The Good People (18 page)

He peered at them nervously. ‘What are these?’

‘Bittersweet. They will urge her into a deeper sleep. So deep she will not have the strength or wherewithal to rise at night. Let her take them in the evening and I will hold the charm for her in my mind, and I will think on protection for her.’ She patted his arm. ‘All will be well, Daniel.’

‘I thank you, Nance.’

‘God bless you, and may you have a fine, long family. Come back if she keeps at her walking. Wait . . .’ Nance put a hand on Daniel’s arm. ‘There is something else you may do. If ’tis the Good People that are luring her out of doors, let you make a cross from birch twigs and nail it over your sleeping place. Birch will guard her.’

He hesitated by the door. ‘You’re a good woman, Nance. I know Father Healy preached against you, but I think he’s a blind-hearted man.’

‘Do you feel better, Daniel?’

‘I do.’

Nance watched Daniel begin the slow walk home, holding the berries safe between his hands like a man in prayer. The sky soared with late-afternoon light, hemming the clouds with bright bloodiness. Just before he disappeared from view, Daniel turned around and stared at her, crossing himself.

The first snow arrived in the valley. Staggered winds blew white upon the fields until, from the height of Nóra’s cabin, the stone walls dividing them looked like the whorls of a fingerprint. Men planted themselves by the fire, coughing up the season, and the women carded wool and kept company with their spinning wheels, as though compelled to wrap themselves and their families in more layers of homespun. It was a quiet, waiting time of year.

Nóra woke in the grey throat of morning and blinked in the feeble light. She longed to sleep. The nights were shattered with the boy’s screaming, and it was all she could do to hang on to the balm of sleep’s senselessness. How lonely waking in an empty bed had become.

Her head throbbed from the
poitín
bottle. Lying on her back, Nóra stared up into the thatch and listened for some sign that Mary was awake. Most mornings she waited until she heard the scuff of the girl’s footsteps as she readied the fire and set water to boil, or her voice murmuring to the child as she bathed the piss from his legs. Then, Nóra would close her eyes and imagine that it was not Mary but Martin moving about the room, unlatching the door and letting the hens out to scrounge along the wall of the byre amidst the frost and dirty straw. She could picture him perfectly. His lips as he whistled the old songs, his nail pulling away the skins of his morning potatoes, and the careless way he threw them aside. She could hear his usual wry complaint that her hens were tearing into the thatch, and remembered the crinkle of his eyes when she, flustered, defended them. She allowed herself this lie, even when the disappointment on seeing not Martin but the long-limbed maid, puffy-eyed, by the fire was almost too painful to bear.

Nóra could hear nothing. Tying her shawl tightly around her, she went out and saw that the fire had been lit, although there was no sign of Mary. The settle was unfolded and Micheál lay in its corner. Not wanting to rouse his attention, Nóra crept slowly to the side of the bed before peering at him. The boy was listless, his hair sticking to his head with sweat. Nóra watched his mouth slowly undulate, his lips pert and softly wet. Who is he talking to? she wondered.

‘Micheál.’

He ignored her, raising his eyebrows and grimacing at the wall.

‘Micheál,’ Nóra repeated. The boy’s arms were stiff and turned inwards, like the broken wings of a bird pitched from the nest. She called his name for the third time and he finally fixed her with an unblinking stare. His lip curled and she could see the glisten of his teeth. For a moment he seemed to bare them at her.

Micheál had begun to scare her. Everything he did – his quick, unpredictable movements, his calls and shrieks at things she could not see – reminded her of Mary’s words.

He is a changeling. And everyone knows it but you.

‘What are you?’ Nóra whispered.

Micheál looked up to the rafters and blinked. His chin was flaked with a tidemark of dried saliva. He was snot-nosed, his eyes fringed with pale lashes, slick with moisture. Nóra placed a firm hand on his forehead. She could see his jaw grind under his skin.

‘Are you child or changeling?’ Nóra whispered. She felt her throat jump with the pulse of her panicked heart.

Micheál closed his eyes and let out a pealing, wet shriek, bucking his spine against the straw bedding. Before Nóra could snatch her hand away, Micheál reached up and grabbed a fistful of her loose hair. She tried to uncurl his fingers but he jerked his arm backwards and the pain came, hot and searing.

