CHAPTER THREE
The first day had been the hardest.
The terror and insecurity of knowing just enough and nothing more was literally almost more than Sarah could bear.
Were their homes bombed? Was Washington still there? Were her parents still alive? The frustration of no news—of not being able to do anything while death and destruction dismantled their country—was an agony. All she could think was: we have to do something!
The town of Balinagh was ten miles away—too far to comfortably walk over rough and rocky Irish back roads—but there was no other way of getting there.
“Why can’t we ride?” John asked for the hundredth time.
“John, please stop asking me that,” Sarah said. “We don’t know if these horses are used to being ridden—”
“There are saddles all over the barn.”
“But if they haven’t been ridden in a while,” Sarah replied as patiently as she could without screaming, “they’ll be too difficult for us to handle.”
“Not for you,” he said stubbornly.
“It’s been too long since I rode,” she said. “I’m too rusty to be jumping on some horse I don’t know.”
“They seem gentle,” David offered.
Sarah stood up from the porch step where she had been sitting.
“Both of you, listen to me,” she said with exasperation. “They might be gentle on the ground but hell on wheels once you’re in the saddle.”
“Why don’t we try one out in the paddock?” David looked at his son who nodded enthusiastically.
“David, are you serious?” She looked at him with horror. “And what if one of us breaks something? Are you going to set the bone? Horses are not like golf carts, you know. They have minds of their own.”
So that day they walked into town. In slightly less than four hours, they arrived tired, foot sore, blistered, and thirsty.
The first person they met was Siobhan Scahill, the dairy and pub owner.
“Sure, why would you be walking and you with three big horses just standing around?” she said as soon as they walked into her grocery shop which was lighted only by the daylight coming in through the big shop windows.
Sarah wanted to slap her.
“Mom says we need to take things slow,” John replied.
“Sure, it’s slow you’ll be taking things, all right,” the woman said. She reached over and tousled John’s hair. “But I’m sorry for your troubles. Sure, the Americans are a hard lot to take for the most part but we love ‘em, God knows we do. My own boy, Michael, lives in New Jersey.”
Sarah tried not to break down crying right in the store.
“Have you heard from him?” David asked. “Or any news at all?”
The woman shook her head.
“Sure, no,” she said. “Just something terrible bad, that’s for sure. The telly went out about two hours ago with the rest of the power.” She indicated the dark overhead light fixtures. “My Michael is hard to locate at the best of times. If I don’t hear from him in another few weeks, I’ll start to worry.” She nodded to the shelves in her store. “People have already come to stock up and I don’t expect much in the way of deliveries, now do I? What took you so long to come to town?”
“We woulda driven,” John said. “But our car won’t start.”
“No, nor anybody else’s,” Siobhann said. “Although Jimmy Hennessey did say he got his tractor to working.”
“You’ve got nothing at all?” David asked, looking about the store. “No milk, no cans of stuff?”
“Sorry, no,” she shook her head. “I’m dead cleaned out. But you’re staying at the McKinney place, aren’t you?”
“McGutherie,” Sarah said.
“McGutherie’s burned down last year,” Siobhan said.
Last year?
“I’m sure it’s the McKinney place you’re at now,” Siobhan said. “Friends of the McGutherie’s. More of a weekend cabin, not really a tourist rental?”
“That explains a lot.”
“But you’ve got the goat, don’t you?”
“There’s a goat?” John said.
“Sure, there’s a goat and sheep and didn’t Mary McKinney keep a stocked root cellar? Have you looked?”
David gave his wife’s shoulders a squeeze. “We’ll look,” he said. “Where are the McGuthries now?”
“They’ll be living in London, won’t they?”
“But the emails I got from her said there were caretakers. We don’t know how to take care of horses, or where to wash our clothes—” Sarah felt the panic blossom in her chest.
“Well, sure you’ll be needing to take care of the horses. Don’t tell me the poor things haven’t eaten since you’ve arrived?”
“They’ve eaten some grass,” John offered.
“I suppose there’s horse feed in this root cellar, too?” David said.
“There is.”
“And the caretakers?” Sarah persisted, refusing to be shamed by the woman.
“I’ll not be knowing anything about any caretakers,” she said. “Unless it’s yourselves.”
“We’re the caretakers. Great.”
“Who’s been taking care of the horses until now?” David asked.
“Likely that would be the Kennedys. They live about five miles the other side. Now they know you’re there, they’ll leave it to you, I imagine.”
“How much for this lantern?” David pointed to a kerosene lantern sitting high up on a corner shelf.
“Sure, there’s bound to be ten of ‘em at Cairn Cottage,” the woman said.
“That’s the name of our place?” Sarah asked.
“I’d like it all the same,” David said, reaching for his wallet. “And I see you still have matches and a jug of kerosene.”
As David and the shopkeeper busied themselves filling a small but essential shopping bag, Sarah stepped outside and looked down the deserted village street. John followed her.
“Will we get rickets?” he asked her.
“What, sweetie?”
“Rickets. We read about it in school. When you don’t get fresh fruit and stuff your bones start to go bad.”
“No. We’ll find fresh fruit and vegetables.”
“How about a hamburger?”
“That may be a bit trickier.”
