Kate Caoimhe Arthur

The Irish farmhands mourn the death of a child at Denny Abbey

The Irish farmhands mourn the death of a child at Denny Abbey The kine, neglected long past their milking-hour, bellowing. Heaving the pain past their lips, staggering under the heft of it. That is what it sounded like, the noise of them together that night. Or like a savage wedding, where all the guests turn one to another, and clasp cold hands; there, a ring is slipped past the knot of bone and they collapse into a shocking oneness. Candlelight flickers on the warm English stone of the Nuns’ Refectory, I search out the bestial stink of tallow to purge the sweeter note of the little body, laid in its manger. I watch all this from the shadow of the doorway. The Year of Our Lord Eighteen-Fifty and they say their rotting potatoes too give off this sweetness as they are scraped, like broken eggs from their earth, so unlike the good fertile soil here. They were welcome to my father’s land, with their wives and children, thin and staring-eyed as they were, to reap the corn, to hide their strange stories among the whispering sedge. Glad to give them our barns to sleep in and puzzled when they cooked outdoors. And who would not be sorry when one small boy, curled like a field mouse on a dry bed of reeds could not be roused to take his turn with the scythe, whose wet earth would not welcome him as a choice morsel? Published in Spelt, Issue 10, 2023