by Hannah Kent
The sound of the dash stopped. Nóra knew Mary was watching her, but she said nothing.
Micheál’s foot sat in her palm, oddly heavy. There was not so much as a flinch from the boy. Nóra wondered how Nance might have laid the nettles upon Martin’s ice-struck, immobile hand. She imagined her husband sitting in the dark of Nance’s hovel, holding his palm out as she whispered words over it, rubbed the stinging into his skin.
Nóra lifted the plant up and brought it down on Micheál’s lower leg, more firmly this time. A long stroke to drag the leaves from knee to ankle.
Micheál pointed his chin into the air in a weird expression of defiance and then, as the smart settled on his shin, his eyes closed and he wailed.
Mary cleared her throat. ‘What are you doing?’
Nóra ignored her. She lifted the nettle again and brought it down on Micheál’s crooked knees in a light slap, on his ankles and bare feet. His skin pinked under the stinging plant, welts rising.
He must feel it, she thought. If he cries, he must feel it.
Mary stood still, her grip tightening on the dash.
Nothing. His legs, blotched, did not move. Nóra felt desperation rising in her. It had worked for Martin. Her husband’s hand was restored to him with nettles. Yes, it had hurt, he had said, but when the sting subsided he found that his flesh had been flooded with warmth. Martin, holding her face to prove that he was well again. The rough thickness of his thumb rubbing her cheek, soothing her. As good as new, he had said. It takes a lot more than that to bring me down.
Nóra thought she saw Micheál’s toes curl and, heartened, brought the nettles down harder on his knees.
‘Please stop that,’ Mary whispered.
We will make him well again, Martin had assured her. We will care for him together, for Johanna. He will be a comfort to us. Our own grandchild.
The boy began to scream harder and Nóra paused to look at him. His face was scrunched. He seemed like an angry, bucking imp, red in hair and face. His eyes were crimped shut, tears streaming from them, and as he jerked he smacked his fists on the floor. Nóra winced as he struck the clay.
This is not my son, Johanna had said.
And at once Nóra, her heart fluttering at his screams, saw that the boy was not, could not be the child she had seen in her daughter’s cabin. Her eyes began to water, and she saw plainly the puckish strangeness that people had been speaking of. All those months she had thought there was a shadow of Johanna about the boy, a familiarity that anchored him to her. Martin had seen it, had loved him for it. But now, Nóra knew that nothing of Johanna ran through this child’s blood. It was like Tadgh said. She had not recognised him as her own because there was nothing of her family in the creature. He was a cuckoo in the nest.
There is nothing of them in him, Nóra thought. He is not Micheál. And she turned the boy over and brought another nettle down on his calves.
He wailed, his face against the rushes on the floor. Crumbs of mud spattered off the plants, dirtying his clothes and her apron.
‘Stop!’ Mary cried.
He is fairy, Nóra thought. He is not my grandson.
Mary rushed to the floor and attempted to rip the nettle out of her hand.
‘Leave me,’ Nóra said through clenched teeth. She yanked her hand out of the girl’s grip.
‘He doesn’t like it,’ Mary whimpered.
Nóra ignored her.
Without warning, the girl suddenly grabbed the basket holding the remainder of the nettles and tried to fling it across the room. Nóra snatched the woven edge in time, and hauled the basket back towards her, her mouth in a determined line. She refused to look the girl in the eye. Mary got to her feet and tugged at it, crying openly now, her mouth open and wailing, as pink as the boy’s. They wrestled with the basket, each heaving it back and forth, jerking the other, until, finally, Nóra wrenched it out of Mary’s grasp and sat it down beside her, stony-eyed.
‘’Tis a cruelty!’ Mary sobbed.
The child was bawling so hard he had begun to choke. His head rocked from side to side.
Nóra continued to whip him with nettles.
Mary bent down and snatched the rest of the plants out of the basket with her bare hands, throwing them onto the fire. The embers blackened under the damp weight of the nettles. Then, before Nóra could say anything, Mary bolted for the door, flinging it wide and running into the snowy yard.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Dock
‘What is all this madness?’
