Ashfall

by Mike Mullin

  “What?” I asked, confused.

  Darla leaned close and hissed in my ear, “Arthritis, dumbass. Now lie still.”

  It was fine while she washed the outside of the wound with water. It hurt, but I could cope. When she started washing it with bourbon, I clenched my teeth and felt tears leak from my eyes. When she pried the flap of flesh open with her pocketknife, I screamed and passed out.

  Chapter 18

  When I awoke, I was desperate for both water and a place to pee. Odd that my body both craved water and needed to void it at the same time.

  I lifted my head to look around. A mistake, because it triggered a jackhammer headache that was worse, if possible, than the one I’d had before I passed out. I closed my eyes and rested my head, waiting for the pain to subside.

  After the headache had died down some, I reopened my eyes. There was still a small fire going—either I hadn’t been unconscious long or someone had been feeding it. I pushed the blanket off my torso and looked down. I was still naked. The clean area around my wound formed a big oval of pink skin on my otherwise gray, ash-stained body. An Ace bandage was wrapped tightly a few times around my chest, holding a folded white cloth against my side.

  Gingerly I slid my fingers under the cloth. I wanted to get a look at the wound. I pulled it up as gently as I could, but it was stuck. It hurt like crazy to pull the cloth free. The Ace bandage stretched just enough for me to take a look underneath.

  There was a huge cut on my side, about the same size and shape as a horseshoe. Darla had closed it with a row of neat stitches, at least thirty of them—I didn’t have the strength to count.

  I badly needed to pee. I had no idea where I was, where the bathroom was, or whether the toilet worked. I thought about peeing out the front door, but I didn’t know where that was either.

  I swung my bare feet off the couch and sat up. A bad idea. I must have still been short on blood, because what little I had rushed out of my head. The world started spinning around me, and I toppled forward onto the wood floor. Pain spiked in my side and head, and I let out a short, involuntary yell.

  Darla swept into the room a few seconds later. I was curled up on the floor in front of the couch, trying to summon enough strength to get up. She wore a T-shirt that came almost to her knees.

  “What the hell—are you trying to wake up everyone in the house?” she said.

  “No. Just looking for the bathroom. If you could point it out?”

  “Christ. Let me find something we can use for a bedpan.”

  Okay. I didn’t like that idea one bit. It was getting a bit embarrassing, exposing myself to this girl every time I saw her, especially since she found my “equipment” so unimpressive and didn’t mind telling me so. I certainly didn’t want to pee in front of her. Nonetheless, she had already left. I heard the clank of metal pans coming from an adjoining room. If I hadn’t already woken her mother, that racket was sure to.

  She returned holding a bread pan.

  “Really,” I said, “if you could show me where the bathroom—”

  “Can you even stand up?”

  I pushed my head and shoulders up off the floor, preparing to try.

  “Never mind! I don’t want you ripping all the stitches out of your side. I worked damn hard on those.” She grabbed me by my left arm and hoisted me onto the couch.

  I lay back, grateful to rest my pounding head. “Thanks for sewing me up. The stitches look good.”

  “Why were you poking at them, anyway? I put the bandage on you for a reason, dumbass.”

  “I just wanted to see them.” The insults she was dishing out were annoying, but I was grateful, anyway. She had probably saved my life with those stitches.

  “Hmm. Well, they turned out okay. I’ve never actually done that before, but I’ve watched doctors stitch me up twice. Wish I had curved needles like they used on me-would have made it a lot easier.”

  “You should be a doctor.”

  “Maybe. Don’t tell Mom we used her second-best bread pan for this, okay?” She put the bread pan on the couch next to me and stared expectantly. “So you need to pee or what?”

  “Yeah. Could you, like, turn your back or something?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Whatever, sure.” She stepped to the hearth and added a log to the fire.

  I pulled the pan to my groin, lined up my soldier and . . . nothing. It’s hard to pee when a girl’s in the room—even if her back was turned. And on top of that, I was worried about whether I could get it in the pan without splashing. I knew “performance anxiety” wasn’t exactly the right term, but something like that was going on. Or not going at all, rather.

