The Big Snow

by David Park

  For Alberta, again and again

  The North of Ireland

  1963

  Contents

  The Light of the World

  Snow Trails

  The Wedding Dress

  Against the Cold

  The Big Snow

  Also available by David Park

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  The Light of the World

  He spread the map carefully over the bed-end so that it wasn’t creased. There were some marbled white bruises on it, a legacy of all the times they had stretched it over their knees or on the quilt of this same bed. He wasn’t sure if she could see it or not, but he had marked the route in blue ink. Coast to coast. From the grey swell of the Atlantic to the sweet blue of the Pacific. A whole continent in between. The sea is where it starts and where it always ends. He thinks there is a fitness in that, a rightness. The blue of the road runs like a vein across the shaded skin of the continent. He doesn’t know if she can see it but he wants her to know that he’s traced the road, followed the journey they planned to share, and maybe if she can see it and understand, there is still time to make it. It’s a long way to go, for this is a big country, bigger than even his imagination is able to picture and there is no way for people like them, people who have grown up and lived nowhere other than a small place, can ever grasp it. Not until they see it for themselves. Not until they let their hearts believe it.

  He went to the window and looked out on where their lives had been lived, saw the empty, wind-whipped fields stuttering and fretting into each other, and it felt as if their days had been measured and framed by these shadowy lines of hedgerows, the low seal of sky, the fixed boundary of time and place. Where you were born was just one more random twist of fate, which now for him seemed the engine that drove all human existence. So it was no good for the church spire to thrust itself skywards from the heart of the village because he couldn’t believe that it aspired further than a collective need, an insistence on what it wanted the world to be like. When he turned back to the bed and looked at the ashen pallor of her shrivelled skin, the skin of which his hand had known the caress and soft beauty, he felt that what he saw was living, dying proof that there was meaning only in what could be found in the present. It was the thought that charged him, stopped him collapsing at the side of the bed and weeping in anger and rage, stopped the paralysis of self-pity. Now there were only moments – he didn’t know how many – and each had to be filled with the things he needed to say. The preparations for the journey.

  He smoothed the map again and made sure the angle was right for her eyes to see, eyes that drifted in and out of unconsciousness, the drug-fuelled respite from the pain. Then he opened the book of Ansel Adams photographs at her favourite – the one where the stretch of lake seems to hold up its fluid, animated face and pull the sky into it, like the embrace of a lover. And everything is open and brushed by light that feels like the light of the world. It was what she wanted to do, take photographs that were bigger than themselves, opening the moment into such light and space. It was what he, too, now had to do, and he was frightened that he wouldn’t know how to prise open what was left and fill it with what she wanted, with what he needed. He had already told her that he loved her and the raw words had burned his throat with the knowledge that they hadn’t been used enough in the past, so now they seemed like what was expected, a final tidying-up, of setting things in order, and that wasn’t enough.

  He thought best when he focused on practicalities so he stood up and looked around the room. He had to keep it warm so he put some more coal on the fire. They had never used the fireplace before, but he was grateful that they had only blocked it with a piece of painted plywood and not had it bricked up. It smoked a little but if he kept a window on its snib it wasn’t so bad, and the single-bar electric fire could be used as well if the temperature continued to drop. Sometimes he was tempted to open the window wider, to let cold, clean air swirl into the room, but he knew he couldn’t and he knew, too, that what he wanted was something to carry off the smell of what he couldn’t recognize as her. It was as if this thing had sought to take from her all the things that went to make her who she was, the person whom fifteen years of marriage had lodged in his memory. So in its ravenous, gnawing greed it consumed the skin that she had kept beautiful only by the splash of water; the scent of her body; the glory of her red hair, which now had withered into a thin stubble and left her scalp exposed and cold to the eyes. He had tried lying with her on the bed but it didn’t feel the way he wanted and he couldn’t touch or hold her for fear of hurting the fragility to which her body had shrunk, so the most he did was lay his finger lightly on the back of her hand. Even there his eyes fastened on the skin, which seemed to have tightened and pushed the blue tributary of veins close to the surface. The veins reminded him of the road on the map and he remembered its importance and that all that was left for him now was the final chance to step outside his own self-pity and push aside every one of the selfish impulses that flooded his head. He almost envied those who had the comfort of faith. Right at the start, when the doctor told him, he had tried a silent prayer but it tasted of hypocrisy and the words had stumbled then fragmented into the sense of a greater futility, part of a deception that prevented the acknowledgment of the profound and inescapable truth that they were giving him back his wife only so that she could die.

