No Country: A Novel Read Free Page A

chewing between groans.
    A few days later Odd Madgy Finn was back in front of Mr. O’Flaherty’s school. She got no more food than she always did—fruits she got off the trees in season—the wedges of bread from Mr. O’Flaherty, or the praties that Padraig’s ma would give her if she showed up at her shop, sometimes a heel of cheese, and perhaps a bit of coloured paper which Poor Madgy Finn would treasure until it got sodden and sere. But one thing was changed in Madgy. Her stomach bloated and grew as the weeks passedinto warming months and late summer, until time came when she could barely stir.
    She disappeared for a few days as September ended. No one knew where she was. There was even some relief, I sensed, among the townspeople. But, as unexpectedly as ever, she limped her way back, her dress now filthy with mud and a rusty stain, and one breast lay open to plain sight. On her teat suckled a naked infant, large, like a diminutive man, with a smudge of pasty hair on his blue skull. Padraig’s ma coaxed her to come home with her, though Odd Madgy Finn bridled if anyone, even Mrs. Aherne, came too close to the bairn, let alone tried to dress it. I once saw her trying to feed her newborn some bread. The baby began to choke. Madgy threw the lump down, thrust her teat back in his mouth, and strolled away to the woody copse of elms and rhododendron, where a thin spring burbled from the rocky ground and black-back gulls roosted under Ben Bulben.
    When she sensed no one was around she would leave the baby in a small nest-like mess made of moss and furze. I saw it there a few times, returning from school, and heard it gurgling and gooing and a-staring at the branches overhead. Madgy would run off and bathe in the stream, squawking and guffawing in the chilly water, and sometimes took to the habit of hunkering down to defecate on the road itself. And once, stingy Willy McDougall was driving his flock of mangy sheep down when he saw her, crossed himself, and doubled back, and came another day because he thought it bad luck itself to see anyone parting with anything at all on his way to market day.
    In a couple of weeks Odd Madgy Finn began to leave it for longer and longer. The dress about her breasts was always wet and glotty with milky ooze, her hair coming off in patches, andshe spat about a lot. Some days, she took to walking down to Sligo Town in the afternoon, begging and badgering people for food or a dram, but always returned to wherever she had left her bairn, by the time the light grew westerly and long on Sligo Bay.
    And then it happened. Just a month or so after her birthing, she returned one noon and found that the birds had been at it when she was gone. They had pecked and ravaged her boy eyeless and scratch-headed, cheeks torn and flesh-pecked. Madgy had put the bairn to breast, but the creature was past suckling. She set up a mighty howl, and when she stumbled into the open door of our schoolroom with a great cry, we were all that shivered and goose-bumped with horror as she held out the baby to Mr. O’Flaherty, herself smelling of blood and stale milk. The youngest of us, Charley Keelan and Malachi O’Toole, set up wails of fright. Mr. O’Flaherty rushed out, and Odd Madgy followed him—still holding out the mottled bundle. Mr. O’Flaherty, whom we had never seen flustered, made a retching sound and led her out, slamming the door behind himself, leaving us inside in the gasping dark.
    There we sat, still as death itself, in the closed schoolroom. Malachi was sniffling and hugging his older brother Joe, and rusty-haired Charley Keelan bent over the dirt floor, his hands over his ears. When Mr. O’Flaherty returned, his face looked old and lined, and he went out again with a piece of black bread in his hand, the door swinging open and shut in the dizzy sea-wind. Madgy put her baby down on the rough dirt of the threshold in front of his laced old shoes, took two lurchy steps back into the yard, bit on the