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.
When the lumpers had softened, Nóra drained them onto the skib and placed a noggin of salted water in the middle of their steaming flesh. She ate a few, slipping them out of their skins as quickly as she was able and dipping them into the water to cool and flavour the potato. Then she took Martin’s pipe out of the nook in the hearth wall, wiped the dust out of the bowl and blew through the stem to clear it. She set it on his stool.
As she went about the room, snatching cobwebs from the low rafters and straightening the cross by the window, Nóra allowed herself to think again of when her daughter was little and when they were all together as a family. She remembered the first years, when Johanna was still soft-cheeked, playing with nuts gathered from wild trees: hazelnuts, acorns, chestnuts. She thought of the potato lamps they made, hollowed out by Martin and handed to Johanna to scrape out faces. Holes for eyes. Gaping mouths.
By the time Nóra finished the Samhain preparations, the usual evening sounds of lowing cattle and the cries and calls of men returning inside from work had long ceased, and all was still and silent except for the crackle of the fire and Micheál’s quiet breathing. Nóra poured out piggins of buttermilk for Martin and Johanna, starting at the sudden screech of a barn owl outside. She placed the wooden cups beside the stools and knelt to say her evening prayers. Leaving the rushlights burning and her grandchild sleeping, Nóra went to bed with a small bottle of poitín, and sipped at it until she felt herself dissolve with the heat of the liquor. The high fire that had been burning all evening had dried the air in the house and, in the warmth of it, Nóra fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.
It was midnight when she heard the noise. A muffled thump, like a fist against a chest. Nóra sat up in bed, her head throbbing. It wasn’t Micheál. The sound had come from outside. She had not imagined it, surely.
Looking out to the main room and the hearth, she could see her grandson’s sleeping form. The turf burnt red. All was wine-dark.
Nóra heard the sound again. Someone was outside. Someone wanted to get in. There was a noise on the thatch, like a stone thrown against the house.
Her blood darted through her veins.
Was it Martin? Johanna? Nóra’s tongue was dry with fear. She placed her feet on the ground and rose, glancing around the room, swaying. She was drunk.
There was another sound – a clinking, like a fingernail tapping on a tin bucket. She made her way into the main room of the cabin. There was no one there.
Another thump. Nóra let out a soft cry. She wished she hadn’t been drinking.
Laughter sounded.
‘Who’s there?’ Her voice sounded feeble.
Another muffled laugh. A man’s laugh.
‘Martin?’ she whispered.
‘Hallowe’en knock!’ growled a low voice.
Nóra’s breath caught in her throat.
‘Hallowe’en knock! A penny a stock. If you don’t let me in, I’ll knock. Knock. Knock.’ There was a sudden pounding against the mud wall of her cabin.
Nóra flung open the door. In the light of the high, slender moon she could see three men standing in front of her, their faces covered in masks of rough cloth. Holes had been cut out for their eyes and mouths, giving them an expression of menace. Nóra stepped backwards in fear as the young man in the middle skipped forward into the cabin, laughing.
‘Hallowe’en knock!’ He did a clumsy jig, rattling the long string of hazelnuts that hung around his neck. His fellows started giggling behind him, but their laughs faded as Nóra started to cry. The dancer stopped and pulled the mask from his face, and Nóra saw that it was John O’Shea, Peg’s grandson.
‘Widow Leahy. I’m –’
‘Damn you all!’ Blood drained from her face.
John glanced back at his companions. They stared, slack-mouthed.
‘Get out, John,’ Nóra hissed.
‘We didn’t mean to give you such a fright.’
Nóra gave a short, barking laugh. The other boys took their masks off and looked to John. Valley boys, all of them. Not her husband. Not her daughter. Just bold, masked boys.
‘Taunting widows are you now, John?’ She was shaking like an aspen.
&nbs
p; John looked uncomfortable. ‘’Tis Samhain. We’re after soul cakes.’
‘And money,’ his friend mumbled.
‘’Twas just for a laugh, is all.’
‘And are ye laughing, lads?’ Nóra raised her hand as if to slap them and the boys shrank back against the open door. ‘Ye spalpeens. Stalking new-made widows in the dead of night! Waking good folk from their sleep with your unholy ways!’
