by Bethany-Kris
There were more cars parked in the driveway when Connor arrived home than there had been when he left earlier. He recognized a couple, men who occasionally showed up at his house for a pint of Guinness or a glass of whiskey with his father. Sometimes, they’d sneaked him a sip from their glass, laughing until their faces reddened when he coughed and choked from the harsh liquors.
All of them were Irish, like him, some with thicker dialects than others, and some who spoke of home as being the countryside they’d left in Ireland years ago. He liked those stories the best, when one of them were drunk enough to talk, but not so drunk that he couldn’t understand what they were saying.
His father rarely spoke of Ireland, saying only that America was their home, and that his old country betrayed him. And because of that, Connor had been given the American spelling of his name, instead of the Irish one. Connor believed there was more to the story, more that his father didn’t say, because even the men who came around didn’t talk about Ireland when Sean was in the same room.
Mostly, Connor tried to stay out of the way of the men when they visited.
His father told him to.
He tried to listen, when he could.
Sometimes, they pried him from one of his many hiding corners, and as long as his father wasn’t too close by, Connor didn’t mind.
Connor decided to use the unexpected visitors to his benefit, knowing his father was probably stuck in his office with the men, or even in front of the television in the main room. If Sean was distracted, he might not notice Connor sneak to his bedroom upstairs to change his dirty clothes before his father could lay into him for getting messy when he knew better.
He was not looking forward to the whipping he would surely get if he was caught with mud-stained skin and clothes.
Even still, Connor wiped his clothes as he climbed up the front steps out of habit, trying to get rid of whatever mud might have dried. Barely any came off, and his hands were brown, with dirt caked under his fingernails.
Stupid mutt.
Next time, he was going to have his pocketknife ready for that dog.
Connor opened the front door slowly, listening for any sounds that would tell him where his father and the other men were inside the house. Faint murmurs echoed down the hall, telling him they were likely in the main room. He had hoped they would be upstairs in the office, because it would be easier for Connor to get inside his own room when he didn’t have to bypass the office. The main room, though, had a wide entrance that he would have to speed by and hope not to be noticed.
It wouldn’t be as easy.
“Connor?”
Connor damn near slammed the front door shut and bolted back down the front steps at the soft call of his name—it was only because the voice, though hoarse and sore sounding, was soft, did he push the door open the rest of the way. He quickly stepped inside, making sure not to let the door even make a click when it latched shut.
On her hands and knees, scrubbing muddy footprint streaks off the wood floor, was the maid. Connor’s gaze instantly went to the flimsy, flower-patterned scarf tied around her throat. It was an unusual sight, as she only ever wore black- or gray-colored clothes, and never something with more color.
Where had she even gotten that scarf from?
“Oh, you’re all dirty,” she whispered, not moving from her spot with the scrub brush and chemical-smelling bucket on the floor. “You better hurry upstairs and get cleaned, lad.”
Connor’s gaze darted down the hall, thankful his father wasn’t standing there watching. She wasn’t allowed to talk to him, and he wasn’t allowed to speak to her, but sometimes, they managed a word or two when it was safe.
She was nice—sweet. Though never explicitly asked, she made sure Connor had clothes or pajamas on his bed every night and day, a glass of cold water on his nightstand before bed, and juice in the morning, hot meals, and sometimes she’d sneak him food, toys or his picture books when he was being punished.
He knew she wasn’t, but she was the closest thing to a mother he’d ever had. The others that had come before her were never as soft-handed, gentle, or caring. They only worried about doing what they needed to in order to avoid Sean’s anger, and Connor didn’t blame them for that.
He was the same way.
Sometimes, like him, she wore bruises on places where they couldn’t be hidden.
“I will,” Connor said.
Her hand fiddled with the scarf at her neck, but quickly stopped when Connor looked at the item again. He didn’t know if she had seen him in the office doorway, earlier. Not like his father clearly had. Connor wasn’t about to ask.
“Hurry,” she said in that raspy way.
He wondered if her throat hurt—did it hurt to speak?
He decided not to ask that, either.
Connor didn’t wait around in the entryway any longer, once the maid went back to scrubbing the floor. He headed down the hall, more cautious than before. The closer he came to the main room, the louder and clearer the voices of the men and his father became.
“He’s too stuck in what used to be,” Sean said. “He’s not ready to take this organization where it needs to go.”
“Sean—”
“Declan is still thinking small. We need to think big.”
“Declan makes sure our arses stay out of prison.”
“Then you think small, too,” Sean snapped with his usual bark of irritation.
A familiar drip of cold dread slid down Connor’s spine. When Sean got angry—especially when the men were in the house—it never ended well. He sped up his steps, despite his curiosity over the conversation happening behind thin walls. He didn’t understand what they were talking about at all. Words like “organization” and “prison” were foreign to him, and he didn’t have a clue who Declan was.
He thought it might be interesting to figure out, but if Sean was already mad, Connor wasn’t about to get caught up and add to it by coming in the house looking like a dirty dog that had rolled in the mud.
