The Good People by Hannah Kent

families that do be hiring have nothing more than we. They lay down on rushes every night just the same as us. But find yourself a farmer who will see to it that you’re fed.
    They had fed her at the northern farm over the summer. Lumpers. Stirabout. But only after the family had eaten; she was left to drain the piggin of buttermilk and scrape the pot clean of meal.
    Mary turned on her side. It could be worse, she comforted herself. One woman and a child, rattling around in a house with a cow and a bit of scoreground. But there was a strange feeling in the place, something she could not quite make out. Perhaps it was the loneliness of the woman. The widow, Nóra Leahy. Hollow-cheeked and hair greying about her temples. She looked as though she had been thrashed by womanhood; her ankles were swollen and her face threaded with deep lines. Mary had studied her at the fair, noticing the sun’s trace on her skin, the expanse of furrows that suggested a life well lived.
    David had warned her to take a good look at their faces. If a man has a red nose, he’s a man in liquor and you’d best avoid his house because you can be sure all the money goes on the drink and not on those under his roof. The women with puckered mouths? Mary, gossip is sour. They’ll be watching your every move. Best find a face where there’s little shadow of a frown and their eyes are all crow’s feet. They’ve either been staring into the sun all their lives, or they’re a kind soul, and you can be sure that whether ’tis work in the field or smiling that gave them such a face, you’ll be better off with them.
    Nóra Leahy had crow’s feet. She had seemed kind enough at Killarney, her clothes neat and her face open. But she had not told her that she was a widow, and she had lied about the boy.
    What was it she had said?
    I have my daughter’s child to care for.
    No word about a scragged boy with a loose, mute jaw. No suggestion of a house of illness, or death, or the need for secrecy.
    Mary had never seen a child like Micheál before. Asleep he could almost be any skinny wretch, a little boy like any other, although stunted and pallid. But awake, there was no doubting that something was gravely wrong with him. His blue eyes seemed to slip unseeing over the world, passing over her as though she were not there at all. It was unnatural, the way he folded his wrists against his chest, the sloping angle of his mouth. He looked old, somehow. His skin was tight and dry, and there was a thinness to it, like the pages in a priest’s holy book. He had nothing of the round-cheeked softness of the children Mary knew. When she had stepped through the door of the cabin and seen the old woman holding him on her lap, she had thought at first that it wasn’t a child at all but some strange scarecrow. A baby’s plaything, made from sticks and an old dress, like the effigy of St Brigid carried on the saint’s holy day: shrivelled head, hard angles hidden by discarded cloth. And then, as she had drawn closer and seen that it, he , was alive, her heart had dropped in fear. Thin and flared with a disease like those that sucked the sap from a plant and shrivelled it to withered stalk. She had been sent to a home touched with sickness, and she would be tainted with it.
    But no. He was not sick, they said. Only slow. Only struggling to grow as other children did.
    A copperheaded, snub-nosed, wasting runt. A pattern of sally rods bound by skin and rash and groaning like a demon.
    Mary brought a gentle hand to Micheál’s forehead and pushed the hair back from it. He was drooling: a watery line of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth across his face. Mary smoothed it away with the back of her hand and wiped it on the blanket.
    The widow must be ashamed of the boy. That is why Nóra had not told her.
    What had her daughter done to deserve such a child?
    If a woman could bestow a harelip on a baby by meeting a hare in the road, what ill thing was met with to turn a