Nance’s moan dropped to a low ragged breathing. Sweeping up a sudden fistful of ash, she threw her body towards the yard door of the cabin, flinging the cinders towards it. Ashes to banish Those that would restrain a soul’s flight into the other world. Ashes to sanctify the grieving of kith and kin and mark it as holy.
Amidst the prayers, Nance slowly dropped her head to her knees, wiped the ash from her face with her skirts, and rose from the floor. The keening had finished. She waited until the words and cries of those in the room subsided into respectful silence, and then, nodding at Nóra, retired to a dark corner. She knotted her white hair at the nape of her neck and accepted a clay pipe, and spent the rest of the night smoking thoughtfully, watching the womenfolk and mourners circle Nóra like birds above a new-shorn field.
The night ground down the hours. Many of the people, dulled and comforted by the heady fumes of burning coltsfoot, lay down to sleep on the floor, plumping beds out of heather and rushes and slurring prayers. Rain escaped down the chimney and fell hissing on the fire. A few kept their eyes open with stories and gossip, taking turns to bless the body and finding omens in the thunderstorm that thrashed the valley outside. Only Nóra saw the old woman rise from her corner, slip her hood back over her head and retreat into the darkness and the howling world.
CHAPTER
TWO
Furze
Nance Roche woke in the early morning, before the fog had eased off the mountains. She had slept in the clothes she had returned home in and their damp had spread to her bones. Pushing herself up from her bed of heather, Nance allowed her eyes to adjust to the low light and rubbed at the cold in her limbs. Her fire was out – only the faintest suggestion of warmth met her outstretched hand. She must have fallen asleep in front of its heat before she could preserve the embers.
Taking her shawl off a hook in the wall, she wrapped herself in the rough wool and familiar smell of hearth smoke, and stepped outside, snatching a water can as she left.
The storm had thrashed the valley with rain all night and the woods behind her stunted cabin dripped with water. The fog was thick, but from her place at the far end of the valley, where the fields and bouldered slopes met the uncleared woodland, she could hear the roar of the river Flesk’s swollen waters. A short distance away from her cabin was the Piper’s Grave, where the fairies dwelt. She nodded respectfully towards the crooked whitethorn, standing ghostlike in the mist in its circle of stone, briars and overgrown grass.
Nance tightened the shawl around her, joints creaking as she walked to the sodden ditch left by a collapsed badger set. Squatting unsteadily over the edge, she pissed with her eyes shut, her fingers holding on to bracken stalks for balance. Her whole body ached. It often did after a night of keening. As soon as Nance left any corpse house, a great, pulsing headache would swell in her skull.
’Tis the borrowed grief, thought Nance. To stand in the doorway between life and death racks the body and bleeds the brain.
The slope down to the river was slippery with mud and Nance stepped carefully, wet autumn leaves slicked to the bare soles of her feet as she made her way through the brushwood. It would not do to fall. Only last winter she had slipped and hurt her back. It had been a painful week in front of the fire then, but the worst of it was that, injured, she had felt herself crease with isolation. She had thought she had grown used to a life alone, that the skittering presence of birds sufficed for company. But without visitors, without anything to do but rest in the darkness of the cabin, she had felt so violently lonely she had cried.
‘If there is one thing that will sink sickness deeper into the body, ’tis loneliness.’
Mad Maggie had told her that. In the early days, when Nance was young. When her father was still alive.
‘Mark my words, Nance. That man who came by just now? No wife. Few friends. No brothers or sisters. The only thing keeping him company is his gout, and ’tis the loneliness of him keeping it there.’
Maggie sitting in their cabin, pipe in mouth, plucking a chicken. Feathers in the air. The rain pelting outside. Feathers resting in her wild hair.
That fall was a warning, Nance thought. You are old. You have only yourself to rely upon. Since then she had minded her body with tenderness. Steady steps on grass slippery with weather. No more reckless journeys to cut heather on the mountains when the wind growled. An eye to the fire and its crush of embers. A careful hand with the knife.
