The two women had spent hours browsing through the larders among the makeshift shelves of potted and preserved foods, trying to find something that might somehow bring back the flavor of the old birthday parties.
“Listen to us, Mac,” Jeanne had said, “talking about ‘old’ birthday parties. Like they happened a century ago.”
“It was more than a century,” he’d replied. “It was a lifetime back. It’s only a year or so since the old times. But they’re never going to come back. Not ever.”
There’d been venison, a whole haunch cooked over an open fire in the backyard, though Mac and the two older boys had been concerned about the smell of the roasting meat attracting bad company.
Canned vegetables were offered with the roast, followed by an assortment of pies and pastries. Some fresh bread with almost the last of their shrunken supply of precious butter was also put on the table.
Angel had baked a beautiful cake, rich with dried fruits and marzipan. The only container large enough in the house for all the ingredients was the blue-and-white porcelain bowl from the bedroom.
It dated back into the eighteenth century, carried by Mac’s ancestors from Scotland. The blurred outlines of the ancient flowers and thistles were barely visible on its smooth sides. Now it stood to one side of the sideboard, dangerously close to where Jack was perched.
The cake was ornamented with multicolored icing. Pamela’s great love had always been reading, so Angel had made a pile of books from the sugary marzipan, setting them on a green grassy bank with a vivid blue stream flowing by.
“Time to cut the cake,” said Mac.
“Yeah,” chorused Paul and John. “Let’s hear it for the cake.”
“So beautiful, so rich,” breathed Jeanne.
Pamela, eyes sparkling, stepped forward to the cake, holding a long butcher’s cleaver in her right hand. She’d told everyone that she wasn’t going to dress up, not even for her own eighteenth birthday, and wore denim dungarees. But the cameo brooch glittered on one of the straps, and the tiger’s-eye ring shone on her left middle finger.
All around the cake, on its large turquoise plate, lay the detritus of the extraspecial meal. The ragged side of venison, dried bones thrusting through the frayed remains of the rich, dark meat. A bowl of buttered carrots, pallid grease congealing on its edges. The white sauce, flavored with nutmeg, now crusted and cold.
Mac wondered for a moment whether they should have cleared the table to give extra pride of place to the beautiful cake.
But it was too late now.
“Too late,” he whispered to himself.
A few minutes ago he’d been distracted from the gift giving by the sound of a dog barking furiously a couple of hundred yards north, toward the frozen creek.
Now it had stopped, and the New England evening was totally silent.
“Make a wish as you cut it, honey,” said Angel. “But don’t tell anyone what it is, or it’ll never come true.”
The metal blade of the broad knife touched the green icing, near the pile of marzipan books.
“I wish…” Pamela began teasingly, her eyes closed, a half smile on her lips.
A wrenching of metal broke the expectant quiet. The heavy security shutters were torn off the east window of the room, and a Molotov cocktail hurtled through the glass to explode against the sideboard.
Flaming gasoline sprayed everywhere, covering the screaming figure of young Jack.
Simultaneously there was an enormous thundering blow against the front door, cracking it off its hinges. A shotgun was fired through the broken window, the starring lead catching John McGill through the throat, tearing his neck apart and rupturing his windpipe.
His blood splattered across the room, into Pamela’s face, patterning the untouched icing of her cake with streaks of crimson.
“Guns!” Mac yelled above the screaming. “Get the guns!”
Jack, his clothes ablaze, had fallen from the sideboard and was running toward the hall. Angel grabbed him and flung him bodily to the floor, covering him with her body and beating at the flames with her bare hands.
It was a world of noise and fire and hideous violence.
Despite the appalling and unexpected carnage, the family had been well trained.