No Country: A Novel by Kalyan Ray Page B

of fabric—but measuring ladles, the yardstick for marking off cloth, were lying neatly on the counter. The thieving had been done deliberately and thoroughly. There was no spillage, no careless tearing or hurried abandon. That was the most terrible part of it all.
    I could hear Mr. O’Flaherty wheezing softly behind me. I thought him winded and worn out by this short walk. When I turned and he looked me full in the face, I could scarcely bear to read the knowledge in it. He was weeping silently, occasionally stopping for air, and his tears ran down unchecked. He saw all this about him as clearly as I did. Was Mrs. Aherne alive then? I was too terrified to look into the next room. But Mr. O’Flaherty moved purposefully.
    “Maire,” he called, “Maire, it is myself, Schoolmaster O’Flaherty. I know you’re abed, but I need to speak with you.”
    He walked into the inner room and slumped down in the chair at the head of the bed. In the dim room, Mrs. Aherne turned to look at him with her enormous eyes. Her face was gaunt, and itwas clear that she was gravely ill; her body seemed wasted under the covers. And it was then that my eye caught the sight of her arm. It lay bare to the shoulder, and somehow it was transformed into a monstrous thing. Her nails looked now like cracked fish scales pasted loosely on a bloated claw. Along her arm, the veins stood out like black wires, twisted one over the other, or ran skittery along the inflamed skin, hopelessly distended and oozing in parts with a deadly gum.
    “Brendan,” she said to me directly.
    “Aye, Mrs. Aherne,” I replied, wondering what I could do.
    Mr. O’Flaherty sat by the bed, his blackthorn planted between his feet, his chin on the hands with which he held the stick. I could not see his face, but could read the slump of his shoulders well.
    “Brendan dear,” Padraig’s ma said again, “coax the silly child to come out from under the bed, will you?” Her voice had resumed its usual strength, as if nothing was amiss. It even sounded amused, as it used to be, by one of Maeve’s pranks. I knelt down on all fours, but the face of the child was terrified. Her eyes looked at me as if she were an animal, the small creature finally hounded to its burrow’s end. She had gathered foodstuffs around her, setting up house: a large piece of cheese, some sweets, fragments of biscuits, which indicated what she had eaten recently.
    “Do you want to come out and play?” I asked, poking my head under the bed. She shook her head and shrank back farther in her nook, holding the round of cheese. I did not know what to do or say. I knew how to deal with children a little older, but children change so in a year or two that it was like trying to speak another language altogether. Maeve stared back, somber, and shook her head.
    With the same strong and laughing voice, Mrs. Aherne said, “Maeve dear, I am hungry, and so are these two gentlemen whohave come to visit us. Can you give them a plate of biscuits and make them your pretend tea?”
    I saw then what effort it took for Padraig’s ma to speak in her normal tone. A thin sweat covered her face, and her arm that was whole clutched the counterpane, while the other lay by her side, purple and rigid. Maeve came up from under the bed. The child seemed reassured and went about her task of hospitality. While she was thus busy and growing happy in a way children can, Mrs. Aherne spoke low to Mr. O’Flaherty.
    “I knew them all, moving about the shop, Mr. O’Flaherty,” she spoke in a whisper. “I knew Mrs. O’Toole by the sound of her short leg as she lifted away the seed potatoes. I knew John Shanley when he was dragging off the fabrics, for he wheezes and stops and moves again, and many others. Oh, Mr. O’Flaherty, the saddest blow was when Mrs. Purdy came in late at night and took trays of needles and my lace where I hid them under the counter, and my bundle of shillings I buried in the floor—which she must have known all