by Hannah Kent
‘Do you think we ought to send for the doctor?’ Mary asked.
Nóra turned to her with weariness. ‘The doctor, you say. Are there doctors on every lane up in Annamore? Do they come and tend you for nothing?’ She nodded at the crock on the table. ‘That’s all the money I have there and precious little it is too. Do you think I have coins buried about the place? Do you think I am a rich woman? Cream and butter and eggs – that’s what stitches body and soul together.’ She began to plait her hair with quick roughness, tugging at the grey strands. ‘I don’t know how you all live up in Annamore, but down here, in this valley, we grease the landlord’s palm with whitemeats. How do you think I keep the three of us out of the rain? Turf on the fire? And now the blessed cow is on the dry and you would have me fork out a fortune for a doctor to come and condemn my grandson! When next summer I’ll have no man to go and work the fields and earn the keeping of the cabin, and ’twill be the crowbar and the lonely road for me!’
Mary was solemn. ‘Have you not your nephews to work the ground for you?’
Nóra took a deep breath. ‘Aye. Aye, I’ve nephews.’
‘Perhaps it won’t be as bad as you say.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘And perhaps there is a doctor who will see to Micheál for nothing. Or maybe for a hen.’ Mary’s voice was soft. ‘Your wee hens are good layers. You said so yourself. Would a doctor not come for a hen?’
Nóra shook her head. ‘The hens are not laying as they did. And what do you think a hen is worth to a doctor who lives in town and eats eggs every morning like he laid them himself?’ She sighed. ‘’Tis the priest we want. ’Tis the priest for folk like us.’
‘Shall I fetch him then?’
Nóra stood and pulled the shawl over her head. ‘No. Get on with your churning, Mary. If anyone is after summoning the priest for Micheál, it should be me.’
Nóra set out down the lane across the face of the valley slope. The air was cold and clean, and the snow on the ground stung her bare feet as she walked. There was no one else on the road. All was still, except for the circling of rooks above the empty fields.
The priest’s house was a small whitewashed building set at the corner of the valley where the heather sprawled and the road bent around the mountain, leading the way to Glenflesk. After being admitted inside by a thickset housekeeper, Nóra waited in the parlour where the fireplace lay unlit, before the priest joined her. He had been at his breakfast. Nóra noticed egg yolk dribbling a fatty line down his clerical shirt.
‘Widow Leahy. How are you getting on?’
‘Thank you, Father, I’m well enough.’
‘I’m sorry for your troubles. As they say, “’Tis a lonely washing that has no man’s shirt in it.”’
Nóra blinked back a prickling of irritation. ‘Thank you, Father.’
‘Now, how might I help you?’
‘I’m sorry to be disturbing you. I know ’tis dreadful early and you a busy man.’
The priest smiled. ‘Tell me why you’ve come.’
‘’Tis my grandson. I’ve come because his mother, my daughter, is dead and I was hoping you might be able to heal him.’
‘Your grandson, is it? What sickness does he have?’ Father Healy’s face grew sombre. ‘Is it the smallpox?’
‘’Tis not the pox, or a sickness like that, no. ’Tis something worse. I don’t know what.’
‘Have you sent for the doctor?’
‘I haven’t the wherewithal. Not now.’ Nóra could feel herself blushing and it embarrassed her. ‘What means I have is spent on a live-in girl to help with him.’
‘Begging pardon, Widow Leahy, but perhaps that is the problem.’ Father Healy’s tone was gentle. ‘Getting a girl in when you could get the doctor and have him well again.’
‘I don’t think he can be made well again by a doctor,’ Nóra said.
‘Then why have you come for me?’
‘He has a need for a priest’s healing. He hasn’t the full of his mind.’
‘Ah. Is he soft-brained?’ Father Healy asked.
‘I don’t know. He’s hardly a child at all.’
‘Hardly a child? What an odd thing to say. What are his symptoms?’
‘He has not the use of his legs, Father. He won’t say a word, although not two years ago he was talking like any other little boy. He is forever awake and screaming. He does not thrive.’
Father Healy gave her a look of pity. ‘I see.’
