The Black Snow: A Novel

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The Black Snow: A Novel Page 14

by Paul Lynch


  Can’t you see she’s unwell? she said.

  Barnabas sighed at her. I’ve a heap of stone to get for the byre.

  And what about the horse?

  Do you want me to get this done or not?

  Of course, Barnabas. But the horse is sick. Could you not borrow one?

  McDaid only has that auld half-donkey.

  Cyclop ambled over curious to the conversation, lay down between them. He behaved before them like some kind of lion-heart returning from war, his dark and thick coat vined with thorns that hung from his neck like a garland displaced, the whites of his ankles mudded. He sat watching the entertainment with his front paws stretched lordly out while thumping his tail and waggling the dark triangles of his ears. He watched with one eye the slinging voices in the yard, looked at the woman when she hitched up her voice and he looked at the man when his voice rose to meet hers, unrolled a wobbling half yard of tongue that told of his appreciation. And then he shared a look with the horse as if they were above such things.

  Eskra sighed and turned with the bone and waved it at the dog. Don’t you want this or not? The dog appraised the woman and the bone with a cursory glance and he turned his one eye towards Barnabas and the horse. Sometimes I wonder about that dog, she said. The horse and the dog looked at each other again. Eskra lobbed the bone up the yard and the bone rolled to a stop on the flagstones beside a cylinder of chopped wood. Cyclop stood and stretched out his back a mute and keyless accordion and brought himself back into shape with a yawn. He walked towards the bone and took a sniff and left it where it was, returned to his flagstone seat. Barnabas watched Cyclop make that saurian yawn that could make it seem the dog housed within him an entire other nature, some berserk violence waiting to be unleashed, and then he quit looking at the dog and spoke to the horse, you’re a good girl, now come on would you. Saw the withdrawal of Eskra and her plum shadow from the flagstones.

  He took a turn off the main road that led up long and slow into bog and dark hills, no more than a grass-humped track. The better nature of that sky before him. From far off he heard schoolchildren’s voices skirl on the wind like sirens, screams like some fragment of a dream. He watched the horse take to the hill with no sign of trouble. The way she had loosened up out past the house made him think she was being temperamental, and she walked now at an easy gait, her head nodding as she walked to the cart’s softly squealing axle. The days of rain had given some life to the land and he saw the wild grasses reach up eager out of the earth like teeth tearing at the sky for the sun’s fleeting rays. He saw everywhere the ferocity of spring, the upswing against death that held within it an unfurling bass power that brought bud into leaf, bulb into flower, felt within himself a measure of that same ferociousness, could hear against the sky the sound of his soul singing.

  As the road rose deeper into the hills, nature in its appearance seemed fouled to him. The fields losing their green to become wan and toothless. This bog a tattered place ruled by an aberrant nature that denuded itself of any markings of man, shook off his sheuchs and stone-wall perimeters, set sawtooth briars to grow where they pleased. The distant white smears of lone sheep occasional as if they had been scattered by wind. The road bending gently up the steepening hill and when they reached halfway and the road levelled briefly he allowed the horse to rest. He rolled a thin cigarette and turned to the land below him and lorded chugs of blue smoke over it. The townland of Carnarvan with its scattering of houses, and further to the east the town on the hill like some dull shrine to the living. He thought about when he first returned to Donegal with Eskra and the boy. How he saw this land with marvel. The sea and the sky and the hills pressing themselves newly upon him. The play of light in its ceaseless shape-shifting. He saw the way light could sway in the rain like a dancer, shimmer like a swished skirt, foot itself elsewhere. And he saw the place for how old it was and watched the countenance of the hills in their ever-changing solidity, as if the place could re-imagine itself at any moment, these mountains ancient creatures shifting in their sleep, dreaming their own myths.

  He turned and flicked the cigarette into the ditch and began to lead the horse upwards. What flickered then into his mind was an old memory, to the tongue the fresh-picked taste of raw jam from the bramble. The hills rising up as if they were another realm of time he was walking into.

  He didn’t see the old man on the road until he was almost upon him. An ancient face tongued by wind and rain. He saw what lay beneath the man’s papery skin was not bone at all but bog wood as if he had risen ageless out of the moss, contoured and shaped by the land’s slow heavings. The old man’s eyes were half lidded pinkly and his head was held back as if to see out the peeps of them but Charlie Cannon was blind. He’d often given Charlie a lift into town in the days before the petrol rationing, and even then his was one of the few cars on the road amongst the horse and traps. Now the man did the long walks on his own, could be seen eyeing the long hill up to church in the town with his cane. He saw how Charlie walked now with the cane slung under his arm, his body an all seeing thing, the land become a part of his nature. The blind man stopped when he came close to the ensemble and he held his head up curious. Barnabas waited till he came close and said, how are you getting on, Charlie Cannon? saw with amusement the man’s puzzled face trying to get a latch onto his voice. Owling wild eyebrows shaped sensory to the wind like palps and then the old man’s brows fell and his voice was heard softly. That you, Barnabas Kane?