  He turned to another photograph. A stretch of desert, running from the eye to the dark bevel of mountains and a rim of thrown sky where striated, penumbral light seemed to slip into a memory of itself. Then, taking the damp cloth from the bedside table, he slowly traced the hollow contours of her face like a blind man feeling Braille, trying to read the memory of who she was and who she used to be. He let the edge of the cloth linger on the dried-up lips and tried to conjure the lilt of her smile, the way her eyes seemed to smile too, but there was only the flinty staleness of her breath and the open purse of her mouth, which had not uttered a word since her return. He switched on the bedside light in an attempt to chase away the tide of thickening grey light that had started to seep into the room, but it made her skin seem yellow and brittle like parchment, and the light was intrusive and illuminated what he didn’t want to read until he angled the shade to the wall and she fell into shadow again. It was the light of the world he wanted for her now, the light in these photographs that would bathe and swaddle her in its warmth, stir these wintry limbs into life. If only there was a doorway into them that he could carry her through, everything might be all right. And coming home to die was only right but it wasn’t right enough when it wasn’t where the heart wanted for its home. She was bigger than this place with its falling mesh of narrow and mean understanding; she belonged in the space of some other world. Always.

  He pointed to the map, moving the shade a little so that it was encompassed by its stretch of yellow. ‘It’s a long way,’ he said. ‘Not like taking a dander up the road, or going up to the shops. You could put this whole island in the back pocket of any one of those states and never notice it was there. A whole continent. A whole different world, too.’ The closeness of his whisper to the side of her face trembled a little feather of her hair. ‘It’ll be an adventure all right, no two ways about it, but what a thing to do. Who around here would ever believe it possible? They’d think we were off our heads if they ever found out – maybe we should send them postcards from everywhere we go but not sign our real names on them.’ The lines at the sides of her eyes crinkled a little and for a second it made him think she was going to open them and the thought that his words were reaching her made him talk faster and more intensely. ‘We’ll have to plan it really well, though – it’ll take a lot of planning all right. It’s not just like
going off for a week at the seaside. There’s the car to hire and the best route to work out and we should keep a diary, a log of every town and place on the way. You can draw little pencil sketches in it and we can collect things and stick them in, too. It’ll be important to keep a record of everything. Your photographs of course – we’ll have those and I’ve been thinking that I should try to write something when we come back home or even as we go. Our kind of On the Road but I don’t know if it’d be fiction or travel writing or what. Maybe we can put everything together in a kind of journal. Maybe if we did it well, someone might be interested in publishing it. You never know.’

  The doctor wouldn’t return until his morning surgery was over. He’d give her more drugs, touch him on the shoulder and then they’d talk about the weather. He wished he could give her the drugs himself, avoid the embarrassment of small talk and that joint walk down the stairs and the inevitable fumble with the door. It had transmuted into a predictable ritual and only the knowledge that it was coming to an end made him accept it with patience. He turned another page and, conscious of the thickening gloom, angled the bedside lamp again so that it illuminated the photograph. ‘El Capitan, Merced River, Clouds, Yosemite National Park’. The river is in white-ridged full flow, funnelling out from tall, fir-clad banks and rushing past the humped blackness of rocks. In the foreground, firs and pines scratch the darkening tumble of clouds. Behind, the sheer stretch of rock is lightened on one face by the sheen of light that seems to have travelled from a brightness further off. Maybe some nights they’d sleep in the car or even take a small tent with them and pitch it in the lee of trees. In the morning, drink from the river, let the water splash their faces and feel the tangy freshness on their tongues. He told her about it and his voice was washed by excitement as he lived it for her and in the telling he remembered about the stars – more stars than they could ever imagine – and before they went to sleep at night, before they smothered their night fire with dust, they’d lie under the stars and just stare, just stare at the great arch of sky.

  Stars in her hair. Not those brittle strands that dithered and splayed their dryness across her skull. He’d kissed her first under the stars, at the end of the lane leading to her parents’ farm, his heart pumping and kicking in his chest like a piston, his arms holding the whole of her so tightly that it was as if he wanted all the life of her to flow into him. And he had felt it more intensely than he had ever felt anything before or since – the press of her breasts against him, the softness of her mouth, which took his and silently spoke her equal need. Afterwards they had laughed but held each other as if frightened either to let go or to do it again, and neither of them had spoken until she told him it was time for her to go inside again and he had stood until she vanished through the yellow square of light before he threw his face to the same stars and shouted, ‘Yes, Yes!’ again and again, then started to run like a boy on the first day of his holiday.

  He turned to another page. ‘Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1945’. A plain of rocks and boulders stretches like a moonscape towards the mountains. A corridor of light braids one of their flanks. The two mountains are shaped like a woman’s breasts, the range like the supine body. The oval rock closest to the camera becomes the secret place. He wondered why he had never seen the photograph properly before as he propped it open at the foot of the bed. But in the last few days he had realized that there were many things he had never seen properly. This was only one more. Taking things for granted was what people called it, but that didn’t explain it all. He felt as if he had been sleepwalking these last few years, his senses worn dull by familiarity and complacency. Now he had come to them suddenly and terribly so that there was nothing in the moment that was not felt, nothing that did not press and print itself on his consciousness with a sear. And he didn’t want it any other way, didn’t want it muffled and rendered vague by the drugs the doctor had offered him surreptitiously as if trying to sell him something illicit.

