“Murdered?” she said as she sat down heavily into a kitchen chair.
“Aye,” Dierdre said. “Took everything but left the animals to wander. That’s how they discovered the murder. One of his cows was found, dead, too far from Iain’s place, and someone went to check on Iain.”
“Are you worried about the two of you?” Sarah asked, her own worry ratcheting up.
“Aye, of course. Me an old woman and an addle-pated old man. We’re sitting ducks, we are.” Sarah could see how upset the older woman was and it unnerved her to see it. Dierdre was always so steady and self-assured.
“Do you…is there any way to protect yourselves?” Sarah asked.
“Guns, you mean? Oh, aye, but Iain had guns too. A fat lot of good they did him, lying in his own gore.”
“Did he have dogs?”
“Shot dead, both of them, and never raised a whimper to warn him.”
“So, maybe the killers were someone who knew the dogs?”
Dierdre stared at Sarah as if she’d started speaking Latin.
I’ve been reading too many mysteries, Sarah thought.
“It’s just, it would explain why…” she said.
“Yes, it would,” Dierdre said slowly, as if realizing for the first time something very important. “They didn’t bark because they knew them. Iain was killed by someone he knew.” She looked at Sarah and, if anything, the fear seemed to be more intense than before.
Later, when the couple took their leave, David agreed to go with them for the night. After seeing how upset Dierdre was, Sarah encouraged him to do it.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, not at all sure they would be. “Get them settled in and reassured the best you can. It’s just one night.”
That night, Sarah and John sat in front of the fireplace as usual.
“Feels weird, Dad not being here,” John said.
“I know.”
“Are you okay, Mom? You look a little nervous.”
Sarah saw that John looked a little nervous too. Afraid that his insecurity might be the result of her nerves, she smiled and shook her head.
“Not at all,” she said. “Just missing Dad’s company. We’re really the Three Musketeers, aren’t we? Just feels wrong not to all be here, is all.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Ready to hear chapter eight?” she asked, picking up the book.
“Yeah, sure. Hey, you know, Mom?”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“If it’d make you feel better, you can always keep the gun loaded while Dad’s away.”
The gun?
Sarah sat at the kitchen table staring at the small rifle.
“Dad said not to tell you,” John said, frowning at her. “He said you’d freak out about a gun in the house.”
Sarah ran a hand through her hair.
“Where did it come from?” she asked. It looked lethal just sitting there, as if it could harm the two of them without even being touched.
“Dad found it in the barn.”
“Does it have bullets?”
John opened a kitchen drawer and withdrew a box of bullets. He pushed the box across the table to her.
“Does Dad know how to shoot it?” she asked.
“He says he had a rifle when he was a kid.”
Sarah looked at her son as if there were more to the story.
John shrugged and nodded to the gun.
“How hard can it be?” he said.
Sarah lifted the rifle gingerly. It was very heavy.
“It’s not loaded,” John said.
“Okay,” she said, putting the gun back down and taking a long breath. “Do we know how to load it?”
Her son grinned at her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The next morning, they woke up to frost on the ground. With no central heat, Sarah and John moved about the cottage in their Gor-Tex jackets over sweaters like tubby Michelin men. John’s jacket was so big, he folded the sleeves back. He wanted to cut them but Sarah wouldn’t allow it. What if they were here long enough for him to grow into them?
John lit the fire in the cook stove and gathered more wood, set the rabbit trap, sharpened the knives (I wouldn’t even let him open a can of dog food back home, she thought with amazement, for fear he’d cut himself), fed the horses and the goats and the chickens with corn and hay he took out of the basement storage. While he did his chores, Sarah put water on for tea, sliced bread and put it on the stovetop to toast, then scrambled six eggs in the iron skillet. Dierdre had shown her how to make butter from the goat milk and she was going to try that today. They were all, finally, at the point where they didn’t mind the taste of the goat milk in their tea. She needed more soap—for the dishes, for their clothes, for their baths. She intended to heat up water today so John could have a nice long soak in the tub. She couldn’t remember the last time the child had been clean. Probably at the hotel in Limerick.
Later, she helped John bring in the sheep from the pasture and the horses from the paddock. She found herself looking up repeatedly to see if David might appear on the horizon. She expected him any time. The weather was biting cold and the wind had picked up. Even so, before dinner—a cold dinner of leftover rabbit with green tomato preserves from the larder—she set John to constructing a target of straw in the back pasture. She fetched the rifle from the kitchen and the box of rounds. With shaking fingers, she fumbled a round into the side port. She held the gun muzzle away from her as if frozen.
“You gotta cock it,” John said.
She looked at him, frowning.
“Slide that part up and it drops in.” He pointed to the cocking mechanism.
“Dear God in Heaven, how do you know that?” She shook her head, slid the action forward and heard the sounds of the bullets dropping into the chamber.
“I saw it on YouTube,” he said, shrugging.
“Remind me to watch you closer.” She held out another round.
“You can’t put that in port side,” John said. “It has to go underneath.”
Sarah took another breath and scanned the horizon for strength and perspective and then did something that she never in a million years would have imagined herself doing. She handed the gun to her son.
