The Black Snow: A Novel

by Paul Lynch

  I wouldn’t have recognized ye in that new beard ye have, Barnabas.

  Barnabas nodded towards the dogs. Did you steal them wild cats from the circus?

  Deep smell of dog and boiled meat in the man’s house and he was watched as he entered by a pleading, sad-eyed Christ from the wall. He took a seat at the table while Goat stood on his short legs in the scullery with his back turned pouring tea. Barnabas sat poking a finger inside the new hole in his trousers. Goat sat light of bone on the chair, looked as if wind could lift him out of it. One of the black dogs appeared behind him and sat watching. The sound of pigs outside.

  Tea all right for ye?

  Tis a bit cold.

  When I was a youngster, before your time now, the town and the countryside used to be swarming with pigs. Those mucs were called greyhounds, long-snouted and near as skinny as dogs so they were. Goat smiled and leaned into him. They had a wild habit of roaming. If you let one of them go wandering somebody else’s cornfield the price of trespass would be sore.

  Barnabas smiled back at him. Is that so?

  Aye.

  Goat took a drink of tea. I still canny make it the way my auld missus used to make it what with the rationing. She made tea so thick you could stand two men on it.

  How long is it now since she’s gone?

  Five year.

  As he spoke, the old man’s eyes removed themselves from the room and just as quick they sharpened.

  Barnabas spoke. You did a good turn coming out to help me that day of the fire, Goat. You and your boys. They came up to the place like lightning.

  Goat McLaughlin nodded grimly. Aye. Ye were lucky they were working in the farthest field. Tell me, I hear now you’re having further bother.

  Who told you that?

  Goat McLaughlin pulled his chair closer to Barnabas, leaned his pig smell into him. Barnabas saw how the old man’s silver beard bore fading flashes of red and had to lean back from the smell.

  The old man studied the man dripping before him. So what would make a man like you tramp all the way out here in this rain?

  Barnabas cleared his throat, sat up straighter. I came to ask you for help, Goat. I canny get the money to get the byre rebuilt and I donny want to have to sell up my fields. So I’m asking for help. Scrap blocks. Any old timber. Anything your boys might have. Anything at all would do. Just so’s I can get started and get to building again. Feed my family. You understand that, don’t you?

  The old man eyed him long without blinking and when he blinked he made a show of it. I understand that need fine rightly, Barnabas. Didn’t I raise up three boys and a daughter of me own. But times are tough. I would imagine most around here would be likely to help if they could but most round here have nothing. Them boys of mine, each one of them is struggling with their own families to feed. The way I see it, it’s not so bad. Your feet are put back on the earth now like the rest of us. Twill do ye no harm.

  Barnabas winced. That’s some position to take, Goat. I’ve a wife and boy to look after.

  Aye. But you are alive, Barnabas, and not dead like Matthew Peoples and that is your great blessing.

  Barnabas began to feel his head thicken and he looked into the old man’s eyes and began to hate what he saw in there, the yellowing rheum and the righteous blue that shone out of them. He leaned in towards the pig smell. No one put a blessing on my house. And there’s no need to bring him into it.

  The old man watched the way Barnabas’s face tightened. The great Lord is all the property we need, he said.

  All I’m asking is if you’d put word about.

  Goat eyed him and blinked another slow blink as if looking at an inner picture of the man and his eyes began to burn more fiercely. Aye, I will. But it is the way of the Lord that we must embrace suffering and adversity. Ye should have been prepared, Barnabas, for this sort of reckoning. It comes to all men, sooner or later. The great question in life is, are ye ready for it when it comes? That is the measure to my mind of a true man. Like I said, it will do ye no harm.

  I’m not the kind, Goat, to go through life lying down.

  A second dog entered the room making a high clip on the floor tiles with its nails. The dog’s black fur shined near blue and it stood with red eyes watching Barnabas. The third dog appeared and the first dog yawned and Goat McLaughlin watched Barnabas stand up. He stared at the old man in disbelief and shook his head at him, saw the chorded folds of his throat, found himself wishing for a moment the old man’s death. By a knife, probably. Something blunt to make the pain endure.

  Would you ever go and tell those hounds of hell to fuck off.