The roar from the Flesk grew louder as Nance drew closer, until she could see the white foam of the current teeming at the top of the riverbank through the surrounding trunks of oak, alder and ash. The storm had stripped the trees of their remaining leaves, and the wood was black and tannic with moisture. Only the birch trees, moon-pale, shone in the wet.
Nance picked her way around the broken branches that littered the ground and the tangles of ivy and withered bracken sprawling over the bank. Folk did not often frequent this end of the valley. The women did not come for their water or washing this far upriver because of the Piper’s Grave, the lurking fairy fort, and there was a feel of neglect and wildness from their absence. The stones had not been scuffed clean of their moss and the briars had not been cut back for fear of them snagging on laundry. Only Nance came to the water’s edge here. Only Nance did not mind living so close to the woods that claimed this part of the river.
The storm had infuriated the current and Nance saw that the stones she usually trusted to take her weight had been dislodged by the high water. The bank crumbled underfoot. The river was not especially wide or deep here, but when in flood the current was strong, and Nance had seen it fatten with swollen-stomached foxes washed out of their holes by fast and violent rains. She did not want to drown.
Taking off her shawl and draping it on a low branch, Nance sank to her knees and crept as close to the river as possible. She lowered her can and the water surged into it, pulling at her arm.
Rubbing her skirts free of leaf litter and soil, Nance shuffled back up to her cabin, trying to clear the fog from her mind. Small wrens swooped the grass and brambles, darting in and out of the mist and its suggestion of light. Mushrooms scalloped out from rotting wood in the undergrowth. The smell of damp soil was everywhere. How Nance preferred to be outside, with the great, wide ceiling of sky and the ground full of life. Her squat cabin, half dug into the ground and slouched in front of the woods with walls of wattle and mud, thatched with potato stalks and heather, seemed ugly and squalid compared to the dripping canopy of trees. She paused and looked down the valley, away from the woods. The whitewashed cabins of the cottiers lay scattered across the curve of the cultivated fields, now stubbled and browning, potato patches with loose-stoned walls beside them. She could see smoke rising from their roofs through the thinning mist. On the bare mountain sides the cabins grew smaller, dug more deeply into the ground to sturdy them against the wind. Their limed walls seemed blue in the morning gloom. Nance cast a look up to where the Leahys’ cabin lay on the slope of the hillside. It was the cabin closest to her, and yet even that house seemed far away.
No one lived within calling distance of Nance. Her own windowless cabin, once whitewashed like the others, had flaked and greened with moss and mould over the years, until it looked as though the woods had claimed it as their own.
At least the inside of her little home was as clean and tidy as she could make it, no matter the ceiling crusted with soot and the damp in the corner. The dirt floor was swept and unpocked, and heather and rushes tempered the mustiness of the hay where her goat stood tethered at one end of the room.
Nance stirred the fire into life and left the water pail to settle. The storm had muddied the river and she must be careful not to drink it too quickly.
Never had she felt so weary after keening. Her bones felt rimed with exhaustion. She needed to eat something, a mouthful to feel restored.
The death cry had come on strongly last night. Wit
h the ashes on her face, Nance had felt the world shiver apart and had abandoned herself to the wail that rose from her lungs. Dizziness had come upon her, and the room of dark-clothed men and women had spun until all she could see was the fire and, in the smoke, images. An oak tree burning in a forest. A river surrounded by wild iris, yolked with yellow. And then, finally, her mother, hair falling into wild eyes, beckoning her into the dark. She had felt she was mourning the world.
Sometimes, in the company of suffering, Nance felt things. Maggie had called it an inward seeing. The knowledge. Sometimes, as she guided babies from their mothers and into the world, she sensed what their lives would be like, and sometimes the things she sensed frightened her. She remembered delivering a child whose mother had cursed him in her pain and fear, and she had sensed a darkness fall on him. She had cleaned and swaddled the infant, then later, as the mother slept, crushed a worm in his palm for protection.