‘You won’t say to mamó?’ John twisted his mask in his hands.
‘Oh, Peg’ll be hearing of it. Away with ye!’ Nóra picked up a stool and flung it at them as they ran out of the cabin into the night. She swung the door to, fastened the latch and leant her head against it. For one tender moment she had thought it was Martin and Johanna at her door. Stupidly, she realised that she had been anticipating their faces. The shock of the lads and their awful masks had shaken her, but it was the ruined expectation that had hurt the most.
I am a drunk old woman crying over ghosts that do not come, Nóra thought.
Micheál had woken. He wailed in his bed of heather, eyes round and dark. Nóra staggered over to where he lay and slumped to the ground. She stroked his head and tried to sing to him as Martin had done, but the tune was mournful and her voice broke on the words. Eventually she rose and fetched her husband’s greatcoat from her bed. Wrapping it around her and breathing in his old scent of burnt coltsfoot, Nóra eased herself to the ground next to Micheál.
‘God and Mary to you, Nance.’
Nance looked up from her knife to see a shawled figure in the doorway.
‘Old Hanna?’
‘And getting older with every passing day.’
‘Come in and God welcome.’ Nance helped her visitor to a stool by the fire. ‘Is it for yourself you’re come?’
The woman grunted as she sat down, shaking her head. ‘’Tis my sister. She has a fever.’
Nance passed Hanna a cup of fresh milk and nodded at it. ‘Drink. Tell me, how long has she been sick, and does she eat?’
‘She eats nothing, but takes a little water. The sweat pours from her and she shivers as though she is bitter cold. But we have the fire high, and ’tis warm as you like in with her.’
‘I can give you the cure.’
‘Praise be.’ Hanna took a sip of the milk and pointed to the knife in Nance’s hand. ‘I’ve come and stopped you from your work.’
‘’Twas only thistles I was cutting. For my hens. Musha, curing fevers is my work.’ Nance put the blade down and walked to the corner of the room, taking a little cloth bag from it. She untied the leather string of the bag and, using her fingertips, carefully sprinkled the herb from it into the neck of a brown glass bottle, muttering under her breath.
‘What is that?’ Hanna asked, when the bottle was filled and Nance had finished her charm.
‘Meadowsweet.’
‘Will it cure her?’
‘Put the dried flowers drawing on the boil as soon as you get home to her. Give her three drinks off the top of it and she will be as well as she ever was.’
‘Thank you, Nance.’ Hanna was relieved.
‘But don’t be looking behind you until you’ve reached the lane. Don’t be looking at the Piper’s Grave or the whitethorn, or the bottle will empty.’
Hanna looked grave. ‘Very well, so.’
‘Finish that milk now, and God be on the road with you.’
The woman drained the cup and, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, stood up and reached for the bottle.
‘Remember what I said: don’t look back.’
‘Very well, Nance. And God bless you.’
Nance walked Hanna to the door, farewelling her with a wave. ‘Close your fist around that bottle there.’ She waited in the doorway and watched the woman walk from the woods towards the settled valley, her eyes down and her shawl pulled firmly about her head, as though to blinker herself against even a passing glance at the fairy ráth and the whitethorn, red haws glistening upon the branches, blood-bright.
It was not so often that women came to her for herbal cures. Most women in the valley knew enough to tend to the daily blights and bruises of living: wild honey for the inflamed and crusted eye, comfrey for pained bones, yarrow leaves pushed inside the nose to make it bleed and relieve the pounding head. Nance knew the people visited John O’Donoghue for brutal surgery, trusting his blacksmith’s strength to pull the rotting teeth from their mouths or slip the dislocated shoulder back snug into its joint. They came to her only when their own poultices of gander dung and mustard or their teas of king fern failed to halt the infection or smother the cough. They came to her only when their panic had begun to fight the bridle, when their children continued to lie slack in their arms, or they knew that whatever illness plaguing them was more powerful than red dandelion or penny leaves or the salted tongue of a fox.
‘’Tis something else this time,’ they would say, extending a twisted foot or breathing through a congested lung. ‘’Tis the evil eye,’ they said. ‘’Tis the Good People.’
