No Country: A Novel by Kalyan Ray

machine that bespoke our own tragic ingenuity. The three logs were tied together, as if it were a stook, with a heavy log suspended from the top.
    When I came down to the village, it was as if I had been transported to that day of our childhood when Padraig and I watched the felling of Fintan’s home.
    The men had arrived at Purdy’s cottage, and were trampling about, their boots covered with mud and manure, quite unmindful of Mrs. Purdy’s flowerbed and the sundial their little boys had setup from learning about it at school. Mr. Purdy sat hunched and woebegone on the dirt, but his wife was going on pleading, with Mr. Arkwright shaking his head from side to side as if bothered by a slow fly.
    “ ’Tis that long we’ve been here . . . Mr. Arkwright, sir . . . All that time that my husband was a boy himself. Forty years now. You know what a hardscrabble living ’tis here, and now the potatoes rotten in the ground. We done paid our taxes year in and year out—and look, sir—our youngest is but six months old.” Twisting her arms helplessly by her side, tears streaming down her smudged cheeks, Mrs. Purdy, staring ruin in the face, and her small children looking up at her in wonder, did the ugly weeping of the desperate poor, her mouth distended, veins standing out on her throat.
    The men had set up the contraption close to a miserable cottage at Mr. Arkwright’s bidding for the game they called Tumbling.
    Mr. Arkwright was not even looking at her when the first thud sounded. Mrs. Purdy cried out. The men grunted and pulled it back again as far as it would go. Mrs. Purdy’s balled hands unwound and dropped by her sides as she watched, as if entranced by the action.
    As the ram was released, it moved forward with a rude elegance, rising a little at the end of the short trajectory before crushing the wall. The roof leant forward, the sodded wall and thatch tilting. The hut appeared an animal gut-hit, fallen on its knees before lying dead. The weak wall fell, and then a lower chunk of the sill. The interior of the mean little cottage with its tawdry poverty lay open. The ram swung again, and this time the roof cracked, and the hut lurched.
    There was hoarse weeping, a terrible noise—and everyone was startled. It was Mr. Purdy, squatting on the ground, beating hisopen palm on the dirt by the road. His stubbled cheek looked like red bellows. It is a terrible thing to hear a grown man weep, out in the open before everyone, forgetting everything. Such crying is kept muffled, secret, for it shreds the heart of the weeper and taints the sweetness of our humanity. His children watched open-mouthed as their father wept. I felt like a felon myself, but there was nothing I could do.
    But one person did not feel so. Padraig’s ma had emerged from her shop and, running as swiftly as she could, she flung herself on the machine. The pole she had pushed with flying frantic strength buckled and came collapsing down. Amid the confusion, Mrs. Aherne picked up a shard of broken foundation rock and hit the man who had set up the machine. Before his bullyboys could do anything, the man fell like a dropped sack.
    The bullyboys were upon her instantly, but she was a lynx, sharp and agile. She had kept hold of the sharp rock and threw herself forward and hit out at the midriff of one of them. He staggered back, but then a second one took a mighty swing and knocked her to the ground. The rock fell out of her grasp, and lay under her helpless palm. Mr. Arkwright’s assistant moved quickly for a large man and held her down, and the young man who had knocked her over smashed the heel of his boot down on her white palm, trampling it hard underfoot against the foundation rock under it.
    What happened after, I do not exactly remember. “Let her go, let her go, Burridge,” Mr. Arkwright was screaming. “Let the woman go, she is known to his lordship. Don’t hurt her, let her loose!”
    I must have done something too, though by God, I am