  The spit-rain stopped in solemn sympathy with the man and in the sheen of the road he saw the world corrupted, the sky, the trees, the mountains, the fields, remade now into a shadow world in which one could not perceive their true forms. What he saw in those shadows was a lesser truth of what the world was and what he saw around him was what the world is and nothing else goddamnit. He walked and could feel the breeze enter cold through the hole in his trousers, saw in his mind the leering face of Goat McLaughlin, the scrawny old man with bird-like talons for hands. That puckered face sucking it all in. Deliberating on my ruin like some un-anointed priest.

  He followed the road home and rubbed the scab the razor left on his hand, searched his mind for ideas, felt all the while as if he were on the brink of some revelation. He passed one of McDaid’s small fields and saw the corner of it flooded with rain. A rust-gnawed gate stood sentry to it and he unlatched the loop of old blue rope and entered the field. Sheep black-faced staring at him. He walked towards the corner where the land sloped and held a huge rain pool and he went over to it and surveyed the field’s drainage. The liquid silver of the rain pool mirrored the world so intently it was like a rag of sky torn free. In it he could see the sky satin white and the limbs of trees, a barren beauty like some kind of sprawl-boning clamour of the dead. When he returned to Donegal he was first struck by such trees. Could watch their different shapes all day. Not one the perfect image of a tree but each one oddly unique. Some of them huge and thickened with snaking ivy so that it seemed life was being constricted out of them, the trees breaking free near the top to gasp for air. There were trees cleaving like married old couples. Long-necked superior larches and firs aloof and furred a thick green. Old sycamores that were strangers to time. An oak he saw daily at the back of a field naked and dead like a stunned invert octopus.

  McDaid was sitting in front of the fire eating when Barnabas came through the door. The house held in an almost religious silence. He looked up at Barnabas and laughed. Jesus, ye look like a dying bastard.

  That field of yours down the lane is taking the full run of the rain. You need to get that drainage sorted or it will be ruined. I’ll give you a hand digging it.

  I lost a wee lamb this morning.

  Drown, did she?

  McDaid shook his head sadly. Naw. It were got by a dog.

  Barnabas snorted. Did you get the gun to it?

  McDaid nodded to a shotgun on the table. Maybe if I’d seen something of it.

  He sat spooning broth from a bowl and then pincered his fingers into the soup, produced a small bone and sucked it. He reached towards a bottle and poured a dram into the same bowl and drained the bowl with his teeth. Wee sup? he said.

  What is it?

  Poitín.

  That stuff will burn a hole through your head.

  A wee slice of the black bread then?

  Go on.

  He watched McDaid saw the bread and then the farmer turned conspiratorially and his voice dropped to a hush. Fancy a wee taste of something different, Barney, now that the butter is rationed to fuck?

  As he looked at Barnabas his lazy eye was upon the door.

  Like what?

  A wee taste on the bread.

  You’ve not been at Eskra’s honey have you?

  McDaid went to the other side of the room where he had a simple kitchen laid out and he reached towards a
shelf and took down a brown pot. He hunched his shoulders over it and began to smear something upon the bread, brought it over on the flat of his hand. A wicked smile lit his face and the bread he held out for Barnabas had a fatty smear on it.

  Jesus fuck, Peter. What’s that?

  Try it. It’s quare unique.

  McDaid sat into a tattered, mud-coloured armchair and looked as if he was squeezing in a laugh. He held himself still and leaned forward eyeing Barnabas intently. His eyes flashed and he licked his lips. Go on taste it.

  Barnabas put it into his mouth and ran his tongue over it. What he tasted was old and oily, came with a heavy tang of turf. Something else unknown, deep and rancid, and his face curdled and he stood up and began to spit the food into the fire. McDaid slapped his thigh and his face creased up with laughter.

  That’s the funniest fucking sight so it is.

  Jesus fuck, Peter. That’s sick as a dead dog.

  It’s something different all right.

  What is it?

  You won’t tell no one?

  I canny wait to tell the world about your great culinary discovery. What is it?

  McDaid sat for a moment and then winked. It’s bog butter.

  Barnabas looked at the man stunned. Jesus fuck, he said.

