When he came back, it was with Father. He stood for a long time at the window, staring out, and then he turned without a word and clattered down the wooden stairs. I looked at Jacob, and then we followed, Woof shadowing anxiously at our heels.
Down in the kitchen, Father pulled back the rug in front of the fire and lifted an iron ring that I had never really noticed before. The ring was stiff and crusted with dirt, but it came up, and with it a section of the boarded floor, dust and crumbs falling into a dark hole beneath.
Father swung himself down into the hole. It wasn’t much of a cellar, only a waist-deep pit with an earthen floor, but it was stacked full of crates and cardboard boxes, gone soft with damp. He passed out the first box, and as Jacob lifted it onto the kitchen table, the bottom gave way. The contents tumbled out, clattering onto the table and from there to the floor. The big box was full of smaller ones, brightly colored and heavy—9mm, it said on the side of each one, 100 rounds.
A cold feeling started in the pit of my stomach, and as Father passed out another box, it began to spread until the whole of my upper body felt numb. Where had he got all this from? It was not the same ammunition he used for the old shotgun hanging above the door. I knew by sight the shells for that and where Father kept them, locked in a tin in the dresser drawer.
We had learned to shoot with that old shotgun, aiming first at empty tins and then at rabbits that we skinned and stewed over the fire.
But these bullets were different. And something told me they were not meant for animals.
At last the table was covered with boxes, and Father opened up the smallest, which was a plastic crate with blue clips on each side. Inside were three handguns and two rifles.
“I’ve kept the war from you as long as I could,” Father said as he took out the guns and laid them on the table, side by side. He turned and looked at us—first Jacob, then me. “Do you understand? I’ve run from it as long as I could. But now the war has come to us. Now we have to fight.”
“What do they want?” I whispered.
“They want to win,” Father said. “They want our land. And they want our lives. So let’s make them pay for them.”
And he held out a handgun to me, butt first. When I took it, it was colder and heavier than I could ever have imagined. And the numbness spread over my whole body.
We did not go out for the rest of the day. We sat in the bedroom in silence, listening to the lowing of the cows, bellowing to be milked, and watching as the helicopters touched down and the men came scurrying out in camouflage gear to hide behind rocks and trees and bushes. When I closed my eyes, the gun felt hard and heavy in my hand. I could hear again the cracking roar and see Mother’s lifeless body falling on our doorstep.
Could I do it? Could I kill someone in cold blood as they had killed Mother?
I did not know. But the war had gone from being something remote and far away, the distant nightmare of a child, to something terrifyingly close. The only thing between us and the soldiers now was Father’s wall. It protected us—as real and solid as Father himself. But it hindered us too. For now I realized we could not see the soldiers on the other side. The ones farther away, encamped behind the trees—those we could see. But as the day wore on and afternoon became dusk and then night, I could see shadows flitting across the meadow and I knew that they were getting closer.
It was full dark when May said, “Woof?” in a little, scared voice. Turning, I realized that Woof was no longer in the room. For some hours now he had been pacing around the house, whining to be let out, but now there was no sound of his padding feet or his claws scrabbling against the back door.
“Woof!” I called as loudly as I dared, but there was no answering bark or sound of paws on wood.
Just then a voice came from outside. It was distorted by a megaphone so that I could not hear all the words, but some of them came through plain.
“Mr. Reynolds, Paul Reynolds . . . under arrest . . . surrender your weapons . . . come out.”
I looked at Father. His face was set and white in the thin moonlight, and he opened the window and leaned out, making me want to whimper with fear for him.
“I’ll go to hell first,” he shouted across the yard, into the darkness, but there was no immediate answer, only the far-off movement of shadows scurrying. Father dropped back down, his back to the wall, and he slotted a cartridge of ammunition into his gun. I heard voices, not amplified through a speaker this time but low and far away, as if they were readying themselves for something.
Then, all of a sudden, there was a loud, shocking click and a white, blinding light, like someone had ripped a hole in the heavens to let the daylight in. Only this was no daylight. Shading my eyes against the glare, I could see a square bank of floodlights had been fixed above the barn wall, battering us with its illumination. Now the soldiers could see us—but we could no longer see them. We could see nothing beyond the floodlights. Nothing but the wall.
My heart began to beat in my ears.
“Last chance,” I heard, in the tinny electronic boom of the megaphone, over the singing of my own blood. “. . . officers coming in . . . resist . . .”
Resist.
It sounded like a command.
Resist.
“You mind what I told you,” Father whispered. He took the safety catch off his gun. “You make them pay.”
I nodded.
And then a head came up above the wall.
What happened next was far quicker than it takes to tell.
Father stood up. He took aim. He fired, and the man on top of the wall dropped like a stone.
There was a volley of shots, Father fell back into the room, there was the sound of breaking glass, and a bullet zinged across the open room and struck the plaster of the wall behind May’s bed, opening a great white wound in the wall.
And that was when I saw—May was not there.
“May!” I cried hoarsely. Jacob stood up, looking wildly around, and there was another crack and he fell, hand to his shoulder, a great spreading stain coming out from under his hand. Father gave a cry of fury and let loose another dozen shots at the soldiers outside before dropping onto his knees and pressing a balled-up blanket to Jacob’s shoulder. Jacob was gasping and swearing with the pain, but he was alive.
For a moment I stood in terrible indecision, wondering whether to stay or go after May. But Jacob had Father. And who knew what May might do, downstairs, alone and panicked?
Making up my mind, I ran out of the room, ignoring Father’s urgent shout to stay put, and down the stairs, the gun heavy with foreboding in my hands. I knew before I got to the ground floor what had happened. I knew from the wind and the sound of the door banging against the wall.
May had gone.
She had gone after Woof.
From outside I heard a staccato exchange of fire.
“You shot my fucking son!” Father screamed, and he fired into the darkness.
Then, out of nowhere, a dog barking and barking and barking and May’s high voice calling, “Woof! Woof!”
A shot rang out, and then there was a sudden, horrific silence.
“Little girl,” I heard shouted from outside, not through the loud-hailer, but one soldier to another. “It’s a little girl!”
I heard feet on the stairs, and Father came running past me. He did not stop, even though they were coming now. Swarming over the wall, ten, twenty, forty of them, with helmets and masks. The house filled with a choking gas.