by Hannah Kent
Mary tucked Micheál’s head against her collarbone, her arms awkwardly clasped around his body. ‘He has a tremor in him,’ she remarked.
Nóra poured out two piggins of buttermilk and began to prepare potatoes for their dinner. There was a tightening in her throat, as though a rope had been pulled against her neck, and she did not trust herself to speak. Several minutes passed before she heard Mary’s quavering voice behind her.
‘I’ll do my best for you.’
‘I’m sure you will.’ Nóra choked on the words. ‘I’m sure you will.’
Later that evening, once Mary and Nóra had finished their quiet meal and called the hens in for the night, they turned out the settle bed, placing a rough mattress of woven straw and a blanket down.
‘You’ll be warm here, by the fire,’ Nóra said.
‘Thank you, missus.’
‘And you’ll have Micheál to keep the heat in the bed.’
‘Does he not use that cradle?’ Mary pointed to the rough cot of woven sally twigs.
‘He’s grown too big for it. It cramps him. Now, mind you tuck him in well or he’ll kick his bedclothes off in the night.’
Mary looked at Micheál, who was propped up against the wall, his head rolling on one shoulder.
‘Tomorrow I’ll show you a little of the valley, if ’tis fine. You’ll need to know where the well is. And I’ll show you the best place to wash clothes in the river. It might do you good to meet a few of the other girls about here.’
‘Will Micheál come with us?’
Nóra gave her a sharp look.
‘I mean, do you leave him here, or do you take him about with you? A boy like him, who hasn’t the use of his legs . . .’
‘I don’t like to be taking him outside.’
‘You leave him alone?’
‘I won’t have folk splashing water on drowned mice.’ Nóra picked up the pail of dirty water they had washed their feet in. Easing the door open, she cried a warning to the fairies and threw it into the yard.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Ash
‘Are you of the living or the dead?’
Peter O’Connor opened the door to Nance’s cabin and ducked his head under the low frame, a bottle of poitín in his hand. ‘Dead from dry-thirst.’
Nance beckoned him in. ‘Sit down, will you. Grand to see you, Peter.’
‘’Twas a fine wake they gave Martin, and a fine caoineadh from you, Nance.’ Peter lowered himself down by the fire and fussed with his pipe, taking Nance’s crude pair of tongs and lifting an ember to light it. ‘Lord have mercy on the souls of the dead,’ he whispered. He sucked on the pipe until the tobacco flared and a coil of smoke rose.
‘What brings you today, Peter? Is it the shoulder of you?’
Peter shook his head. ‘The arm is alright.’
‘Is it the eyes?’ When the man didn’t respond, Nance settled herself more comfortably on her stool and waited patiently.
‘I keep having these dreams,’ Peter said finally.
‘Ah, dreams, is it?’
He clenched his jaw. ‘I don’t know what’s bringing them on, Nance. Powerful dreams, they are.’
‘And are they troubling you?’
Peter took a long draw on his pipe. ‘Ever since I found Martin lying dead by the crossroads.’
‘Full of trouble, are they?’
‘Full of badness.’ Peter looked up from the fire and Nance saw that his face was dark. ‘I can’t shake the feeling that something terrible is coming, Nance. I dream of dead animals. Their throats slit and them bleeding into the ground.’ He cast a look at Nance’s goat. ‘Or I dream that I’m drowning. Or a hanged man. I wake choking.’
Nance waited for Peter to continue speaking, and when the man remained silent, his knees drawn up to his chest, Nance gestured to the bottle he had brought. ‘Will we have a drink?’ She pulled the cork out and passed the bottle to him.
He took a deep gulp, winced and wiped his mouth.
‘Powerful poitín,’ Nance muttered, taking a swig of her own. She sat back down by the fire. She was prepared to wait. Sometimes a listening ear was all that was needed. Just silence and time in a cabin where there was no chatter, or stories, or neighbours. Where there was nothing but a fire and a woman. A woman they didn’t desire. A woman whose tongue didn’t slip secrets to other wives. Just an old woman with an ear and a taste for the smoke and the drink. That was worth slipping out of their cabins for, worth the walk between the lazy beds and the mossed walls to visit her in the fading hours. Nance knew the power of silence.
