The Black Snow (23 page)

The storm with Barnabas was days behind. Each of them bruised to the other and she saw how hurt the boy was, the way
he wore that hurt in his eyes as if an inside part of him had been darkened by them. After a day she and Barnabas made their peace and she had resolved with him to try better, admitted to him that she had made a mistake. That she had lost her nerve and did not trust him.

Things will improve, he said.

They have to, she answered.

Too late she saw the gap that opened permanently between Barnabas and Peter, the man no longer calling around, a sweeter man there never was but there is only so much sourness sweetness can take without becoming bitter. She told herself Barnabas would come around and see it how Peter saw it. That they would make their peace.

She took oats from the jar and soused them in the pan with hot water and set the pan on the stove. Pinched at the salt and sprinkled some on top of the water. Another wasp at the window. It flitted at the glass and she stepped away from it and saw it swing for the open door. Out and away with you. Upstairs the floor timbers groaned and she heard the sonorous noises of great suffering, Barnabas shifting out of bed and complaining to the walls. She leaned on the jambs and called up to Billy and waited till she heard him shout he was up and a few minutes later he came downstairs dressed for school. He sat at the table and played with his porridge. Grumbled at her. This tea’s thin as piss water.

Don’t you talk like that. That’s the last of our rations.

He pushed the cup away from him.

Give it here.

He sat there fumbling with his thumbs and stole quick looks at her, something fraying about her general nature, the way her hair was shot with more silver. She watched him sit hunched
as if protective, saw on his left hand ink marks that wandered spiralling to his fingers, a schoolboy’s tapestry of violence in weaves and scrawls and an ornate skull and cross bones.

Why do you draw on your hands? she said.

Dunno.

Barnabas came plodfoot down the stairs bit down on a fag, the man fully dressed but for his bare feet. He sat down on the range chair and produced a pair of socks. Saw Eskra watching him. The way she spoke barely under her breath. Why don’t you cut your toenails? He looked at her and said nothing, turned to the boy. When you get home from school quit whatever you are doing. I have a job for you.

Billy stood up and shrugged and bent for his schoolbag. Aye, whatever.

Don’t you whatever me. Barnabas grabbed him and began to ruffle his hair with affection and the boy resisted against him, broke free with a staring red face. Leave off, would ye. He went out the door.

The air between Barnabas and Eskra a delicate thing that could bear little pressure upon it. He went out to the yard and closed the back door behind him. She began to clean about the house, went to the back door and opened it again, drafts of cool air bellowing into the room that fluttered the pages of a recipe book on the table. She went to the radio and turned the dial and stood a moment to listen. Could not recall what it was she heard, but the music brought suddenly a dim memory from childhood. A brass band in a park. Musicians in black. Sitting beside her father. Her mind grasping for details that were lost to her, faint smells found of roasting peanuts. The music on the radio swelled and subsided and left her holding the ghost hand of her father,
and she stood there, saw herself as a child, felt herself as a child, felt for a moment grief for the loss of her old self.

