The Promise of Home

by Darcie Chan

  “Please, please, Michael—” his mother began again, but the crack of the rifle next to his ear prevented him from hearing what more she said.

  The intruder’s head snapped backward. The hand holding the knife dropped away from his mother’s throat as its owner sank to the floor.

  Michael rushed forward and grabbed his mother by the arm. She stepped away from the body convulsing at her feet. A drop of blood appeared on her neck where the intruder’s blade had nicked her skin, but she didn’t seem to notice as she hugged Michael close.

  “Anna? Anna, what’s going on? I was halfway across the lawn with the milking and heard a shot.” Lizzie came through the back door, out of breath after running from the barn. His grandmother looked down at the dead man and then at the rifle that Michael held. “Michael?”

  “I came in from hunting and he had her pinned against the cupboard,” he whispered, lowering the butt of his rifle to the floor. “He had a knife.”

  His grandmother stared at him, her mouth open far enough that he could see the gaps where her teeth were missing. She walked over to the body and peered down at the man’s face. “You shot him right through the eye.”

  “He didn’t have a choice.” Anna finally found her voice, although the tears were coming and she seemed to have difficulty speaking. “That man had a knife at my throat, and he would’ve killed us both—or worse—if Michael hadn’t done it.”

  “Anna, come sit down,” his grandmother said. She pulled out a chair, and Michael helped his mother over to it. “Thank goodness you’re all right. Thank goodness. Maybe now you’ll listen to me about feeding strangers who show up here. You can’t trust anyone you don’t know during times like this. Do you hear me? You can’t trust anyone.”

  “It’s all right, Grandma,” Michael said in a soothing voice. “Now’s not the time for scolding.”

  His grandmother had worked herself up, and she, too, was looking unsteady. Michael carefully leaned his rifle in a corner near the kitchen door and pulled out a chair for her next to his mother.

  “You’re right,” she admitted as she sat down, “but we do have to worry about what to do with him.” She jutted her chin in the direction of the dead man on the floor. “Why don’t you check his pockets, Michael? See if he’s carrying identification.”

  Michael hesitated, not wanting to go near the body.

  “We should call the police,” his mother said, but his grandmother vigorously shook her head.

  “Not so fast, Anna. We wouldn’t want Michael to get into any trouble. We know it was self-defense, but you’d have to convince the authorities of that. What if they didn’t believe you? Michael could be arrested. And they’d probably want to know where Niall is. If they contacted him, you know he’d leave his job and rush home.”

  His mother was silent for a moment. “That’s true,” she said slowly. She wiped under her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I’m not hurt, after all, and I wouldn’t want him to lose that job or worry about us here.”

  “In my experience, the police sometimes make a mess of things,” his grandmother said. “No, this is something we should deal with ourselves, if we can. Now, Michael, go see what that fella had on him.”

  He steeled himself and went over to the corpse. It had pretty much stopped twitching, but there was no avoiding the gruesome sight of the man’s face, with blood filling the eye socket and spilled in rivulets down his cheek. The man obviously hadn’t bathed in some time, as the stench from his body was acrid and nearly overpowering. Gingerly, Michael reached into the pockets of his filthy coat and pants. When he found nothing, he pulled open one side of the coat to reveal a bulging interior pocket.

  There was a soiled, wrinkled handkerchief tucked inside, along with a gold pocket watch, two quarters, and a crumpled one-dollar silver certificate. Michael brought the items to the table for his mother and grandmother to see. “The watchcase is engraved. ‘B. D. Woods,’ ” he read, looking down at it. “But it might not be his.”

  “From the looks of him, I doubt it is,” his grandmother said. “And if there’s nothing in the way of solid identification, then good. If he’s a nobody, he won’t be missed. We ought to wait a little longer and then bury him while it’s still dark.”

