Susan Kiernan-Lewis - Free Falling

“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 “being 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.