  Darla had finished feeding the fire. “Are you ever going to do it?”

  “Yeah, I need to, but I can’t. Not with you standing there.”

  She let out an exaggerated sigh and strolled toward the kitchen. “Yell when you’re done.”

  It took a minute, but I finally got it done. Sweet relief. I didn’t splash, either. Well, not enough that anyone would notice. “Finished!” I called out.

  Darla returned and took the bedpan from me. I pulled up the blanket. Despite the fire, I was cold. “Any chance I could get some water?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, I should have thought of that. You need to drink a ton. Blood loss—your right boot was completely full when I pulled it off you. You lost some more while I was stitching you up. I’ll be right back.”

  When she returned, she was carrying two thirty-two-ounce plastic cups, like the ones I used to get at fast food restaurants. She handed me one. “Drink this. I’ll put the other one beside the couch.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t yell again unless it’s something important. Mom needs her sleep,” Darla said. Then she disappeared.

  Chapter 19

  I woke to a smell: something delicious wafting out of the kitchen. I retrieved the cup of water from the floor and drank it all. I lay back down, thinking about calling out and asking for food. Before I could act on the thought, I fell asleep again.

  The next time I woke, it wasn’t a sound or smell calling me from sleep. It was the imminent explosion of my bladder. My back hurt, too; I’d obviously been on that couch a long time.

  I heard someone moving in the kitchen, so I called out, “Hello?”

  Mrs. Edmunds came through the doorway. “My, I thought you were going to sleep through another day and night. You must be hungry.”

  “Yeah. But, um, where’s the bathroom?” I sat up, holding the blanket to my chest. “I think my eyeballs are yellow.” I must have wobbled a bit, because she rushed over and grabbed my left arm.

  “Sure you’re up for a walk?” She peered at my face.

  I nodded.

  “Okay, I guess there is something sloshing around in there.” Holding my left arm, she helped me stand. My head felt as if it might blow off my shoulders at the slightest breeze, but no way did I want to undergo the humiliating bedpan procedure again. I wrapped my left arm over her shoulder and held the blanket around myself with my right hand. Together we hobbled to the kitchen and from there into a bathroom.

  There was no toilet. A sink stood just inside the door, and a shower/tub combo was tucked against the far wall. Between them, where the toilet should have been, someone had run a plastic pipe out of the floor. A big red funnel, the type normally used for gasoline, was affixed vertically to the end of the pipe at about knee level.

  “Darla rigged it up. She calls it a squat tube. Although I guess you won’t have to squat.”

  “It goes outside?”

  “It connects to the septic system, like the toilet did. Now, it’s only for number ones. Number twos we’re burying over where the garden was, at the edge of the yard.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll leave this door cracked in case you need any help,” she said as she left.

  I leaned against the wall, supporting my weight with one hand and aiming with the other, and peed into the funnel. When I finish
ed, I twisted the knob on the sink, but nothing came out. What an idiot, I thought. Of course the water didn’t work. And of course what water they had would be too precious for hand washing.

  I was wrong. Mrs. Edmunds had laid a hand towel and a bowl of water on the kitchen table. I washed my hands as best I could one at a time, using the other to clutch the blanket around my body.

  The kitchen was dim. There was light filtering in through the windows, so it must have been daytime, but it was an ugly yellow-gray half-light. Even in the poor light, I could see the water in the bowl darken as I washed.

  Mrs. Edmunds walked into the kitchen carrying a pile of clothing. “Your clothes need some mending. These might be a little big on you; they were my husband’s.”

  “Oh, is he—”

  “Dead.”

  “Sorry. . . .”

  She shrugged. “Three years, five months ago. He was cleaning out a cattle grate.”

  I didn’t see how that could have led to his death, but it didn’t seem polite to ask. I took the pile of clothes in one hand, hugged it to my chest, and hobbled to the living room to get dressed.

  When I returned to the kitchen the stove was on. The blue flame of the burner was shockingly bright in the dimness. Mrs. Edmunds was spooning some kind of thin yellow batter into a frying pan. It smelled heavenly.

  “The gas works here?” I said.