“Show me,” she said.
The boy took the rifle. He turned facing the scarecrow and pointed the gun in that direction.
“The guy on the YouTube video said the best way to load a gun is to not take your eyes off your tactical environment…the thing you’re aiming at,” he said. Without looking away from the scarecrow, he palmed the clip horizontally in his right hand and, following the trigger guide forward, shoved it into the magazine from underneath.
“Okay,” Sarah said, trying to remember that her grandfather and his whole generation had been familiar with firearms since they were in single digits. “Just two shots apiece to save ammunition,” she said.
John’s first shot went straight to the head. But the recoil knocked him flat. He backed up twenty yards and planted his left foot forward, the heel of his right behind the left. He took careful aim at the target. His second shot also went to the head and this time he stayed on his feet. Sarah’s first shot hit the body and the second one missed entirely. At least she didn’t fall down, she thought grimly, but the anticipation of the recoil made her even more fearful of the gun.
After that, they practiced loading the gun until they could both do it quickly and without looking.
That night, David came home exhausted with a bandaged hand, bringing soap and a bag of flour. Sarah watched him ride up over the knoll and realized, for the first time, that the sight of him felt like an answer to prayer. He waved off dinner, saying Dierdre had practically stuffed him before he left her place. He opted instead for a quick wash up with soap and a collapse by the fire with John, who gave him a blow-by-blow account of his chores and the various antics of their animals.
Sarah read a quick, encouraging note from Dierdre, full of apologies for “bein
g such a ninny” the day before and realized that just because she couldn’t mail a letter home to her folks didn’t mean she couldn’t write one. She had found a large supply of loose leaf paper and several ball point pens in the kitchen drawer. Just the thought of talking to her parents—even if it was one-sided—made her feel closer to them. After a paragraph of what could only be considered serious whining, Sarah crumpled up the letter and started over. She told her parents that they were fine. That’s not a lie, she thought with surprise. She said she prayed they were, too.
So, how to describe our daily round here? We live in a one-room cottage, with the nearest market really more of a convenience store and it nearly ten miles away. It’s been a little over three weeks since we got here and now people only gather at the convenience store (which they call a “dairy”) to trade and swap news. I don’t know how it is there, but the news here changes from day to day and most of it sounds made up so we don’t put too much stock in it. There haven’t been any goods for sale at the store since a couple days after the crisis, but people have loads of stuff to trade: fish, produce, horses, milk, homemade beer (don’t ask). There is only one road leading to our cottage and that’s mostly dirt and rock. Okay for horses, bad for cars. (Which, of course, works out okay these days.)
The people who own the cottage left a storage cellar of food, mostly for the horses. There’s a pot-bellied stove that keeps the cottage warm at night, a fireplace we rarely use because we lose too much heat, and a cook stove that we use all the time. There is, of course, no electricity so there’s no TV, no radio, and no water heater, so we have to boil water on the stove (meaning we have to gather wood first) if we want a warm bath or to wash the dishes properly. There’s an ancient washer that’s really just a mechanical hand-crank thing that works because it’s powered by me but no dryer.
The nights are still and you can see every star in the firmament one by one. The mornings are crystal blue and so bright at first that it hurts your eyes. Our days are very busy. (You probably guessed that since we have to find firewood before we can make a fire before we can heat the water before we can wash the breakfast dishes! Ha ha!) After the effort of producing a meal of some kind and then cleaning up afterwards, you have to feed the animals and not get stepped on, cut, pinched or bruised in the process. In the middle of all that, there is incredible silence and stillness—in your mind, in your ears, in your thoughts. Sometimes the world is so quiet here I think I can hear God talking to me and I swear that never happened back home. I think it must be like what it was for our ancestors a hundred years earlier. After all that hard work, you read if it’s still light enough, you take long walks–to check on the animals usually—that freeze your feet and your ears and burn your cheeks. And then when you return to the cottage, the job is to try to get warm again, or dry if it’s rained on your walk which it almost always does, or find something to eat that won’t cause terrible gas or constipation the next day. No wonder the Irish drink!
Sarah looked over the letter and felt a little better. Reading it seemed to help put it in perspective for herself. She noticed that David had fallen asleep in his chair and John was working out a move on the chessboard by the fireplace. Every once in awhile he got up and added a stick to the fire. She folded the letter and tucked it inside her Joy of Cooking cookbook.
“What were you writing?” John asked, focused on his chessboard.
“A letter to Nana and Grandpa,” she said. “Telling them a little about our life here.”
He looked up and smiled.
“That’s cool,” he said.
The next morning there was snow on the ground and more pouring out of the sky. Without waiting for breakfast, David and John ran outside, John to drag in firewood and David to check on the horses and the goat. When they came back into the kitchen, their clothes were wet. Sarah was pulling muffins out of the oven. She poured the tea.
“Horses okay?” she asked, handing John a towel for his wet hair.
“They’re fine,” David said. His injured hand was bandaged and he held it out away from his body. He said he had slammed it in a fast closing gate at Seamus and Dierdre’s. It reminded her that there were so many ways to get hurt these days and without antibiotics or even topical ointments, the simplest cut quickly could become infected.