His steps quickened as the entryway to the main room came into view. He dropped his head down low, shoved his hands in his pockets, and passed by without even looking inside once. He didn’t pause as he headed for the stairs, almost feeling like he might be into the safe zone.
Almost.
If there was anything Connor had learned in his short life, it was that relief was the most traitorous feeling.
“Connor!”
His muddy boot had just hit the bottom step when his father called his name with a coldness that burned from feet away. He didn’t bother to turn around right away, but his shoulders shrunk in on themselves as he listened to Sean’s footsteps come closer.
“Turn around!”
Connor did as he was told, although slowly, and he didn’t raise his gaze.
“Thinking you could sneak your dirty arse upstairs, did ye?” Sean asked.
Connor’s eyes prickled with pain from holding back the wetness wanting to fall. He knew better than to cry, so even if he hurt, he held back the tears. “Sorry.”
“Look like swine, you do,” Sean raged on, “like a wee pig. Did I raise a pig, Connor?”
“No, sir.”
“Apparently, I did. You look like a pig, you smell and act like a pig, so you must be a pig.”
Embarrassment and shame filled Connor to the brim, and he still couldn’t raise his head to look up at his father. None of the men had come out of the main room, but he knew they could hear every single word. Sean wasn’t being quiet, and the walls were terribly thin.
“I’m not a pig,” Connor whispered.
“You are—you’ll eat supper outside on the ground like a pig would, too, damn you. Get your muddy face out of my sight, lad, now.”
Connor didn’t have to be told again. He bolted for the stairs, careful not to go too fast, lest the dried mud fall from his boots and clothes and give his father more of a reason to be angry. As it was, Connor didn’t understand why all his father had
done was yell at him and shame him. Sean liked his physical forms of punishment much more than verbal.
He decided it didn’t matter.
He’d clean himself up.
He’d eat outside in the mud like a pig for supper.
It was better than a beating.
Better than the belt.
Better than the hole …
• • •
Connor awoke when he was kicked from his bed. He couldn’t see straight in the dark, and he didn’t even know what had happened, except that he was lying on something much harder and colder than his bed.
He only figured out he’d been kicked out of his bed when Sean’s boot connected with Connor’s arse a second time.
“Move,” Sean said, amusement coloring up the anger in his words. “Don’t make me tell you again, lad.”
Connor still wasn’t sure what in the hell was going on, and he didn’t move nearly fast enough to please his father’s rage.
“Feckin’ useless thing, I said move!”
Sean didn’t need Connor to do a thing, as he found a handful of his hair clenched in his father’s fist before he was thrown a good three feet across his bedroom floor.
“Thought I’d forget about what you did earlier, did ye?” Sean asked.
Connor didn’t get the chance to respond. He only heard the whistle of the leather belt cutting through the air before he felt the pain. The kicks and hair-grabbing had been nothing—those were things that he was used to, but not the belt.
That always hurt.
Even when he braced for it, even when he had time to know it was coming, and even when he didn’t, the belt hurt.
Connor cried out at the first strike, falling over on all fours just as the second hit from the belt came to land across his back.
“That’s better,” Sean said, “pigs walk on all fours. Just like you should be. To the hole, lad, just like you are.”
His father made the noises of a pig as he beat Connor over and over again, all the way to the familiar rug that smelled like piss no matter how many times it was washed. Sean waited, not using the belt or saying a thing as Connor pulled back the rug to expose the wee hatch that opened up all too easily under his tiny hand to expose a hole in the floor.
It was dark in there.
Smelly.
Cold.
He hated the hole.
Still, Connor slipped down inside, fearing another swat from the belt was sure to follow if he didn’t get in before his father told him to.
Up above, Connor saw the sliver of Sean’s pleased smile before the hatch was closed, and the latch was turned, locking him inside. Through the cracks, just big enough to let light through, he saw the streams of color fade as the rug was tossed back over the door in the floor.
It was dark again.
He wouldn’t sleep now.
Instead, Connor waited for the maid.
She would bring him water.
Maybe a toy or a snack.
She always did.
Except, she didn’t come that night.
One Year Later …
The soft meowing coming from behind the old shed had Connor picking up his pace as he rounded the back side of the building. His father always said to stay away from the shed, because it leaned too much to the left, and a strong wind would blow it over. Sean never used the shed, and just a peek inside the one broken window told Connor it was empty and dirty.
Connor didn’t have much use for the shed, either, but one day, a month earlier, he had heard the strange cries coming from behind the building while he had been carving his name into a tree with his pocketknife. He followed the sounds, both intrigued and scared, until he found what exactly it was that had been making the noise.
A cat.
A tabby, orange-colored, with stripes all up its back and blood on its back legs. She had just been slipping into the large dug out hole that led underneath the shed, when Connor caught sight of her. Unsure of what to do, he’d raced back to the house, sneaked out the flashlight his father kept under the sink, and went back to the hole.
