“Oh, yeah,” John said. “I made a rabbit trap.”
“To catch as in for eating?” Sarah tried to keep the note of incredulity out of her voice.
“Well, not for pets, eh, sport?” David tossled his son’s hair. “Lunch?” he said, hopefully to Sarah.
“You just had breakfast,” Sarah said with exasperation.
“Of a sort,” he said. “Two spoons of jam and tea without sugar or milk. Pretty crappy breakfast.”
Sarah added two more eggs to the skillet and felt her own stomach growl. Feeling like she was throwing gemstones down a well, she added a third for herself. “We only have seven eggs left,” she said. “We need to be really mindful of our rations.”
“I’m going back to Dierdre’s tomorrow,” David said. “I’ll trade my services for another dozen eggs.”
“And maybe some milk, Dad?” John took his plate of eggs and sat down at the kitchen table. “I hate drinking tea without milk.”
“He needs milk, David,” Sarah said, the panic still with her. “He’s a growing boy.”
“I’ll bring back milk and eggs,” he promised. “Don’t worry.”
The lunch was eaten quickly. David and John returned to finding ways to safeguard the house and barn and Sarah turned her attention back to the stove and bread-making. Although never much of a baker she had, in one of her more industrious moods, typed in a recipe for bread on her phone. But the battery had long since gone dead and, besides, the robbers had taken all their phones last night. Sighing, she tried to remember the ingredient amounts. Baking is a science, she knew. You could wing it to a certain extent when you cooked, but baking needed exactness. She pulled open drawers in the kitchen, looking for a bread recipe.
She glanced at the starter on the counter and knew she couldn’t waste it by experimenting. She thought of the disappointment on John’s face if she had to tell him tonight that there was no bread. By God, she was going to make him bread today! Was it so much to ask that she give her child a slice of damn bread?
Sarah crossed the living room and began pulling books off the shelves. Mostly they were paperbacks left by previous vacationers. She stacked them carefully—in case they ended up being the only things they had to read for the next few months—and even opened the pages to see if, by some miracle, a recipe index card had been used as a bookmark. Before she’d abandoned books entirely and gone strictly to e-readers, she’d kept favorite recipes on index cards which she laminated and used for bookmarks. She paused for a moment remembering that. She did used to do that. What an odd, endearing habit, lost now in her love affair with her Kindle.
On the very bottom shelf of the bookcase, she found it. And when she did, she literally whooped with delight. Not just a recipe, but a cookbook. And not just any cookbook but Joy of Cooking—a cookbook from her very own kitchen library, and one she knew as well as a beloved novel. Finding it felt like the first real stroke of luck since the crisis. Like a turning point, somehow.
An hour later, with the dough rising under a thin, worn dishtowel she had found in another kitchen drawer, Sarah walked outside into the sunshine. She felt like she had accomplished something no less significant than whatever David had been doing to shore up their physical defenses. As the mother, she felt she’d done her job to tend her nest and protect her hatchling. She was surprised by a stack of wood outside the kitchen door. John had collected and stacked the wood without being told. She scanned the vacant courtyard between the barn and the house. Maybe, she thought, just maybe there’s some little good to all this mess.
David came out of the barn, wiping his hands on his jeans.
That’s not good, Sarah thought sourly. We don’t have an automatic washing machine any more. Unless you count me.
“Hey,” he said, walking toward her and smiling. “I think I’ve done as much as can be done to secure the place. They’ll have to take crowbars to get in next time.”
“Great,” she said. “Horses okay?”
He looked over his shoulder toward the pasture.
“I turned them out,” he said. “They were getting really skitterish in the paddock.”
Just the thought of the horses “skitterish” made Sarah’s stomach clench.
“Do you know for a fact that the pasture is fenced?” she asked.
He looked at her in surprise. “I thought all pastures were fenced.”
“Maybe we’d better do a perimeter check, to be sure,” she said. “Where’s John?”
“I thought he was in the house.”
Sarah literally vibrated with the anxiety that pulsed through her at his words. For a moment, she felt like she might hyperventilate. Instead, she found herself turning toward the pasture at a run.
“Grab the halters,” she said. “And catch up with me.”