“What about the sheep?” John asked. “They’ll freeze to death out there.”
David took a hot muffin and sat down at the kitchen table.
“Dierdre said they’ll be fine. They’re all wearing wool coats, you know. But we’ll check on them later to make sure they’re good.”
That appeared to satisfy John. He wolfed down two muffins and a mug of tea.
“What about the chickens?” she asked.
The two had created a makeshift coop for the three chickens and one rooster given to them by Dierdre and Seamus. They had hitched one of the horses up to a rudimentary harness and dragged a large piece of useless and rusting farm equipment out of what looked like a small barnyard shed. They had prepared the inside as Dierdre had suggested with bedding and pine shavings on the floor. At the time, Sarah had watched them work together and felt her heart lift at their obvious closeness and the sounds of their voices and laughter. She thanked God for it and realized, again, that this too was an answer to prayer. She thought of the sheep and wondered if, like the stupid sheep, she didn’t really know what to pray for, but was being given by God what she needed—in spite of her ignorance. She smiled to herself. At least she was smart enough to know when she received it, she thought, that it was grace.
“Dierdre said they should be fine in their coop for the winter,” he said, reaching for another muffin.
“I had no idea it would snow this early in Ireland.” Sarah said as she poured her own tea and sat down.
“Dierdre said people are leaving the area,” David said.
“What do you mean? They’re leaving Balinagh? Why? Is it better in the cities?”
“I guess they think so. Or maybe they’re just moving to be closer to family. I mean, look at us, here. It’s really hard just making breakfast happen. Most people wouldn’t live like this if they had a choice.”
“I don’t like the feeling of being out here by ourselves.”
John hopped up from the table.
“I’m tacking up Star,” he said, shrugging into his jacket. “Gonna check on the sheep in the far pasture.”
Sarah frowned. Give it to God Give it to God Give it…She looked at David.
“Yeah, I’ll go with him,” he said, shivering in anticipation of the cold. “Wait up, sport,” he said. But John was already gone.
“It is hard here,” Sarah said.
“Yeah,” David said. “But unlike everyone else, we don’t have a choice.”
He pulled on his jacket and one glove, tucked another muffin into his pocket and followed his son to the barn.
Sarah put the dishes in the sink and punched down the dough for the bread she was planning for lunch. She was going to serve up the goat butter she had made earlier. John was right. They were all going to get rickets.
An hour later, she wandered out to the barn to pat a few horses’ noses. It made her feel more confident the more she was around them. She picked up the chicken feed bowl and visited the coop first. The three chickens were huddled on their perches eyeing her with malevolence, it seemed to her. Hey, I don’t make the weather, she thought, tossing them a spray of seed which they ignored. She looked around for the rooster. He was probably strutting around outside somewhere. She felt under each hen and brought away two eggs which she tucked one in each of the pockets of her jacket. She felt as proud as if she’d laid them herself. Fresh eggs meant a decent meal even if there was nothing in the rabbit traps today. She heard a noise behind her and whirled around. David stood in the door, cradling his hand to his chest.
“Oh, my God, you gave me a start,” Sarah said, double checking that her jerking hadn’t broken the eggs.
“I saw the coop door opene
d and just wanted to make sure it hadn’t been left open accidentally,” David said as they both moved out into the sunshine.
“Why aren’t you with John?” Sarah asked. “I thought you were going with him to check on the sheep.”
“Sarah, he doesn’t need me. He’s fine.” He held up his bandaged hand. “With this, it was more trouble than it was worth to get up on the horse. He didn’t have the patience to wait and I didn’t think it was necessary.”
“This is not a safe place to be wandering about anymore, David. I thought Dierdre made that clear to you.” Sarah tried to fight down the surge of fear that began to radiate from her.
“We can’t live like scared rabbits, either, Sarah.”
“Alive scared rabbits,” she said, suddenly furious with him. “He’s barely ten. You let him do too much. And why didn’t you tell me about the gun?”
“I thought you’d do pretty much what you’re doing right now. You tend to be jittery. I didn’t want to add to your anxiety.”
The arrogance of him thinking he was less anxious than she was! Sarah was a second away from cracking one of the eggs on his head when they both heard the staccato pounding of the pony’s hooves on the hard packed dirt road behind them.
“He’s back,” David said, frowning, as he looked over her shoulder.
Sarah emerged from the coop to see John ride up to them, wheel his pony around and slide to the ground. His hair was wild and blowing, his eyes huge and his cheeks red from the cold.
“Dad!” he said. “You gotta come!”
Sarah grabbed his arm.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
“It’s the sheep. Something’s got at ‘em,” John said, his eyes wild and darting from parent to parent. “One of ‘em’s…one of ‘em got killed.” Her son looked like he might cry and Sarah felt her stomach tighten.
“Okay, show me,” David said heading toward the barn to saddle Rocky. John shoved his pony’s reins to Sarah and ran after this father.
Sarah stood there with the two eggs in her pocket and the pony’s reins in her hands. She watched them enter the barn and wondered when it was that John had stopped wearing his hard hat.
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