Coldest at Night by Colin Leonard
Co. Meath, Ireland 1741. The Great Frost.
Michael Reilly hugged his daughter Brid as tight as his weakened arms would allow. They were wrapped in all the clothes they owned and huddled beneath two heavy blankets but still the girl shivered. The wood on the inside of the door glittered with frost in the candlelight. The nighttimes were the coldest.
Michael knew of a few ways that they might die. They might die of the cold. That’s what had taken his son, the baby that bore his forename. Although they had wrapped him up in a woollen shawl and Michael’s wife had kept him close while they slept, the cold had still stolen his fragile life. It had got inside his veins, turned his lips blue and his eyes glassy. The morning that he died had felt like the end of the world, a pit of screaming and tears, like they were on the dark edge of hell.
They might die of disease. That’s how his wife had died but then she’d had no strength left to fight it after baby Michael died. She hadn’t recovered rightly from the birth, she hadn’t healed as she should. Infection found an easy way inside her. So did sickness. Maybe from something that she ate on one of the days when there was no choice of what to eat. Maybe from the dirty snow that Michael tramped into the cottage after another desperate search for food and was too exhausted to notice. It could have been from breathing the dead air of their infant in her arms. Her skin itched with red sores and she threw up blood. When the sores broke they wept with infection and they wouldn’t heal.
That was three days ago. He couldn’t bury her. The ground was too hard, his muscles were too weak. He brought her out to the fields, wrapped in a sheet, coughing as he dragged her. She wasn’t the only one left out there. Theirs was within a ring of cottages beside the field. Since things had gotten really bad, they hadn’t seen much of their neighbours. Some of them had left over the previous months, headed for the towns, ignoring the stories of folk being beaten away from doors and left to die in the streets. Michael was one of those who didn’t believe that there would be salvation in the towns. The towns were beset by riots and killings. He reckoned they’d freeze to death on the journey anyway.
Everyone who stayed was cowering in their own places. The cold and the hunger had instilled in the community a fear of each other that was dark as the devil. There were snow covered lumps out in the field, the lengths of men, women, and smaller. He placed his wife among them and cursed at the dogs that howled in the distance.
On that sorrowful walk back to his daughter, he thought of another way that they might die. There was movement within the other cottages and dark eyes peering through the windows. He knew the frost had changed his neighbours. It had changed them into something dangerous and starving. He determined that he would keep their door barricaded from then on.
Apart from the neighbours, he feared marauders arriving. One day he saw a wild-eyed and jagged-limbed man thrash through an abandoned cottage searching for something to eat, anything to eat. There was nothing left in the empty houses. The man didn’t have the strength to push open any of the closed doors. Micheal and Brid crouched low until they heard him stumble away across the fields. Michael feared that others might come in greater numbers, working together, and come with weapons. That would be a hateful way to die.
They might die from starvation. There was so little left to eat, no potato crop this year. The river Boyne had frozen over, keeping its fish to itself. Birds and rabbits were harder to catch, the weaker he got. Some days they ate only grubs and insects. Brid sobbed as she swallowed them and Michael would hold her against his heart. If they could survive a few more weeks then surely the weather would break. Just a few more weeks to eke out sustenance. He boiled snow over their fire for water but fuel was getting harder to find as well.
So many ways that they might die. Michael pressed his cheek against Brid’s hair and pulled the scratchy blankets over their heads. In the cold, silent nights they could hear for miles. There was a shuffling sound outside. Brid whimpered. Michael hushed her. The table was wedged against the door but it was best to stay quiet. Maybe it was a wild dog.
He went over to extinguish the candle flame and caught sight of something moving in the moonlight. Something in the fields. More than one. They moved so slowly. The moon was horribly bright. He could see faces at the windows of some of the other cottages. The shuffling sound carried softly across the air like a heavy breath, a terrible sighing, like a river calling them to drown. The figures in the field got closer. The face at the window of the cottage nearest them opened up in a scream that ripped through the rhythmic sounds of the approaching figures. Brid bolted up to her father’s side and she cried when she saw what was coming. He recognised the sheet he had swaddled his wife in. The figures reached the end of the field, seperated and each made for a different door, their faces white and frozen, their eye sockets empty. Michael whimpered and turned Brid’s face away from what had once been her mother. Barricading the door would not stop her. She carried a bundle in her arms. Her mouth hung open in sorrow. Her bones showed through her hands.
There were so many ways for them to die. He had never dreamed that this would be it.