The Good People (2 page)

W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

PART ONE

Death is the Physician of the Poor

Liagh gach boicht bas

1825

CHAPTER

ONE

Coltsfoot

N
óra’s first thought
when they brought her the body was that it could not be her husband’s. For one long moment she stared at the men bearing Martin’s weight on their sweating shoulders, standing in the gasping cold, and believed that the body was nothing but a cruel imitation; a changeling, brutal in its likeness. Martin’s mouth and eyes were open, but his head slumped on his chest and there was no quick in him. The blacksmith and the ploughman had brought her a lifeless stock. It could not be her husband. It was not him at all.

Martin had been digging ditches beside the fields that sloped the valley, Peter O’Connor said. He had seen him stop, place a hand on his chest like a man taking an oath, and fall to the gentle ground. He had not given a shout of pain. He had gone without farewell or fear.

Peter’s chapped lips trembled, eyes red-rimmed in their sockets. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble,’ he whispered.

Nóra’s legs collapsed beneath her then and in the fall to the dirt and straw of the yard, she felt her heart seize with terrible understanding.

John O’Donoghue, his thick forearms scar-speckled from ironwork, heaved Martin over his shoulder so that Peter was able to lift Nóra out of the mud. Both men were dark-eyed with grief and when Nóra opened her mouth to scream and found that she had choked on it, they bowed their heads as though they heard her anyway.

Peter wrested the chicken feed from Nóra’s clenched fists and kicked the clucking hens from the doorstep. Placing her arm around his shoulders, he led her back inside the cabin to sit by the hearth where her grandchild, Micheál, was sleeping in the unfolded settle bed. The little boy, his cheeks flushed from the heat of the turf fire, stirred as they entered, and Nóra noticed Peter’s eyes flicker to him in curiosity.

John followed them inside, his jaw clenched with the weight of Martin’s body and his boots tracking mud over the packed clay floor. Grunting with the effort, he laid Martin on the bed in the small sleeping quarter off the main room. Dust from the disturbed straw mattress rose into the air. The blacksmith crossed himself with deliberate precision and, stooping under the lintel, murmured that his wife, Áine, would be there soon, and that the new priest had been fetched.

Nóra felt her throat close over. She rose to go to Martin’s body in the bedroom, but Peter held her wrist.

‘Let him be washed,’ he said gently.

John cast a troubled look at the boy and left without saying another word, shutting the half-door behind him.

The dark rose.

‘You saw him fall, did you? Saw him yourself?’ Nóra’s voice sounded strange and small. She gripped Peter’s hand so tightly her fingers ached.

‘I did,’ he murmured, looking at Micheál. ‘I saw him in the fields and raised my hand, and I saw him fall down.’

‘There was a need for those ditches. He told me yesterday there was a need for them to be dug, so the rain . . .’ Nóra felt her husband’s death creep over her, until she began to shake with it. Peter draped a greatcoat over her shoulders, and she could tell from the familiar smell of burnt coltsfoot that it was Martin’s own. They must have brought it back with his body.

‘Someone else will have to finish those ditches,’ she gasped, rubbing her cheek against the rough frieze.

‘Don’t be thinking of that now, Nóra.’

‘And there will be the thatch, come spring. It needs thatching.’

‘We’ll all be taking care of that, don’t you worry now.’

‘And Micheál. The boy . . .’ Alarm ran through her and she looked down at the child, his hair copper in the firelight. She was grateful that he slept. The boy’s difference did not show so much when he was asleep. The keel of his limbs slackened, and there was no telling the dumb tongue in his head. Martin had always said Micheál looked most like their daughter when asleep. ‘You can almost think him well,’ he had said once. ‘You can see how he will be when the sickness has passed. When we have him cured of it.’

‘Is there someone I can fetch for you, Nóra?’ Peter asked, his face splintered with concern.

‘Micheál. I don’t want him here.’ Her voice was hoarse. ‘Take Micheál to Peg O’Shea’s.’

Peter looked uneasy. ‘Would you not have him with you?’

‘Take him away from here.’

‘I don’t like to leave you alone, Nóra. Not before Áine is with you.’

‘I’ll not have Micheál here to be gaped at.’ Nóra reached down and grabbed the sleeping boy under his armpits, hauling him into the air in front of Peter. The boy frowned, eyes blinking, gummed with sleep.

‘Take him. Take him to Peg’s. Before a soul is here.’

Micheál began to squall and struggle as he hung from Nóra’s grip. His legs tremored, rashed and dry-looking against the bone.

Peter grimaced. ‘Your daughter’s, isn’t he? God rest her soul.’

‘Take him, Peter. Please.’

He gave her a long, sorrowful look. ‘Folk won’t mind him at a time like this, Nóra. They’ll be thinking of you.’

‘They’ll be gawping and gossiping over him, is what.’

Micheál’s head slumped backwards and he began to cry, his hands drawing into fists.

‘What ails him?’

‘For the love of God, Peter, take him.’ Her voice broke. ‘Take him away!’

