The Good People (8 page)

Brigid took the feather and stroked the boy’s dimpled chin. He giggled, his chest in convulsions. Brigid started laughing with him. ‘Will you look at that!’

‘’Tis a good sign,’ said Peg, gesturing to the pair.

Nóra’s smile emptied. ‘A good sign of what?’

Peg picked up the iron tongs and idly poked the fire.

‘Are you a deaf woman now? A good sign of what, Peg O’Shea?’

Peg sighed. ‘A good sign that your Micheál might yet be well.’

Nóra pressed her lips together and continued tipping the last of the potatoes into the hot water. She flinched as it splashed her hand.

‘We only mean well for the child,’ Peg murmured.

‘Do ye now?’

‘Have you taken him to Nance, Nóra?’ Brigid’s voice was hesitant. ‘I was thinking just now, it might be that he’s fairy-struck.’

Silence filled the cabin.

Nóra suddenly dropped down on the floor. She brought her apron to her face and took a shuddering breath. She could smell the familiar scent of cow manure and wet grass.

‘There now,’ Peg whispered. ‘’Tis a hard day for you, Nóra Leahy. We had no right to talk of such things. God bless the child and see he grows up to be a great man. Like Martin.’

At the sound of her husband’s name, Nóra groaned. Peg placed a hand on her shoulder and she shrugged it off.

‘Forgive us. We only mean well.
Tig grian a n-diadh na fearthana
. Sunshine follows rain. Better times will be upon us soon, just wait and see.’

‘Faith, God’s help is nearer than the door,’ Brigid piped.

The rafters creaked in the force of the wind. Micheál continued to laugh.

CHAPTER

THREE

Ragwort

S
amhain Eve came upon
the valley
, announced by a wind that smelled of rotting oak leaves and the vinegar tang of windfall apples. Nóra heard the happy shrieks of children as they traced the field walls and their dressing of brambles, plucking the last bloody berries before night fetched the
púca
to poison them with his breath. They emerged from the ditches in the smoky peace of twilight like a band of murderers, their hands and mouths stained purple. Nóra watched them as they scrambled up the hills to their homes, some of the boys wearing dresses to deceive the fairies. It was a dangerous night to be caught outside. Tonight was a ghost night. The dead were close, and all the beings caught between Heaven and Hell would soon walk the cold loam.

They’re coming, thought Nóra. From the graves and the dark and the wet. They’re coming for the light of our fires.

The sky was fading. Nóra watched as two young boys were hustled indoors by their anxious mother. It was not the time to tempt the Devil or the fairies. People disappeared on Samhain Eve. Small children went missing. They were lured into ringforts and bogs and mountain sides with music and lights, and were never seen again by their parents.

Nóra remembered, as a very small girl, the fear and talk when a man from the valley did not return to his family’s croft one Samhain Eve. They found him the next morning, naked and bleeding, curled into the soil and clutching yellow ragwort in his hands. He was abducted, her mother had told her. Taken to ride with the
sióga
until dawn broke out in feeble light and he was abandoned. Nóra had sat in the shadows, listening to the adults as they spoke in urgent whispers around her parents’ fire. Wasn’t he a poor soul to be found in such a way. His mother would die of the shame of it. A grown man, shivering and talking of the woods like a poor unfortunate.

‘They took me,’ he had muttered to the men of the valley when they helped him home, covering him with a coat and bearing his stagger on patient shoulders. ‘They took me.’

The next evening the men and women had burnt all the ragwort from the fields to deprive the Good People of their sacred plant. Nóra could still remember the sight: tiny fires burning along the cant of the valley, winking in the darkness.

The brothers had reached their cabin and Nóra watched as their mother closed the door behind them. With a last, long look to the woods and the billhook moon rising over them, she made the sign of the cross and went indoors.

Her house seemed smaller, somehow, after the time outside. Nóra stood by the doorstep and looked at all she had left in the world. How it had changed in the month since Martin died. How empty it seemed. The crude hearth, the smoke of former fires blacking the wall behind it in a tapering shadow of soot. Her potato pot hanging from its chain and the wicker skib resting against the wall. The dash churn by the stopped-up window and the small table under it bearing two miserable pieces of delph and crocks for milk and cream. Even the remaining treasures from her dowry – the salt box on the wall, the butter print, the settle bed with its seat worn smooth from use – seemed dismal. Here was a widow’s house. Martin’s tobacco and pipe in the hearth’s keeping hole were already covered with a film of ash. The low creepie stools were empty of company. The rushes on the floor had dried and powdered underfoot, their freshness long gone with no cause to replace them. There was little sign of life other than the fire’s lazy burn, the murmuring of her chickens fluffed in their roost, and the twitching sleep of Micheál as he lay on a pile of heather in the corner of the cabin.

He is like Johanna, Nóra thought, examining her grandchild’s face.

The boy looked unbearably smooth in sleep, bloodless and waxen. He had his father’s furrow between chin and bottom lip that pushed his mouth out in a wet sulk, but his hair was Johanna’s. Reddish and fine. Martin had loved it. Once or twice Nóra had entered the room to find her husband sitting with the boy, stroking his hair as he used to do with their daughter.

Nóra brushed the thin locks from Micheál’s forehead, and for one moment, through the stinging blur, imagined that he was Johanna. If she squinted it was as though she was once again a young mother, her little girl sleeping before her. Copper-headed, sighing in sleep. Her only baby to draw breath and stick to life. An uncomplaining child with hair of down.