The fire burnt. Peter smoked the bowl of tobacco down to ash and rapped it out against his knees. They passed the bottle of drink between them, until the damp night air seeped under the door, making Peter restless.
‘Did I tell you about the four magpies I saw before our Martin passed, mercy on his soul?’
Nance leant forward. ‘You did not, Peter.’
‘Four of them. There’s death coming, isn’t there? I saw lights by your Piper’s Grave. By the ringfort. And that night I had the first of these dreams.’
‘I saw lightning strike the heather on the mountain,’ Nance muttered.
‘The night Martin died?’
‘The very same. There’s a strange wind blowing.’
‘They’re abroad. The Good People. Do you think that’s why I’ve been dreaming the things I have, Nance?’
She reached out and patted his shoulder, and saw, briefly, his narrow cot against the wall in his cabin, the long hours spent smoking while the night pressed down. ‘Weren’t you born with a caul on your head, and isn’t it truth that such a one has eyes for things that are beyond the knowing of most? Still, Peter, let you remember, a lot of fears are born of sitting too long alone in the dark.’
Peter picked his teeth with a dirty fingernail and gave a short laugh. ‘Faith, what does it matter? I’d best be on my way.’
‘Sure, Peter. Go on home.’
He helped Nance to her feet and waited as she used the tongs to pluck a coal from the fire, dipping it, hissing, in her water bucket to cool. She dried the dead ember on her skirt, spat on the ground and passed it to him. ‘You’ll see no púca tonight. God save you on the road.’
Peter put it into his pocket with a curt nod. ‘Bless you, Nance Roche. You’re a good living woman, no matter what the new priest says.’
Nance raised an eyebrow. ‘The priest has been wasting words on me, has he?’
Peter chuckled. ‘I didn’t say? Oh, you should have heard him at Mass. He was trying to open our eyes to the new world, he said. ’Twas our duty to slough off the old ways that keep Irishmen at the bottom of the pile. ’Tis a new age for Ireland and for the Catholic Church. We’re to be paying our pennies to the Catholic campaign, not to unholy keeners.’
‘Slough off the old ways. He has a pretty mouth on him, then.’
‘Not so pretty, Nance.’ Peter shook his head. ‘I’d give him a wide berth. Let him settle in. Learn how we do things around here.’
‘I suppose he thinks I am one for those “old ways”.’
Peter’s face grew solemn. ‘Heathen ways, Nance. He said he knows that people come to you and that we’re not to anymore.’ He paused. ‘He said you’re full of devilment and tricks to be keening for the money.’
‘So. The new priest is against me.’
‘Father Healy may be. But here I am, Nance. And by my soul, I see no devilment in your home.’
‘The Lord protect you, Peter O’Connor.’
The man gave her a smile and set his hat on his head. ‘We still have need of you. We still have need of the old ways and knowledge.’ He paused, his smile fading. ‘It reminds me, Nance. There’s a boy, you know. Up with Nóra Leahy. A cripple boy. I thought you should know, in case the widow has need of you.’
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‘I saw no cripple when I was up there for the keening.’
‘No. She had me take him away.’
‘What ails him?’
‘I couldn’t tell you, Nance.’ Peter looked out into the encroaching dark. ‘But ’tis certain there’s something terrible wrong.’
Nance spent the rest of the evening hunched close to her fireside, her tongue worrying the teeth in her gums. The night felt restless. She could hear the croak of frogs and a small scratching that might have been a burrowing rat, a jackdaw on the thatch.
In the unbusy hours, time lost traction. Often, as Nance sat quietly carding wool or waiting for her few potatoes to boil, she imagined that Maggie sat in the room with her. Marked, terrifying, calm-eyed Maggie, drying her herbs, skinning her rabbits. Maggie with her pipe clamped between her teeth, keeping her fingers busy. Showing Nance how to listen to the secret, knocking heartbeat of the world. Teaching her how to save others, if she could not save her mother.