  Charlie Cannon, you’ve got eyes in your ears or is it ears in your eyes, who knows. And you don’t even need your cane. Look at you. There was me thinking you were blind all this time. How you’ve been fooling us.

  Charlie Cannon let out a soft laugh and his left hand fluttered.

  I don’t need no eyes to see what’s on this road. Aren’t I on it all this time?

  Would you not live someplace easier?

  They say an ancestor of mine called Ranty lived up here with his eyes gouged out. That some mean bastard took them out with a knife. Kept living up here anyhow as blind as the eternal night. Once you know a place you know it.

  As the blind man spoke he gestured with his left hand to give shape to his words, as if he did not trust what he said because he could not see how it registered on the face of another. When he spoke his left hand shook and when he listened it lay restless by his side. The men talked more, about the farm and the fire, and when Charlie Cannon asked what caused it, Barnabas spat on the road. Well, Charlie, I’ve lost long nights of sleep trying to figure it. I haven’t ruled out in my mind it were started deliberate. Time will tell, won’t it?

  The blind man was silent a while and then he pointed to the deadland around them. What brings you up to Blackmountain, Barnabas? Yer too early I fear for the cutting of turf. Unless you want to get soaked out of it. He laughed softly.

  Barnabas found himself pointing up beyond the hill to show where he was going and then he lowered his hand and let it waver as if he was suddenly uncertain the man was blind at all. I’m bringing the horse for a walk. She’s been unwell. I need to build her strength up, he said.

  He heard the lie as bare as the land around him and it had a worse taint. The old man nodded slow and said, aye, but when he spoke again Barnabas saw the jittery hand had stopped moving. Sounds to me that horse is spavined so she is. You’ll make her lame taking her all the way up to this place.

  She doesn’t seem that way to me.

  Maybe so. But when they’re sore like that they get spooked wild easy. You should beware taking her up this hill. Listen to that wind. It carries nothing but the ghosts of the dead long gone from out of here. You’ll get the horse spooked so you will.

  You’re a wild man for the superstitious talk, Charlie Cannon. And what are you doing so happy in their company?

  Sure I’m nearly an auld ghost myself.

  Goan, would you.

  The old man laughed quietly and he nodded to Barnabas goodbye. Barnabas found himself waving back, watched
the blind man continue down the road without need for the stick. He slapped the haunch of the horse and began to laugh and shake his head. Ghosts, he said.

  The steepening road tired out the horse but soon they reached the pass. A different world then amidst the tops of the hills and the view of the land fell away behind them. A place called Drumtahalla and he knew not much about it and to his right the lonely green of the Meeshivin forest. Used to be that forest sprawled everywhere. The breeze came emboldened, whistled and hissed, took on a knife edge. Deadskin scree upon the slopes of the mountains and just beyond the pass he could see the white of Charlie Cannon’s cottage nestled into the hills and an old ruin beside it.

  Horse and man came through that pass and then the road dipped and he saw it lean long and lonely stretching it seemed into the forever of dark and distant shapes, other mountains unknown to him, the bog’s expanse of endless browns within brown. They were following that lonely road when the horse stopped suddenly in protest. He pulled at the animal but the horse did not budge and she rested her dark eyes upon the land sullenly. What the fuck’s wrong with you? In the breeze, the horse’s mane fluttered but the animal held still and he went to the cart and took a bucket. He stepped into the bog and bent to a nearby stream and filled the bucket with bronze water. As he bent, his eyes fell upon the roots of an ancient tree left exposed agonizingly close to the stream, the trunk long gone and the roots hung out useless over the shifting land neither met by earth nor water. That tree probably as old as five thousand years. He saw how this place was once forested and full of men and women no doubt who walked about an ancient race with similar concerns, the need to eat, the need for shelter, the need to keep warm their children. And he watched a bird wing blackly over the barren turf, let from its mouth a forlorn call.

  He put the bucket under the horse’s mouth but the horse showed no interest. He produced an ash-plant from the back of the cart and began to whip the animal but the horse did not budge and he lost his temper, began to beat her with his fist. He punched her in the shoulder and slapped her on the withers and then he turned in frustration. Stood thinking. Behind him the animal began to move slowly forward into the bladed wind.

  He came upon the place as he had been told it, saw two stone cottages alongside a stream. They stood forsaken beside three dead and twisted trees that once stood sentry over them while beside one lay a lamb’s skull grinning up at him. All that stood of these houses now were their walls like old teeth bared to the wind in some sardonic grimace, and he saw how one of the walls had fallen in as if time were something huge that fell against it. Who had lived here he could not know but Peter McDaid told him it was the famine some hundred years ago that drove them out and that people were long past caring.

  Each house open to the sky and he stepped inside one, the ground sprung with a carpet of heather and he looked at it and tried to imagine that somebody once lived in this place, once pressed bare feet to its floor, maybe weans were born here, who knows, grew up here, were loved here, died here, or were driven out from hunger to who knows where else, and he tried to imagine the sounds of their living but instead he heard the silence of the years passing over it. He looked at the walls two foot thick and packed with earth and he began to loosen a stone.

