The Good People (14 page)

‘I know she died.’

Kate slowly shook her head. ‘No, Mary Clifford. No. She did not die. She was swept. Taken. Carried away by the Good People. Oh, you’re laughing at that, are you?’

Mary shook her head. The woman’s breath was hot in her face.

‘How well it is that you are not afraid,’ Kate said. ‘But you should be. If I were you, I would go on back home to Annamore. No good will come of your work there, not in that house. Let you go on back to the widow and tell her that I know what that boy is, and that she ought to take remedies to banish him before someone does it for her.’

CHAPTER

FIVE

Alder

W
hen Nóra heard the knock
on her half-door she thought it was Peg. ‘Come in,’ she cried, not looking up from where she was dressing Micheál. She knotted the cloth about the boy’s hips, then, not hearing any movement, looked up. At first she could not see the visitor – the sun outside cast their face into shadow. But as the door creaked open a man stepped inside, taking off a ragged felt hat, and her heart clutched in recognition.

Tadgh.

Nóra stood, her breath suddenly sharp. Her son-in-law had changed since she had last seen him, when he had arrived bearing his starving son on the donkey. Tadgh had always been small and wiry, but now he seemed shrunken. He had grown a beard, but it was patchy and thin. He seemed untended.

Grief has withered him, she thought.

‘I heard Martin died,’ Tadgh said. ‘I’m sorry for your troubles.’

‘Tadgh. ’Tis good to see you.’

‘Is it?’ he asked.

‘How have you been keeping?’ Nóra showed him to the settle bed and sank down on a stool. She felt weak.

Tadgh shrugged. ‘Times are hard,’ he said simply. ‘How is the boy?’

‘Grand, so he is.’

Tadgh nodded absently, gazing about the room. ‘’Tis a fine place you have. I saw the cow. He has milk, then.’

‘Micheál? He does. There’s enough for him.’ Nóra pointed to where the boy, now cleaned, lay on a clump of heather.

Tadgh stood and regarded him from a height. ‘He’s unchanged then,’ he said suddenly. ‘There’s still that queer look to him. Is it illness, do you think?’

Nóra swallowed hard. She said nothing.

‘When he stopped walking Johanna thought he was ill. She thought he had caught something off her.’

‘Faith, ’tis nothing that time won’t heal, so I think,’ said Nóra, trying to maintain a steady voice.

Tadgh scratched his head, the sound of his fingernails loud against his scalp. He looked troubled. ‘He was such a bonny child. Such a fair little babby.’

‘So he is still, for all the difference.’

‘He is not,’ Tadgh said decisively. He stared at Nóra. ‘For two years he was well. Then . . . I thought it might be the hunger, you know. I thought ’twas our doing. The place was so awful cold, and there wasn’t a lot we could give him. I gave him all I . . .’ His voice broke. Nóra could see that he was fighting to speak without emotion. ‘I thought I’d done it,’ he whispered finally, glassy-eyed.

‘Tadgh,’ Nóra breathed. ‘Tadgh.’

‘I thought he might be better here. That’s what they said. That it was just want of milk and things to eat.’

‘I’m taking good care of him, Tadgh. I have a girl in with me now.’

‘But he’s the same, isn’t he?’ He squatted beside Micheál and extended a hand out over the boy, waving it in his face. Micheál took no notice of it. ‘Do you think ’tis his mind, like?’

Nóra said nothing.

‘Johanna didn’t think ’twas the cold. Or the hunger.’

‘She thought it was the bug.’

Tadgh nodded. ‘At first. She thought it had gone into his legs like it had gone into her head. Stopped him from walking, like. Just as it stopped her from . . .’ He bit his lip and lowered himself to the ground, sitting cross-legged next to Micheál. ‘My little man. Your da is here.’

Micheál arched his back and shot a thin arm out in an aimless punch.

‘Look at him fighting.’

‘He does that of a time. He can move.’

Tadgh gave a sad smile. ‘But he is not walking.’

‘I try, sometimes. I set him up with his feet on the ground. Hold him, like, with the wee soles of him on the clay. But he can’t seem to put the weight of him down.’

They both looked at Micheál. He was staring at something on the ceiling, and as they looked up to see what had captured his attention, he let out a pitching squeal of laughter.

Tadgh smiled. ‘A laugh for your da. Maybe he’ll be talking next time.’

‘’Tis awful good to see you, Tadgh. You seem changed.’

Tadgh looked down at his hands, as if considering the black crescents of dirt under his fingernails. ‘I have been meaning to come.’

‘You have been busy.’

‘No. There is no work.’

‘You have been grieving, then.’

‘I have been afraid to come, Nóra. I have been afraid of what I would see. ’Twas not until I heard that Martin had passed, Lord keep him, that I knew I needed to visit you.’

‘Tadgh? You’re scaring me, the talk of you.’

‘I wasn’t going to say a word about it, Nóra.’ He looked at her with the darkling, lowered stare of a hunted man.

‘Johanna. ’Twas in the last days. She was in the bed, and the cloud was on her mind, and she was fighting it best she could, but the pain was awful on her and it made her say some things.’ He frowned. ‘She said some awful things, Nóra.’

‘What did she say?’

‘I don’t want to tell you.’

‘Tadgh, tell me. For God’s sake, you’re frightening me.’