There were things you could do to answer visions, Nance knew.
She had been troubled by the storm last night. Walking down the mountain slope from the Leahys’ cabin under a sky welted with lightning, she had felt movement. Had felt things shifting in the darkness. A summoning. A warning. She had stopped by the fairy fort and waited in the rain with a tug of expectation and portent in her chest, and while the wind blasted the whitethorn, the limestone in the ráth flashed purple. She had half expected to see the Devil himself step out of the woods beyond her cabin. Nance did not usually feel afraid to leave a corpse house alone. She knew how to guard her body and soul with ash and salt. But last night, as she waited by the Piper’s Grave, she felt vulnerable to whatever unseen presence tremored in the black. It wasn’t until she saw lightning strike the mountain high behind her cabin and set fire to the heather that she had understood that something was indeed abroad and had hurried home to her fire and to the company of her animals.
Nance looked over to where her goat stood amongst the nesting hens, impatient in her corner. A drain had been hollowed out of the dirt floor to separate the animal and her leavings from Nance’s own quarter, while allowing her warmth to give heat to the room. Nance stepped over the rivulet of waste and water and placed a gentle hand on the goat’s head, smoothing the hair on her cheek and combing her beard free of straw.
‘You’re a good girl, Mora. Faith, what a grand girl you are.’ Nance pulled a stool out from the wall and set it beside the goat alongside an armful of beaten furze.
‘Is it famished you are? What a great wind there was. Did you not hear it? Were you not afraid?’ Nance crooned to the goat, slowly reaching for a tin pail. She leant her forehead on the animal’s wiry coat and breathed in her warm odour of dried whin and manure. Mora was skittish and stamped, her hoofs dull against the packed earth and hay, but Nance hummed until she quieted and began to nibble at the dry furze. Nance took hold of her teats and milked, singing softly, her voice cracked from the keening the night before.
When the udder’s stream failed, Nance wiped her hands on her skirt and picked up the tin. Stepping to the doorway, she tipped a little onto the threshold for the Good People, and drank the milk, sweet and warm and flecked with the dirt from her own hands, straight from the pail.
No one would come for her today, Nance knew. The valley folk would be swarming the house of the Leahys to pay their respects to the dead and, besides, people did not often come to her at a time like this. She reminded them too much of their own mortality.
The keener. The handy woman. Nance opened her mouth and people thought of the way things went wrong, the way one thing became another. They looked at her white hair and saw twilight. She was both the woman who brought babies to safe harbour in the world, and the siren that cut boats free of their anchors and sent them into the dark.
Nance knew that the only reason they had allowed her this damp cabin between mountain and wood and river for twenty-odd years was because she stood in for that which was not and could not be understood. She was the gatekeeper at the edge of the world. The final human hymn before all fell to wind and shadow and the strange creaking of stars. She was a pagan chorus. An older song.
People are always a little afraid of what they do not recognise, Nance thought.
Warmed and comforted by the goat’s milk, Nance wiped her mouth on her sleeve and leant against her doorframe, gazing out to the valley. Above, the sky had unfurled to the grey of dirty fleece, but Nance knew the day would be clear. She would be free to sleep and rest, and perhaps walk the lanes and ditches in the quiet of the afternoon to gather the last of the flowering yarrow and ragwort, the last blackberries and sloes, before winter brittled the world. Whatever remaining rain lingered in the clouds would pass beyond the mountains before breaking.
In all things Nance bent her hours to the sky. She knew its infinite faces.
The wake went on for two days, during which the people of the valley walked the mud-slick path to Nóra’s mountainside cabin, some with whiskey bottles held tightly in their hands, rosaries tucked into pockets, others hauling their own stools and rough súgan chairs. Rain returned to the valley on the second day. Water dripped off the men’s peaked caps and felt hats. They came with cold embers in their pockets and hazel sticks, and sat on wads of bracken amidst the strewn rushes. The air of the corpse house was grey, and people coughed amongst the burning lights of fire and pipe. They knelt and prayed for Martin, touching his sheeted body. The women and children, unused to the draw of a pipe, coughed and blew smoke over the corpse, masking the rough, rising smell of death.
