Paradise Alley (9 page)

She barely understood, at first, that they were talking to her. The old women like so many crows, flapping their black-shawled arms and their gums, every tooth rotted from the lack of any food. Making soft, soothing, gummy noises, telling her what she should do—

“You bet' safe self—”

“You kin get ma'. Any ma' will do.”

“Any ma' do.”

—repeating that over and over, until the cart came, and they stirred themselves to walk after it. Rising up from the pile of sticks and black rags that they were. They started as soon as they saw it, fifty yards down the road, getting a good head start so they could keep up with it for a few paces, holding their arms and their mouths open in desolation, offering themselves up as mourners.

She did the same, with them. That was the custom, hoping the bereaved in their grief would throw a few pennies out on the road. But there were no bereaved here—just the cart man flicking the reins at his donkey. Looking straight ahead, the bare feet of the deceased bumping along in the back of the cart, sticking out of their crude linen shrouds. The old women following anyway, as long as they could. Holding out their arms still, their mouths too dry to keen, their tongues clacking dully against the roofs of their mouths.

One of them, the ablest, still managed to keep up with the driver, somehow. Holding on to the cart with one hand and trying to look up into his face. Ruth tried to move along with her, to hold her up. Listening to her rail at the driver though he looked straight ahead, as motionless and unseeing as his cargo:

“I am descended from perhaps as good a family as any I address, though now destitute of means!”

The old women walked on for a few feet more before they fell back, collapsed by the side of the road again, the cart rolling on to the cemetery.

• • •

The country around Limerick was mad with new roads. They ran straight and true as a leveling rod, and when she came to one she decided to take it even though she had no idea where it ran. But after a few hundred yards she noticed that she was the only one on it. The only sounds the crunch of her feet on the rubbled rock, the cries of the crows wheeling and diving ahead of her, leading her out along the treeless plain.

She walked along it for miles, nonetheless. The clouds streaming past her. Some dark shape seeming to pursue her, to run alongside her so that she thought it was a cloud at first, or maybe one of the wheeling crows, or the devil. But there was no crow that big, and after a time she realized it was her own shadow, slanting just off the road, wraith-thin and insubstantial, fading and evaporating with the clouds. She waited until it swung along in front of her, then trod it down under her feet, making it disappear.

The road seemed to run on forever, far out past the horizon, but that was an illusion. For after she had followed it all day, it only dipped down into a little dell and ended right there, in the middle of the plain. There was nothing more. No destination, no town. No direction signs to anyplace else, it just stopped. And there she stood, all alone with the crows careening around her at the road's end, and screamed into the silence.

She thought there was something wrong with the village when she was still half a mile away. The whole thing no more than a white smear on the green and lovely countryside. Twenty houses, crouched together on the edge of a bog. No smoke coming from the chimneys, no cows out in the pastures or pigs in the mud pens. No sign of anyone or anything moving in the whole village.

She supposed they might have taken to the road together. She had seen that, too: Villages that had subsisted in the same place for a thousand years, all picked up together and making for Dublin, or anywhere else they thought they might get fed. Thinking there might still be safety and sustenance in numbers, what had led them to huddle together in the first place. Only she knew, after months on the road, that there was no safety, there was no succor anywhere—

When she moved closer, though, she was sure she saw something. A few low shapes skulking between the houses.

She stopped where she was. There were always stories out on the road of men robbing cabins, murdering, even eating, the people inside. Thinking maybe she should try to walk around the village. Yet it was no more than the
suggestion
of movement, flickering off the whitewashed house sides. And anyway the shadows looked low to the ground, like those of children, or pigs.

She left the road when she reached the village, taking her added precaution, just in case. Creeping toward the back of the closest house, trying to keep as low to the ground as she could. Hearing her own soft footfalls on the grass. Smelling all the smells, and the absence of smells in the village. The odor of pig shit moldering in the sties, and the lack of anything cooking, of any fire on the hearth, and a general stink of putrefaction.
All the usual.