  Later, he unhitched the horse and turned the cart around and fastened the animal again. Upon the cart he began to make a grey mountain of stones. He reduced one of the old houses to a low wall, heaped upon the cart as many stones in weight as he guessed the horse could carry, the cart fit to take more but for that damned beast of a horse. When it was time to leave the animal was reluctant and he looked at her, saw a skitter in her eye, the flip of an insect on the surface of still water. What’s wrong with you? he said. Is it that you’re angry? He whispered to her encouragement and apologized for hitting her earlier and then he shouted at her until she strained forward, pulled the cart into a squeal of protest under the dead weight of those stones. She took to the road slow and he walked alongside her while the wind rose to their backs and harried them. The day dragging what light there was to the west in heavy chains and it cast upon the land its monolith shadows. They made their way amidst the groans of the cart that sounded in unison with the wind and they travelled slowly through the pass till they met the land and the road twisting downwards, lumps of rock like jut bones and far off grassy fields. He turned an eye to the load to make sure no stones were coming loose and he walked alongside the horse holding onto the harness. The road steepened and the cart made another groan and the horse made a strange squeal to accompany it. He looked at the animal and didn’t like what he saw and he told the horse to steady, took a tighter hold of the harness. The horse squealed again and the sound of it bore clean through the wind like a blade. He pulled the horse to a stop. They stood a minute like that facing downhill and what winged then in front of them was a butterfly, a crimson Peacock with peering blue eyes on its wings, and it shook itself up into the air before them and dived again, came to rest upon the horse’s nose. In that instant the horse took fright, reared up her head and screamed, began suddenly to move. Barnabas roaring out at the horse but the animal moving regardless, picking up speed now until he was running alongside her shouting, what’s wrong with you, would you hold on, and he pulled at the bridle but could feel the animal pull easily beyond his strength. As he ran he saw the road lean dangerously downwards and he pulled at the horse but the animal paid him no heed, and he began then to shout out words, words that in another place or circumstance could have raised the dead, but here they could not put a stop to a horse that came under the influence of gravity. The spiral of the road and the speed of the animal and the sun dimming quickly as if it could not dare to watch, and he found he had to let the horse go, watched what happened with horror. The rear left wheel of the cart wobbling and then disintegrating as the wood buckled and broke, shot spokes into splinters. The cart took a quick lope dangerously to one side as if it were some kind of stone mastodon being brought down by hunters, toppled towards the earth in what seemed to him a miraculous slow arc of movement and it took sideways with it the harnessed horse a shrieking brown blur.

  A caress of lamplight held Eskra’s sleeping face and faded into dark up the wall. Her features weightless as a child, her skin made buttermilk. She sat on a chair resting her elbow against the deal table while she held against her head an enclosed hand. Her other hand open and so gentle upon the wax tablecloth it would seem she came through this life without pressure or weight or any bearing against the world at all. The east outside came pitch against the glass and the night sat hushed so that when she slipped into dreaming the drifting images that came took her back to Vinegar Hill, and she heard the tones of her dead father’s voice, heard it bright in a way she could not while awake–his voice that came strong even in sickness, and she a little girl hugging him bone-tight and she saw in the shape of his eyes their true colour, saw pitted in his soul the sadness that shone an awareness of his coming death. And as she dreamed she saw the horse stood over them watching her with the eyes of a woman. Billy then stomping into the room in his boots and she fell away from her father, fell into the room with quickly opened eyes and a feeling that lingered of sadness. Yellow lamplight forming to make the shape of her son who stood pointing by the window. He’s back now so he is. Billy turned and was gone outside in noise and rush.

  She stood by the side of the house with the west lit in its last embers. Watched the slow approach of a swinging lamp. Billy a fragment of the dark running down the road and she saw then what was coming towards him was not Barnabas on his own but Barnabas and another. Up the lane like slow-herded animals, the hulk shape of a cart behind them mountained with stones and she recognized then the particular walk of McDaid, the man’s forward lean with his elbows pointing out like he was walking into wind always. The wellying waddle. How Barnabas coalesced into the man she knew, his eyes yoked to the ground. She saw then it was not the horse and cart they were leading but McDaid’s cart and mule and t
hey brought it to a groaning stop in the middle of the yard.

  Where’s the horse, Barnabas? she said.

  In the lamplight they began to unload the stones.

  Barnabas turned. Billy, get up here and give us a hand.

  The boy came forward and stood narrow against the thickness of his father.

  Barnabas, she said. What’s going on? Where’s the horse and cart?

  She watched him grunt and grab a stone off the cart, place it upon the flagstones. The billowing stone dust caught in the lamplight looked like ten thousand distant suns, born into glitter and dying there.

  Barnabas, she said.

  He turned to her dirt-faced and she saw in his eyes a great weariness and he did not speak but sighed at her. McDaid turned to her and spoke, his voice awkward and soft. Barnabas had a wee accident up on Moyle Hill, Eskra. The wheel came off the cart. Turned the whole thing upside-down so it did. Lucky no one got kilt.

 

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