No Country: A Novel by Kalyan Ray

in her muddled head that the good plate and clean glass were for someone else. She would not touch them—but returned stealthily when Mrs. Aherne attended to the shop—to stealfrom her pantry, broken pieces of pratie, hard heels of cheese, even some rancid lard about to be thrown out.
    Padraig’s ma saw how matters stood and began to leave choicer bits by the kitchen corner as if waiting to be thrown out to the dogs. Madgy Finn always ate them with relish, after which she would go off, pissing behind hedges, wandering about the hills. She would sometimes be seen walking the mudflats, toes kicking up sludge near the estuary, or on a rock in the afternoon, licking a fistful of dry sea-salt, her eyes closed in contentment or hunkered on all fours, arse in the air, drinking with loud, happy noises from a stream halfway to the Ben. Padraig’s ma had worried that Odd Madgy Finn would forget about the baby altogether someday. She tried to keep an eye on Odd Madgy Finn’s whereabouts, but ’twas no use whatsoever. Madgy would come back, never late for a nursing, as if the feeder and the fed were tied together by an invisible cord, and one knew about the other’s need, and nothing else was a let or hindrance.
    Despite Madgy Finn’s dirty fingernails, unwashed hair, snot-ringed nostrils, drooling yellow mouth, the child flourished, with a headful of black curls, and everybody knew what Padraig’s ma saw before her eyes—she was a little Padraig, even down to the way she ran, on her toes, and the way she called out “Ma” for Mrs. Aherne, though no one had taught her that or otherwise. But her very first word was “Moomagy.” It was a word she had made up and was cross if anybody else said it.
    When she cried out that name, no matter when or where, Odd Madgy Finn would bare and offer her goose-pimpled breasts to the child. The infant would suckle noisily, her minute palm playing with the other nipple, which would grow moist and ooze. Padraig’s ma would turn away, her face flushed with envy for mad and filthy Madgy Finn.
    Maeve—as Padraig’s ma had named her—was that lively and that wild, and proved as much the prideful Irish as Maire Aherne herself, screaming and scratching her way when she would not be held. But she used to lie perfectly docile of her own free will on the filthy lap of Odd Madgy Finn. One day she would let her grandmother tie her hair with ribbons and flowers and braids; the next day she might not let her come close, or so much as make a stroke with her hair-comb. Maire had met her match and was completely in her power.
    By this time in 1845, Maeve was almost two, and could lead anyone a merry romp about the kitchen garden, sometimes pulling up carrots to see if they were growing, to the distraction of her grandmother. But after a long time of running and hiding and chasing the chickens, and jumping about with the village dogs, she would call out, “Moomagy, Moomagy!” and our Odd Madgy Finn would appear, already with her bare teats flopping and thwapping about her chest as she ran and stumbled, speaking some excited babble into Padraig’s yard. Passersby would halt in their stride before they continued, shaking their heads.
    Our children are usually edged out by their younger brothers or sisters, so at what age Maeve would be weaned was something none seemed to have thought about. By now Maeve was a romping child, and no more in real need of pap milk than I was. But there was no way to dissuade Odd Madgy Finn from showing up, or of Maeve calling and claiming her Moomagy.
    •  •  •
    W ITH THE FIRST falterings of the potato crops from that summer of 1845, more and more wandering men drifted through. In the past, even the tramps that limped and begged on their migratorypaths were familiar to us, but these strangers were a different breed altogether, desperate, angry, rooting all over the land, mostly men, but sometimes women with children. The older boys—not yet men—roamed, but without