A few moments later, David joined them.
“She said she’ll hold our lantern and fuel ‘til we’re ready to leave. There’s a little restaurant down the way,” he nodded down the street. “Siobhan thinks they’re still serving. Guess the locals don’t eat out much.”
“Siobhan?”
“Yeah, she’s not really awful. In fact, I think she means to be helpful. Just Irish-y.”
“Let’s eat, guys,” John said, pulling his parents down the street.
Sarah walked ahead of David. Maybe because she didn’t look like she was walking with anyone, a man coming toward them in the opposite direction got eye contact. Her first impulse was to smile, as she might at the drive-through cashiers of a fast food restaurant, so it startled her when the man leered back. He was thin and young and dirty. Sarah noted his filthy beard and scruffy clothes which looked like he’d slept in them. She smelled him as he walked past. Stung by his visual assault, she turned to get David’s attention as the man passed.
“Did you see that?” she said. But David was looking at the shuttered and dark village windows. He met her eyes with a distracted, vacant look that told her he wasn’t listening or even seeing her.
Peeved and tired by the already long day, Sarah shook off her annoyance and focused on keeping up with her son.
“Wait for us, John,” she called, hurrying to catch up with him and leaving David to his private reflections.
Later that afternoon, stuffed with mutton and potatoes, they collected their purchases from Siobhan’s store and made the long walk home. John was tired and so fretful. Sarah began limping before they had turned the first corner out of town. And David’s shoulders were
aching from carrying the heavy bag by the time, four and a half hours later, they finally walked into the frontcourt of Cairn Cottage at twilight.
David opened the door to the dark interior of the cottage. He went in first and set the bag down. “Power is definitely out,” he called to them. “Give me a sec to get the lantern lit.”
“I’m tired, Mom.” John sighed heavily.
Sarah wrapped her arms around him, grateful they were so far away from the destruction and confusion of what was happening at home, and then feeling instantly anxious about her parents and what they might be experiencing at that very moment. It seemed like such a basic, little thing, she thought, to have a warm, well-lit place in which to curl up tonight. “I know, angel,” she said. “Just a few more seconds and you’ll be in bed.”
A few moments later, the one room of the cottage glowed warmly from the kerosene lantern.
“We’re good, family,” David said.
Later that night, as John slept soundly in the big bed, Sarah and David sat on the porch with the lantern between them and finished off a bottle of Pinot Noir.
“I can’t imagine what’s happening at home,” Sarah said, shivering in her heavy sweater.
“I know.”
“And you don’t have any theories about what happened? That’s so unlike you.”
David sighed. “From what I saw,” he said, speaking deliberately as if carefully choosing every word, “and from what Siobhan heard from other people in the area, I think what happened is that a nuclear bomb exploded over London or maybe the Irish Sea.”
“Oh, my dear God.”
“And the reason that’s my best guess,” he said, putting his arm around Sarah and giving her a reassuring squeeze, “is because of the big flash we saw earlier and because none of our electronics work any more.”
“Nuclear radiation did this?”
“No, it’s called electromagnetic pulse. It’s hard to explain but the results of it are what we’re experiencing now.”
“If it is this electromagnetic thing, how long until things get back to normal?”
“Everything has to be rebuilt,” he said. “All the cellphone towers are fried, all the cars, the power grid. It’s a total destruction of the infrastructure.”
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,” David 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 h
er. “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.
“Look,” his mother said. “It’s only September so there should be berry patches somewhere. Tomorrow we’ll go looking. And there’s a jar of jam in the cabinet—”
“With nothing to put it on,” John complained.
“I’m going to make bread tomorrow,” Sarah said.
“You are?” David asked.
“We’ve got salt and water and bags of flour in the cellar. I don’t think I even need yeast to make it work.”
“Eggs would be good,” David said as he got up to clear the table. “I wonder if we can meet up with our neighbors and maybe trade something for some eggs.”
“How do we cook ‘em?” Sarah asked. “We’ll need butter or lard. This is all so difficult.”
“Let’s just take this one step at a time.”
“Who knows we’re here?” John asked.
“What do you mean? Our whole family knows we’re in Ireland.”
“What if they’ve all been killed?”
“Don’t even say that, John. Our family is fine, I know it. They’re probably working right this minute to try to get us home.”
“What if it’s worse for them? Maybe they don’t even have a house? At least we have a roof.”
The rain began again as if to underscore the point.
“Trust me, sweetie,” Sarah said as she kissed him. “If no one comes for us, we’ll get out and back home on our own somehow.”
“Promise?”
“Absolutely.” She looked at David and he nodded at John.
“Promise, son,” he said.
Sometime in the middle of the night, Sarah put a hand out to touch her husband’s shoulder but felt only the cold place where his body had been in the bed. She saw his silhouette as he stood at the living room window. She watched him staring out into the dark night. She knew there was nothing to see.
Watching him, she could feel the anxiety and tension pinging off him in waves. “David?” she whispered.
He turned but made no move toward the bed. “Go back to sleep, Sarah,” he said. “I’ll be there in a bit.” His voice sounded hoarse and muffled—as if he’d been crying.
Sarah lay back down but now she couldn’t sleep either.