Nóra thought they would never leave. She was sick of their company, the crush of the rushes beneath their feet, the way they sat and spoke of Martin as though they had known him best above all others.
I am his wife, she wanted to spit at them. You did not know him as I knew him.
She could not bear the way the women moved about the walls like shadows, gathering in tight clusters of gossip then disbanding to come and talk of time and faith and God. She hated the way the men spoke endlessly of the whoring October rain, and raised their rough-shod drink in Martin’s direction to slur, ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul, Leahy, and on the souls of all the faithful departed,’ before returning to their chuckling conversation.
It was only when the rain broke that Nóra was able to leave the cabin to relieve herself behind the house, and to take in great lungfuls of fresh air. She rubbed her hands in the wet grass beside the dung pile and wiped her face, pausing to watch the children play with stones in the yard. Shin-streaked with dirt and bright-eyed with the excitement of an occasion, they piled stones into cairns and took turns to knock them over. Even the shy girls squatted on the ground in pairs to play Poor Snipeen, one holding palms together in prayer while the other stroked their fingers gently. ‘Poor Puss,’ they murmured, before striking out at the hands in violence. Their slaps and cries of delighted pain echoed through the valley.
Nóra watched them play, a hard lump in her throat. This is what Micheál would be doing if he were not ill, she thought, and she was overcome with a wave of grief so sudden she gasped.
It would be different if he were well, she thought. He would be a comfort to me.
There was a tug on her skirt and Nóra looked down to see a boy of no more than four smiling up at her, an egg in his hand.
‘I found this,’ he said, and placed it in her palm before scarpering off, bare feet kicking up mud. Nóra stared after him. Here is what a child ought to be, she thought, and pictured Martin holding Micheál before the fire, rubbing his legs to restore the life to them, the boy’s eyes closing at the touch of his grandfather’s hand.
Nóra blinked quickly to stop the tears from coming and looked out to the horizon.
A curtain of rain was slowly moving across the mountains on the far side of the valley, beyond the low land where the river ran, and the crouch of woods to the east. Other than a few ash trees around the white cabins scattered about th
e dale on untilled ground, and the tangle of oak and alder beyond Nance Roche’s greening bothán in the distance, the valley was a broad expanse of fields ribboned with low stone walls and ditches, flanked with bog ground and rough hillside where little else but furze and heather grew amongst the slabs of rock.
Even under the low rainclouds, it was a sight that calmed Nóra. The valley was beautiful. The slow turning towards winter had left the stubble on the fields and the wild grasses bronzed, and the scutter of cloud left shadows brooding across the soil. It was its own world. Only the narrow road, wending through the flat of the valley floor, indicated the world beyond the mountains to the west: the big houses and copper mines, the cramped streets of Killarney bristling with slated buildings and beggars, or, to the east, the distant markets of Cork. Only the occasional merchant headed towards Macroom, his horses’ sides laden with casks of butter, suggested that there were other valleys, other towns, where different folk led different lives.
There was a shout of laughter from the children, and Nóra was startled out of her reverie. She turned to see an old woman making her way over the uneven ground from the cabin closest on the hillside, leaning heavily on a blackthorn stick.
Peg O’Shea.
Her neighbour smiled at the children as she entered the yard, then caught Nóra’s eye and shuffled towards her.
‘Nóra. I’m so sorry for your trouble.’ Her neighbour had the sunken cheeks of the very old, her lips curling inwards from loss of teeth. Her eyes, however, were wren-black and beady. Nóra felt them pass over her face, taking her measure.
‘God and Mary to you, Peg. Thank you for taking Micheál.’
‘’Tis no trouble at all.’
‘I didn’t want him here. The house is full of people. I thought . . . I thought he might be frightened.’