  “We’re on propane,” Mrs. Edmunds replied. “As long as the tank holds out, we’ll be able to use the stove. Then I guess we’ll have to switch to the fireplace for cooking.”

  “Where’s Darla?”

  “Out working. Digging corn, taking care of her rabbits, maybe cutting firewood . . . I don’t know. I’d be helping, but she thought one of us should stay with you.”

  “Huh. I thought she didn’t want me around.”

  “She said you’d ruin all her hard work stitching you up if you woke up and nobody was here.”

  “I know it’s a pain, having me here. I really appreciate—”

  “Don’t mind Darla. I know she has a tongue so rough it could strip rust off a harrow disk at twenty yards, but she likes you fine. She’s just scared. We both are. But the good Lord brought you to my barn door for a reason, and my job is not to ask why. Now eat up.” Mrs. Edmunds flipped four small yellow pancakes out of the griddle onto a plate.

  The pancakes were delicious. Yellow and crumbly, they tasted of cornbread and bacon. But then again, I was so hungry that anything probably would have tasted amazing. After three or four bites, I noticed a bit of a gritty texture and a hint of sulfur: ash, getting into everything. Between mouthfuls I said, “These are delicious, thank you.”

  “Oh, you’ll get sick of it soon enough. It’s only corn pone. That’s mostly all we eat now. Corn pone for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

  “I could eat these all day.”

  “Well then, I’ll fry another batch.”

  “Thanks.”

  Mrs. Edmunds’ teeth gleamed in the half-light. She reached into a cupboard and pulled down a mason jar. “Don’t tell Darla,” she said as she poured a trickle of honey over the remaining two pancakes on my plate. “She wants us to save the honey—for what, I don’t know.”

  I took another bite. Heavenly.

  Two plates of corn pone and two glasses of water later, I was tired again. I limped to the couch and collapsed.

  ***

  When I next opened my eyes, it was fully dark outside. Someone had fed the fire—there was enough flickering light to see by, and my side was uncomfortably warm. Darla was bending over me unbuttoning the shirt I was wearing, her dad’s shirt.

  I said something like, “Wha? Uh.” Never mind full sentences, even polysyllabic words were beyond me when I was half asleep.

  “Lie still. I’m going to check your bandage,” she said.

  She pulled the shirt open, slid the Ace bandage away from the wound, and lifted the white cloth. The wound was an angry horseshoe of crusty red scabs. I didn’t see any pus or much swelling, which was a relief.

  Darla began washing it using a bowl of water and hand towel. As she scrubbed the scabs, it hurt. When she finished that and washed the area around the wound, it felt good. Too good. By the time she finished, I had a hard-on so intense it hurt. It was pretty obvious, too, even in her dad’s loose jeans. The heat in my face at that moment had nothing to do with the fire.

  It didn’t make sense. Darla hadn’t said three kind words to me since I’d arrived. But my body obviously didn’t care.

  Darla put a fresh cloth over the stitches and pulled the Ace bandage back into place. She stood and glanced down. As she stalked out, I heard her mutter, “Boys.” I curled up on my left side and tried to think about anything but the way her hands had felt against my side.

  Sleep was a long time coming.

  Chapter 20

  I woke up in time for breakfast the next morning. Darla, Mrs. Edmunds, and I sat down together to eat corn pone. Darla ate mechanically, forcing down her food with a grimace. It tasted wonderful to me.

  As we finished breakfast, Darla announced, “I’m going to spend the day digging corn. You going to care for the invalid, Mom?”

  “You could take a day off,” Mrs. Edmunds said. “How many sacks of cornmeal do we have now? Four or five—”

  “Six,” Darla said.

  “It’s enough. Rest for a day.”

  “How do you know it’s enough? How long will it be before we can grow anything? Before any help comes from outside? A year? Three? How long will the corn keep, buried in that ash?”