‘He was born well. That’s why ’twould be a kindness for you to come and see him. Why I’m asking you to call, Father. I think . . . perhaps something has happened to him.’
‘Such as?’
Nóra clenched her jaw to stop her chin from trembling. ‘People are saying he is a changeling.’
Father Healy looked at her from under lowered brows, his face colouring. ‘That is superstitious prattle, Widow. Don’t be listening to talk like that. A woman like yourself – you’ve more sense than that.’
‘Father,’ Nóra added hastily, ‘I know there’s plenty folk who don’t believe in a happening like that, but if you were to come and see the boy . . .’
There was silence. The priest looked apprehensive. ‘If the boy is afflicted with a suffering of the usual kind, or if he is dying, I might attend to him. I would be glad to help. But if he is an idiot . . .’
‘Would you not pray for him? Heal him?’
‘Why do you not pray for him, Widow Leahy?’
‘I do!’
Father Healy sighed. ‘Ah, but you do not attend Mass. Ever since your husband died. I know ’tis a troubling time for you, but believe me when I tell you that it is at Mass where you will find your comfort.’
‘’Tis no easy thing to be widowed, Father.’
The priest’s expression softened slightly. He glanced out the small window, clicking his tongue. ‘Is the boy christened?’
‘He is.’
‘Has he had the Holy Eucharist?’
‘No, Father, he is only four.’
‘And no doctor has ever seen to him?’
‘Once. This summer gone. Martin fetched a man from Killarney, but he did nothing. Just took our money.’
Father Healy nodded, as though he had expected as much. ‘Widow Leahy, I think perhaps that it is your duty to care for this child and do the best you can.’
Nóra wiped her eyes. She felt lightheaded with frustration. ‘Would you not come and see him and make the sign of the cross over him, Father? A priest such as yourself has the power to banish –’
‘Don’t be saying fairies, Widow. I’ll have no talk of fairies.’
‘But Father O’Reilly –’
‘Acted the fairy doctor? Presumed to act the fantastic ecclesiastical? Father O’Reilly, may God bless his soul, had no right to engage in these vestiges of pagan rites. And not without leave in writing from the bishop of the diocese would I do the same.’ His face was earnest. ‘Widow Leahy, ’tis my responsibility to raise the people of this valley to a morality that corresponds to the requirements of our faith. How can we insist on the rights of Catholics when the valleys are full of the smoke of heathen bonfires and the wailing of hags at wakes? Those who are after keeping us out of parliament need only point to the Catholics pouring beestings at the foot of whitethorns, dancing at crossroads, whispering of fairies!’
Nóra stared as Father Healy pulled out a handkerchief to wipe the spittle that had gathered at the corner of his mouth. Her feet ached from the cold. ‘Forgive me, Father, but your shirt is dirty with egg,’ she said. Without waiting to see the priest’s reaction, she stood and left the room.
Nóra turned off the lane by the parish house and walked a mile down a little-used path, her face hot with anger. The river could be heard in the distance and soon Nóra reached a ditch where a slow trickle of water had melted snow
to mud. She sank to her knees beside a tumbled stone wall to which nettles clung in a thicket.
It was true, what she had said to the priest. Martin had gone for the doctor, though they could not afford it. Borrowing a horse down at the blacksmith’s and rising in the mist of the following morning to ride into Killarney and fetch that man. How strange he had seemed, trotting beside Martin. The doctor had been tufted with white hair that clung to his balding scalp and covered the back of his hands like down, and his small wire spectacles had slipped down the greasy length of his nose with every jolt of his horse. When he had stepped into the cabin, he had glanced up at the ceiling as if he expected it to fall upon his head.
Nóra had been so nervous her teeth had chattered. ‘God bless you, Doctor, and welcome, and thank you for coming, sir.’
The man had set his satchel upon the ground, nudging the fresh rushes with his foot.
‘I’m sorry to hear you have a sickly child. Where is the patient?’
Martin had pointed to where Micheál lay, listless in his cot.
The doctor stooped over the bed and looked down at the boy. ‘How old is he?’
