Susan Kiernan-Lewis - Free Falling

Sarah stared out into the dark Irish night.

“Oh, my God,” she said, her voice a whisper.

“I’m sure everyone is already working on rebuilding things,” he said. “But it will take time.”

“In the meantime,” Sarah said, “We’re safe?” She looked at him for confirmation.

“We’re safe,” he said.

She tilted her face up to her husband. They kissed and then sat in silence a moment. Sarah could see David was working something out in his mind. As the wife of a philosophy professor, she was used to long bouts of silence between them as he mulled through complex thought.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“Just wondering,” he said, rubbing her arm and looking out into the black Irish night. “Where do you imagine that damn goat is?”

When they awoke the next morning, Sarah made cheese sandwiches and mugs of tea for breakfast. The first thing they did was locate the root cellar. They found potatoes, two cases of a decent Côte de Rhône, three bags of flour, sweet feed for the horses, and several dozen tins of meat.

David dragged a bag of feed and the three of them went into the stables. It was obvious that the horses’ stalls had not been mucked out for weeks.

“Oh, shit,” Sarah said when she saw it.

“Literally,” David said.

“What do we do?” John asked, holding his nose.

“First, we get them out of there to someplace where they won’t run away so we can feed them and clean out their stalls,” Sarah said. “I’ll do one and you do two,” she said to David. “And you stay out of the way so you don’t get kicked,” she said to John.

“Aw, Mom.”

She took a leather halter off the hook in front of the first stall.

“I can’t believe we’re on our own with these animals,” she said. “Unbelievable.”

She opened the first stall door. The name “Dan” was on a tarnished metal plaque on the door.

“Whoa, there, Dan,” she said as she stepped into the stall. “Just gonna arrange breakfast and do a linen change, big guy.” Carefully, she approached the horse and slipped the halter over his head. “Hand me the lead, would you, David?”

He looked around.

“It’s like a big rope or leash,” she said, buckling the halter. The horse was big, at least seventeen hands. He was a dark bay with a blaze on his forehead. She was grateful for his calmness and tried to force herself to relax.

He handed her the leather lead he had found hanging on the wall. She clipped the lead to the halter and led the horse out of the stall. “We’ll just put them all in the paddock while we clean up,” she said. “God, it’s a mess in there. My shoes are already ruined.”

She stood, frozen for a moment, staring at the manure and holding the rope attached to the horse. “What are we going to do, David?”

“I thought you said we needed to remove them first,” David said, frowning.

“No, I mean about everything,” Sarah said. She looked over her shoulder to make sure John was still outside tossing the ball he had found against the wall of the house. “Don’t you think we should try to get to Limerick? There should be an American consulate there.”

“Sarah, no.” David shook his head emphatically. “If this was some kind of nuclear bomb that went off then there could be a risk of nuclear contamination in the cities.”

“I don’t think staying here is a good idea,” she said. She looked around for a place to tie up the horse. She knew she was telegraphing her anxiety and frustration to him. He had started to stamp his feet and that made her more nervous. “We can’t even feed ourselves here. I want us to go to Limerick.”

“Okay, Sarah, that’s crazy. How are we going to get there? Walk? It’s like two hundred miles or something.”

“You just made that up!”

“It doesn’t matter how far away it is,” he said, jabbing the pitchfork into a pile of manure and narrowly missing his topsider. “Even if the cities aren’t radioactive, it’s still a bad idea. For one thing, Americans aren’t going to be too popular wherever we go.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean whatever has happened, it’s because of us . You get that, right? Either someone did this to us and the UK is paying the price of being our friend, or we retaliated. But however it went down it still adds up to the Americans being the ones at the center of this disaster.”

Sarah stared at him, the will to fight left her as the realization of what he was saying began to sink in.

“Should we…should we stay away from town, do you think? There are no laws now to protect us.” She clasped her hands as the fear sifted through her. “Should we stay out of Balinagh even?”

“I don’t know,” Mat said, picking up the pitchfork again. “But I do think we’re safer here in the country on a whole bunch of different levels.”

“Mom, I saw rubber boots in the room where all the saddles are hanging.”

Sarah hadn’t noticed John enter the barn and wondered how much he had heard.

“Oh, thanks, sweetie,” she said. She gave David a this-isn’t-over look and untied the horse, Dan, to lead him out to the paddock.

“See if there are a pair for me, too,” he called after her.

An hour later, all the horses had been fed and their stalls cleaned. David threw the pitchfork onto the muck cart and pulled the cart behind the barn where there was a huge pile of manure.

“I wonder if I have a job to go home to,” he said to himself as he dumped the steaming horseshit onto the pile.

“I guess we won’t know until communications have been restored.” Sarah came up behind him, and wiped her hands on a towel.

He looked up at her. “That might take months.”

“And you think we should just live here in the meantime?”

“Got any better ideas?”

She looked at the pile of horse manure. “My God, how our lives have changed in the blink of an eye.”

“Come on,” he said, grabbing the cart to steer it back around the barn. “Let’s find the damn goat.”

The goat was in the pasture with a kid.

John was delighted. “Isn’t he cute, Mom?” He laughed as the baby goat jumped around him.

“Does this mean we can’t milk her?” Sarah asked.

“Were you going to milk her?” David asked with surprise.

“Well, I assume that’s what Siobhan meant when we said we needed milk and she referenced the goat.”

David laughed. “God, this keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

“Do we let them run wild out here?” She looked at the huge pasture. “I mean, is this where they live?”

“Beats the heck out of me,” he replied, running his fingers through his hair.

“Do we feed them? Can’t make very nice milk if we don’t feed them grain, do you think?”

“Sarah, I have no idea,” David replied. “I’m a city boy.”

“Lotta help that is!” she said, laughing. “Just what I need on a farm in rural Ireland in the middle of a damn blackout with no food and no clue—a damn philosophy professor.”

He started to grin. “Well, I suppose I could analyze the bigger questions here.”

“Yeah, that’d be helpful,” she said. “God knows, you’ll have time to do it, too.”

They both laughed.

“Are you guys okay?” John asked, frowning. He was holding the squirming kid in his arms.

“We’re losing it!” Sarah said, still laughing.

“Well, I wish you’d both chill,” he said. “You’ve got a child to think of.” Which just set them off even more, with David holding his sides and tears coursing down his face.

That night they ate salted baked potatoes without butter and canned meat from the root cellar that looked and tasted like shredded Spam. John revisited his rickets question.