She took the sweeping brush and went to the front door and opened it. Heard on the breeze a distant dog’s woofing, a high octave of birdsong. Caught the music of the bees and heard it off-tune, an odd discordance. She swept up the hall and went into the kitchen for the brush and pan. She found the brush in the turf bucket and shook her head at Barnabas leaving it there like that, the man was unbelievable, began to nose about for the pan, found it behind the back door nestled against the shotgun. She took the brush and pan to the hall and bent to the small hill of dust and dog hair and she went outside with it to the hedge and bent and lowered the dirt into the thicket. She walked back to the house and it was then the strange music of the bees reached into her. She began towards the side of the house, her head cocked to listen better, wondered what it was that made so strange their droning. She came closer and what she heard was shrill and worrisome and what she saw was not seen until she was upon it, until she lifted the hive roof. What she had heard and believed to be the bees were not bees at all and that few of her bees were living. In that small moment of time she saw the carcasses of her hive strewn about, the mesh floor some mediaeval orgy of body parts like the leavings of a battlefield blooded. Bee wings torn off and strewn about to catch the light in their tiny way and shine it silver, pieces of black bee legs like loose strands of tobacco, thoraces disembodied and heads rolled as if they had been beheaded, and in a way they were, and she saw most of the bees’ abdomens were missing. What bees were left complete were lying on their backs as if astonished at such butchery, and the insects that had invaded murderous for her
bees filled her ears with violence–a plague of wasps that swung dangerous, made fizzy the air. In that moment she lost her mind to them, batted her hand at the wasps, a movement that was reflex and helpless, and the draft of her hand brought the insects upon her. A pail of wasps rose up narrow-waisted, swung at her with their stingers. They broke the white seal of her arms, the skin that lay thin on her hand bones, the delicate arch of her neck, pierced the promenade of her forehead, the plash of perfect skin between the eye and eye-bone. She felt the pain pulse white lightning in her eye and then thicken until it was felt in the whole of her head. She batted blindly, uselessly, staggered backwards the hot pain like pokers scalding the insides of her and her mind fell away from her. Jagging breaths and backwards then and she lost her balance and hit the ground, wasp venom ferrying itself within her, her-lips-her-skin-her-limbs thickening with it, and the strength gone out of her arms and she lay there on the green grass involuting and useless.

The spring sun shone and from the sky came chill drafts that made the leaves tremble. Out of the sky came a cabbage butterfly, a dark blind eye on each of its white wings and it beat the air briskly, fluttered high a soft kiss to reach the branch of an ash. And when it had rested a while upon a greening new leaf, it dived itself back down, its wings held over its head in the poise of a fallen angel. In the moment he came for her he saw the butterfly upon her, resting serene on the curve of her waist, a white orchid. Bent and took her in his arms.

He watched her open one eye, the other lidded swollen, a marbling of red and blue and she murmured to him my bees are lost. What he heard was a mesh of words unintelligible, her
bottom lip fattened and her hands and arms and throat puffed up. Upon her forehead was a swell like she had been felled by a stone. He heard in her breathing a wheezing and he put his fingers onto the ashy of her skin, took her inside and sat with her by the bed until Billy came home from school. Sent the boy off for the doctor.

He went outside and walked slowly towards the hives, saw the place was devastated, heard a quiet that was total. Later, he told her they were all gone, the larvae and the eggs all taken and the honey was eaten also. She did not speak, lay there inert with one eye open towards the ceiling and then she turned away from him. He went into the kitchen and took from the press a number of blue glass bottles and he filled them with sugar water, hung them around the hive, put them inside the house, upon the deal table and on the sills of the windows, put two each side of her in the bedroom, hung them outside around the house. Later when he went to check on them he saw those placed by the front of the house held dead or drowning wasps in their dozens. He stared into a trap and felt pure disgust. Something else unsettled him. What he sensed perhaps was in the air itself or in his tasting of it, an odd and faint pungency, and when he looked up from the trap he knew that the world was askew to them, that somehow they had fallen out of kilter with what was, some invisible order, and he could not understand what for or how so. A whirling universe of chaos and dark and the light bending sharply away from it, could sense as if a door just opened to him the nature of the trap greater than he had ever imagined.

Two days later she rose to a yellow afternoon that lit the room. The house so quiet with all its windows closed she could hear
above all else her heartbeat. She stood in front of the mirror and saw her face had lost its shape. She dressed with care and went downstairs and bent to tie her shoelaces and found her fingers hurt. What had to be done now was resolute inside her, had formed into a solid visual shape as she had lain there. Through the mesh of pain in her body she saw it. Now I know what’s going on. My family. She sleeved her coat and stole out the front door and did not look towards the ruined apiary, could hear Barnabas banging something in the back yard as she ghosted out the gate. What kind of evening it was she paid no heed and as she walked past Peter McDaid’s house he saw her from the field and waved meekly and saw the wave unmet, watched her pass down the lane. She met the main road and began to walk in the direction of the town, began moving her fingers through the hurt, sucked on her swollen lip as she walked, ran her tongue over the place where the venom had been entered.

