they witnessed in so many of our countrymen. Whether or not this was true, I did not know. But as someone who had spent a substantial portion of his life in his bed, I was grateful for the comfort.
Beneath the feather mattress of my bed was a box filled with straw. Each spring, the old straw would be removed and replaced with fresh from the fields behind Artane Lodge. We packed it in tight, and the box, at nearly two feet in height, was the perfect foundation. Beneath Nanna Ellen’s feather mattress lay a similar box, but as I pulled the mattress aside, it wasn’t straw I found but dirt, thick and black. Centered in the dirt was the concave impression of a body.
“She sleeps in that?” Matilda breathed the words. “But why?”
I didn’t answer her, though; I was too busy watching the worms as they wiggled out to greet us, slinking over the putrid soil from within the bed’s bilious bowels.
* * *
? ? ?
IT WAS MATILDA who spoke first, her voice quavering. “We need to get out of here.”
My eyes remained fixed on the bed, though, on the outline of Nanna Ellen’s body pressed into the moist soil. The stench, of death and decay, was nearly overpowering, as if a body, left to rot in the earth, had recently been uncovered by the gravedigger’s shovel. White maggots joined the worms, fluttering to the surface with excitement and vigor, their little bodies writhing. My mind went back to the last time I had seen such a sight nearly a year earlier. Thornley had been working in the fields at Artane near the barn and ran behind the house. I was having a day better than most, and Ma carried me downstairs to the sofa in the sitting room. When he barged in, his face flush and dripping with sweat, he could barely speak. He had run so hard that his breath deserted him, and it took him a moment to regain his voice. “You’ve got to see this,” he finally said between gasps. “Behind the barn.”
He was eight at the time, and I was only six, but the excitement in his eyes lit a fire within me and I wanted to see whatever it was he had found. I wanted to see it then and there, and an energy surged through me, enough to help me to my feet. I could walk, but not well, so he threw my arm over his shoulder and helped me tackle each step. Faster than I could have moved on my own but slower than he would have hoped, we left the house and crossed the field to the barn, located on the east side. A large structure built to hold more than a hundred cows and nearly a dozen horses and sundry other livestock, the barn towered over most on the property, casting a shadow of immense proportion over the surrounding land. Together, we made our way around the south side and towards the chicken coops. Before we arrived, I sensed something was wrong, for the chickens were emitting the most awful reports. Their normal bawk, bawk, bock had been replaced by nervous clucks and squeals I would never imagine coming from fowl. As we neared, I noticed the muddy ground was littered with brown and white feathers and streaks of red that thickened around the coops themselves.
“What happened?” I asked.
“A fox, I think. A fox did this. Or maybe a wolf. Something got inside the coops and killed six of the hens last night,” Thornley retorted. “Take a look.”
The stench hit me then, the coppery odor of spilt blood and torn flesh. “I don’t want to.”
“Don’t be a ninny.”
“No, take me back home.”
He wouldn’t, though; he kept dragging me closer. It didn’t matter that my feet stopped moving as I dug my heels into the dirt; he was much stronger than me, and pulling my frail body along was little chore for him. Before I realized it, we stood beside the open door of the coop, and my eyes couldn’t help but land on the shredded bodies of half a dozen hens. A cloud of flies buzzed over the coop, thick and gloomy, as they landed on the knotted flesh and picked