Susan Kiernan-Lewis - Free Falling

“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.

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?”