Fir trees banking up a hill to her right netted the last of the daylight and thickened the air with resin. When the road met a stone culvert she took the left past it, a rutted lane that leaned down a hill and bent around a corner. Halfway down she met the white of a house. Did not knock to enter, opened the latch of the door without stopping and walked in. When she stood in the room she saw in it few furnishings and that nobody was home. A rocker with worn arms sat beside a fire that looked a good while dead. On the air the stench of the unwashed, while hung from a rafter above the fireplace was a black fowl. She looked in the second room. A brass double bed with a single blanket. A thickening of that stale smell. She began to look about the house for her missing white sheets, found nothing.

As she came towards the town she walked past people who
knew her–an old woman called Mrs Doherty who slowed to talk and looked at her aghast when she saw the state of Eskra’s face, the fattened lip, the lowering swell of her forehead, her left eye askew. Eskra marching past her, walking with her hands fisted and burning, felt a swelling and heaviness in her legs. How she must have looked to others she knew too well from the way their eyes fell upon her, two men staring hard from the back of a passing cart. Across the town centre she marched towards the double-door of a pub. One door shut and the other open to a cramped foyer and she stepped into that dark and opened a frosted-glass lounge door. A grey and greasy window lit the bar and she stood in its watery shadows, the counter to her right without a bar keep and a turf fire burning. A table of three men stirred by the door to gawk at her, one of them leaning over his drink with his finger in his nose. The mouth of the man closest to her fell open when he saw her face, lifted his foot off a stool. Eskra saw what she came for at the far end of the room.

Baba Peoples sat with her back to the door beside an old man and woman. There was meekness in the way they were, hunched and no talk out of them and their hands were cradling their drinks. Eskra came behind Baba Peoples and closed a fist around a length of her thinning hair, yanked her backwards off the stool, began to drag the woman across the room like a sack. An odd sound left the lips of the old woman, a muted shriek that sounded more animal than human while she kicked her measly legs uselessly beneath her. Eskra dragging the old woman towards the door and one of the men stood quick and came behind Eskra and took a hold of her shoulders, tried to swing her away, forced her to let go of Baba Peoples. The old woman scrambling to her feet and as she moved Eskra shook free of the man and hit Baba Peoples a
slap hard on the cheek, could feel in that slap how brittle were the woman’s bones. The old woman flew from the slap and when she got up from the ground she took in the grotesque swells of her attacker. Her eyes shook with startle. Eskra’s voice reaching up into a yell. You little tormentor. You’re no better than a witch.

The man who stood behind Eskra took her firmly by the arm and she tried to pull free but couldn’t. The barman appeared squat and bald and began shouting. Hold on there now, he said, his face reddening, but he did not come between them. Eskra shook herself free and stared at her restrainer as if daring him again to touch her, and she turned around and faced Baba Peoples. A voice rose up from behind her. She’s only an old woman. What in the hell did she do to ye?

Eskra turned to the table and pointed to Baba Peoples. She’s been tormenting my family. This last two months now. Doing things to us. She’s been holding us to blame for the accident that killed her husband. This woman is bitter and twisted, no better than a little witch.

Faces turned to watch the words register on the face of Baba Peoples and she stood in that glare smaller than she ever stood, her failing grey hair unkempt over her face. She stared up at Eskra, took a step towards her, spoke then with unexpected defiance. I did no such thing, Eskra Kane. To ye or yer family. Yer making it all up.

Eskra’s voice became cat spit. Listen to you and all your lies. You little fucking child hag. You did to my bees and you did to my family. And I know you did to our dog.

The old woman took another step towards Eskra and reached her hand into her dress pocket, produced a small seamstress scissors. She held it in the air before Eskra and stood defiant. The
barman shouted firmly at her. You put them scissors away, Baba Peoples. The old woman leaned towards Eskra. I resent what yer sayin, Eskra Kane. I never done nothing to yer family other than ask ye for money. And got none. Now say it to me again, woman. Call me a liar.

Eskra grew more vexed. The lies out of your mouth. Admit the things you have done. You’re trying to drive us out.