They walked and called for forty minutes before Sarah turned back. They found all three horses but not John. She led Dan and the pony. David led the big bay he called “Rocky.” Both Rocky and the pony had nameplates on their stalls but unlike Dan’s theirs were in Gaelic. After a day of struggling to pronounce their names, David and John rechristened the two “Rocky” and “Star.”
There was no fence.
“This isn’t Mandarin,” she said to David, referring to the neighborhood in Jacksonville where they lived. “You can’t just let him go do his own thing. He’s only ten years old.”
“I thought he was with you,” David said. “I’m sorry...”
“We were broken into last night! What if those people are still around? What if they have him?”
“Look, I know—”
“No, you don’t know! You don’t know, David!”
It took every ounce of emotional strength she had not to physically or verbally launch into David. Some part of her knew he wasn’t to blame for John being missing. She had never felt so powerless, so ineffectual, in her whole life, especially now when the stakes were so high. She was so upset she didn’t even think about the fact that she was leading a horse on either side of her. Her focus was on getting her boy back. She turned to walk back to the house, praying that John was there.
“You keep looking for him out here,” she said. “I’m going to see if he’s back at the cottage.”
“We’ll find him, Sarah,” David called after her, the panic and fear in his voice belying his words. “I’m sure he’s just exploring.”
Sarah didn’t bother replying. She was angry and afraid, a combination of which she had felt pretty much nonstop since the crisis had happened. She felt as if her whole world were hanging on by a thread, with nothing certain, nothing secure.
It was early afternoon but already it seemed as if the sun had disappeared. The light was grey, and dark clouds scudded across the sky. What if he gets caught out here and it storms? One of the horses shied at something in the grass and Sarah dropped the lead rope. She quickly snatched it back and tried to calm him, convinced it was her own anxiety that had caused him to panic in the first place.
Damn horses, she thought. They can read your mind. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her nerves, for their sakes if not her own. She estimated that she was about fifteen minutes from the cottage. If David found John in the pasture and they rode double on Rocky, they could actually beat her back to the house. The thought comforted her and she walked on, pushing thoughts of crumpled little boy forms and wild dogs from her mind.
Cresting the last hill, she saw their cottage below. The courtyard was empty but something caught her eye in the pasture behind the house. A small herd of fluffy white sheep were moving steadily toward the cottage. Sarah looked closer and could see John’s red shirt in front of the flock. He was leading the sheep by a rope.
Tears of relief came to her eyes. He was safe and sound.
He waved and she started down the hill to meet him.
“Where’s Rocky?” he asked when they met up.
“Dad’s got him. He’s up in the far pasture looking for you.”
“How come?”
>
Sarah shifted both lead ropes to one hand and hugged him tightly.
“John,” she whispered into his hair. “You scared us to death. We didn’t know where you were. Did you tell anyone you were leaving?”
John moved out of her hug. “Mom, stop. You’re pinching me. I didn’t realize I was leaving,” he said, “until I got the idea about the sheep.”
“You must never ever do that again,” Sarah said, gently shaking his shoulder with her free hand.
“Sorry, Mom,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. She steadied herself with a long breath. The fear and anxiety of the last hour would take awhile to abate. “So, what’s with the sheep?”
“They’re ours.” He twisted around to show her the tag in the ewe’s ear that he was leading. “See? It matches the brand at Cairn Cottage. You know? The one in the barn on the stalls?”
“Sheep,” she said. “That’s nice.”
“Mom,” he said with exasperation. “We can make wool from their fur, you know? We’ve got sheep, now.”
“Well, let’s get them into the paddock,” she said. “Why were they wandering about out there anyway? Do they live out there?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I just thought we should get all the stuff that’s ours in one spot, you know?”
“Good logic,” she said. “Next time tell someone you’re leaving, though. We were worried sick.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, leading the way down the hill to the paddock. Sarah let the flock go ahead and followed with the two horses.
Later that night, after a dinner of perfectly baked bread and scrambled eggs, Sarah sat on the couch with the cookbook on her knees reading about how to make butter from goat’s milk. David and John played cards by the fireplace.
“You know, we can eat the sheep, too,” David said.
“These sheep are not for eating,” John said, firmly. “They’re for the fur.”
“The wool,” Sarah said.
“Yeah, for sweaters and blankets and stuff. Mom knows how to knit.”
All of a sudden the room reverberated with the sound of a shrill scream. David and John were on their feet in an instant.
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 Orc
a 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.
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