  “Lizzie,” his mother said in an anguished whisper, “I don’t…I will not allow him to be buried out there. Not out there with my…my—”

  “I didn’t mean there,” his grandmother said. “Of course not. The ground’s frozen anyway. No, the only place we could dig a grave for him would be underneath the haystack beside the barn.”

  “We’d have to move a ton of hay,” Michael said. “It’s covered in snow, too. It would take hours to expose a big enough piece of ground.”

  “So, we’d bury him, on Easter Sunday, no less, and then what?” his mother asked. “Would we just go about our business, knowing all the while that there’s the body of a criminal festering out there next to the barn? What if someone does come looking for him? No, we’re not going to bury him here. Absolutely not.”

  “Then what do you suggest, Anna?”

  Michael looked from his grandmother to his mother. He didn’t want the man buried anywhere on their property, either, but what else could they do? “Could we move him…the body…to some other place?” he suggested.

  “Not us,” his mother replied. “But maybe someone else could. I’m going to go call Frank. He’ll know what to do.”

  —

  For as much of his early childhood as Michael could remember, there had been no modern conveniences of any kind in the farmhouse. It still had no indoor plumbing, other than a hand pump at the kitchen sink that drew up water from the cistern. The electricity now supplied to his grandparents’ farm was a recent upgrade made possible only by the farm’s close proximity to the main road, where the power lines had been run. Residential telephone service was still a luxury reserved for wealthy city households, though. If his mother needed to make a phone call, she had no choice but to drive to a Union Oil station on the edge of Burlington, where there was a public call box.

  Michael was putting his rifle back in the gun cabinet when he heard the familiar rumbling of the family’s truck outside. His mother was back already, and when she came through the door, the relief on her face was plain. “I got hold of him at the rectory. He’s already started the Easter Vigil, but he said he would come as soon as he can.”

  “Well, good,” his grandmother said. She had just retrieved the pail of milk she’d left midway between the house and the barn and put it down in the root cellar, where the milk would keep for the time being. “In the meantime, we ought to move the body onto the back porch. From the looks of it, he’s probably crawling with lice, and that stink is god-awful.”

  His mother nodded in agreement. “I’m going to be sick if I smell him much longer. Michael, you take his feet. Lizzie and I will grab his hands. Maybe the three of us together will be able to drag him out back.”

  “We need something to put over his head or we’ll have a bloody mess smeared on the floor. Anna, where are the old burlap sacks we use for the garden vegetables?”

  Michael glanced at his mother in time to see her flinch at the question.

  “Oh! I know right where they are. Just give me a minute.” His mother made meaningful eye contact with him before she hurried out the back door to the root cellar.

  They managed to drag the body from the kitchen. It was all they could do to get it outside and position it in the corner of the back porch, where it was out of the way. His grandmother fetched an old horse blanket from the barn and covered the body.

  The three of them stood outside, resting after the exertion of their task. It was a relief to get some fresh air, even though it was cold, and Michael had no desire to go back into the bloodstained kitchen. He realized that his game bag was still suspended across his shoulder and chest. “Mother, I got two squirrels while I was out,” he said in a quiet voice. “Should I go ahead and dress them?”

&
nbsp; “You might as well. I have no appetite whatsoever, but after we clean up the rest of the mess in there, I suppose I should finish cooking. Frank might be hungry when he gets here.”

  Grateful for his mother’s answer, Michael headed for the barn.

  Onion, the family’s Holstein, lowed and shifted in her stall when he flipped on the lights. Michael passed her on his way to a supply closet at the end of the barn, where he grabbed an old bucket that was no longer used for milking. He carried it back to a worktable pushed up against the end of the stalls. Tabby, the resident barn cat, meowed hopefully from the hayloft as he took off his game bag and removed the squirrels and his hunting knife.

  “You already had your milk for the evening, old girl,” he said to the cat. “But maybe you could do with a bit of squirrel liver as well.” His mother didn’t care for liver of any kind, and she rarely served it because she couldn’t stand the odor of it cooking. Of course, that smell would have been an improvement on the stench already in the kitchen.

