Free Falling (7 page)

Sarah shouted: “John, no! Stay here!”

David put his hand on John and nodded. He picked up the heavy awl leaning against the fireplace and stepped to the front door. John moved to join him but Sarah grabbed his arm.

“Stay here,” she said, the fear bubbling out of her with every word.

David jerked open the door and strode out onto the porch.

“Who’s there?” he said loudly. Sarah could tell he was making his voice sound deep and threatening. He hesitated and then moved off the porch into the night.  

CHAPTER SEVEN

They had caught a rabbit.

The loud snap of the trap and rabbit’s scream had heralded the moment when regular fresh meat came back into their lives. The next morning, Sarah noticed that John was very quiet at breakfast. He had successfully held back the tears last night when David brought the still-warm carcass into the kitchen, but had blurted out this morning that he was becoming a vegan.

Sarah fried up the last of the eggs. His tea was black but sweetened. There was a decent store of sugar in the cellar.

“You know, God made that rabbit for us,” she said. “He put it here to help sustain us.”

“To eat, you mean.” John pushed his eggs around with his fork and did not look up.

“Yes, to eat…”

“If that’s true, then why did He make them so cute, huh? Answer me that.” He pushed his plate away.

“That is a good question with an unknowable answer,” Sarah said, trying not to smile.

“You
assume
God made the rabbit for us to eat because that’s what you want to do to it. That’s what you call…” He looked out the window as if looking for the word out there.

David walked into the kitchen. “It’s called
rationalization
,” he said, tousling his son’s hair.

John stared down at his hands. “Why would He make ‘em so cute if He wanted us to kill ‘em?” he repeated quietly.

David sat down next to him. “I don’t know, son,” he said. “And I know it’s hard because you’ve always looked at rabbits as pets, but your trap has provided for us, do you see that?” He looked up at Sarah and she nodded. “We need the meat and you helped give us that.”

John looked up at him. “I provided for the family,” he said.

“That’s right, son.”

John pulled his plate back and picked up his fork.

David looked up at Sarah.

“No more eggs left, sorry,” she said. “And there is also the little matter of inning-skay the abbit-ray.” She made a face and indicated the door that led to the root cellar where they’d put the rabbit.

“Gimme a break. I know
pig
-latin, guys.”

David sighed and reached for a slice of cold toasted bread. He spread a scoop of Dierdre’s jam on it while Sarah poured him a cup of tepid tea.

“Helluva way to start your day,” he said which caused all three of them to start laughing.

In the beginning of their second week in Ireland, they learned to milk the goat, and they all developed new habits for securing the house and checking in with each other. David learned how to quickly gut and skin a rabbit (without gagging). Sarah learned to make a delicious rabbit stew using whatever vegetables she found in the root cellar.

John learned to gather wood and peat for the fire, to daily reset his rabbit traps, to clean out the horses’ stalls with his Dad, to move the sheep from one pasture to another and then home every night to the safety of their paddock. At night, he would clean the horse’s leather tack while his Dad sharpened their tools and Sarah read to them from one of the paperback mysteries. She made it “family friendly” when needed as she read.

They abandoned plans to ride into town after Dierdre told them she heard that someone had burned an American flag in one village. Sarah decided it was just as well. It was too far away and they had fallen into a comfortable rhythm with David riding to Seamus and Dierdre’s a couple times a week to work for them. The first time, he brought fresh eggs back with him. The second time, John accompanied him and they brought back a live chicken. David also delivered scribbled instructions from Dierdre on how to weave and comb wool without a loom.

Besides, Sarah thought, all of this was just temporary. Best to just sit tight and ride it out.

One evening, after they had been in Ireland a month and it was cold even in the middle of the day, they moved to their usual places in front of the fireplace after dinner. Sarah finished cleaning the dishes and joined the other two who were talking seriously, their respective handiwork of tack and tools ignored. She pulled out the novel she had been reading to them.

“It’s ‘cause the sheep trust us,” John was saying. “I mean, I know Seamus says it’s ‘cause they’re stupid— “

“You got Seamus to talk?” Sarah said as she sat down.

John ignored her. “But they’re not stupid,” he said. “They just know that we know what’s best for them.”

David poked a log in the fireplace. “They all know that?” he asked, smiling a welcome to Sarah.

“Well, no,” John admitted. “Sometimes one here or there will get his own ideas about stuff, but it almost always ends badly, you know? Like when the big shaggy one, you know, Orca? With the gimpy leg? Got stuck in the ditch over by Blue Rock?”

“How do you know the name of it?” Sarah asked.

John gave her a barely tolerant look. “I don’t know the real name of it,” he said. “It’s big and blue so that’s what I call it. Anyway, he was trying to get to that old deer salt lick and didn’t think things through, you know?”

“Like us,” his mother said.

John turned to her and grinned. “Yeah. That’s the point I was trying to make,” he said.

David sat back in his chair and picked up the hatchet he was sharpening. “And we’re Orca with the gimpy leg,” he said.

“Uh huh,” John said. “Only if we just relax…. you know?”

“And trust our Shepherd?” David said.

“Well, that’s what I think,” he said. “I see it every time I move ‘em to a new pasture. They’re like all freaked out ‘Where are we going? Where are you taking us?’ You know? Even though we were just there two days before. But when they chill and let me do the leading, they’re fine.”

David stared at his son. “How old are you again?”

John dumped the bridle he was working on to the floor next to him.

“Okay, Mom, she’s about to be murdered in the basement, right?” He looked at his Dad.  “Why do girls always go down to the basement when they hear a noise? Are they just stupid or what?”

Sarah cleared her throat, gave her son a baleful look, and began to read.

The next morning, after their chores, they got a surprise when they looked up to see Seamus and Dierdre coming down the long drive that led to their cottage in their pony and trap. They came bearing gifts—another two chickens and a rooster, another dozen eggs, a kidney and potato pie, and a newspaper. The newspaper was printed in Draenago, one town over from Balinagh, and there was no knowing how factual the information was. The old couple had been to town the day before. David and John helped Seamus unhitch the pony and put it in the paddock with a flake of hay while Sarah made a pot of tea in the kitchen with Dierdre. She had tried her hand at a basic loaf cake the day before, no icing, and was as proud to serve it up to Dierdre with their tea as if it had been a Lindser Torte.

The older woman seemed tired to Sarah. But likely it was the additional news she brought that contributed to the lines of worry on her face.

“We heard of a friend of a friend, from the village,” Dierdre said, after Sarah had poured her a second cup of tea. “He’d been murdered in his bed. The villains broke into his house, murdered poor Iain, and ransacked his croft.”

Sarah was horrified. Her eyes flickered through the kitchen window to the sounds of her son’s laughter as he talked with Seamus and David.

“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.