  I was up with the cousin Willie Lafferty cutting turf last summer and we found this thing in the moss and dug it out and we figured it for one of them bog-butter finds they always be talking about in the paper. The damn thing old as the hills probably. I took it home and forgot about it till the other day and then I had a wee taste of it. Doesn’t taste so bad to me considering.

  Barnabas stood and shook his head in disbelief. He took the jar and looked at it in amazement. Damn it. Peter. You must be gone in the head. Who knows how old this is? Most of them finds are about two and a half to three thousand years old according to what I read. Hold now. That must be a hundred generations.

  I had it last night on me spuds.

  There’s people in Dublin who’ll want to be hearing about that.

  Arrah, fuck Dublin. Fuck the lot of them and the restrictions they put on us. All they’ll do is send some inspectors up who’ll not let us cut turf for a while. Who needs that? I’m doing everyone a favour.

  McDaid leaned back into the armchair and swung his wellies up lordly onto a stool. Barnabas sat there ruminating. When he spoke he was staring at the butter in amazement. When you think about it, somebody churned that with their hands and put it in a place in the moss for safekeeping. Sat there all this time them thousands of years and them people long gone and everything with them. Not a trace of them but what’s in that jar. We’re an ancient race. What are you going to do with it?

  McDaid slapped his thigh and began to laugh out loud. Sell it about as lard, he said.

  When he was done laughing the men sat a while in silence. Then McDaid spoke. Ye look troubled, Barnabas.

  Barnabas groaned quietly. Problems with the bank.

  Aye.

  Well. I’m rebuilding the byre anyway.

  Good on ye.

  There is a way it can be done.

  Spit and sawdust?

  The load-bearing wall is gone and a lot of them stones are ruined. So what I need are blocks. I’ve asked about but nobody wants to help.

  Who’d you ask?

  Fran Glacken. That Goat McLaughlin.

  Sure you’ll get nothin off that Fran Glacken. That man’s been fighting with his own two brothers this last twenty year and none of them talking to one another. And all over some access to a field. For a while there his own two sons weren’t talking to each other and both of them under the one roof. And that Goat. McDaid shook his head. He’s too much of a thran cunt to deal with.

  I’ve a few quid hid someplace to buy some animals again. But other than that it’s either rebuild or sell up. Eskra thinks we should leave. I’m not going to be selling nothing, so I am.

  McDaid shook his head. Jesus Christ, sir. We canny be having that.

  He stood and took the bog butter and sealed it and put it back on the shelf and he turned around and stood where he was, began to scratch at his blue jaw. His eyes lit with an idea. I know a place where you can get a heap of good quality stone. As much as you like of it. And it won’t cost you nothing nor bother nobody at all too. It belongs to nobody at this point in time. All you got to do is keep quiet about it.

