Free Black Hills (9781101559116) by Rod Thompson Page A

did the catching. She swore it was true, but to Cormac, it sounded like a pa-story.
    â€œDinner’s ready,” Lainey had called to him in the barn one day when he was cleaning stalls. Before going into the house, he washed up in a wash basin sitting on a small stand outside the door. The route to the table took him past Lainey bending to put a pan on the bottom shelf in the kitchen. Taking advantage of the situation without thinking it through, Cormac slapped her a good one across her bottom-side. Instantly her face clouded with anger and she stood up with flashing eyes, rubbing her backend.
    â€œYou nincompoop!” she screamed, and threw the pan at him, but Cormac only ducked and laughed at her, which only served to make her more angry. Yelling and screaming, she chased him out of the house with a cast-iron skillet held high with both hands. Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz exchanged looks, and the next day Mrs. Schwartz had them building Lainey her own bedroom. Cormac would have gone without dinner had Mr. Schwartz not stolen a piece of beef for him.

    Trips to town, though rare because of the distance, were something to which they all looked forward. Just before Lainey’s eighteenth birthday on March seventeenth, Mrs. Schwartz declared it to be time to go for supplies, and then in secret reminded Cormac that it would be a good time for them to get presents for Lainey.
    During their first year living as a family, Lainey had told him that her parents had been special people in Ireland and all of Ireland celebrated her birthday with the wearing of the green with her favorite shade being kelly green.
    â€œMrs. Schwartz,” Cormac began as he sat down at the table with a cup of coffee. “What kind of special people were Mr. and Mrs. Nayle? Lainey told me that on her birthday, all the people in Ireland wear her favorite shade of green to celebrate her birthday because her parents were important, but she didn’t say why they were important.”
    Mrs. Schwartz stopped churning the butter to look at him incredulously and then she looked at Mr. Schwartz. He was sitting straddle on a wooden bench, braiding two pieces of a broken rope together. They looked at each other for a long moment and then began to smile. The smile turned into a loud laughter and an accompanying loud guffaw by Mr. Schwartz.
    Cormac could only stare at the two in confusion, but knowing something was not right and Lainey had probably been stringing him along in some way, he felt his anger rising and his face turning red. “What?” he asked. “What are you laughing about?”
    They couldn’t answer with other than more peals of laughter. Cormac couldn’t sit still and got up from the table, knocking over the cup of coffee he had just poured for himself in the process, which only made the Schwartzes laugh harder.
    He didn’t understand what was going on but he was embarrassed and knew that somehow he had been made a fool of, Lainey was at the bottom of it, and he was darn well going to find out what it was all about. Cormac slammed the door on the way out, causing another round of loud laughter from the Schwartzes.
    It was at that moment that Lainey came around the corner of the house not ten feet away. “Uh oh,” she said, reading the look on his face in an instant and realizing she was in trouble. She had no idea what was the problem, but she knew Cormac well enough to know she had better get out of there real quick. With him hot on her heels, she ran for open spaces where the snow wasn’t so deep. She being the faster and could outrun him if she could just stay out of his reach until then.
    She was leading Cormac easily until snow that looked level on top was covering an eight-inch indentation in the ground below caused by a hog that had escaped the pen during the rains months earlier and had wallowed in the mud. Lainey’s feet broke through the snowy crust and sank to the ground, and she fell face