Peg O’Shea stood in the doorway, gaping at Nóra and Micheál. Nóra was sitting on the floor, shoulders shaking, clenching her fists until her nails dug into the flesh of her palms. Micheál, half naked, was shrieking with pain. As he screamed, he lifted his head and let it fall on the floor in a repetitive, sickly knocking. His face was covered with dirt from the nettles.
Peg hobbled in and quickly picked him off the ground. ‘Oh, come now. Oh, little one. Shush now.’ She sank onto a stool next to where Nóra lay slumped. ‘Nóra Leahy. What in God’s holy name have you done to this boy?’
Nóra shrugged and wiped her running nose.
‘That maid of yours, Mary, she comes running into my house in pieces, crying you’re after whipping the boy with nettles. Are you turned in your mind? Does the boy not suffer enough already?’ Peg watched Nóra closely then stamped her foot on the ground. ‘Enough! Stop your crying and talk sense to me.’
‘Father Healy,’ Nóra gasped.
‘What about himself?’
‘He will not heal the boy. I asked him. He said he has surely turned idiot and there’s nothing to be done. He said I’m not to be talking of the Good People, and that ’tis all superstition.’ Nóra’s chin trembled. ‘Where is Mary to now?’
‘I sent her to the Flesk for dock leaves. Pull the shirt of him down, Nóra. Here, I’ll do it then. The wee lad is screaming like you’ve burnt him alive.’
Peg lay Micheál on her lap and bundled him in her shawl. ‘You’ve a right to be telling me what is happening.’
‘People are saying he is a changeling.’ Nóra’s face scrunched in despair.
Peg was silent. ‘Well. There might be something in that. Is ait an mac an saol. Life is a strange son.’
‘If you believe he is a changeling, then why do you touch him?’ Nóra spluttered. ‘Why do you care if I nettle him?’
‘You are as cold as a holy trout, Nóra Leahy. Do you not know yourself that if the wee one is a changeling, your own good grandson suffers the ill you inflict on his stock? If the Good People have him, they will not take kindly to you treating one of their own like this.’ Peg lifted Micheál’s dress and examined his legs, turning them in her hands. ‘You did a good job of it. What on earth were you hoping to do?’
Nóra hauled herself up onto the settle. ‘I thought ’twould restore the quick to his legs. I thought the sting might give him cause to move.’ She took a shuddering breath.
‘That is some dreadful quackery if I ever heard it. Quite the herb woman, you are.’ Peg clucked her tongue.
‘’Twas what Nance Roche did to Martin when he was alive and with me. Nettles brought the quick back to his hand.’
‘Nance Roche has the knowledge. Some pride you have there, Nóra, thinking you’ve the same skill as that one. ’Twould be better if you made a tea of the nettle and gave it to him, the doty child.’ She pulled Micheál’s head back against her skinny throat and held him tightly, murmuring into his ear. ‘What have we to do with you, then? From what wild place have you come to us?’
‘Peg, I know what they are saying of me,’ Nóra said, her voice cracking. ‘They say my own daughter was not called away by God, but by Them in the ráth. They say her own son is with her in the hill, and I am left with the fairy child. They say the misfortune in the valley is his fault and will be on my soul. T
hey say . . .’ Her voice broke. ‘They say Martin died because of him being here. And I look at him, and I wonder, Peg.’
‘Nóra Leahy. Hold your head up and not care a tinker’s curse what anyone says to cheapen ye,’ Peg replied. ‘Night will come again, please God. You should be glad this one is a changeling, for then you bear no blame for him. There are ways to restore Micheál to you.’
‘I know what they do to banish changelings,’ Nóra spat. ‘Put him on the dung heap in the night for the fairies to claim! Threaten him with fire. Would you have me put that one on a hot shovel and roast him? Would you have me smack him with a reddened poker and bring the eye out of him?’
Peg’s face was serious. ‘Enough. Enough with all your mad cures dreamt up out of despair, and enough of all this dark talk. You have a need to talk with one who knows of these things.’ She looked Nóra in the eye. ‘You have a need to speak with Nance.’
