by Hannah Kent
‘Please God he will be. Keep yourself safe and warm. I suspect ’twas only when this one’s mother sickened that he began to go soft in the head and his limbs moved to kippeens. I never heard a thing about a strange child while she was alive.’
Nóra’s stomach dropped. Her own kin, sitting in her house, blacking her grandson. She pressed her face against the door, feeling her pulse jump in her throat.
‘Did Nóra tell you that, so?’
Peg scoffed. ‘What do you think? She won’t have any talk about him. Why do you think she keeps him here like a clocking hen, and none of us knowing the state of him? Why do you think, with her husband just gone, she made Peter O’Connor bring him to me before there was a crowd in this place? ’Tis a rare soul who has set eyes on him, and for all us being kin, I’d not had a good look at the cratur until these past days. You can imagine the shock I had when I saw the boy.’
‘She’s shamed by him.’
‘Well, something’s not right. It must be a great burden. Her daughter dead – God have mercy on her – and now this ailing one to care for all alone.’
‘She’s doughty though. She’ll get on.’
Nóra watched from behind the door as Peg leant back, running a tongue over her gums. ‘She’s got some spine, that woman. Nóra has always been a proud one. But I do be worried after her. Such a dark season of death and strangeness. Her daughter, and now Martin, and the child blighted with it all.’
‘Peter O’Connor was saying he saw a light by the fairy ráth in the hour of Martin’s passing. Said he thinks there’s a third death coming.’
Peg crossed herself and threw another piece of turf on the fire. ‘God protect us. Still, worse things have happened.’
Nóra hesitated. Rain dripped down her face, the damp of the cloak soaking into her clothes. She didn’t care. She bit her lip, straining to hear what they were saying.
‘Did Nance keen for Johanna?’
Peg sighed. ‘She didn’t, no. Nóra’s girl married a Corkman some years back. She’s buried there, somewhere out by Macroom. Nóra only heard Johanna had died when her son-in-law came to give her the child. Oh, ’twas a pity. Johanna’s man appeared one night at dusk during the harvest just gone, Micheál strapped on a donkey. Told her that Johanna had wasted away and he a widower. Yes, a wasting sickness, the man said. One day she took to her bed with a pounding head and she never got up from it again. She faded day by day until she had gone completely. And he was in no place to care for the boy, and I know his people thought it only right that he be taken to Nóra and Martin. She never said a word like it, but there was a rumour that Micheál was half-starved when he came. A little bag of bones fit for a pauper’s coffin.’
How dare she, thought Nóra. Gossiping about me on the day I bury my man. Spreading rumours about my daughter. Tears sprung to her eyes and she pulled away from the door.
‘There’s no shame in poverty.’ Brigid’s piping voice travelled over the sound of the wind. ‘We all know the price of it.’
‘There’s no shame for some, but Nóra has always held her head high. Have you ever noticed that she doesn’t talk of the dead? My own husband is long gone to God, and yet I talk of him as if he were still here. He remains with me in that way. But when Johanna died, ’twas as though Nóra struck her daughter’s name from her tongue. I’ve no doubt she grieves, but any memories of her daughter she shares with the bottle alone.’
‘Does she go the shebeen?’
‘Sh. I don’t know where Nóra gets her comfort, but if a woman can find peace in the drink, then who are we to grudge her for it.’
It was too much. Nóra hastily wiped her eyes and, jaw clenched, entered the kitchen, her cloak and face slick with rain. She shut the door against the storm and set the pail on the table under the window, packed with straw to keep the cold out.
The women were quiet. Nóra wondered if they guessed she had overheard them.
‘Did she give much?’ Peg eventually asked.
‘She’s spooked.’ Nóra dragged her cloak off her shoulders and crouched by the fire to warm her hands, her eyes averted.
‘’Twas a time when we couldn’t move for butter in this valley,’ muttered Peg. ‘Now every second cratur is blasted.’
Micheál murmured and, relieved for something to do, Nóra picked him up out of the cramped cradle. ‘You great lad. Oh, the weight in him.’
Peg and Brigid exchanged looks.
‘What were ye talking of?’ Nóra asked.