Peter nodded and lifted Micheál onto his lap. The boy was clothed in a girl’s woollen dress, too long for him, and Peter awkwardly wrapped the worn cloth around the child’s legs, taking care to cover his toes. ‘’Tis cold out,’ he explained. ‘Do you not have a shawl for him?’

Nóra, hands shaking, took off her own and gave it to Peter.

He stood up, bundling the bleating boy against his chest. ‘I’m sorry, Nóra, so I am.’

The cabin door swung wide after him.

Nóra waited until the sound of Micheál’s crying faded and she knew Peter had reached the lane. Then she rose from her low stool and walked into the bedroom, clutching Martin’s coat around her shoulders.

‘Sweet, sore-wounded Christ.’

Her husband lay on their marriage bed, his arms tucked close to his sides, grass and mud clinging to his calloused hands. His eyes were half closed. Their pearled whites glimmered in the light from the open door.

Martin’s stillness in that quiet room sent sorrow pealing through her chest. Easing herself down onto the bed, Nóra touched her forehead against Martin’s cheekbone and felt the cold of his stubbled skin. Pulling his coat over the both of them, she closed her eyes and her lungs emptied of air. Pain descended with the weight of water and she felt that she was drowning. Her chest shuddered, and she was crying into her husband’s collarbone, into his clothes reeking of the earth and cow shit and the soft sweet smell of the valley air and all the turf smoke it carried on an autumn evening. She cried like a pining dog, with the strained, strung whimper of abandonment.

Only that morning they had lain in bed together, both awake in the dark of early dawn, the warmth of Martin’s hand resting on her stomach.

‘I think it will rain today,’ he had said, and Nóra had let him pull her close against the broad barrel of his ribs, had matched the rise and fall of her breathing with his own.

‘There was a wind in the night.’

‘It woke you?’

‘The boy woke me. He was crying in fear of it.’

Martin had listened intently. ‘There’s no sound from him now.’

‘Are you digging potatoes today?’

‘Ditches.’

‘And will you have a word with the new priest about Micheál on your way home?’

‘I will.’

Nóra stretched herself out against her husband’s dead body and thought of the nights they had slept in company together, the touch of his foot on hers in the unthinking custom of their marriage, and sobbed until she thought she would be sick.

It was only the thought that her cries might wake devils lying in wait for his soul that made her stop. She stuffed her mouth with the sleeve of Martin’s coat and shook, silently.

How dare you leave me behind, she thought.

‘Nóra?’

She had fallen asleep. Through the swelling of her eyes she saw the slender outline of the blacksmith’s wife standing in the doorway.

‘Áine,’ Nóra croaked.

The woman entered, crossing herself at the sight of the body. ‘May the Lord have mercy on his soul. I’m sorry for your trouble. Martin, he . . .’ She paused and knelt by Nóra’s side. ‘He was a great man. A rare man.’

Nóra sat up on the bed and wiped her eyes on her apron, embarrassed.

‘The sorrow is on you, Nóra. I can see it. And we’d do right to give him a proper wake. Would you be willing for me to wash and lay him out? Father Healy has been sent for. He’s on his way.’

Áine put her hand on Nóra’s knee and squeezed it. Her face, hanging from wide cheekbones, seemed spectral in the gloom. Nóra stared at her in horror.

‘There now. Here are your beads. He’s with God now, Nóra. Remember that.’ She glanced around the room. ‘Are you alone? Did you not have a child . . .?’

Nóra closed her fingers over the rosary. ‘I am alone.’

Áine washed Martin as tenderly as if he had been her own husband. At first Nóra watched, clutching the prayer beads so tightly that the wood baubled her skin into welts. She could not believe that it was her husband naked before them, his belly painful-white. It was shameful for another woman to see the pale secrets of his body. When she stood up and held her hand out for the cloth, Áine passed it to her without a word. She washed him then, and with every movement of her hand she farewelled the boned curve of his chest, the sweep of his limbs.

How well I know you, she thought, and when she felt her throat noose tighter, she swallowed hard and forced her eye to the neat cobwebbing of veins across his thighs, the familiar whorl of his hair. She did not understand how Martin’s body could seem so small. In life he had been a bear of a man, had carried her on the night of their wedding as though she was nothing more than sunlight.

The dark fur of his chest slicked damp against his skin.

‘I think he is clean now, Nóra,’ Áine said.

‘A little longer.’ She ran her palm down his sternum as though waiting for it to lift in breath.

Áine eased the grey cloth from her fingers’ grip.

The afternoon darkened and a bitter wind began to blow outside. Nóra sat beside Martin’s body and let Áine stir the fire and fix the rushlights. Both of them jumped at a sudden knocking on the door, and Nóra’s heart gave a scalding leap at the thought it might be Martin, returned to her by the evening.

‘Blessings on this house.’

A young man entered the cabin, his clerical garb flapping in the doorway. The new priest, Nóra realised. He was dark-haired and ruddy-cheeked, with long limbs that seemed at odds with his soft, child’s face and pouting mouth. Nóra noticed a conspicuous gap between his front teeth. Father Healy’s hat dripped with rain, and when Peter and John followed him inside, their shoulders were wet through. She had not realised that the weather had changed.