Mary ran down the grassy slope as fast as she could, briars snagging her skirt and the skin of her legs as she went. Her blood sang at the sudden pain of it, but she did not stop until she could see the riverbank beyond a tangle of fallen tree branches. The flowing water looked as dark as a nightmare. By the time she reached its edge, her shins were scraped bloody by brambles.
Taking jagged breaths, Mary kept her head down, searching for the long leaves of water dock amidst winter’s ruin of dead grasses and the snap of withered bracken. She found a clump of dock growing on the side of the crumbling bank, and crawled towards the water on her belly to reach it without the soil giving way. Tugging at the leaves with an outstretched hand, she looked into the water and saw her own warped reflection staring back at her. She was shocked to see the fear on her face, and the urge to cry swelled again. She wiped her streaming eyes and nose on her sleeve.
Seeing Nóra whip the boy with nettles had unsettled something within her. There was an ugliness there that she had only seen a few times before in her life. Once she had seen a man sneer at a madwoman who had taken to wandering in her undershirt, contempt crowning his face in a dark halo. Another time she had seen a group of older girls crawl backwards, naked, through a briar on May morning. There was something about their pale bodies writhing against the grass, flinching at the prick of thorns, that had deeply disturbed her. At the time she had not known what it was they were doing, and had buttoned the secret sight of them deep down in her chest. It was only later that she heard of the powers of double-rooted briars, understood that the girls had been crawling through the Devil arch to curse someone. She had never seen those girls again. But the memory of them had clawed its way back to her mind at the sight of the muddy widow lashing the legs of the child.
It was not the beating. Mary had seen children younger than Micheál smacked into yesterday by their mothers in Annamore. She had felt the weight of a man’s swinging arm at the northern farm.
It was the cruelty in the blows. The widow had looked demented. She had brought the nettles down on Micheál’s skin like he was nothing more to her than a stubborn nag, or a carcass to be flensed. It turned the pulse of her heart.
The nettling had not looked like a cure. It had looked like punishment.
The slope was greasy with snow and mud and Mary found her feet sliding on her way back to the cabin. More than once she had to use her hands to scramble up the hillside, and she felt the smear of mud on her face when she wiped her swollen eyes. On the way to the river she had taken the path leading from the lane, but in her haste to return she had run towards the woods where the ground was most steep. The air burnt in her lungs. Suddenly, the soil beneath her left foot gave way, pain flared through her and she fell to the ground.
Mary let go of the dock leaves and gripped her ankle in both hands. She blinked back tears and sat there rocking in the mud, chest heaving.
I want to go home.
The thought ran through her like a thread, drawing tightly, until she felt puckered with longing.
I want to go home.
Clenching her teeth, Mary tried to stand. It was no use. The tendons in her ankle sprang with pain. Sitting in the mud she let the tears come. She hated the valley. She hated the brittle, unnatural child, and the damp loneliness that hung off the widow like a mist. She hated the broken nights and the smell of piss that clung to the cripple’s clothes, and she hated the pity in the face of the old neighbour. She wanted her brothers and sisters. She wanted the feel of the younger ones’ fingers combing her hair by the fire. She wanted the cheerful noise of the babies, and their red-cheeked faces, and their little hands on her shoulder, waking her in the morning. She wanted David and his solemn understanding.
’Tis too much, Mary thought. Why is the world so terrible and strange?
‘I never saw anyone cry so bitterly.’
Mary flinched. An old woman stood behind her, wrapped in a tattered shawl, dragging a broken branch.
‘Are you hurt?’ The woman bent down, concerned. Mary, too surprised to move, stared back. The woman’s skin was creased and her eyes were clouded, but there was softness in her voice. She reached out and placed her ancient hand on Mary’s bent knee.
‘You’re hurt.’ The woman answered her own question. ‘Sit still for a moment now.’ She fussed with the broken branch and Mary saw that she had been using it as a sled. It was piled with lumps of turf, dung and plants. The woman carefully took these off, placing them on the ground beside her, and snapped off the smaller twigs. She soon had a rough stick, which she gave to Mary.