She was just sidling around to the front of the first house when she spotted another fleck of movement, out of the corner of one eye. She swung about—in time to see the back legs of a dog, disappearing behind the side of the next house.

So that's what it was.
She thought of trying to follow it, but she knew it was useless, that she didn't have the strength left to chase down and kill a dog. The village was still unnervingly silent, bereft even of the cawing and flapping of the crows that were everywhere else.

Best to see what there was and get out.

She went into the first house. It must have belonged to the richest people in the village, she guessed, a well-made home, of wood as well as stone, and blocks of peat. She knocked on the wooden door—what had once been a good door, swinging broken off its hinges now—then pushed it back and padded inside.

The house was a shambles. The plates and cups, the finest she had ever seen, and the solid wood furniture—all broken up, lying in a great heap by the fireplace. Even some of the hearthstones dug out and tossed around the room.

Slowly, the thought penetrated through the daze of her hunger:
They didn't just pack up and leave.

She saw there was another, open doorway within the house and looked upon it with trepidation. The very idea of an inner room in a
home seemed sinister to her, an obvious trap. But she needed to look, and in any case there was such a stench coming from it she couldn't believe anyone, man or beast, could be lying in wait for her there.

She stepped inside, and saw it was the bedroom, with a real bed, a fine embroidered quilt. Underneath it lay a man and a woman and two children—all of them dead, though not for very long. Their faces covered with large, red spots and sores. By the side of the bed stood a cradle, a dead infant inside that had been badly gnawed by something.
The dog—

She crept back out without having bothered to make more than a cursory search for food, the stink becoming too much even for her. She stepped out the door, glad just to be back in the cool air—and as she did she saw the low, black shape pad quickly behind the next house.

Another dog—or the same?
At that moment, though, she was startled by a sudden,
human
sound, coming from somewhere on the far side of the little village, a few hundred yards away.

It was the sound of a woman, she realized. Screaming something in a voice so high-pitched and desperate that Ruth could not even distinguish at first what she was saying. Instinctively, out of what dull concern she had left for another suffering creature, she took a step toward it, wondering what she should do.

Then she stopped, able to make it out now. The one word the woman was screaming, over and over again:

“Food! Food! FOOD!”

The same old cry.
But didn't she know there was no food?
And if there was,
she
would eat it—

The foolish boy, chin and chest covered with the vomit of his last meal.
She gave the last turnips, the last lumper to him, her eldest son, the half-dead boy. She had saved it while the rest of them starved—

Ruth crept over to the next cabin—a poorer one, its walls made only of dried peat, and mud and straw. Yet inside was even worse than the first house. Here bodies lay all about the dirt floor, tossed and worried out of their death blankets—throats gnawed open, whole limbs pulled off and scattered about. She halted in the doorway at first, not sure at all about whether to go in. Then she made herself take a few steps, holding her nose against the stink. Picking up a poker from the fire while she tried not to look at the chewed-up bodies, jabbing under the
stones, and the straw boss. Looking for a stray lumper, a turnip, a bit of Indian meal—

But there was nothing, and she backed out the cabin doorway. She was still trying not to look, her eyes cast to the ground—when she heard the growl just behind her.

She turned slowly, all the way around, and saw the dog head-on for the first time. Why it had growled at all, she didn't know. It could probably have been upon her without that inadvertent warning, could have torn her throat out before she even fully realized it was there.

The animal was large and mostly yellow, much bigger than it had seemed before, coming up nearly to her thigh. Its ribs showed through its patchy coat, and bits of blood and offal covered its snout. It growled again, and snapped its jaws, pointed yellow teeth flashing in its red mouth.