‘Micheál!’

Nóra winced and tried to twist herself free, but the boy’s small, sticky fingers were knotted in her hair. He pulled harder. Tears sprang to her eyes.

‘Let me go. Let me go, you bold cratur!’ Hair ripped from her skin, and in the sudden glare of pain she lashed out and tried to slap Micheál across the face. The angle was awkward and she missed him, cuffing the top of his head instead. In her anger she released his fingers and, holding his jaw firmly with one hand, slapped him again with the other, hitting his cheek. Her palm stung.

‘The badness in you!’ she shouted, slapping him again. His face was pink, his mouth wide and bawling. Nóra wanted to stuff it shut. Wanted to push his soiled linen in his mouth to stop up his screams. ‘You wicked thing,’ she hissed, holding her smarting scalp.

‘He can’t help himself.’

Nóra turned and saw Mary standing by the door, the milk bucket resting on her hip.

‘He was pulling the hair out of my skull!’

Mary closed the door against the white brilliance of snow. ‘Are you alright?’

‘I can’t sleep for him! He screams all night.’ Nóra could hear the hysteria in her voice.

The maid nodded. ‘I think ’tis the cold. And he has a rash on his back. From the way he soils himself.’

Nóra sat by the fire, her hand against her throbbing skin. ‘You could wash him, you know.’

‘I do,’ Mary protested, and her voice was so thin that Nóra felt ashamed.

‘Well. How is Brownie milking?’

‘’Tis not a lot, missus. You said she’s a good milker, but . . . I’ve been singing to her because I know they like the singing. But she’s going to the dry.’

Nóra closed her eyes. ‘The way we’re going, we’ll be short for rent.’

‘Shall I churn today?’

‘Is there enough?’

Mary lifted a corner of the cloth covering the crock of settled milk on the table. ‘Sure, well. There might be just enough to churn. Just enough. Should I give Micheál the buttermilk? It might soothe him. I don’t know whether ’tis the bitter cold or perhaps he’s dreaming things that wake him so and lead him to screaming. I can’t sleep for his screaming either.’

‘Well, the road to Annamore is where you left it.’

‘I don’t mean that,’ Mary said, anxious. ‘Not that I want to go home, like. Only there seems to be a change coming over him and I don’t know how to keep the peace in him. He’s suffering, I think.’

‘Have they been telling you this at the well?’

‘They’ve not, no,’ Mary protested. ‘The women there have not been talking to me at all. I go and fetch the water and come back again, and I don’t stop to gossip or talk about you or Micheál. I promise you.’

Nóra realised that the maid was near tears.

‘One of the women sees me coming down the road and takes three steps backwards. On account of my red hair. Kate. Kate Lynch.’

‘She’s got an awful fear of the evil eye. Don’t you mind her. She’ll cross herself when meeting with anything in the road. Hare, weasel, magpie.’

‘She spits on the ground and says, “The Cross of Christ between me and harm!”’

Nóra rolled her eyes. ‘Kate’ll be crossing herself at me soon, in fear of a widow’s curse.’

Micheál took a shuddering breath and began to scream louder. ‘Look at the legs of him,’ Mary said, pointing. ‘He’s hardly kicking. Do you not think they look broken? Like he’s no feeling in them at all.’ She bent down to the crying boy and lifted his dress to show Nóra. ‘Look.’

Micheál’s legs were as thin as the winter-bare striplings outside. His skin clung to the bone, streaked with marks. Nóra felt sick at the sight.

Mary chewed her lip. ‘He’s being smoked up by some kind of sickness. I know he’s not had the walking in them for some time, but now he has hardly the twitch in his toes.’

Nóra hastily pulled the cloth back over Micheál’s thighs. ‘I wonder, Mary,’ she murmured. ‘How much suffering can a person bear without something turning in them?’

The girl was silent.

Nóra combed her tangled hair with her fingers and stared at Micheál. When she slapped him she had felt on the brink of something dark, something she knew she would not be able to come back from. There was no knowing what she might have done had Mary not come inside at that moment, and it frightened her.

What has happened to me?

Nóra had always believed herself to be a good woman. A kind woman. But perhaps, she thought, we are good only when life makes it easy for us to be so. Maybe the heart hardens when good fortune is not there to soften it.

‘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.’