The Good People by Hannah Kent Page A

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