It was mainly the men who came for herbs. Those who worked in the fields and were less used to the sight of their own blood. Those who did not trust the doctor or could not afford his labelled tinctures. Men of the earth, they took comfort in seeing their sores stemmed by plants they had played with as boys, by a hand as wrinkled as the grandmothers they remembered by the fires of their childhoods.
But Nance knew that most of her patients did not come for herbs at all. Those with broken bodies came in the light of day in the company of family. Those who sought other advice, who found something deeply amiss, who could not lay a finger on the origin of their suffering, came in the shifting hours of dawn and twilight, when there was time for secrecy and they would not be missed. They came alone, wrapped against the cold, their faces ashen with anxiety. Nance knew that, for all her stoppered teas and mixtures of fat and ragwort, it was these visits that allowed her to remain in her cabin. They wanted her time. They wanted her voice, and her hands holding their own. They saw in her age and loneliness the proof of her cure.
What woman lives on her own with a goat and a low roof of drying herbs? What woman keeps company with the birds and the creatures that belonged to the dappled places? What woman finds contentment in such a solitary life, has no need of children or the comfort of a man? One who has been chosen to walk the boundaries. One who somehow has an understanding of the mysteries of the world and who sees in the clawing briars God’s own handwriting.
Nance took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air and, nodding towards the fairy ráth, returned inside to her thistles.
Nóra set out to the Killarney fair early, a skiff over her arm to carry her shoes and save them from the mud of the road. The dark dawned to a white-knuckled day as she walked, the jackdaws shrieking at the November morning.
How odd to think that she would be returning with a stranger. Someone to live with and talk to, and who would share the heat of her fire. Someone who might help whittle the long winter days away until spring came with its comforts of birdsong and work.
It had been Peg O’Shea who had given her the idea to hire a maid. After Samhain Eve, Nóra’s grief had sharpened into righteous anger and she had stormed into Peg’s cabin.
‘I’ve a mind to make a harness out of your boy, John,’ Nóra had announced. ‘Running around after dark, putting the fear into widows and children and disturbing my sleep. Here I am with no husband, himself fresh in the grave, and only myself and my nephews to work the ground, and now I have John and his spalpeens battering down the door in masks.’
Nóra winced as she walked along the road, remembering her words to Peg.
‘He’s gallows-bound with that larking. Do they want to be seeing me in my grave? Is that what they were after with their badness?’
‘Ah, that’s not it at all.’ Peg had taken one of Nóra’s hands and held it
lightly in her own. ‘I tell you, them boys scare more than widows. ’Tis a good thing they had their masks on or you would have been crying louder. Have you seen the face on our John? Like a flitch of bacon on the turn. You should see the girls running from the sight. Ah, Nóra. Come now. We’re kin and all. I’ll have a word with him.’
It was then that Peg had gently advised Nóra to find some kind of company. When she had pulled a face at Peg’s suggestion that she move in with Daniel and Brigid, the older woman had encouraged her to look for someone at the November hiring fair.
‘Get a girl, just to see you through winter,’ she had said. ‘’Twould be a grand help to you, what with Micheál and all. ’Twill be hard looking after a wee cripple on your own. Was it that your man was in the fields and running errands, and you in the house with the boy? Well, what when you’re off to sell your eggs and butter?’
‘I can sell eggs and butter to those who come collecting for it.’
‘And when you’re in the fields in the summer? Doing the work of two to keep the thatch over your head?’
‘I can’t be thinking of summer yet.’
‘Well then, Nóra, do you think it best to be sitting the dark hours through on your own? There are girls from up north, their families are starving. Would it not be a comfort to know you’re taking one in? Would it not be a comfort to have an extra soul about the place this winter?’
There had been sense in what Peg had said. Later that day, sobbing to ruin on her bed while the child howled by the dying fire, Nóra understood that she was slipping. She was not like Martin. Her grandchild was no comfort to her; he was burdensome. She needed someone who might quiet the shrieking wean, who might help her resurface after she was hit with the waves of her grief. Someone who was not from the valley, who would not spread knowledge of Micheál’s withered legs amongst her neighbours, would not say he was astray in the head.