She remembered what Martin had said the night Johanna was born, swaying with a night empty of sleep and full of whiskey, jubilant and terrified and lightheaded. ‘Wee dandelion,’ he had said, stroking Johanna’s feathery hair. ‘Careful or the wind will come and blow you away and scatter you over the mountains.’

A proverb ran through her mind: Scattering is easier than gathering.

Nóra felt a sudden weight on her chest. Her little girl and her husband were gone. Scattered into the air and unreachable. Gone to God, gone to places where she, growing old and already too full of bones, too full of the weight of her years, ought to have gone first. She heard the breath in her throat rasping and snatched her hand away from Micheál.

Her daughter should still be alive. Should be as Nóra had found her when she and Martin had walked the full length of a day to Tadgh and Johanna’s cabin in the moors, the first time Nóra had seen her daughter since the wedding. Johanna had seemed filled with happiness, waiting at the top of the lane against the flowering gorse and the sky, wide with light, her son in her arms. How she had smiled to see them. Proud to be a wife. Proud to be a mother.

‘This is wee Micheál,’ she had said, and Nóra had taken that little boy into her arms and blinked hard at the pricking of tears. How old had he been then? No more than two. But growing and well and soon tottering after the piglet that ran squealing about the damp floor of the cramped cabin.

‘By my baptism, but he is the spit of you,’ Martin had said.

Micheál had tugged on Johanna’s skirt. ‘Mammy?’ And Nóra had noticed how her daughter swung her son onto her hip with practised ease, how she tickled him under the chin until he shrieked with laughter.

‘The years go in a gallop,’ Nóra murmured, and Johanna had smiled.

‘More,’ Micheál had demanded. ‘More.’

Nóra sat down heavily on the stool and stared at the boy who now bore little resemblance to the grandchild she remembered. She stared at his mouth, ajar in sleep, the arms thrown up over his head, wrists strangely twisted. The legs that would not bear his weight.

What happened to you? she wondered.

The house was awful in its silence.

Since Martin died, Nóra had felt that she was merely passing time until he returned and, at the same time, was devastated by the knowledge that he would not. She still noticed the absence of sound. There was no whistle as Martin pulled on his boots, no laughter. Her nights had emptied of sleep. She endured their unfeeling hours by curling herself into the depression his body had made in the straw when he was alive, until she could almost imagine that he embraced her.

It was not supposed to be like this. Martin had seemed so well. A man who was ageing, sure, as she was, but a man who carried his winters on a strong back and who had two firm legs wired with the ropey muscle of a farmer. His had not been a sour body. Even as their hair had greyed, and she had seen Martin’s face shaped by time and weather – mirroring her own, she imagined – he had seemed quick with life. She had expected him to outlive them all. She had envisioned her own death at his patient, watchful side. Had sometimes, in a gloomy mood, imagined him at her own funeral, throwing clay onto her coffin.

During the wake, the women had told her that the grief would subside. Nóra hated them for it. There was a void there, she understood now. How had she lived her whole life and not noticed it! A sea of loneliness that sang a siren song to the bereaved. What a gentle thing it would be to give into it and drown. What an easy keel into the abyss. How quiet it would be.

She had thought she’d never surpass the grief of that summer afternoon when Tadgh arrived, his eyes blank and his hair littered gold with the harvest chaff.

Johanna is dead, he had said. My wife is dead.

Johanna, dandelion child, gone like clocking seed on the wind and, as she felt the field of oats rise up about her, the scythe falling from her hand, there came the thought: This is it. The tide is come and I will let it take me.

Had it not been for Martin . . . He had found comfort in Micheál, that now-motherless foundling brought by Tadgh in a turf basket. He had urged her to care for the boy, to dribble milk into his piping, empty mouth. He had loved him. Found reason for happiness in him.

‘He looks as though he is dying,’ Nóra had said that night as they sat, drowned in grief. It was evening. The harvest sun had fallen and they had left the half-door open to allow the pinking dusk to spread throughout the room.

Martin had lifted the boy from the basket, holding him as though he were an injured bird. ‘He is starved. Look at his legs.’

‘Tadgh says he does not talk anymore. Has not spoken for six months or more.’

The griping boy calmed in the embrace of his grandfather. ‘We will fetch the doctor for him, and we will make him well. Nóra? Do you hear me?’

‘We cannot afford a doctor.’

She remembered Martin’s wide hands, the kindness in the way he stroked the boy’s hair. The dirt under the rough callouses of his skin. He had petted Micheál in the same way he soothed spooked horses, speaking with a calm tongue. Even that night, stabbed through with grief for their daughter, Martin had been calm.

‘We will fetch the doctor, Nóra,’ he had said. Only then had his voice broken. ‘What we could not do for Johanna we will do for her son. For our grandson.’

Nóra stared at the empty stool that had held her husband that summer night.

Why could God not have taken Micheál? Why leave an ill-formed child in the place of a good man, a good woman?

I would throw this boy against a wall if it would bring me back Martin and my daughter, Nóra thought. The notion horrified her no sooner than it had crossed her mind. She glanced at the sleeping boy and crossed herself in shame.

No. It would not do. To sit slumped by the hearth, thinking dark thoughts, was no way to welcome the dead. This was no home for her daughter’s spirit, or the returning soul of her man, God have mercy on them.

While Micheál slept, Nóra rose and filled the pot with water from her well bucket, dropping in as many potatoes as she could spare. With those set upon the fire to boil, she arranged stools around the hearth: Martin’s place, closest to the flame, another for Johanna beside it. They might be gone, she thought, but with God’s grace she could welcome them again for one night of the year.