‘Try standing, girl. Take this.’
Mary hauled herself upright onto her good foot, and planted the stick firmly into the waterlogged ground.
‘Now, put your other arm about my shoulders. I’m taking you to my home. I can do something for you there. See, that’s my cabin.’
‘What about your turf?’ Mary sniffed. She could feel the thin ridge of the woman’s shoulder blade against her arm.
The woman grimaced under her weight. ‘Never you mind that. Can you hobble along, so?’
Mary leant heavily on the stick and held her sore foot aloft. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘I’m as strong as an ox.’ The woman smiled. ‘That’s it. This way.’
They stumbled back down the slope until they reached the dirty clearing beside the woods. A small mud cabin stood against a wall of alder trees, their bare branches knotted with the old nests of birds. There was no chimney, but Mary could see smoke listing from one end, where a gap in the thatch admitted it to the open air. A tethered goat grazing on the grass at the woods’ edge looked up at their voices. It stared, gimlet-eyed, at Mary.
‘You live here?’
‘I do.’
‘I thought this cabin was abandoned.’ Mary could hear the river in the distance.
‘I’ve lived here twenty years or more. Come in, girl. Come in and sit by the fire.’
Mary grasped the doorframe of the cabin and hopped inside. From the clearing the bothán had looked crude and damp, but the room was surprisingly warm. The floor was covered in cut green rushes, which gave off a clean, sweet smell, and a turf fire burnt upon a large hearthstone, away from the wall. There was no window to admit the light, but the fire’s glowing heart prevented the darkness from gloom. Mary, glancing up, saw a vast number of St Brigid’s crosses, blackened by years of smoke, fixed against the rafters around the low ceiling. In the corner of the room stood straw baskets, some filled with ratty, uncarded wool.
‘Are you a bean leighis?’ Mary asked, gesturing towards the drying herbs dangling from the rough-hewed crossbeams.
The woman was washing the mud off her feet and hands on the threshold. ‘Have you not seen a one with the charms before?’
Mary shook her head, her mouth dry.
‘Sit down on that stool there.’ The woman shut the door and the room became darker, the firelight throwing long shadows against the walls. ‘My name is Nance
Roche,’ she said. ‘And you are the maid with Nóra Leahy.’
Mary paused. ‘I am. I’m Mary Clifford.’
‘’Tis an unhappy house you’re in.’ Nance sat beside Mary. ‘Nóra Leahy is an unhappy widow.’
‘Aren’t all widows unhappy?’
Nance laughed and Mary noticed her bare gums, the few teeth bunkered in them. ‘Not every dead husband is mourned, cailín. Nor every wife.’
‘What happened to your teeth?’
‘Ah, there was time enough for me to lose them when I’d nothing for them to do. But here, let me take a look at you.’
Mary extended her bare foot in front of the fire, feeling the warmth of it against her sole. ‘’Tis my ankle.’
Nance examined the swelling without touching her. ‘Musha, so ’tis. Will you let me give you the cure?’
Mary’s eyes were wide in the dark. ‘Will it hurt?’
‘No more than it does now.’
Mary nodded.
Nance spat on her hands and lay them gently upon the ankle. ‘Christ upon a cross. A horse’s leg was dislocated. He joined blood to blood, flesh to flesh, bone to bone. As He healed that, may He cure this. Amen.’
Mary crossed herself in imitation of Nance, and as she did so she felt a slow rising of heat against her skin, as though she had drawn too close to a flame. But the pain faded, and she exhaled at its lessening. She tried to stand, but Nance shot out a finger in warning.
‘Not yet. You’ll need a poultice.’ She stood and, as Mary watched in curiosity, filled a chipped earthenware bowl with plants from a basket covered with a damp cloth.
‘What are those herbs there, then?’ Mary asked.
‘Oh, that’s my secret.’ Nance picked up an egg and cracked it sharply on the bowl’s rim, straining the white through her crooked fingers. When the egg had separated, she slipped the remaining yolk into her mouth and swallowed it.