  Michael took hold of the first squirrel and readied his knife to cut through the fur on its back. It usually took him less than ten minutes to field-dress a squirrel, but tonight he found it difficult to force the knife through the pelt to begin the process of skinning the animal. His hand, no, his whole arm was shaking. Slowly, he put the knife down and began to take deep breaths. For some reason, he felt unsteady, as if the tremors in his hand were spreading up into his shoulder and throughout his whole body. The barn began to spin, and it was all he could do to stumble over to one of the milking stools and sit down.

  He had killed a man.

  The very hands that rested on his knees, the hands that were suddenly unable to do what he wanted them to, had held a rifle and ended a man’s life. Up until now, he hadn’t allowed that realization to sink in, or maybe he’d been in shock and incapable of any rational thought. The weight of it, regardless of the man’s actions toward his mother, was immense.

  He had done it in defense of his mother’s life. He was acting out of instinct and a duty to protect his family and the farm, as he had promised he would. His father or his brother, and even his feisty grandmother had she been in his position, would have done the very same thing. He was pretty sure that killing to protect another wasn’t a sin. And yet, the slight recoil of the rifle shot that had killed the intruder seemed to reverberate again and again in his hands and in his mind. Each replay of the memory battered him with a wave of guilt.

  At that moment, Michael wished more than anything that he could speak with his father. The Great War had ended before he’d been born, but his father had fought in it and survived. Surely, his father had to have shot many enemy soldiers to emerge from the trenches in one piece. Maybe he would have some advice about how to get past it—the reality of having killed another person, the shock and the remorse of it—even if the killing had been in self-defense or the defense of another.

  His mother had cautioned him not to bring up the war in any conversation with his father. “It haunts him, Michael,” she’d said once when he’d found an old photo of his father wearing his Army uniform. “Your father wouldn’t tell me much about it, but I know he must have seen and done things he never imagined he would. He was quiet for a long time after he came home, and after all these years, he still cries out in his sleep sometimes. He lost both his brothers, bless their souls. War’s cruel like that, you know. It can take away people you love. It can change a man, the kind of person he is, at his core, and not in a good way. Thank goodness that didn’t happen to your father. He came back from the war the same man I married, but I respect his wishes not to talk about it. He wants to move forward with his life, not be caught up remembering the horrors he experienced across the ocean.”

  In the quiet of the barn, Michael realized that even if his father hadn’t been hundreds of miles away, there would be no way he could confide what he’d done and ask for guidance. Both his mother and grandmother had made it clear that what had happened with the hobo was not to be revealed to Niall. He wouldn’t disobey them.

  He remained on the milking stool for several more minutes, until his breathing steadied and his trembling stopped. Tabby made her way down from the loft and, purring loudly, began rubbing the length of her body back and forth against his shins. He reached down and picked up the cat, holding her gently as he scratched behind her ears and under her chin. Her thick, soft fur against his cheek and the low, monotonous rumble of her purring relaxed him further. If only life were as simple for him as it was for Tabby. With a bed of hay, daily rations of mice and milk, and an occasional bit of affection, she was perfectly content.

  Michael’s second attempt at skinning and gutting the squirrels was successful. Once the carcasses were completely dressed out, he dropped the livers on the floor for Tabby and collected the pelts and entrails in the old bucket. The frozen ground was too hard for him to bury them, so he disposed of them on the manure pile behind the barn before he went back to the house.

  The kitchen smelled much better when he brought the cleaned squirrels inside. His grandmother had mixed up a bucket of borax cleaner and was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. The blood spatters on the cabinets and countertop were gone. His mother had cleaned herself up as well. Wearing a fresh dress and apron, she stood in front of the stove, stirring a pot of simmering vegetables.

  “These just need rinsing,” he told her as he left the squirrels in the sink basin and pumped some water to wash his hands. “They’re young ones. The skins came off easily.” The cold water running over his fingers and palms was tinged pink as it carried away the last traces of his squirrel cleaning. He focused on lathering the soap and tried not to think about the body on the back porch.

