Rising From the Ashes: The Chronicles of Caymin (43 page)

“To himself, that’s all we are.” Eilish sighed in resignation. “I blame myself. If I hadn’t taught you to read and write and make lace…” She looked over at Orla, still kneeling by her father’s chair. “If I could, I’d send you to the nuns who raised me. You’d be safe there.”

Orla turned to her mother. “Mam? For how long must we go? Will we ever come home again to Ireland?”

Eilish looked at her sadly. “I don’t know, child.”

Chapter 1

Green.

Later, when Conn tried to recall her first memories of the farm, green was what she remembered. So many different greens. The dark blue-green of West Virginia mountain ridges covered in pines; the soft, dappled green of sunlight filtering through the leaves of the trees that lined the rural highways and roads they traveled; the rich, cool green of the grass around the farmhouse, grass that tickled her bare feet – the first time she could remember being allowed to go barefoot outside. But it was all mixed up with the greens in the dreams – the soft green fields dotted with stone cairns and crisscrossed with low rock walls; the deepening purple-green of the undersides of the grasses and heathers when a storm blew in from the sea. Except Conn had never been to the sea.

The station wagon’s tires crunched on the gravel of the dirt drive that wound uphill to the house. It took a couple of minutes for the dust cloud raised by the car to drift away and give them their first glimpse of the house.

“Oh no,” groaned Elizabeth.

The house looked haunted. The grass was knee-high. Several windows were broken, and the white paint was peeling, exposing the weathered grey clapboards underneath. Extending from one side of the house was a portion made of log with a small stone chimney. At the other end of the house, a larger stone chimney was almost completely covered by ivy so thick it looked solid in the deep shade of the enormous trees growing around the house – elms and maples and oaks and hemlocks with sad, droopy branches.

Ten-year-old Conn looked worriedly at her mother and said, “It’s not so bad. We can fix it up, Mom. And look at the beautiful trees. We didn’t have trees like this in New Mexico.”

The brown desert landscape around Sandia Base in Albuquerque seemed a world away. So did the day the Marines came to the door…

“Are we here?” Conn’s seven-year-old brother, Will, stirred in the back seat, unsticking his face from the vinyl where he’d been sleeping, scrunched between a stack of boxes and the side of the car.

They all climbed stiffly from their 1958 Chevy Nomad, “the same age as me,” Conn reminded Will frequently. “Daddy bought it the day I was born.”

“Well, let’s take a closer look,” Elizabeth sighed, tossing her thick auburn hair over her shoulder and letting her car door close.

They climbed the wooden steps to the deep front porch where a lonely-looking porch swing hung at one end. Elizabeth dug the house key from her purse and tried to work it into the lock. It finally slid in, but wouldn’t turn. She sighed in frustration as she tried to wiggle the key in the lock. Giving up, she said, “Let’s go around back.”

Conn led the way around to the screened porch on the back of the house. The screen door hung by one hinge, and inside the porch, the kitchen door was ajar.

“Hello?” Elizabeth called out, pushing the door open cautiously. All three humans jumped when two squirrels came racing through their legs.

Peering into the kitchen, it looked as if it had been ransacked. Cupboard doors stood open and drawers lay upside down on the floor. A huge wood-burning cookstove occupied one wall of the kitchen, while on an adjacent wall stood a cast-iron sink with an old-fashioned hand pump standing over it. A small electric icebox stood unplugged with its doors open. Cans of food were scattered everywhere. A bag of flour on the slate countertop had been chewed open and spilled onto the gray linoleum floor, the perpetrators leaving white telltale footprints all over the kitchen. “This is raccoon,” Conn pointed. She had recently studied animal tracks in Girl Scouts. “And this one is rabbit, I think.”

“Raccoon?” Will asked, moving closer to his mother and looking around uncertainly.

Conn peered into the log room and saw a squat stone fireplace with a swiveling iron hook.

“Let’s check out the rest of the house,” Elizabeth said, pushing open the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the dining room.

All the furniture in the dining room and sitting room beyond had been covered by white sheets. A broad oak staircase brought them to the second floor where there were three bedrooms with similar sheets covering the beds and dressers.

“I guess nobody’s been here since Nana died,” Elizabeth sighed.

Will couldn’t remember Nana at all, but Conn could, even though it had been five years. They had stopped to visit her on their way from Norfolk to New Mexico. Conn could recall sitting next to Nana on the front porch swing, holding her hand. Nana’s skin was soft and dry and wrinkly, but what Conn remembered most was that Nana chewed her nails, something Conn did also. Since then, whenever Elizabeth scolded Conn for biting her nails so short, Conn stubbornly declared it couldn’t be so bad if Nana did it.

“This used to be my room,” Elizabeth smiled as she pushed open the door of the room at the end of the hall.