‘Our Brigid here was asking about Nance.’
‘Is that so.’
‘’Tis. She can’t hear enough.’
‘Don’t let me be interrupting you. Go on with your story, then.’ Nóra thought she caught a glimpse of panic between the women.
‘Well, now. As I was saying, folk back in the day thought it mighty strange for a woman to be living off thin air and dandelions. And they went to the priest about her. ’Twas not Father Healy, but the priest before him. Father O’Reilly, God have mercy on him. He would have none of their suspicion and gossip. “Leave the poor woman be,” said he. Sure, Brigid, Father O’Reilly was a fierce man, a powerful man for those who had no voice or home for themselves. ’Twas he who urged the men to build her the cabin and sent them to her for the herbs and cures. He went to her himself. Terrible rheumatism.’
The water in the black pot trembled. Nóra, lips tight in anger, stared as the rain escaping down the chimney hole hit its iron sides.
‘What happened next, then?’ Brigid filled the silence.
Peg shifted in her seat, glancing at Nóra. ‘Well, not long after Nance had got her cabin she began to get a name for herself. I was on the night-rambling one evening, down at Old Hanna’s, and we got to be telling stories about the Good People. And Hanna starts telling us about a fairy bush, a sceach gheal that was very near cut down. It was your own Daniel’s uncle, Seán Lynch, that was after doing it. Begod, he’s some fool. Seán, he was a young man then, and he was up by the blacksmith’s with the lads, boasting amongst themselves. Your man Seán was talking of cutting down the whitethorn and the lads were warning him against it. Somehow, word of his daring got back to Nance Roche. Surely you’ve seen where the tree stands, by the fairy ráth? She lives near it. And Nance went to Seán’s cabin one night, frightened the life out of him and Kate by appearing in their doorway, and she tells him he’d best leave the whitethorn alone or They would be after him. “That is Their tree,” says she. “Don’t you be putting a hand to it, or I tell you, Seán Lynch, that you’ll be suffering after it. Don’t you be putting a hand to anything in violence.” Well, didn’t he laugh her off, calling her filthy names besides, and didn’t he go to cut the sceach gheal that very day. Old Hanna said that she saw with her own eyes how Seán took a dirty great swing at the fairy whitethorn with his axe. No word of a lie, didn’t Hanna see him miss the trunk completely. Didn’t the axe swing through the air, missing the wood and land in his leg. He near cut himself in half. And that is why he has the limp.’
There was a soft gurgle from the floor and the women looked down to see Micheál staring at the rafters, a crooked smile on his face.
Nóra watched Peg lean forward and examine his face, her eyes thoughtful. ‘He likes a story.’
‘Go on, Peg,’ Brigid urged. She was perched on the edge of the settle, the firelight full and flickering on her face.
‘Well, that was the start of it. People saw in that axe swing proof Nance had the fairy knowledge, the fios sigheog. Folk started to go to her if they thought Them were abroad and at Their tricks. They thought perhaps she used to go with Them, which is how she got her way of understanding.’
‘I never met a one who was taken by the Good People. I never met a one who was swept.’ Brigid shuddered.
‘I’ll tell you something now, Brigid. This valley is full of old families. For all the folk on the roads, there
’s not often room for strangers that don’t marry into the blood. Nance planted herself into this soil with herbs and death-cries and sure hands when a woman’s time came. There was plenty that feared her after the whitethorn, and there’s plenty that fear her to this day, but there’s more that need Nance. And as long as they need her, she’ll be in that bothán by the woods. My man, when he was alive, woke one morning with his eye all swolled up and no seeing out of it. He took to Nance, and she said ’twas the fairies struck him in the eye. Said he must have seen them on the road, and ’twas not his right, so they brought the sight out of the eye that saw them. Said they spat in it when he was asleep. But she had the charm. She put the herb in his eye – glanrosc, I think it was – and cured the fairy spite out of it. Now, I don’t know whether Nance was ever swept or not but there’s no doubting that she has a gift. Whether that gift is God-given or a token from the Good People, well, that’s not for us to know.’
‘Will Nance be there when my time comes?’
‘Sure, ’tis Nance for you.’