  “I’ll help.” It seemed like a perfect opportunity to try to pay back some of their generosity. I’d be dead now if they had rolled me back out into the ash instead of taking me in and stitching up my side. “I don’t know exactly what you mean by digging corn, but I’m feeling better—”

  “Yeah, so we’re going to drag the invalid out to the field where he’ll rip my stitches open and have to be dragged—”

  “Darla! He’s a guest, not ‘the invalid.’ And normally I don’t hold with putting guests to work, but things are a little different now. Some exercise probably won’t hurt him, so long as he doesn’t overdo it.” Mrs. Edmunds stared at me expectantly.

  “No, ma’am, I won’t overdo it.”

  “That settles it, then, we’ll all go dig.”

  Soon I found myself carrying three empty feed sacks up a nearby hill. Darla and her mom each carried a shovel. The day was brighter than any I’d seen—nothing approaching normal, though. The sky looked sort of like a faded yellow twilight; not a hint of blue or cloud was visible, only a stifling blanket of yellow haze. No ash fell, but every time the wind gusted, it kicked up great plumes of the stuff. All three of us wore wet dishtowels around our faces.

  It was so cold outside that I could see my breath in the air. I’d lost track of the date, but it must still have been September. Definitely way too cold for September in Iowa, whatever the date was. How cold would it get? And if winter was starting in September, how long would it last?

  At the top of the ridge a huge rectangle was marked out with four bamboo poles. “That’s the spot we’ve already dug,” Darla said. “We’ll work from this edge, throwing the ash into the marked area.”

  “We’re digging for corn?” I asked.

  Darla gave me that look I used to get from teachers when I asked a stupid question. “Yeah, you’ll see.” She started digging beside one of the bamboo poles, scooping up the ash and tossing it aside. Her mom moved about ten feet off and began digging as well.

  Plumes of ash trailed in the wind as they worked. Darla shoveled maniacally, ramming in her spade and hurling each scoop away. Her mom kept up a measured pace, without any wasted effort. Soon they were both sweating and coated with clumps of white-gray ash. I stood watching them for a few minutes, at a loss for what to do. They’d only brought two shovels.

  Darla motioned me over. She’d cleared most of the ash from a thin strip of ground. Stalks of corn, squas
hed under the ashfall, were visible here and there. They were a kind of sickly looking yellow, like grass that’s been covered with something for a while. The ash layer was only five or six inches deep.

  “Why’s the ash so thin here?” I asked Darla. “It was almost two feet deep in Cedar Falls.”

  “Top of the ridge. Wind’s been blowing it away like snow. It’s about twelve inches on the lee sides of the hills, deeper in the valleys.”

  “Huh.”

  “Okay, so here’s what you do. Come behind me and Mom and pull up each stalk of corn, like this.” She grabbed a stalk and pulled it free of the remaining ash. She stripped the ears of corn off the stalk and tossed them into a feed sack. “Easy, right?”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Make sure you don’t miss any ears. Too much damn work unburying them.”

  So I spent the day stooped over, picking corn. I tried shoveling for a while, spelling Mrs. Edmunds—Darla flatly refused to give up her shovel—but it put too much strain on my side. I couldn’t shovel nearly as fast as Mrs. Edmunds, let alone match Darla’s frenetic pace. It was frustrating being so weak, unable to contribute my fair share of work. I’ve never been the biggest guy or the strongest, but I’ve always made up for it with effort. Yeah, I might have blown off stuff Mom forced me to do, but if I’m into something, like taekwondo or WoW, I work like crazy at it.

  We dragged three sacks of corn to the barn at lunchtime. Mrs. Edmunds made cornmeal mush for lunch—for variety, she said, laughing. And after lunch we did it all again, shoveling ash and picking corn until I was so stiff and sore that I could barely move.

  By late afternoon we’d filled three more feed stacks. After we took them to the barn, Mrs. Edmunds returned to the house. Darla walked through an interior doorway, to a part of the barn I hadn’t been in yet. I hesitated a moment, unsure which way to go, then followed Darla.

  Chapter 21

  Darla led me into a room filled with rabbit hutches, wire-mesh cages suspended from the ceiling by wires. The cages were linked together in two long rows, with eight cages per row. Two or three rabbits lay in most of the cages, just one in a few of them: maybe twenty or twenty-five rabbits in all.