Free After the Lockout by Darran McCann

significant family connections. In fact, Stanislaus was offended by the naked prejudice with which so many of his parishioners treated theHarte family; the dark, swirling rumours that they were gypsies, travellers, tinkers, just generally not long off the road, themmuns . On the rare occasions when the wicked assumption was challenged, just look at them would be the answer. They did look wild, it was true: Ted Harte was a hairy, ruddy fellow with broad shoulders and hands like cudgels; his wife Martha had straggly hair all down her back. They were old and though they had many grown-up children scattered around, only their youngest daughter had come with them when they moved to Madden. The reasons why the family might have split up this way were much-speculated. But it was poor Ida that suffered the worst slanders of the poisoned tongues. Many of the matronly ladies who backboned his parish believed, absurdly, that she had designs on their husbands, and Stanislaus knew they would have been scandalised at the sight of Victor dancing with her. Yet Stanislaus found himself oddly fond of Ida. She was as he imagined women had been back in the thirties: without reticence or propriety, certainly, but neither charmless nor irredeemable. In one of the few memories he had of his mother, he saw her laughing lustily as some nameless hag affectionately told her she was as a meabhar , clean off her head.
    Margaret Cavanagh was another matter. He would have to keep an eye on her. The late Dr Cavanagh had given his eldest daughter extensive home-schooling, quite separate from the curriculum of needlework, singing, reading and arithmetic offered at the National School, and since his stroke ten years before, and later his death, Margaret had been the nearest thing to a doctor in Madden. Dr Cavanagh had been a man possessed of the most independent intellect, the Lord alone knew what he had introduced her to. She had continued her self-educationafter her father’s incapacitation, something Stanislaus viewed as akin to swimming out to sea without hope of safe return. Recklessly cultivated intellects were often resistant to the higher truths of which the Church was guardian. She and Victor were around the same age and must have known each other growing up. They were, in the narrow context of the parish, of roughly equivalent social standing. The doctor’s daughter, the rich man’s son. Perhaps there had been an attraction. Perhaps there had been more than an attraction. Hadn’t she, after all, spurned several perfectly presentable suitors? Previously Stanislaus had seen this as dedication to her younger siblings – any husband would be within his rights to send them away, even if it meant the orphanage or the workhouse – but now he wondered whether Miss Cavanagh had remained needlessly unmarried for other reasons. Miss Cavanagh was the schoolteacher, and education was a dangerous thing if not applied correctly. Perhaps behind a blameless exterior there lurked independent notions, dangerous to the parish’s most impressionable minds. Yes, he would have to keep an eye on Miss Cavanagh.

    You’re comfortable on the straw, considering your bruises. You lie looking out the open window of the shed at the clear sky. The heavy rain earlier has purged the atmosphere, and the stars are a hundred thousand pinholes in the cloudless curtain of night. The metaphor of the stars representing the departed is too commonplace for you not to think of Mam. You pick a faint, light-blue glimmer beside the North Star. Not the North Star itself, the one next to it, twinkling from some unfathomable distance. That’s her.
    A lantern approaches. You sit up in the straw. It’s not cold but Maggie shivers in her shawl. Without a word she kneels beside you and you reach for her. Your lips lock savagely, directly, violently. You move her onto her back, into your little straw bed, ignoring your aching ribs, and you grope stupidly at the