Nóra offered Micheál to Brigid, her voice cold. ‘Hold him while I fix the tea.’
Brigid settled the boy awkwardly against the curve of her stomach. As if sensing Brigid’s strangeness, Micheál stiffened, his arms shooting out from his sides. His mouth crumpled in discontent.
‘He likes feathers,’ Nóra said, easing potatoes into the steaming pot. ‘Here.’ She picked up a small downy feather that had escaped from the chicken roost and was blowing about the room in a draught. ‘Martin always gave him a tickle.’
Brigid took the feather and stroked the boy’s dimpled chin. He giggled, his chest in convulsions. Brigid started laughing with him. ‘Will you look at that!’
‘’Tis a good sign,’ said Peg, gesturing to the pair.
Nóra’s smile emptied. ‘A good sign of what?’
Peg picked up the iron tongs and idly poked the fire.
‘Are you a deaf woman now? A good sign of what, Peg O’Shea?’
Peg sighed. ‘A good sign that your Micheál might yet be well.’
Nóra pressed her lips together and continued tipping the last of the potatoes into the hot water. She flinched as it splashed her hand.
‘We only mean well for the child,’ Peg murmured.
‘Do ye now?’
‘Have you taken him to Nance, Nóra?’ Brigid’s voice was hesitant. ‘I was thinking just now, it might be that he’s fairy-struck.’
Silence filled the cabin.
Nóra suddenly dropped down on the floor. She brought her apron to her face and took a shuddering breath. She could smell the familiar scent of cow manure and wet grass.
‘There now,’ Peg whispered. ‘’Tis a hard day for you, Nóra Leahy. We had no right to talk of such things. God bless the child and see he grows up to be a great man. Like Martin.’
At the sound of her husband’s name, Nóra groaned. Peg placed a hand on her shoulder and she shrugged it off.
‘Forgive us. We only mean well. Tig grian a n-diadh na fearthana. Sunshine follows rain. Better times will be upon us soon, just wait and see.’
‘Faith, God’s help is nearer than the door,’ Brigid piped.
The rafters creaked in the force of the wind. Micheál continued to laugh.
CHAPTER
THREE
Ragwort
Samhain Eve came upon the valley, announced by a wind that smelled of rotting oak leaves and the vinegar tang of windfall apples. Nóra heard the happy shrieks of children as they traced the field walls and their dressing of brambles, plucking the last bloody berries before night fetched the púca to poison them with his breath. They emerged from the ditches in the smoky peace of twilight like a band of murderers, their hands and mouths stained purple. Nóra watched them as they scrambled up the hills to their homes, some of the boys wearing dresses to deceive the fairies. It was a dangerous night to be caught outside. Tonight was a ghost night. The dead were close, and all the beings caught between Heaven and Hell would soon walk the cold loam.
They’re coming, thought Nóra. From the graves and the dark and the wet. They’re coming for the light of our fires.
The sky was fading. Nóra watched as two young boys were hustled indoors by their anxious mother. It was not the time to tempt the Devil or the fairies. People disappeared on Samhain Eve. Small children went missing. They were lured into ringforts and bogs and mountain sides with music and lights, and were never seen again by their parents.
Nóra remembered, as a very small girl, the fear and talk when a man from the valley did not return to his family’s croft one Samhain Eve. They found him the next morning, naked and bleeding, curled into the soil and clutching yellow ragwort in his hands. He was abducted, her mother had told her. Taken to ride with the sióga until dawn broke out in feeble light and he was abandoned. Nóra had sat in the shadows, listening to the adults as they spoke in urgent whispers around her parents’ fire. Wasn’t he a poor soul to be found in such a way. His mother would die of the shame of it. A grown man, shivering and talking of the woods like a poor unfortunate.
‘They took me,’ he had muttered to the men of the valley when they helped him home, covering him with a coat and bearing his stagger on patient shoulders. ‘They took me.’
The next evening the men and women had burnt all the ragwort from the fields to deprive the Good People of their sacred plant. Nóra could still remember the sight: tiny fires burning along the cant of the valley, winking in the darkness.
The brothers had reached their cabin and Nóra watched as their mother closed the door behind them. With a last, long look to the woods and the billhook moon rising over them, she made the sign of the cross and went indoors.