How quickly the air thickened with ghosts.
‘Some folk are born different, Nance. They are born on the outside of things, with a skin a little thinner, eyes a little keener to what goes unnoticed by most. Their hearts swallow more blood than ordinary hearts; the river runs differently for them.’
A memory of them sitting in her father’s cabin, washing the road from their feet. Nance’s heart thrilling in her chest at delivering her first baby into the world – the seventh son of a jarvey’s wife. The first sight of the hair, the waxen slip of the child into her hands. How she had trembled at the sound of the infant’s cry.
Maggie smiling at her, settling on the stool, lighting her pipe. ‘I remember when you were born, Nance. Your mam was in some froth of pain. Colliding with nature, so she was. I came and all was chaos – your da was in a fit because you were showing a mighty reluctance to be dragged into the world. I loosened every lock. I unbarred the door and pushed the straw from the window. I untied the knots from my shawl and your mam’s clothes, and told the men to set the cow free. They kicked her into the night. Only then, when everything was slack, did you slip amongst us like a fish from a loose net.’
‘Did you know I was different then?’
Her aunt had smiled. Tapped the ash from her pipe. ‘You came as children sometimes do, Nance. In the small, sliding hours of the night. Fists clenched. Already brawling with the world.’
There was silence.
‘I don’t want to have the difference upon me. I don’t want to be alone like that.’
Maggie leant closer, eyes fierce. ‘What is in the marrow is hard to take out of the bone. You’ll learn that soon enough.’
Mary woke with a start, a weight of panic on her chest. Sitting up in a sweat, she gazed about her, taking in the rosy glow of the hearth and the unfamiliar walls of the cabin. A moment passed before she remembered where she was.
I am in the widow’s house.
Mary looked at the sleeping child lying beside her, the thin buckle of his spine pressing against her leg.
I am in the widow’s house, she thought. And this is the child I must care for.
She lay back down and tried to sleep, but the smells of the cabin were strange, and there was a gnawing at her chest. A desire to be back in Annamore, lying beside her brothers and sisters, the whole tangle of them in front of the fire on the sweet-smelling rushes, made her eyes fill with tears. Mary blinked them away, tucked her wrists under her chin and pushed her face against the makeshift pillow of rags.
Her stomach groaned. She had eaten too much. At least I will not go hungry here, she thought, for all the widow’s warnings about eggs. There were worse places she could be. David had told her about the farm he had been hired to last autumn, a smallholding out on the peninsula where they spent the days cutting and carrying seaweed for the fields. Long days of standing in salt water, back bent to the cold, and the heavy trudge to the fields. The weed had soaked his clothes through the loose weave of the basket and turned his skin raw.
Pray to God you are hired to some place where they feed you well, he had said.
It wasn’t the work David had minded. All the men and women of the place had taken their fair share of labour. But it was a poor thing to have your body trellised in salt, your feet bleeding from hidden rocks, and a belly full of sea air and little else.
Her brother had not told her these things in front of their mother. She would have worried herself sick with it, and it was hard enough to see her fretting over the children at home, with the coughs, and the potatoes too few in the ground and the bodies too many, and the rumour of evictions and the middlemen’s crowbars that passed from cabin to cabin like a dark shadow. Her brother had waited until they were outside, looking for stray eggs in the tufts of grass.
Find yourself a place where they feed you, David had said. No matter the dirt. Sure, some families that do be hiring have nothing more than we. They lay down on rushes every night just the same as us. But find yourself a farmer who will see to it that you’re fed.
They had fed her at the northern farm over the summer. Lumpers. Stirabout. But only after the family had eaten; she was left to drain the piggin of buttermilk and scrape the pot clean of meal.
