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Mac felt his breathing getting ahead of him, like he couldn’t catch up. He bent over and put his hands on his knees.

But she’s already gone, he told himself as he tried to calm down. It’s not an emergency because she’s already gone. It could not have happened but it had happened. He knew it was true but he didn’t believe it. She had left them. Mac knew instantly, before his father appeared in the doorway in his long underwear, before he flew to find help. The thing that animated her, the thing that made her her, had simply slipped out. Where did it go? The doctor could be two miles away or twenty miles or one thousand miles. He didn’t need a doctor to say what he already knew.

“Will you come in to rest?” the doctor’s wife had asked, placing her hand on his back. When he refused she told him to sit while she rigged out the pony and cart to take him home, but it was better to be busy so he’d helped her. Someone will have fetched Gráinne Ní Dhomhnaill, who was a big age but knew more about illness than any doctor. Macdara remembered Gráinne’s cow eyes looking around on the day she came to check on his mother’s belly, not long before Vincent was born. His mother always said Gráinne knew the old ways—maybe the woman knew of some concoction that would wake her.

“You’ll drop him,” Barry said now as Eamon took Vincent from the cradle. The priest went outside to lead a decade of the rosary. Barry could be bossy, and the younger group tended to rise up as one against being bossed by anyone but Macdara. It wouldn’t take much for the morning to ignite—all it would take would be one to shove another and there’d be pandemonium—but Cathal stopped everything before it started.

“Hssht,” Cathal said to Barry, holding up his hand in threat. It was the same sound he made at the horses.

“He’s sliding out of his arms,” Barry said, his voice furious. “He’s only a baby himself.” Cathal put his foot on the loft ladder and looked up at his third son as if to say don’t make me come up there.

The doctor was holding their mother upright and had tilted her face toward the light of the window.

“Perhaps the children could wait outside,” the doctor suggested, but no one moved. Mac watched as he shined a light in her eyes. He felt her throat, looked at the pale sides of her wrists. He knelt and removed her shoes, gently peeled down her stockings to feel her ankles. Mac looked at Cathal, to see if he might be understanding this. Her ankles! He rolled her stockings back up and kneaded her belly through her blouse. “Will you help me,” the doctor said to Cathal. “I need to set her on the bed.”

But Cathal didn’t move, so Mac stepped forward and the two of them carried Mary to her bedroom, where the exam continued. Cathal never took his eyes from her, as if at any moment she might sit up and say she felt better now. When the doctor finished his exam, he asked if Cathal wanted to step out the back door to speak with him, but Cathal told him to say what he had to say to all of them. Choosing his words, the doctor told them it had been instant, she hadn’t felt a thing.

“But what happened?” Mac asked.

The doctor’s eyes moved from boy to boy to boy. He wrung his hands and looked back down at Mary. “It’s difficult to be certain,” he said. “Had she complained of any pains or soreness? Was she more tired than usual?” He lifted Vincent from Eamon’s arms and laid him in his cradle. He listened to Vincent’s heart with his stethoscope. He unpinned his diaper and looked at his tiny bum.

He asked how many weeks it had been since Vincent was born and who’d helped her deliver the baby. What age was her first child now? How many had she had in all?

“Eleven,” he repeated when Mac told him the number. “In seventeen years.”

“Twelve, actually. There was one who…” Mac trailed off and glanced over at Cathal, but Cathal wasn’t listening. He was kneeling at Mary’s side with his face pressed into her skirt. Mac probably shouldn’t have said anything. No one ever discussed it but it might be important for the doctor to know.

“He was born but I think he was already—”

“Ah,” the doctor said.

“He’s buried on the island next to my grandmother Walsh. On Illeaneeragh, I mean.” The doctor was from Wexford, originally, there on a program to bring young doctors to the Gaeltacht. He didn’t know one island from another until he had to be rowed out to one in a curragh.

“It’s just to give me an idea.”

The doctor shined his light in Vincent’s eyes. He pressed Vincent’s belly with his fingertips, which made him cry in earnest. When he finished the exam, he put a clean cloth from his own bag inside the diaper, and pinned it closed. He wrapped the blanket tightly around him.

“He’s hungry,” he said. “The women will come soon.”

HE WAS RIGHT. THE WOMEN appeared at the open door looking shrunk with shock and carrying baskets of food. They also looked determined, bent to a task that only they fully understood. Mac had seen those expressions before but never for him, for his people. The Lord save her, they said. So young. What in the world could have happened? Cathal smoothed her hair and joined her hands. Compared to the women Cathal’s expression was blank and for the first time Mac could see how much he and his brothers resembled him. He was staring, wide-eyed, like the babies did when they were tired. Once Cathal stepped away the women could take over—the whole reason they’d come down—but Cathal wouldn’t leave.

“Mary,” he said, his voice breaking.

Vincent’s whinging escalated to a roar.

“Mary!” Cathal said again, sharply, as if to tell her enough was enough. And then he abruptly stood and looked wildly around the room. He rushed past the women and out of the cottage, his hands covering his ears.

“What’s to be done?” Maisie Faherty asked as she lifted Vincent. She bent her finger and gave him her knuckle to suck. The boys knew it was a question for her fellow women, not them. As Maisie swayed with Vincent in her arms, she and the other women studied the boys just as the doctor had done, their eyes going from one to another to another. Evelyn Coyne sat by Mary while Honnie gathered what they’d need to wash her, comb her hair. The door and window were already open, which was good—her soul had safely gotten out. Evelyn asked one of the boys to bring a candle and warned them that their mother couldn’t be left alone from that point forward. Around the clock, through the night, she must have someone keeping vigil until she was returned to the earth. We’ll help, she assured them, not to worry.

To a boy they all felt dazed, as if nothing that had happened that day was real. Talking quickly and quietly the women started naming other women nearby—all, Mac knew, women who’d had babies within the last few months—and he worried they’d send him to fetch these women, that he might have to knock on their doors and say something about their milk. Would it even work? He’d seen many a nanny goat kick a hungry kid away with her hind legs if it was not her own.

Finally, Gráinne Ní Dhomhnaill asked Mac if his mother had oats soaking, told him to check what was in the cloth-covered pot, and sure enough it was a pot of oats. The old woman pressed the top to get the cloudiest water to rise up, and then used a spoon to dribble the cloudy water into Vincent’s mouth whenever he drew a breath between howls. Where were his mother’s milk pans, she asked next. She’d probably separated milk earlier that morning. Mac showed her and she brought each pan to the window to see better. One of the other women said that Mary Mackin had American baby bottles she was going to bring over but was boiling them at home first. Before he took his leave, the doctor said he’d discuss with the chemist getting baby formula delivered, but it might take a day. Vincent’s small face turned a furious purple as he roared and rooted with his fist.

“Will I try?” Macdara asked, reaching to take his brother, and once he had him firm against his chest he put his knuckle to his brother’s gums as Maisie had done. He felt the astonishing strength of Vincent sucking, searching. Someone mixed a spoon of fresh cream into the oats water and using the tip of a spoon Macdara dripped it into his brother’s mouth. Back and forth, drop by drop, Vincent drank until his crying lost its power. While Mac held the baby, Honnie clapped her hands and told the rest of the children to go up to her place, the dog had puppies they could look at, and there was food there waiting for them. She told them to find a soft place and have a sleep if they could because they all had long days ahead of them.

“Me have a sleep at Lees?” Thomas asked Macdara with his hands on his hips. The rest of them looked on. How odd, their expressions all said.

“You don’t have to sleep,” Mac said. “Just go on up.”