He kept watch while the cat birthed three kittens, hidden in her safe spot. The whole time, she watched Connor, too, probably trying to figure out what in the hell he was doing there. He decided she was a stray, since she was kind of dirty, and she had no collar.
Connor didn’t know much about cats, or what to do when he saw the animal’s kittens come from her body, all wet and slimy in wee sacks. His curiosity kept him there, long enough for him to watch each kitten come out, for the mother to eat the sacks and other bits that came out with the kittens, and then for her to clean each furry bean shape until near soundless meows filled the hole under the shed.
He was amazed.
He was also careful not to touch the kittens, or the mother cat, if only because he didn’t want to scare her away, or hurt her babies. They were very wee—enough to fit into his six-year-old hand.
His father hated animals. All kinds, not just cats. Connor had once seen Sean kill a neighbor’s cat just for walking across the hood of his car, and he knew his father left raw meat with poison pellets outside around their property whenever other neighborhood animals came around too much.
Connor wasn’t allowed to have pets.
He knew better than to even ask.
It was that reason alone that he kept quiet about the mother cat and her three baby kittens hidden behind the shed in the hole under the building. He figured it wasn’t the orange cat’s fault that she had wandered onto their property to have her kittens, so he didn’t say a thing, instead checking on them once or twice a day when he knew he wouldn’t be caught.
Now that a month had gone by since he first found the mother cat giving birth, the babies were not wee furry beans that couldn’t make very much noise or move very far. The kittens, one black and white, one colored like its mother, and the third—his favorite of them all—a multi-colored kitten, were capable of crawling from the hole and wandering into the tree line just behind the shed where they played and fought.
They didn’t wander very much farther than that, though.
Sometimes, if he went to visit the cats, and the mother wasn’t there, he’d find the babies meowing, and it made him sad. They didn’t have a home like he did—even if his wasn’t a very good home—and he wondered if they were cold or hungry. It was fall, the leaves had just begun to turn color and the air was chillier, so he wondered what the cats would do once winter came.
How would they get food?
How would they get warm?
Would their mother leave because they were bigger?
Even though Connor knew the cat and kittens weren’t his to keep, he worried about them, and how they would fare once the snow started to fall in a couple of months. He knew the mother cat hunted for food, because sometimes he found the heads or guts of tiny mice just outside of the hole, and he once saw the orange tabby carrying a mouse into her den.
Come winter, he knew the rodents would den, too.
How would she eat then?
Would the babies still be drinking her milk?
He didn’t know much about animals, but he didn’t think any of the answers to his questions would be ones he liked. He also knew that asking his father to bring the cats inside for the winter would do him no good, except to watch Sean kill the animals, so he didn’t bother to even try and convince himself to ask at all.
Instead, Connor had gotten another idea.
One day, while walking the trails in the woods, he’d found a bird that was almost dead. Not quite dead, as it still moved, but almost. He wasn’t sure if it had fallen from up high in a tree, or if it had gotten hurt some other way and fallen to the ground. Maybe it was old, and was just dying as things did when they got older.
He wasn’t sure, but he’d crushed the bird’s head under the heel of his shoes, made sure it wasn’t moving after that, and took it to the den where he knew the cats still lived. He left the carcass just outside of the hole, and wh
en he checked the next morning, the tiny, dead bird was gone.
He’d done the same thing for a mouse he’d found in the cellar of his house, although that had been trickier, because the mouse was very much alive and quite fast. But he got it—his pocketknife did the rest of the work for him. That time, the mouse he left behind disappeared, too.
Connor felt good.
He was helping.
He still worried that the cats would be too cold in the winter.
For that, he didn’t know how to help at all.
Peering into the hole, Connor found all three kittens tangled into one sleeping pile of fur. The mother cat wasn’t in the den with them, but he didn’t think that was very unusual, as she often left the kittens alone. He had also learned, over the past month, that cats slept a lot. Mostly, they came out of their den toward nightfall, when it was dusk, and there was less activity.
Sticking his hand in the hole, Connor let his fingertips drift over the fur of his favorite of the three kittens. The multi-colored one—he thought it was a male, probably, and though he knew better, he’d given him a name: Kitty.
It wasn’t very original, but Kitty was the only one of the three kittens that let Connor pick him up and pet him, or sometimes he would even sit in his lap and let him talk for as long as he wanted.
If he could pick just one of the cats to keep, it would be Kitty.
“Connor!”
The hushed, yet high, whisper of his name made Connor stand up straight and peer over his shoulder into the woods where the call had come from. He recognized her voice without even needing to see her face, and out of habit alone, he checked around the corner of the shed to make sure the blinds were still closed on the windows of his house, and his father was nowhere in sight.
“What’cha doing?” Evelyn asked.
Her voice was closer the second time she spoke, and it made Connor nervous. In the year that they had become friends and started playing together in her backyard, but mostly on the trails, he had been very careful about keeping her away from his house. She knew where he lived and how to get there, he just didn’t allow her to be seen by his father.
Sean didn’t like him having friends.