Her house seemed smaller, somehow, after the time outside. Nóra stood by the doorstep and looked at all she had left in the world. How it had changed in the month since Martin died. How empty it seemed. The crude hearth, the smoke of former fires blacking the wall behind it in a tapering shadow of soot. Her potato pot hanging from its chain and the wicker skib resting against the wall. The dash churn by the stopped-up window and the small table under it bearing two miserable pieces of delph and crocks for milk and cream. Even the remaining treasures from her dowry – the salt box on the wall, the butter print, the settle bed with its seat worn smooth from use – seemed dismal. Here was a widow’s house. Martin’s tobacco and pipe in the hearth’s keeping hole were already covered with a film of ash. The low creepie stools were empty of company. The rushes on the floor had dried and powdered underfoot, their freshness long gone with no cause to replace them. There was little sign of life other than the fire’s lazy burn, the murmuring of her chickens fluffed in their roost, and the twitching sleep of Micheál as he lay on a pile of heather in the corner of the cabin.
He is like Johanna, Nóra thought, examining her grandchild’s face.
The boy looked unbearably smooth in sleep, bloodless and waxen. He had his father’s furrow between chin and bottom lip that pushed his mouth out in a wet sulk, but his hair was Johanna’s. Reddish and fine. Martin had loved it. Once or twice Nóra had entered the room to find her husband sitting with the boy, stroking his hair as he used to do with their daughter.
Nóra brushed the thin locks from Micheál’s forehead, and for one moment, through the stinging blur, imagined that he was Johanna. If she squinted it was as though she was once again a young mother, her little girl sleeping before her. Copper-headed, sighing in sleep. Her only baby to draw breath and stick to life. An uncomplaining child with hair of down.
She remembered what Martin had said the night Johanna was born, swaying with a night empty of sleep and full of whiskey, jubilant and terrified and lightheaded. ‘Wee dandelion,’ he had said, stroking Johanna’s feathery hair. ‘Careful or the wind will come and blow you away and scatter you over the mountains.’
A proverb ran through her mind: Scatterin
g is easier than gathering.
Nóra felt a sudden weight on her chest. Her little girl and her husband were gone. Scattered into the air and unreachable. Gone to God, gone to places where she, growing old and already too full of bones, too full of the weight of her years, ought to have gone first. She heard the breath in her throat rasping and snatched her hand away from Micheál.
Her daughter should still be alive. Should be as Nóra had found her when she and Martin had walked the full length of a day to Tadgh and Johanna’s cabin in the moors, the first time Nóra had seen her daughter since the wedding. Johanna had seemed filled with happiness, waiting at the top of the lane against the flowering gorse and the sky, wide with light, her son in her arms. How she had smiled to see them. Proud to be a wife. Proud to be a mother.
‘This is wee Micheál,’ she had said, and Nóra had taken that little boy into her arms and blinked hard at the pricking of tears. How old had he been then? No more than two. But growing and well and soon tottering after the piglet that ran squealing about the damp floor of the cramped cabin.
‘By my baptism, but he is the spit of you,’ Martin had said.
Micheál had tugged on Johanna’s skirt. ‘Mammy?’ And Nóra had noticed how her daughter swung her son onto her hip with practised ease, how she tickled him under the chin until he shrieked with laughter.
‘The years go in a gallop,’ Nóra murmured, and Johanna had smiled.
‘More,’ Micheál had demanded. ‘More.’
Nóra sat down heavily on the stool and stared at the boy who now bore little resemblance to the grandchild she remembered. She stared at his mouth, ajar in sleep, the arms thrown up over his head, wrists strangely twisted. The legs that would not bear his weight.
What happened to you? she wondered.
The house was awful in its silence.
Since Martin died, Nóra had felt that she was merely passing time until he returned and, at the same time, was devastated by the knowledge that he would not. She still noticed the absence of sound. There was no whistle as Martin pulled on his boots, no laughter. Her nights had emptied of sleep. She endured their unfeeling hours by curling herself into the depression his body had made in the straw when he was alive, until she could almost imagine that he embraced her.