Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker Page B

match even though the first one already illuminated the small niche they were standing in, chasing away every possible shadow.
    No one answered her, for they could see now the elongated jaw of the skeleton before them. The pointed teeth and long, extended claws of what was once a bear, or some other prehistoric monster, curled up to die in the tomb many ages ago. No king, no king at all—though nevertheless they stood staring at it for a few minutes more, compelled by its sheer size and mysteriousness. Before the stoop-shouldered man asked timidly:
    â€œWell then, do ye suppose he et our king?”
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    The old women sat by the road, waiting for the burial cart to come out. She sat with them for want of anything better. They saw through her disguise, such as it was. Telling her she should get to a man while she still could, telling her she should get herself married, if that was what it took.
    She barely understood, at first, that they were talking to her. The old women like so many crows, flapping their black-shawled arms and their gums, every tooth rotted from the lack of any food. Making soft, soothing, gummy noises, telling her what she should do—
    â€œYou bet’ safe self—”
    â€œYou kin get ma’. Any ma’ will do.”
    â€œAny ma’ do.”
    â€”repeating that over and over, until the cart came, and they stirred themselves to walk after it. Rising up from the pile of sticks and black rags that they were. They started as soon as they saw it, fifty yards down the road, getting a good head start so they could keep up with it for a few paces, holding their arms and their mouths open in desolation, offering themselves up as mourners.
    She did the same, with them. That was the custom, hoping the bereaved in their grief would throw a few pennies out on the road. But there were no bereaved here—just the cart man flicking the reins at his donkey. Looking straight ahead, the bare feet of the deceased bumping along in the back of the cart, sticking out of their crude linen shrouds. The old women following anyway, as long as they could. Holding out their arms still, their mouths too dry to keen, their tongues clacking dully against the roofs of their mouths.
    One of them, the ablest, still managed to keep up with the driver, somehow. Holding on to the cart with one hand and trying to look up into his face. Ruth tried to move along with her, to hold her up. Listening to her rail at the driver though he looked straight ahead, as motionless and unseeing as his cargo:
    â€œI am descended from perhaps as good a family as any I address, though now destitute of means!”
    The old women walked on for a few feet more before they fell back, collapsed by the side of the road again, the cart rolling on to the cemetery.
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    The country around Limerick was mad with new roads. They ran straight and true as a leveling rod, and when she came to one she decided to take it even though she had no idea where it ran. But after a few hundred yards she noticed that she was the only one on it. The only sounds the crunch of her feet on the rubbled rock, the cries of the crows wheeling and diving ahead of her, leading her out along the treeless plain.
    She walked along it for miles, nonetheless. The clouds streaming past her. Some dark shape seeming to pursue her, to run alongside her so that she thought it was a cloud at first, or maybe one of the wheeling crows, or the devil. But there was no crow that big, and after a time she realized it was her own shadow, slanting just off the road, wraith-thin and insubstantial, fading and evaporating with the clouds. She waited until it swung along in front of her, then trod it down under her feet, making it disappear.
    The road seemed to run on forever, far out past the horizon, but that was an illusion. For after she had followed it all day, it only dipped down into a little dell and ended right there, in the