The Good People Read Online Free

girl to a neighbour’s? Take her husband too, so he might come back with you. ’Tis no night for a soul to be alone on the road.’
    ‘Take her to Peg O’Shea’s,’ Nóra muttered. ‘She’s closest.’
    Áine looked between the women. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
    ‘’Tis for the good of the young one’s child.’ Nance reached out and placed her wrinkled hand on Brigid’s belly. ‘Make haste, girl. Put some salt in your pocket and leave. This storm is brewing.’
    By midnight Nóra’s cabin was oppressive with the smell of wet wool and the sourness of too many people in a crowded room. The eyelids of Martin Leahy were bright with two pennies, placed there by a neighbour, and there was a crusted saucer of salt balanced on his chest. A plate of tobacco and coltsfoot sat on the dead man’s stomach. The air was unbearably close, smoke-rich, as the men nudged their lips with clay pipes, borrowing Nóra’s knitting needles to tap out the ashes and wiping them on their trousers.
    At the approach of midnight John O’Donoghue recited a rosary for the dead, and the company knelt and mumbled their responses. Then the men retreated to the walls of the cabin and watched the women keen the body by the poor light of the rush tapers, stinking of fat and burning too quickly from their brass pinch.
    Nance Roche led the wailing against the muted cracking of thunder. Her forehead was grey with ashes, her hands blackened from where she had smeared cold cinders on the foreheads of the other women. Nóra Leahy felt each powdered cheek split with the hot, wet path of her tears. She knelt on the ground and looked up at the circle of familiar faces, furrowed in solemnity.
    This is a nightmare, she thought.
    Nance closed her eyes, let her mouth slip open, and began a low lament that vanquished the small conversation of the men like an airless room snuffs a flame. She crouched on the clay floor and rocked back and forth, her hair loosened and thin over her shoulders. She cried without pause, without words. Her keen was hollow, fear-filled. It reminded Nóra of the bean sidhe , of the silent, scrabbling death-yawns of drowning men
    As Nance keened, the other women muttered prayers for the dead, asking God to accept Martin Leahy’s departed soul. Nóra noticed Kate Lynch, brown hair dull in the gloom, next to her kneeling daughter, Sorcha, dimpled and whispering, and Éilís O’Hare, the schoolmaster’s wife, crossing herself in a latticework of prayer, one eye open to Nance as she clawed the firelight. Her neighbours and their daughters. The glut of valley women, all wringing their hands. Nóra shut her eyes. None of them knew how she felt. None of them.
    It was frightening, to be unbridled from language and led into anguish by the bean feasa . Nóra opened her mouth and did not recognise her own voice. She moaned and the sound of her grief scared her.
    Many in the room were moved to tears by the caoineadh of the women. They bent their damp heads and praised Martin Leahy with tongues loosened by poitín , naming the qualities that recommended him to God and man. The fine father of a daughter, gone to God only months before. A decent husband. A man who had the gift for bone-setting, and whose wide hands could always calm horses in a hackle of panic.
    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