The Good People Read Online Free PDF Page A

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