Chapter 3 – The Angel's Shivering
"Ouch."
Elizabeth stopped walking across the front room's wooden floor as she reached out and gently extricated her long brown hair from her son's tiny fist.
"You are a strong one, little man. Just like your daddy. But no pulling mommy's hair, please."
She kissed the little boy on the forehead before bending down and placing him on his back on the soft piece of carpet which was surrounded on all four sides by three-feet high vertical wooden bars.
"I think maybe your father was right about this contraption after all."
She smiled as she thought about when Jack had first brought it into the mercantile house and set it down in front of the large plate glass window. The sun had shone through the glass warming the area with its yellow beams.
"Jack! It looks like a miniature jail cell! I am not putting my son in that!"
"First of all, he'll like it. He's spent enough time with me at the jail that he's accustomed to bars."
"He's three months old! I don't want him accustomed to cell bars!"
Jack snickered as he took his son from Elizabeth's arms and set him down in the enclosure.
"Second of all, when I'm away, you'll need to be able to put him down and not worry about him. Especially when he starts crawling."
"I can't believe you made our son his own personal jail cell", Elizabeth had replied in surprised disgust.
"It's called a playpen. I saw an advertisement for one in your Sears Catalog and figured it was easy enough to make. You'll see that I'm right."
Now, Elizabeth looked at her son and grinned. "It appears that your daddy knows us pretty well. Now, you stay in your little cell while I make some soup."
Elizabeth, with her sleeves unbuttoned and rolled up to above her elbows, grabbed the raw chicken and smacked it down on the cutting board as she continued talking over her shoulder to her son in the other room.
"Your daddy will be home in two or three days. If I make the chicken soup now, he can have it whenever he gets here. I'll just have to warm it up. See, isn't that smart of me? You have a very smart mommy."
Elizabeth arranged the chicken with the breast side up and then pulled one leg away from its body. Stretching the wing as far as it would go. Holding the heavy cleaver above the joint, she took a deep breath before slamming it down into the fowl.
The rectangular-bladed hatchet hit the flesh and bone, releasing the leg from the rest of the body, and causing Elizabeth to jump back in confusion. She hastily dropped the cleaver onto the counter and stared at the chicken carcass.
Elizabeth shook her head to clear her mind and picked up another leg of the chicken, pulling it away from the breast.
She shook her perplexed head again; chiding herself for being silly.
Elizabeth slammed down the cleaver again, brutally detaching the limb.
This time, she reacted more in fear than just simple confusion.
What the heck is going on?! It's just a simple chicken. I've chopped up chickens before, she thought in bewilderment.
She took a deep breath and looked at the knife and the chicken on the counter. Grabbing a third leg, she pulled it aside and quickly smashed the blade down.
She jumped back and began trembling.
A frightened Elizabeth looked at the cleaver in her hand and quickly dropped it. Staring it as if it were a snake that would reach out and bite her. She felt her heart begin to race. The anxiety coming over her.
The knife made a thud as it hit the counter and then bounced off and landed on the floor.
Elizabeth looked at a single drop of chicken blood as it lay splattered on the counter next to the dead bird.
Her body shivered and she ran her hands along her arms to warm herself.
Elizabeth, without having a logical reason, hurriedly picked up the chicken pieces and the cleaver, which now scared her. Without hesitation, she carried them out the back door and threw them in the trashcan in the alley behind the house. For some unknown reason, she never wanted to see the cleaver again.
Still shivering, she closed the door, locking it tightly, and hurried back into the front room.
She gazed down at Little Jack, or Thatch as Jack loved to call him, as he waved his fists back and forth, moving his lightweight blanket in innocent curiosity at the realization that he had an incredible ability to hold things.
"Everything's alright, son. Mommy just got an odd feeling. That's all. But everything's alright."
Thatch ignored her as he continued to be mesmerized by the cloth in his hands, and Elizabeth knew that she was trying to reassure herself rather than the naive infant.
As she went back into the kitchen to wash her hands, she couldn't shake the feeling which she had gotten when the large kitchen knife had forcefully hit the body. Slicing it apart.
The faucet water ran over her hands as she rubbed the bar of soap between them.
She lingered at the sink, letting the water and suds swirl done the drain. Keeping her hands under the stream longer than necessary. Her mind trying to process what she was feeling. Why she was scared.
Jack, why does the cleaver make me think of you in danger? What in the world is going on?
"How did the chicken soup turn out? That was a good chicken you had. A nice size", Lucy Madison noted as they sat at her wooden kitchen table the next day.
