the bony woman who appeared out of the woods. Listening to the pinging of ice on the thin panes, they wondered how a woman could survive winter abroad, and they commissioned the men to build Moll a hut at the far edge of the settlement and to leave its door open for her. This was accomplished and though no one ever saw her during the short days, bits of spat-out bones appeared in a pile by the front door, and the skull of a whale and the rib cage of a harp seal appeared lopsided on each side of the door. All winter the misshapen body of a swile-head codfish hung frozen over the frame, lumpy at its crown where a larger fish had bitten but not killed it and the skin and scales had grown back in disorder. Later when spring warmth thawed it out, the flesh and scales drooped and stank and fell to the ground, leaving only the skeleton like a bit of coarse lace. The door opened and closed below it and the continuous round of day and night prevailed.
Far away from Millstone Nether, Norea Nolan was thirteen years old when she talked to a passing tinker one afternoon outside the village pub in her little town on the west coast of Ireland. The next morning she woke up to find her boots gone. She knew who took them, three tin-faced Catholic women with noses like crones’. It was the custom when Norea was a girl to take young girls’ shoes and to bury them secretly out in the fields under rough piles of stones so the girls couldn’t run away. Norea was the eldest of eight and the only girl.
Her village was on the edge of the sea, a worn quilt of land laid out in uneven squares. Against the crooked stone fences thin cows and scraps of sheep huddled away from the cold winds and drizzle. A girl could never find her shoes out there under stained curtains of rain. Now Norea had to go bare-foot. She grew reedy and competent, helping her mother, Dagmar, watching the cycle of pregnancies and births, sharing with her in that house full of boys a narrow life of secret glances and bedtime caresses after all the work was done, more like a sister than a daughter.
Norea had just turned seventeen and her mother lay bleeding after giving birth to her last son. The midwife caught the baby, the placenta and then something that shone dull purple, the limp bloody flesh of a woman’s worn-out uterus. The midwife did not know what it was and set her jaw at the sight of it. If it didn’t belong outside, she thought, it must belong in, and she pushed it back but she couldn’t stop the blood. Norea’s mother pulled her frightened daughter’s ear to her white lips.
Child, she whispered, tears falling from her eyes. Don’t cry. Tá mé sásta le m’staid. I’m a bird with a broken wing. Carry me away on your shoulder. You can do better than I did. Promise me. Take me away from here.
Drinking and telling stories, they kept the body in the front room three days and nights and Norea had plenty of time to think. Before they moved the coffin from the house to the churchyard to bury her mother, Norea had a fit in front of her brothers, her father and the priest, in front of the neighbour women who’d scrubbed and dressed the corpse and now took turns keening for the dead and tending the motherless new-born. Sinewy of spirit, Norea stood at the end of the coffin and screamed, Leave me alone with her, leave me alone!
She tossed her long red hair and wept so bitterly that the young priest took everyone away and closed the door, murmuring, Give her a moment, then. Her only mother, and her now left to cope.
It was the first time in her life Norea had been alone in a room. Quick as she could and wailing loud enough to cover up any noise, she reached into the coffin and took the boots right off her mother’s stiff still feet. She tied them under her skirt against her legs, closed down the lid and lay on top of the coffin, sobbing. Finally the priest pushed in, took the girl by the shoulders and nodded at the men to carry the coffin away without another look inside.
After the funeral, when half the village men lay drunk