With Doady in her last days, neighbours called to Crowe’s to do their bit. None were asked, and nothing was planned; they appeared in their own time and with their own agenda, the women bringing the baked goods or foodstuffs that fed the ones who would come next, the men attending to the jobs in the yard and with the animals. It was an arrangement old as the parish and with the unsaid mutuality that comes from close living in a place that had the air of last stop before eternity.