Conn looked around. Outside one window was a large branch from one of the elm trees, so close she could have reached out and plucked some of its leaves. “Can this be my room now?” she asked.

“Sure,” Elizabeth answered, tousling her daughter’s short red hair. “Let’s take all the sheets off and clean everything before we unload the car.”

“Hey!” said Will a few minutes later from behind the large pile of sheets in his arms. “Where’s the bathroom?”

Elizabeth laughed. “I’ll show you.” She led the way back downstairs, gathering more sheets as she went through the sitting room. Outside, they all dropped their sheets on the grass. “There it is,” she said, pointing to an outhouse a short distance from the house.

“For real?” Conn asked, her eyes wide.

“For real,” Elizabeth replied. “And that’s the first thing we’re going to change. Come on. Let’s get cracking.”

Several hours later, the bedrooms were cleaned and beds made up with fresh sheets. The station wagon had been unloaded, the bikes untied from the roof and stored on the back porch. Elizabeth had found screens in the attic so they could open as many windows as possible to let fresh air into the musty rooms.

“Anybody want another sandwich?” Elizabeth asked, peering into the cooler serving as their makeshift ice box as the electric one wasn’t yet cold, though so far, it seemed to be working.

“No,” Will answered with a big yawn.

“Bed time, then. It’s been a long day.”

They made one last trip to the outhouse by the light of a flashlight. Elizabeth supervised the brushing of their teeth in the kitchen, pumping water for them at the sink, murmuring a prayer of thanks as it drew water after only a few dry pumps. Upstairs, she listened to each of the children as they knelt beside their beds and said their prayers, then kissed them both goodnight.

Will was asleep almost immediately, but Conn waited awhile then quietly stole out of bed and crept down the hall to her mother’s door. She sank to the floor, her back resting against the wainscoting, and hugged her knees to her chest as she listened to the soft sounds of her mother crying.

As she sat there in the dark, Conn tried to remember how things used to be when Daddy was home with them. He was a Marine helicopter pilot at Sandia and mostly flew high-ranking officers to other bases. She remembered hearing his car pull up, and running to leap into his arms, his bristly Marine haircut tickling her cheek. Then, last summer, just before Conn was to start the fifth grade and Will the second, they got the news that their father was being deployed to Vietnam. Most of their school friends already had a parent serving in Vietnam – mostly fathers, but a few mothers who were nurses. Sandia Base was shared by the Navy, the Marines and the Army, and was so big that it had its own schools for the children of the military personnel stationed there.

After their father deployed, she and Will would sometimes come home to find a letter from him waiting there. “My little leprechauns,” he called them. They would snuggle up on either side of their mother on the couch and ask her to read the letter over and over. Usually, there came a point when Conn could hear a shift in the sound of Elizabeth’s voice, and she knew her mother was close to tears. Conn would take Will to the kitchen table then, and help him write a reply to Daddy.

As hard as those months were, spending Thanksgiving and Christmas without Daddy, it all got harder in April. Conn remembered precisely when. It was April 5th, the day after Martin Luther King was shot. She remembered because they didn’t have school that day, so she was home when the doorbell rang. Will was still in bed, but Conn crouched at the top of the stairs and peeked down at the two Marines in their dress blues. They removed their white hats respectfully when Elizabeth opened the door, and one of them read from a letter in his hand, “It is with regret that we must inform you that Lieutenant Colonel Mark Mitchell has been shot down and is reported missing in action.” They spoke words of regret and condolence, handed Elizabeth the letter and left. As Elizabeth closed the door, she looked up and saw Conn. They stared at each other for several seconds before Elizabeth walked to the kitchen.

Conn went back to her room and waited. She tried to read the Nancy Drew mystery she had started, but she found herself listening for the sound of her mother’s footsteps on the stairs. When Elizabeth knocked softly and opened the door, Conn put her book down.

“You heard?” Elizabeth asked as she sat on the side of the bed.

Conn nodded. “What do we do now?”

Elizabeth laid her hand on Conn’s knee, still scabbed from a crash on her bicycle last week. “If anything happened to him, Daddy wanted us to go to Nana’s. We’ll wait for him there,” she said.

Conn nodded again, staring hard at Nancy Drew’s blond hair and blinking back tears. Elizabeth kissed Conn’s forehead and went to Will’s room to tell him.

That night, Conn had tiptoed to her mother’s bedroom door where she could hear her mother crying. She slid to the floor and sat there until the sounds quieted, and then went back to bed.

She had done this nearly every night since, standing guard as she was doing now in Nana’s house on this cool May night. She listened to the unfamiliar sound of crickets chirping as she waited. At length, her mother’s room was quiet. She padded back down the hall and crawled into bed.