Something wrong with how thin it is—
the thought floated through her head. Not that it mattered. There was nowhere to go, the cabin behind her had no door at all, just the rude opening in the peat. If she stepped back inside, she would only be trapped there—

She tried edging her way slowly around the side of the house, back pressed up against the crumbly peat wall. Yet as soon as she started to move, a large red dog trotted around the corner toward her, then two more mongrels after that. All of them, despite the chewed-up bodies in the cabin, looking as half-starved as the one already before her.

Something wrong with that—

Not that it mattered. She was stuck against the wall now, the lot of them growling and snapping at her. One of the dogs made a high, baying noise, as if it were a signal, and the rest of them began to move in on her. A dog circling to each side, cutting off any escape, as quickly and naturally as if they had done this many times before.

She hung back, too weak to do anything much else. She couldn't keep her eyes on them all, the way they were spread out, the best she could think to do was to hold up her arms and hope they wouldn't get through to the throat or the stomach right away. Give her a chance to run though she knew she wouldn't get very far, out along the open road, the open bog stretching out to the horizon—

The dogs hunched down. The baying over now, their voices back to low, throaty growls.
It was coming.
She braced herself against the
wall, trying to watch for the moment they were ready to spring—when a man came around the other side of the cabin.

He was moving very fast, in a sort of crablike, sideways manner, a stout piece of wood in one hand. He was on the dogs almost before they knew he was there. Bringing the wood down on the head of the nearest one, sending it sprawling into the dirt with an awful crack.

“Ha!” he yelled out triumphantly, then pounded away furiously, pulverizing the downed dog's head, its ribs, its splayed and trembling limbs.

“Ha! Ha!”

The other dogs didn't run, even then. Instead they circled around and came back at him, one at a time as they got up their nerve. He dealt the first of them a solid blow across the chest but it came back up, still going for him until, with a lucky thrust, he stuck the stick as far down its gullet as it would go, sending the animal spinning and choking away.

But now the first dog, the huge, loose-skinned yellow mongrel, was on him, and he had lost his stick. Ruth forced herself off the wall, scrambling on her hands and knees to the choking dog, where it twisted around in circles on the ground. She grabbed at the end of the stick, pulling as hard as she could, trying to get it out without shoving her hand between its jaws.

But it was too late, the yellow dog had flung itself at the man's chest, its teeth snapping for his throat. He grabbed great clumps of its fur, actually pulling it closer to his face—then switched his hands suddenly to the dog's neck. Squeezing it down even as the dog cut through his shirt, raked his chest bloody with its nails, squirming and writhing to get its head clear. The man just squeezed harder. Compressing the dog's neck visibly, his face set in a terrible grimace only inches from its snout. His hands sinking deeper and deeper through its fur until, at last, it shuddered in death and he dropped it.

There were two dogs left, still skirting the fight, looking for their chance, but Ruth finally got the stick free and tossed it over to the man. He picked it up and shook it at the dogs—his hands bloody, his close-shaved head covered with red, glowing boils. They looked at him and trotted away, stopping only to snarl back over their haunches.

Why he didn't kill her then she never knew.

In fact, she understood it even less the more she got to know him. All she knew was that she had gotten to her knees, then stood up—staring at him there with the club in his hand, the dog corpses around him. Eyes filled with a yellow, murderous bile, as if he had the
tamh,
or something worse. She tried to prepare herself, tried to think of something she could say if he moved toward her. But instead he only dropped the gore-stained club, and knelt down over his kill.

“Good, good, good—”

Muttering to himself, kneeling in the dirt by the dead dogs. Prying open their jaws, staring one after the other down into their throats.

“Good, good, good,” he went on singing to himself. “No spots on the tongue. Good!”

He pulled a knife out of his right boot and began to hack away at what was left of the pulverized dogs. It was a small blade, so small he hadn't even bothered to use it to defend himself against the dogs. But now, with much effort, he used it to saw their legs off, one after the other, then to tear their tongues out. She watched him, nearly mesmerized, there in the dirt of the road that ran through the village. While he barely acknowledged her, only glancing back up at her with a look that warned her not to make so much as a move toward his kill.