  He felt a pulse of shame and panic about the past. There was so much that was unrecorded, so much that had slipped into the flux and flow of time, and with a kind of desperation he sought to retrieve whatever he could, to feel vicariously what had been lost. He looked at where her camera sat on the dresser and tried to refocus on what had slipped away. But there was so much and so little time. Her head moved on the pillow and for one foolish second he thought she was going to tell him and he went to her and lightly soothed her cheek with the back of his hand. At the very start he had been angry with her secretly, as if he blamed her for letting this thing happen, for taking it into her body, for not being strong enough, but he recognized it now as part of that selfish self-pity he had determined to dispel. The doctor didn’t think there was much left now. Not long. But they weren’t words he had been comfortable using and he had slipped them out of the side of his mouth almost as a whisper. Her nurse told him she prayed for her and sometimes God worked a miracle and what was needed was faith. After she had gone he had burned the tract she had left.

  He straightened the map on the bed and tried to adjust the light so that it caught the route he had marked. He read her some of the place names, pointed out deserts, mountains, forests, the Great Plains. Coast to coast. The blue seas of the Pacific Ocean. He told her they would enter the light of the photographs, leave this shadowy, fretted landscape behind. He turned to another photograph. ‘Minarets and High Clouds, Sierra Nevada’. The mountains are patched with pockets of snow, and above them the white ridges of clouds seem to run and scatter into the sullen water of the sky. It’s as if the snow from the slopes has been wind-blown and scattered skywards. There was one place he wanted to go, go while there was still time. He had remembered it while he looked at the photograph.

  The boarding house where they spent their first night together nestled under the Mourne Mountains on the edge of the resort. They had a room at the end of a corridor beside the bathroom. A room dominated by a cavernous wardrobe with glass panels on its doors and a sagging double bed which was a mountainous pyre of eiderdown and a mismatched assortment of balled and scratchy blankets. From their window they could see the grey rim of the sea, the tired stretch of a headland. It wasn’t what either of them had imagined, but neither wanted to be the first to reveal disappointment or seem ungrateful for what had been a gift from her parents. Instead they told each other that if the weather held up they would be able to spend most of their time out and about. He remembered his own nervousness, the sudden flare of self-doubt when the time came. He thought she probably felt the same but was better at hiding it and, with that indifference she always possessed to what didn’t matter, simply refused any show of coyness. He had watched her take off her clothes in the frosted, pitted mirror, which was marbled and stained with rust in its corners, the sudden whiteness of her breasts flitting like ghosts across his eyes. Then she had turned to face him and he could do nothing but stare at her and then only at her face until her outstretched arms held him as tightly as he had ever hoped.

  Tentative, frightened of ineptitude, their lovemaking was framed by the flushing of the toilet, the tread of feet in the corridor, the groan and complaint of the pipes, and afterwards they had wondered half-aloud if that was what it amounted to and then found comfort in their laughter. They joked about being paid-up members of this exclusive club, talked as if they had just been granted life membership after having had to wait so long for their applications to be accepted. In the morning he woke to find her standing at the window and he imagined he saw disappointment in the frame of her body but when she turned to him there was no trace of it. That night they took a bus round the coast to the harbour at Kilkeel and watched as the fishing boats prepared to set sail. Everything was sharp and clear to him, the way he wanted it to be. He looked at her head lolling on the pillow, her mouth slightly open, and he wondered if somewhere hidden now to the world were the same images lodged for ever. Provisions for her journey.

  The boats bobbing
like a heartbeat, the oil-skimmed smear and skein of reflected light lapping against their wooden hulls. It was the first time he had known the full force and shock of desire. It mixed with the tang of the sea and the lights already shimmering on the horizon and laced his breath as he spoke. He trusted his voice less and less and so he listened silently as she recited the painted names – the Steadfast Hope, the Starry Sky, the Climbing Wave. He wanted to pull her into the shadows of the empty sheds, to have all of her, but the excitement and happiness in her voice made him hesitant as he tried to smother what pushed and pulled at his insides. She skipped like a girl over the splay of ropes and nets and scolded him for his silence, and he smiled to hide what tugged below his surface as she joked that they should steal a boat and sail away. He knew she didn’t want to go back to the room, and the strung pearls of light which glinted in the distance seemed to be what her eyes wished for, but that knowledge did nothing to diminish his desire and as he locked his arm in hers it was his own urgency he felt.

  They were given a ride back in a lorry heading for Belfast. The driver had stopped for them as they stood at the bus stop and offered them a lift. They had sat together in the narrow passenger seat and as the driver talked about his job he felt the press of her body against his own, each point of contact the fusion of need. They had been dropped right outside the door of the boarding house but both had hesitated, unwilling to enter, and then he led her across the road, down over a stony swathe of beach, across jagged tendrils of rock that led to the sea. She understood now and it was all right, and when he found a secret bed of sand that filtered between the shelter of rocks she lay down for him and with the shuck and break of the sea close by he made love to her in the way he hadn’t the night before. And afterwards, when he had nothing more to give, he lay still with his head buried in her hair and she cradled him, and then, inside the rasp and shuffle of the sea across the pebbled shore, he heard her voice repeat the names of the boats – the Climbing Wave, the Steadfast Hope, the Starry Sky – whispering them until they ran into each other and he thought her voice must be part of the sea.