Elizabeth didn't answer right away but paused for a moment, wondering how stupid she would sound as she voiced her concerns to her best friend in Bear Creek.
"Have you ever gotten a weird feeling for no reason when you're just going about your day?"
"What do you mean?" the pretty blond woman asked casually as she refilled their tea cups. "You mean like a Charlie horse in your leg?"
Elizabeth shook her head in disgusted annoyance. "No, not like a Charlie horse. . . More like a shivering that goes down your spine. Even when you're not cold."
Lucy put aside the tea kettle and reached for a plate of cookies. "You mean an Angel's shivering", she said knowingly.
"Angel's shivering?"
Lucy shrugged. "Angel's shivering. Angel's wings. Ghost's tingling. You know, when you get a tingling because an angel's wings are touching you. It means that an angel is checking in on you to see if you're doing okay because something tragic has happened to someone you love. Her wings have touched you as she flits around you. That's what Mary Mary always called it."
Elizabeth furrowed her brow. "Who's Mary Mary? And why is her name said twice?"
Lucy wiped the crumbs from her blouse and swallowed a bite of the sugar cookie before replying.
"She's my best friend back home. Her two grandmothers were both named Mary and each one insisted that she be named after them."
"But they had the same name! She could have just been called Mary", Elizabeth protested.
"How could she just be called Mary if she had two grandmothers? Her parents wanted her named after both of them. If they had just named her after one of them, the other one would have been insulted and hurt"
"But they had the same name!"
"But there were two of them!" Lucy explained again. "One plus one is two. You know, Elizabeth, sometimes I wonder about you. You're the teacher. You're the one that is supposed to be good at simple math."
Elizabeth shook her head in exasperation as Lucy wiped a napkin across her mouth, hiding her smile.
"So, tell me more", Elizabeth grumbled.
"If you had an Angel's shivering, something is happening to someone you love. Probably around the same time that you felt it, or just shortly beforehand. It's not always a death or something totally horrible, but it is something worrisome."
"Oh, shut up", Elizabeth said quietly.
"You asked me!"
Elizabeth remained quiet as she looked down at her tea cup and then shifted her gaze to the carpet where Lucy and Elizabeth's baby boys were lying and waving their limbs about.
"What were you doing when it happened?"
"Using a cleaver on the chicken", Elizabeth responded worriedly.
Lucy involuntarily cringed. "Oh, dear."
"Did you have a dream afterwards?" she gently added.
"Not that I remember. Why?"
"Mary Mary says you'll have a dream about the person. That's how you'll know who the shivering was about. Even if the person is far away, you'll know. It . . . It -"
"It what?"
"If you had the shiver when you were using a cleaver . . . the . . thing . . . the thing that may have happened . . well, it may have had something to do with a cleaver or knife or something."
When Elizabeth looked stricken, Lucy quickly finished her sentence in a more upbeat tone.
"Or maybe it just has something to do with a chicken!"
"This is silly. I am not listening to something a stupid woman with a duplicate double name says!" Elizabeth declared.
Lucy set down her own teacup and looked at Elizabeth with concern.
"Elizabeth, I've known Mary Mary my whole life. She's never wrong."
It had taken more than five minutes for Jack to crawl on the grass to his bag ten feet away.
The rain continued to pour down on him, soaking him until his body, pale due to a loss of blood, was shivering. He gratefully thanked the Force for routinely issuing him a bag made of tanned leather which kept its contents dry.
He wrapped the bag's thinnest portion around his arm and pulled it along with him as he continued to crawl, dragging his injured leg behind him, until he came to the protection of a pine tree which stood out in the otherwise grassy field.
When he leaned up against the spruce's large trunk, he scowled in irritation as he saw that his hat, filling with water, was now more than 20 feet away.
Idiot! he chided himself. Now I'll have to go back to get it! . . . .Forget it. I'll drink later.
Looking down at his leg, he sighed when he saw the pine needles now sticking to the bloody gash.
It was as if nothing was going his way.
Gingerly, he used his fingers to pluck out the conifer's needles, wincing as he touched his sliced-open flesh.
As he removed the last needle and reached into his bag, Jack glanced over at the dead body which lay thirty feet away to his left. It had taken two bullets to kill the man.
That meant he had five rounds left.
Please don't make me have to use them, he thought tiredly. I just want to go home to my family.
I just want to go home and hold my family.
Up next: Chapter 4