Guernica Read Free

one of us hits you with sheep shit?” Josepe said, having retrieved several dried
     dung biscuits.
    As he took aim at his brother, Josepe spotted a sliver of darkness banking tight circles above the hillside. “Justo, Justo,
     an eagle—are there lambs out there?” Josepe screamed.
    “Get the gun!” Justo yelled, leaping down onto a bale and rolling off onto his feet.
    Pascual Ansotegui’s rifl e was old before the turn of the century and the boys had never seen it fired. At thirteen, Justo
     was as strong as some of the men in the village, but Pascual had never taught him how to shoot. Josepe could hardly heft the
     iron weapon off the pegs in the shed. He dragged it to his brother with both hands at the end of the barrel, the butt bouncing
     along the ground.
    Justo took it from him, raised it to his shoulder, and waved the heavy barrel in the direction of the diving ea gle. Xabier
     knelt in front of him and grabbed the stock with both hands, trying to buttress his big brother’s hold.
    “Shoot him, Justo!” Josepe screamed. “Shoot him!”
    With the rifle butt inches from his shoulder, Justo pulled the trigger. The shot exploded in the barrel, and the recoil thrust
     Justo to the ground, bleeding from the side of his head. Xabier flattened out beside him, screaming from the noise. The shot
     did not even startle the eagle, which was now applying a lethal clench of its talons into the neck of a tiny, still-wet lamb.
    With Justo and Xabier down, Josepe charged. Before he could reach it, the ea gle extended its wings, hammered them several
     times into the ground, and lifted off on a downhill swoop just over Josepe’s head.
    Justo fought his way uphill to Josepe. Xabier, crying to the point of breathlessness, face freckled with his brother’s blood,
     ran in sprints and tumbles to a neighbor’s house for help.
    “Look for other newborns, and let’s get the ewes into the shed!” Justo shouted, regaining control. They saw no other lambs
     that were vulnerable, and they both herded the oblivious mother ewe, still dragging birth tissue, into the shed.
    The neighbors held Xabier to calm him. But what did he expect them to do? Where was his father, after all? “Boys your age
     shouldn’t deal with these matters and certainly shouldn’t be shooting rifles; it’s a good thing none of our stock was harmed,”
     they said. He couldn’t hear them over the painful ringing of his ears but read rejection in their faces.
    “Well . . . fine!” Xabier yelled, breaking away to rejoin his brothers.
    The shaken boys gathered in the shed and clutched the ewe, which was bothered not by the loss of its offspring, a development
     it had already forgotten, but by the fierce embraces of these boys, one of whom was bleeding all over her wool.
    When Pascual Ansotegui returned that evening, the boys stood in a line at the door, in descending order of age, and Justo
     briefed his father on the events. Pascual nodded. Justo and Josepe accepted his minimal response. Xabier, though, flared with
     indignation.
    “Where were you?” yelled Xabier, a spindle-thin nine-year-old in third-hand overalls stained with blood.
    Pascual stared without comment.
    Xabier repeated the question.
    “I was gone,” the father said.
    “I know you were gone; you’re always gone,” Xabier said. “We’d get along just as well if you never came back.”
    Pascual tilted his head, as if this would bring his youngest into clearer focus. He then turned away, pulled the floral apron
     from its peg on the hearth, and began to make dinner.
    Justo knew early that he, as the eldest, would someday assume sole control of Errotabarri, and his siblings understood that
     they would inevitably find work elsewhere. If inequitable to the younger children, the pattern assured survival of the baserri culture. Justo Ansotegui would claim his birthright and become the latest in the chain of stewards of the land that extended
     back to times when their ancestors painted