‘Three years old, sir. No, four.’
The doctor puffed his cheeks, his whiskers fluttering as he exhaled. ‘Not yours?’
‘Our daughter’s child.’
‘And where is she?’
‘Passed, sir.’
The doctor had squatted awkwardly on the ground, the cloth of his trousers tight around his knees. The leather of his boots squeaked. He dragged his satchel towards him, opened the clasps and took out a long instrument. ‘I’m going to listen to his heart,’ he explained, glancing up.
The doctor had worked silently. He had pressed the silver stop of his instrument to Micheál’s chest, before discarding it and bending down and placing the hairy whorl of his ear directly on the boy’s white skin. Then he had tapped Micheál’s chest, bouncing his fingertips along the ridges of the boy’s protruding bones as though the child was an instrument he had forgotten how to play.
‘What is it, Doctor?’
The man had brought a finger to his lips and shushed her with a solemn eye. He pressed the fat pads of his fingers under the boy’s jawbone, lifted his arms and examined the milky hollows of his armpits, prised his lips apart and studied his tongue, then fitted his hands around the back of the boy and, gently, as though he were handling glass, turned Micheál onto his stomach. He had clucked at the sight of the rash upon the boy’s back, but said nothing, then ran his fingers down the ridges of the child’s spine, turning his legs and arms this way and that.
‘Is it the pox, Doctor?’
‘Tell me, have you known this child from birth?’
Martin had answered. ‘He is just come to us. He was born well. There was no sickness upon him then. We saw him once and he seemed a normal, healthy lad.’
‘Did he ever speak?’
‘He did. He was learning his words same as any other.’
‘And does he ever speak now?’
Martin and Nóra glanced at each other.
‘We know he is dreadful thin. Hungry, sir. Always hungry. We knew at once there was a wasting on him, and we thought ’twas the hunger. We think his mouth is so full of hunger he has no room for words.’
The doctor hauled himself to his feet, sighing, brushing his clothes down. ‘He hasn’t spoken a word since you took him in, then? Nor taken a step neither?’
Silence.
The man ran a hand over his shining scalp and glanced at Martin. ‘I might have a word with you.’
‘What you have to say you may tell to the both of us.’
The doctor took his spectacles off and polished their glass with a handkerchief. ‘I don’t have good news, I’m afraid. The child does not have the smallpox, nor is he consumptive. The rash on his back is no sign of disease; rather, I think it is caused by the wearing of his skin. On account of him being unable to sit up by himself.’
‘But will he be well again? Will it pass? What have we to do for him?’
The doctor put his spectacles back on. ‘Sometimes children do not thrive.’ He returned his instruments to his leather case.
‘But he was born well. We saw it ourselves. And so he may be well again.’
The doctor straightened, lips pursed. ‘That might be, but I believe he will remain ill-thriven.’
‘Do you not have something in your bag to give him? ’Tis not right that a healthy boy becomes this way.’ Her tongue had dried on the words. ‘Look. Look there. Hungry. Bawling. Not saying a thing. He was cold, he had not enough in his belly, and he is mouldered with it all, I know.’
‘Nóra.’ Martin’s eyes had been soft.
‘He was well. I saw him walk! There is surely something in your bag, some medicine. Would you not give him some medicine? All you’ve done is prod him like a piece of meat on the turn.’
‘Nóra!’ Martin had gripped her wrist.
‘I think you should prepare yourself for the worst,’ the doctor had said, frowning. ‘It would be remiss of me to encourage hope when there is none. I’m sorry.’
‘You cannot tell us what ails him?’
‘He is cretinous.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘He is malformed.’
Nóra shook her head. ‘Doctor, he has all his fingers and toes, I –’
‘I’m sorry.’ The doctor had pulled on his coat, spectacles slipping down his nose again as he shrugged the cloth over his shoulders. ‘The boy is a cretin. There is nothing I can do.’
The day had turned querulous, the horizon blurred under far-off snowfall. Nóra felt a bone-deep longing for Martin, for his calm reassurance. Even when the doctor had departed, and Nóra had felt anger throb through her, Martin had drawn her into the warmth of his chest and murmured, ‘For what cannot be cured, patience is best.’
