his other hand pulled at his fly buttons and as he did so he took in the sight of Barnabas pulling out from the counter a bar stool. He continued walking, waved a silent goodbye to Annie Tully and began to adjust the cap on his head. Barnabas reaching into his pocket for change saw the man in a mirror, froze, felt something move inside him, and when he turned around finally to say something, he saw go out the door the back of that bastard balding head of Pat the Masher.

  Barnabas didn’t look right to anybody who saw him when he left Tully’s. Walking at a quarter lean with his hands jammed in his pockets and smiling to himself a smile that looked the far side of happiness. His mind warmed with drink. The sky had become murk and the murk cast the town in a grey absolute that sullied the earlier brightness. He got into the car and shifted in the seat and looked at his hand, a vibrant purple swelling, and he flexed it into a fist and grimaced and loosened it again. He started the Austin and nosed it into the street but the engine cut out on him. Fuckdog, he said. He saw he was being watched for entertainment by some old boy in wellies across the street sitting on a chair outside the grocery and hardware shop. A pipe hanging from the old man’s gummy mouth and some kind of smile upon his face like he was born fixed with it. The car gave a quick cough and a growl and lurched forward and he nursed the Austin up the street looking down at his hand, saw then too late what was coming towards him. The surge came thickly and consumed the car, snorts heaved into the air and the bellowing noise like low sirens, the chain-gang sound of hooves. They began to spill out from a narrow lane upon the street, their gait slack and their heavy hides of meat rocking slowly above their spindled legs. The head of Hugh Moss under a cap with an ash plant walking behind them. Barnabas had to stop the car, and the engine died out, his good hand whitening on the wheel as the surge began to encircle him, watched incredulous as if they were coming just for him, his vision narrowing down to the swell of different coloured hides, cows that trudged like they were damned to hell, a troupe of marching penitents ash-whipped and wailing dolefully as they misted the air with their breaths. Dead cow eyes staring at him.

  She watched from the window the Austin beetle blackly up the road, the car lurching suddenly to meet the open gate. The way the car braked and then Barnabas getting out of it unsteady, saw her looking at him. He slammed the door. She could see from the way he stood that he was drunk and destroyed within himself, watched the way he came in through the front door leaving it open, marched past her by the living room door with his hands become fists. The way he just shook his head at her. And she saw then the state of his right hand and gasped so quiet he did not hear. Just a glance he stole of her as he went past. What he beheld in that glance he could picture the next day as clear as if he had studied a painting of her, the way she was upon that door, leaning half turned and lit in a failing grey light that put upon her face a pallor and dimmed the brilliance of her eyes, the blueness now that bore a look of such sadness it seemed to him later that what was held there was more than sadness, more than pain, was an approximation of all sadness and all pain and what it could look like in a woman.

  She closed the bedroom door and drew the curtains and lay down on the bed with her hands by her sides, closed her eyes, lay listening. There was a quiet she had grown used to at this time of day that was different to what she heard now. Before, when the men had gone out to work and Billy was at school, the house revealed to her different kinds of silence like secrets. The comfortable silence of being on your own when you know others are close nearby. The immediate shock of silence that comes when you switch off the radio. That moment of silence when you come up out of your thoughts and you see the world as it is for a pure moment, the world as it always is, the fixed seat of the earth neither placid nor raging but resolute to indifference. What she heard now was different–a felt silence that spoke to her desolation, could feel her own earth shaking from tremors that shook free fear’s darkest spirits.

  The next evening he sat on the range chair with his legs crossed, watching her take down the blue china teacups. They never left the high shelf of the dresser but now she was putting them on the table to clean them. Between dresser and table the last cup slipped from her hand to the hard floor. My grandmother’s china, she said. Softly she began to weep and she stood there slightly crooked as if she were suddenly grown old, a hand lidding her eyes and her other hand held aloft to where she had been holding the cup as if a phantom of it remained. Barnabas got up awkward out of the chair and went to her, stood there with his hand upon her shoulder as if he was fearful of pulling her towards him. He bent down to the broken cup and put the pieces on the table. I think I can fix it, he said.

  I don’t car
e about the bloody cup.

  Outside Cyclop could be heard barking short sharp instructions to the birds or to the trees or perhaps he was just making himself known to the world, and what she said to him came soft and unexpected, like some animal dark and imperceptible had come towards him through great quiet and sinked him with its teeth.

  Did you ever think, Barnabas, it is time to just give up?

  He felt the drop-weight of a sickening in his belly as if something rotten inside him had fallen loose, found himself respond with quick anger. He pulled her by the chin towards him, bulled a look into her eyes. Whatever do you mean, Eskra?

  He saw in her eyes a defiance that was hard lit and she did not flinch. He let go of her chin.

  To put the house and the fields on the market, Barnabas, and go back to America. To see all this as something that was good for a while. To admit that we had a good run of it. That nothing lasts and that’s the way of it. To accept in our case that it came sooner than expected. That fortune favours the brave only for a while. That maybe we weren’t cut out for this place.

  His mouth curled and there came to him an array of thoughts that had he acted upon them would have changed him to her for ever. He shook his head with violence, shook his head as if he could scatter from his thoughts the sounds of her words. The talk out of you, he said.

  She stood with her lips rolled inwards so that it seemed to him she had no lips at all or that she was trying to keep something malignant within her. He kept staring at her, shook his head again. After all that I done.

  You are not being realistic, Barnabas.