  It were the Saturday morning before Christmas when John the Masher came up to our house with an iron bar in his hand. I seen him coming through the bedroom window frosted cold and before I’d even got a good look at him and the trouble he was carrying, some part of me knew not to go outside to him. I hid at the side of the window and watched him come into the yard and I could see he was funny, his cheeks all red like his face were flaming and his head were thrown back. Roaring out my name. Billygoat. Billygoat ya bastard. The sound of his roaring sent the ordinary day veering into someplace bad. My heart going off like a gunshot. I thought he was mad because maybe he had been found out about the car in the field and maybe he thought I told on him. And then there was that other thing too what it was we done to that wee girl Mary the Moss under the trees after we went to see her that I will not speak about. I was avoiding him since then and now he was outside, his voice full of violence, shouting all the while for me. Downstairs the auld doll was labouring through one of them piano pieces, ‘O Twine Me a Bower’ or some shite like that, and I heard the piano stop mid-tune. I walked slowly down the stairs afraid the creaking sound of the wood would give me away and then the auld doll comes out of the living room with her face all white and the look she gives me. She says that young Masher boy came up to the window while she was playing the piano and tapped the glass with an iron bar, looked into the room with a wild leer on his face. Something god-awful in his look that frightened her. She says his eyes are rolling in his head like he was not right. She stood in the hall looking at me with her hand on her belly as if to hold it there would keep both of us from alarm and then she called out quietly for the old boy. I whispered to her that I’d seen him go outside. I followed her into the kitchen and what did she do but she went up and locked the back door and a good thing she did. The Masher comes round the back and peers in the window, the iron bar fat in his hand tap tap tap off the glass. And then he is at the back door trying to get in and he starts banging the door something terrible and the door shook and a strange noise came out of the auld doll’s throat. I went over to the stove and took a hold of the poker just in case, the door juddering from the wild kicking his boots were giving it. The Masher calling out the whole time Billygoat, ye cunt ye. I were wild embarrassed and worried he might say something that would ruin me and you could see the shape of his head a dark stain in the ribbed glass of the back door. And then I saw through the main window the old man coming quickly down from the byre, not quite at a run as if he were all calm and Cyclop beside him, and all we could hear then was the sound of a thump and the sight of The Masher been dragged by his hair up the yard. The old boy put him down on the ground and bent to him with his fist, put a right dent into him the best dinger of a punch I seen in a long while and The Masher just curled up into himself a useless heap, the iron bar rolling away by his side. He looked like a scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out of him and the auld doll she was white when we went outside and the old boy was looking up at us and not a bother on him. It’s all right he said. He looks over at me. This here’s Pat the Masher’s son isn’t it? He began to shake his head like he was sad for him. That boy’s lost his mind again, mad as a bag of crows. The auld doll tells me to go find Big Matty and the old boy tells her he sent him home early. He sends me then up the yard for rope and I go into the byre and take some off the wall where it’s hung on a big nail and I’m thinking of the enjoyment I took seeing The Masher beat up like that, the cows looking stupid at me and snorting. The old boy, he ties The Masher’s hands behind his back in case he were going to offer up any more trouble and when I see him like that I began
to feel sorry for him. Then he stands him up and leans him against the wall, the crazy look in his eyes was gone and he looked like a wee child uncertain and weak. The auld doll whispers, asks what he is going to do with him and the old man looks at her and says to her I’ll take him up to Sergeant Porter. She looks at him and shakes her head and says to take him to his father instead, you take him to the guards now and he’ll be sent away for Christmas and for who knows how long and those places are criminal. But the old man shakes his head at her. This is serious business Eskra he says. Somebody could have got hurt. The auld doll tells me she is still shaking from the shock but then I look at her and she looks fine to me. I stand there stupid in the yard not wanting her to ask me anything but she does anyways and I says to her I messed around with him for a bit but that was a while ago now and that he was acting wild strange so I stopped spending time with him and she stands there shaking her head at me. Stay away from him now you hear? All the time in my mind I seen terrible things, not the silly things we got up to before but that other thing we did with Molly the Moss. What we did with that wee girl I did not want to think about and it was all I could do because I was terrified now it had got out in some way. The white skin of the girl laid out, never seen such a thing so exciting nor exquisite and that look then in her eye. What it was we done.

  HE STOOD OUTSIDE TRYING to guess the coming weather, saw a fault over the earth that rived the morning sky. Over the sea and the western reaches of the world sat a ridge of low cloud like dirt snow sided on a road. What it met shined from over the hills, an eternal blue that spoke the world could be perfect if it wanted to. He mucked out the horse’s stable and fed her and when she had eaten he walked her into the yard. Watched the sclerotic way she walked, screwed his eyes at her, could see nothing strange nor obvious upon examination. Just the way the horse held her head as she wambled, spoke again that reluctance. Is it that you’re getting old on me? he said. As he spoke he heard the words of Matthew Peoples telling him about the horse that day of the fire, could hear the ring of the man’s voice, heard the man’s words in snatches, that strange and sleepy tone, and he stared at the man before him in his mind but he could not get a fix on his face. He began to harness the horse and when he drew over the noseband the horse threw her head into the air and snorted, an instruction perhaps in horse-talk to leave her be. Now, now, he said. He whispered further encouragement to her and led her slowly up the yard to the new shed, parked her beside the cart that leaned its long shafts upon the flagstones. He turned the horse around and had begun to fasten her when he saw Eskra step outside. She held in her hand a meat-stripped bone for the dog. She saw Barnabas and the horse and began up the yard all rush through the skitter of chickens.