For what cannot be cured, Nóra thought, leaning against the rough stones. I am burdened with a dying child who will not die.
She wished Micheál dead, then. She wished that he would fall asleep and never wake up, but be taken into Heaven by the angels or into the ringfort by the fairies, or wherever a mute soul went. Better that than to grow old in a body that could not accommodate the years. Better that than to suffer the bridle and bit of the world.
There was no use in denying the truth of it, she thought. ’Twould be a kind of grace if he died.
Nóra shuddered. She knew women sometimes did kill children. But the stories she heard were always of unwed mothers who gave birth in dirty private places, and who bore their anguish out in lapses of guilty violence. Sometimes they were caught. When the bloodstain was found, or the stones shifted from the river floor and the little sacked body rose to the water’s surface to the shrieking surprise of those at their laundry. There was a woman who had drowned herself and her unborn child in Lough Leane and people said that a mist shrouded the water on the anniversary of their deaths every year since.
But I am no murderer, Nóra thought. I am a good woman. She wiped her swollen face with muddy fingers. I will not kill my own daughter’s boy. I will save him. I will restore him.
A light snow began to fall, and a rook, feathers sweeping the still air, landed on the stones. ‘I am alone,’ Nóra said plainly.
The rook ignored her, wiped his grey beak on the wall. As Nóra watched him, marvelling at the bird’s closeness, she felt a sudden weight to the air, a prickling at the nape of her neck.
Then she saw the nettles.
A memory came to her. Martin shouldering the door open one spring evening filthy with rain, his hand clutched to his chest. He had a dreadful cold in it, he said. As though there were no blood in it at all.
Nóra had examined the swollen fingers. ‘Looks to be plenty of blood in there,’ she’d said. ‘Too much blood.’
But the hand ha
d remained that way all night and the following day too, and the next evening Martin had said he would go to Nance Roche for a cure. ‘Sure, hadn’t she brought the worm out of Patrick’s guts, and the lump out of John’s arm, and no harm done?’
‘She’s an odd one,’ Nóra had said, but Martin replied that anything was better than living the rest of his life with his hand a block of ice, and so he had gone.
Martin returned from Nance’s the following morning with his hand swollen still, violent pink, but supple, moving.
‘She’s marvellous skill, that woman.’ He was relieved, filled with wonderment. ‘You’ll never guess how she did it. Nettles,’ he said. ‘She returned the blood to it with nettles.’ And he raised his hand to Nóra’s cheek to show her how his warmth had been restored.
Now, wrapping the cloth of her dress around her hands to keep the leaves from stinging her fingers, Nóra tugged the nettles from the ground, heaping them in her apron. She knew that she must look like a madwoman, a hooded figure nettling in the snow. But her heart thrilled in her chest. She would cure him.
It will work, she thought. It worked for Martin and so it will work for Micheál.
‘Sweet Mother of God, make this work.’ The words folded under themselves and became a circle of prayer. ‘I will warm the life back into him. It will work. Virgin Mother, I beseech thee.’
Nóra returned to the cabin, her apron filled with nettles, their toothed leaves dampened by snowmelt. Shutting the door behind her, she found Micheál on the ground and Mary in the middle of the room, lifting the heavy dash of the churn and whispering, ‘Come butter, come butter, come butter, come.’ She stopped as Nóra entered, panting from the exertion and rubbing her shoulders.
‘What did the priest say?’
‘He’ll have none of it. So, I went nettling.’
‘You went nettling? In the snow?’ Mary frowned.
‘I did, and what of it? Go on with that churning, then.’
As Mary resumed heaving the dash up and down, Nóra threw her cloak over the hearth beam, shook the nettles into a basket and knelt by Micheál. She dragged the boy gently towards her by his ankles, then lifted his dress to expose his legs. Wrapping her hand in a corner of her shawl, she picked up a nettle, and with her other hand lifted Micheál’s bare foot. She tickled his toes with the plant, brushing the edge of the leaves against his skin.