Mary turned on her side. It could be worse, she comforted herself. One woman and a child, rattling around in a house with a cow and a bit of scoreground. But there was a strange feeling in the place, something she could not quite make out. Perhaps it was the loneliness of the woman. The widow, Nóra Leahy. Hollow-cheeked and hair greying about her temples. She looked as though she had been thrashed by womanhood; her ankles were swollen and her face threaded with deep lines. Mary had studied her at the fair, noticing the sun’s trace on her skin, the expanse of furrows that suggested a life well lived.
David had warned her to take a good look at their faces. If a man has a red nose, he’s a man in liquor and you’d best avoid his house because you can be sure all the money goes on the drink and not on those under his roof. The women with puckered mouths? Mary, gossip is sour. They’ll be watching your every move. Best find a face where there’s little shadow of a frown and their eyes are all crow’s feet. They’ve either been staring into the sun all their lives, or they’re a kind soul, and you can be sure that whether ’tis work in the field or smiling that gave them such a face, you’ll be better off with them.
Nóra Leahy had crow’s feet. She had seemed kind enough at Killarney, her clothes neat and her face open. But she had not told her that she was a widow, and she had lied about the boy.
What was it she had said?
I have my daughter’s child to care for.
No word about a scragged boy with a loose, mute jaw. No suggestion of a house of illness, or death, or the need for secrecy.
Mary had never seen a child like Micheál before. Asleep he could almost be any skinny wretch, a little boy like any other, although stunted and pallid. But awake, there was no doubting that something was gravely wrong with him. His blue eyes seemed to slip unseeing over the world, passing over her as though she were not there at all. It was unnatural, the way he folded his wrists against his chest, the sloping angle of his mouth. He looked old, somehow. His skin was tight and dry, and there was a thinness to it, like the pages in a priest’s holy book. He had nothing of the round-cheeked softness of the children Mary knew. When she had stepped through the door of the cabin and seen the old woman holding him on her lap, she had thought at first that it wasn’t a child at all but some strange scarecrow. A baby’s plaything, made from sticks and an old dress, like the effigy of St Brigid carried on the saint’s holy day: shrivelled head, hard angles hidden by discarded cloth. And then, as she had drawn closer and seen that it, he, was alive, her heart had dropped in fear. Thin and flared with a disease like those that sucked the sap from a plant and shrivelled it to withered stalk. She had been sent to a home touched with sickness, and she would be tainted with it.
A copperheaded, snub-nosed, wasting runt. A pattern of sally rods bound by skin and rash and groaning like a demon.
Mary brought a gentle hand to Micheál’s forehead and pushed the hair back from it. He was drooling: a watery line of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth across his face. Mary smoothed it away with the back of her hand and wiped it on the blanket.
The widow must be ashamed of the boy. That is why Nóra had not told her.
What had her daughter done to deserve such a child?
If a woman could bestow a harelip on a baby by meeting a hare in the road, what ill thing was met with to turn a boy ragged and skew the bones in his skin? It must have been a grave sin, to thwart a child in the womb so.
But he had not been born this way, the widow had said.
Perhaps something had struck him down.
There was nothing for it, Mary decided. She could not go home. This farm, this valley – like a pock in the skin of the earth, sunk between the height of rocky mountains – was hers to know for the next half-year. She would have to bite down on her lip and work. She was earning real money for her family, and as long as she and David were out and gathering shillings, there would be no eviction. She could stand six months with a hard, contrary woman and a bone-racked boy. Then she’d be back on the rushes with her brothers and sisters, and her father’s low voice saying the rosary, and they would all fall asleep by the warmth of their fire and not even the whistling wind would wake them.
Nóra woke with restless excitement. There was a stranger in the house. The girl, Mary. Throwing on her outer clothes, she dressed quickly and entered the main room.
The girl wasn’t there.
The settle bed had been turned back in so that it resembled a bench once more, and the fire had been raked and was burning high. In the corner of the room, Nóra saw that Micheál had been placed in an empty basket and that the heavy iron tongs from the fire had been laid across it, inches from his unmoving head.