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me off. I shifted on the coarse horsehair sofa and looked around. There were hunting prints everywhere, but on a table in the corner sat a black-and-white photograph of a handsome woman with two young girls kneeling beside her. They were all wearing white lace dresses. I wondered which girl was Ma.
    “It is about my other daughter, Lizzie, that I have come to see you,” Ma said. “She is sick with the fever and needs medical attention.”
    “Have you no doctors over in that godforsaken place?” snapped her da.
    “We do,” Ma said quietly, “but she needs a hospital.”
    “What’s wrong with the Fever Hospital?” he said. “Not good enough for you and your brats?”
    Tears welled in Ma’s eyes. I could see she was losing her hold on things.
    “She’ll get no care in that place,” she cried. “She needs a private hospital and, well, we have no money for it. That’s why I’ve come to you. Please, Father, will you not help us?”
    Ma sobbed full tilt now, but the oul’ feller’s face did not soften one bit. He was the image of the devil, I thought.
    “Please?” Ma said again.
    Her da looked at her. “You’ve some neck on you, girl, coming here for charity after the disgrace you brought on this house. It was your carryings-on that killed your mother, God rest her soul. “
    Ma bowed her head. “Mama would have found kindness toward me. She knows what it’s like to lose a child.”
    The old man rose from his chair. He coughed and spat into the fireplace.
    “Is it not enough for you that I saved you from being thrown out of your house!” he growled.
    “I know you helped Tom get the mortgage, and I am grateful for that, Father,” said Ma. “That’s why I thought you might…”
    The old man sighed. “Bring the sick child here and I will see she is taken care of,” he said.
    Ma’s face lit up. But he was not finished.
    “On one condition. You leave that fool of a man you married and come back to live here.” He glared at Frankie and me. “And bring them with you if you must.”
    The light went out of Ma’s face. She stood up and smoothed out her skirt.
    “We’ll be going now,” she said.
    Her da sank back in his chair and grunted. “I suppose you know your own way out,” he said. As we went down the hall, we heard him mutter. “You always were an ungrateful girl.”
    We drove home in silence. Darkness gathered around us long before we reached Glenlea. The strength I felt in Ma when we drove home from the bank that day had ebbed away. Now I sensed she was fragile as a blade of grass, trying desperately to hold herself straight against the wind. I was glad to see the welcoming lights of my beloved Yellow House flickering in the dark. I could not wait to hug my da.

    DA ALWAYS SAID crows were a sign of bad luck. They appeared in advance of the banshee, he said, the spirit that comes to carry the dead away. I was afraid of crows. I watched them now as they circled above our cart, swooping and squawking in the spitting rain. I moved closer to Da. All along the road that led to Newry, smoke rose from cottage chimneys and candles flickered on the windowsills. It was Halloween night, and the souls would soon be up and wandering about the land. I felt a strange kinship with them.
    Lizzie had grown worse during the previous night. By morning, she lay in Ma’s arms limp as a rag doll. By noon, P.J. was sent for. Da was so distracted with grief that Ma thought we needed P.J.’s steady hand. By late afternoon, we were all bundled into P.J.’s cart. Ma sat beside P.J., with Lizzie wrapped in a blanket in her arms. Frankie and I huddled next to Da in the back of the cart, mute as nesting birds. We had all insisted on going, even though Ma shouted at us to stay home. Ma had never before shouted at us. The pain of it hurt more than if she had slapped us.
    The Newry Workhouse and Fever Hospital sat high up on a hill just outside the town. I found out later that most workhouses were built high up so they