  “Good.” His mother came to the sink to finish preparing the squirrels for cooking. “If they’re tender, they cook faster.”

  “Well, that’s about the best I can do,” his grandmother said as she slowly straightened up. She placed her hands on her waist and arched her back. “No trace of anything left, as far as I can see. Michael, would you mind getting rid of this water for me? My back’s had about all it can take for one night.”

  “Sure thing, Grandma.” He glanced down into the borax bucket. That water, too, was colored pink. Although his stomach was empty and supper would be much later than usual, he doubted he’d feel like eating anything even when the food was on the table.

  “Not inside, though,” his mother said quickly. “You can leave the scrub brush on the porch, but I don’t want that filthy water anywhere in the house. Why don’t you dump it behind the barn? With any luck, it’ll help keep the mice away.”

  Michael nodded. He picked up the mop bucket and went out the back door again, past the covered, lifeless mass that lay in the corner. As he emerged from the darkness behind the barn with an empty bucket, he heard the drone of a car engine coming up the driveway. He came around to the front, where the porch light glowed in anticipation, as a sedan with a cross and ST. JOSEPH’S CHURCH printed on the door was pulling up to the house.

  His uncle Frank had arrived.

  Chapter 7

  Once Karen had left the hardware store and Emily was alone again, she pulled a peanut butter sandwich and a bottle of water from her purse and sat down on a chair in the back office. Her thoughts wandered as she ate—she was worried about Karen and what might have happened to her husband. The radical fighters who had recently overrun parts of Syria and Iraq were shockingly brutal in their treatment of both civilians and prisoners, and they openly sought to kidnap Westerners.

  Thinking about Karen’s missing husband made her feel more and more disturbed, so she redirected her thoughts to the briefcase. As her curiosity grew, she kept looking at her watch, counting the minutes that passed before Matt returned with his lock-pick set. When she heard the bell on the front door ring to signal the entrance of a customer, she left what remained of her sandwich on the desk and hurried to see who had come in.

  “Sorry it took me a litt
le while,” Matt said as he placed a small leather case on the counter. “I would’ve been back sooner, but the pup was more interested in playing than doing her business.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. I totally understand,” Emily said with a smile. “It’s so nice of you to offer to help me.” She grabbed the briefcase and slid it down in front of him. “Do you really think you can open this?”

  “Oh, sure. Just gotta find the right tool. These keyholes are tiny.” Matt unzipped the lock-pick case. Inside, several thin, oddly shaped metal instruments were held in place by tiny elastic straps.

  “They look kind of like things a dentist might use,” Emily said. “Especially that one—it looks exactly like that nasty little hook they use to scrape your teeth.”

  Matt laughed. “Yeah, I thought the same thing when I first saw them.” He selected one of the tools and carefully removed it from the case.

  “So, how did you learn how to pick locks? You’re the first person I’ve met who owns an actual lock-pick kit.”

  “It was part of some specialized training I went through,” he said. “ ‘Covert entry training’ is what the Marines call it. It’s not as easy as some people think, but it’s a good skill to have. You never know when you might be locked in or out of some place.”

  “Or some thing.”

  “Exactly.” Matt grinned. “May I?” he asked, gesturing toward the briefcase. When she nodded, he held it up and squinted into the tiny keyholes. Then he carefully set it back on the table. “The locking mechanisms inside are probably pretty old, but if they’re not rusted shut, I’ll definitely be able to open this.”

  He paused and looked squarely at her. Emily wasn’t sure why he was hesitating.

  “That’s great! Go right ahead.”

  Matt continued to regard her, but the look on his face was strange. His smile—his whole demeanor, really—exuded kindness and confidence, but his eyes gleamed with mischief. Though she didn’t know what scheme Matt was attempting to perpetrate, it was apparent to her that he was up to something.