‘One time, she was lying abed, her eyes closed. For all of me I thought she was sleeping. And then I hear a queer muttering coming from her, and I says, “Are you awake, Johanna? Is it the pain?” And she shook her head, slight, like this . . .’ He turned his head slowly from side to side, his eyes never leaving Nóra’s. ‘And I says, “What is it?” And she says, “Bring me Micheál.” So I pick the lad up and put him on the bed next to her, and she opened her eyes a wee bit and took a look at him, and a queer expression crosses her face. Like she’s never seen him before in her life. “That’s not my child,” she says. She’s looking at me, shaking her head. “That’s not my child.”’

Nóra’s mouth was dry. She swallowed thickly.

‘“Sure, ’tis,” says I. “He’s your own son, so he is. Do you not know your own son?” And she tries to sit up and looks at him again. “That’s not my boy,” she says. “Bring me my boy.” Sure, I didn’t know what to do, so I keep telling her ’tis Micheál, and her strange way of talking was scaring me that much that I put him on her lap, and that was it. She started screaming. “That’s not my son! Bring me Micheál!” And she’s pushing Micheál off the bed, and were I not there to catch him he would have had a tumble.’ Tadgh was breathing heavily. ‘I didn’t know what to do, so I took Micheál away, out of her sight. But all that night long she was like it. “My son has been stolen from me. My boy has been stolen.” She was clawing at me to go and get the police, raise a watch, like. She wanted to put Micheál out the house. “Get rid of it!” she was saying. “Put it on the dung pile and bring me back our son!”

‘That was it then. That was the last of it, before she fell asleep. ’Twas the last thing she said to me. In the days after, she was not herself. She was halfway to God.’

Nóra stared at Tadgh, feeling like she would choke.

‘I didn’t want to tell you, Nóra,’ Tadgh said, pressing his fingers into his temples. ‘But I see him now, Micheál . . .’

Nóra looked down at the little boy. He was jerking his head, as if stabbed by something unseen.

‘I see him now and I wonder. I wonder at what she said. I see him and I know he’s my son, but I don’t recognise him at all.’

‘I know why.’

They turned to see Mary in the open doorway, her apron wet and dripping, clutching the pail of water to her chest. Her face was chalk-white.

‘He is a changeling,’ she whimpered. ‘And everyone knows it but you.’

The dark unpainted forge of the blacksmith’s sat in the heart of the valley, by the crossroads that divided the community into quarters. On most days the patterned ringing of hammer on anvil could be heard in all directions, and the constant smoke from the forge proved an easy marker for those who required ironwork, or sought to have their teeth pulled. At night, once the day’s labour had been done, people often gathered at the blacksmith’s, the forge becoming a rambling house for the men and the small cabin beside it one for the women. It was a place of frequent company. On nights when the moon gave a clean, clear light to the valley, it was not uncommon for the young people to step outside and dance at the crossroads above the buried bones of suicides, the very place Martin Leahy had died.

Nance did not often come to the blacksmith’s. There was little she owned that needed the attention of pumping bellows and sweaty-faced men – she preferred the quiet skill of the travelling tinkers. It was also a place where she felt her difference. It was often busy with farmers and labourers bringing workhorses to be shod or to be treated for spavins or farcy, and, despite her years in the valley, Nance had never become accustomed to the way conversation stopped in her presence. It was one thing to enter a wake house and have the company fall into respectful silence. It was another to move through a crowded yard in the prickled air of others’ wary regard and to hear laughter at her back. They made her feel like nothing more than a strange old woman plucking herbs, her eyes clouded with age and the smoke of her own badly fired hearth. No matter that some of these men came to her with their carbuncles and congested lungs, or lay their wheezing children by her fire. In the broad light of day, amidst the noise of industry, their stares made her feel scorned and feeble.

‘God bless your work, John O’Donoghue,’ Nance said, standing in the doorway. She had lingered on the road until she saw that the yard of the smith’s was clear of people, then clenched her teeth and made for the forge.

John paused, his hammer raised in the air. ‘Nance Roche,’ he said simply. A local boy, charged with pumping the bellows, gaped in Nance’s direction.

‘I was wondering if you would let me take some of that water there. Your iron water.’

John put down his hammer and wiped his sweating face with a greasy, blackened cloth. ‘Iron water,’ he repeated. He stared at Nance, breathing hard. ‘How much do you need?’

Nance pulled her water pail out from under her cloak. ‘As much as I might carry.’

John took the pail and lowered it into the bucket where he cooled the iron. ‘I’ve filled it to half. Will that do you?’

‘It will. It will. I thank you, John. Bless you.’

John nodded, then returned to the anvil. As he raised his hammer he motioned towards the cabin. ‘Go see the little woman, Nance. She’ll give you something to eat.’

The cabin of the O’Donoghues was built from the same mountain rock as the forge, but was thickly whitewashed, its thatch of heather and oats rising high over a cavernous ceiling. Both half-doors were open to admit the light, and Nance could hear a woman’s voice singing inside.

‘Bless you, woman of the house.’

Áine O’Donoghue was kneeling in front of the turf fire, scrubbing a shirt in a wide wooden tub. She looked up, squinting. ‘Nance Roche?’ Her face eased into a smile. ‘Come in and welcome. ’Tis not often I see you here.’ She rose to her feet, wiping her wet forearms on her apron. ‘What’s that you have?’