by Mike Mullin
“Okay, Max,” Uncle Paul said, “show Alex and Darla how to do your morning chores. After you’ve finished, take them down to the creek with the toboggan and a couple of pry-bars. If you can find any rocks in the creek bed that will work, great. Otherwise, take them to the cemetery and borrow two gravestones. If anyone’s around, come home and get me before you take the gravestones.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“I want to go, too,” Rebecca said.
“Get your morning chores done, and then you can help me build the third greenhouse,” Uncle Paul told Rebecca. Then he looked at Darla. “Work on your gristmill in the mornings. Let’s reserve the afternoon for other projects. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything that’s got to be done.”
Darla nodded.
“Oh, and while you’re at the creek, think about what it would take to build a scaled-up version of the mill. Maybe we could dam the creek and run it on water power.”
“Will there be enough demand to justify it?” Darla said. “Eventually the buried corn will spoil. It might be years before we can plant more. Will we still need a big mill then?”
“I don’t know. Think about it, anyway.”
* * *
The rocks at the creek were hopeless. Either they were too small, the wrong shape, or stuck so thoroughly that all three of us straining on our pry bars couldn’t budge them.
The cemetery was deserted. It turned out to be ridiculously easy, compared to our failed effort in the creek bed, to find two suitable gravestones and topple them onto the waiting toboggan. Darla rigged up a pair of wooden crosses. She carved the dead people’s initials on each cross and pounded them into the ground where we’d taken the granite markers.
Dragging the loaded toboggan back to the farm was not so easy. It took all three of us straining at the rope to move the sled. Those gravestones were heavy.
By the time we got back, it was noon. After lunch, Uncle Paul sent me and Max back to the creek with the toboggan, this time to cut wood. They needed a lot of it. The only source of heat was the living room fireplace, which meant most of the house was freezing. Plus, they were doing all the cooking on a wood fire outside the kitchen door.
Uncle Paul assigned Darla to help him build the new greenhouse in the afternoon. They were building the frame out of leftover two-by-fours and tree branches. When they finished the frame, they would cover it in plastic and prepare the inside for planting. They only had enough plastic for one more greenhouse, although Uncle Paul said he was going to try to trade for more.
It all seemed a bit futile. There were hundreds of acres of fields surrounding their farm. All of it had been planted in corn and soybeans before the volcano erupted. No matter how much plastic we got, most of those fields would go fallow. A lot of people were going to starve. I hoped we wouldn’t be among the victims.
Chapter 56
The next few weeks passed in much the same way. The first week or so was tough; I was weak from my starvation diet at the FEMA camp. But once I recovered my strength, I worked harder than I ever had before.
I’d spent most of my time was spent digging corn, chopping wood, or carrying water. Some mornings I helped Darla build the gristmill, but usually she was carving the grindstones and couldn’t use my help. She ruined one of the stones, cracking it as she tried to drill a hole through it, and we had to raid the cemetery for another grave marker.
Digging corn got tougher and tougher. It snowed twice more, so more than four feet covered the ground. The ash layer here was only a few inches thick, but getting through all that snow to the ash and the corn beneath it was a ton of work.
Sometimes I helped my uncle with the greenhouses. I learned that one of the tricks for a winter greenhouse was building a heat sink: an array of dark stones designed to soak up the sun’s rays during the day and release the heat at night. It didn’t seem to me that it would work since the sun was hidden, blocked by ash and sulfur high in the atmosphere. But my uncle thought enough UV light was getting through for the heat sink to be worth the effort.
He fiddled incessantly with the greenhouses: moving stones, watering the plants, and weeding. He was testing a plot of turnips and another of potatoes. He’d traded for the seeds and potato eyes in Warren, buying them with duck eggs and goat meat. So far, everything had failed to grow except for the kale.
Rebecca, Max, and Anna took care of the goats and ducks. After we’d been there a few days, the kids taught me and Darla how to do it so we could take turns. We fed the ducks corn and a little kale. The goats got mostly hay, although the hayloft was nearly empty. We also fed the goats everything else that humans wouldn’t want to eat: cornstalks, weeds, failed plants from the greenhouses, pine needles, even green twigs—they ate it all. Still, they steadily lost weight and gave less milk.
So Uncle Paul decided to slaughter one duck and one goat, a kid. He offered to teach Darla and me how to butcher them and seemed surprised when we agreed. He patiently explained each step to us, but except for plucking the feathers off the duck, it didn’t seem that much different from what Darla had done with her rabbits. And it was way easier than butchering a pig. Uncle Paul seemed amazed at how fast we caught on.
I was surprised that Max and Anna didn’t protest when Uncle Paul decided to slaughter two of their animals. The kids had evidently put a lot of effort into caring for them, so I assumed losing a goat and a duck would be a big deal. Even Rebecca seemed attached to the ducks. I asked my uncle about it while we were butchering the goat. He didn’t answer at first.
“I think we got through that with the dogs,” he said finally.
“The dogs?”
“You remember them? Denver and Gypsy?”
“Yeah.”
“We ran out of dog food. We could have fed them meat, but we didn’t . . . don’t have enough. They were starving, suffering. I had to . . . I thought it was more humane to kill them than let them starve to death. The kids were pretty upset. We all were.”
“Did you eat them?” Darla asked. I glanced at her, thinking maybe she was telling some kind of sick joke, but she was serious.
“No. We should have. I should have lied and told the kids it was goat meat. But I couldn’t make myself do it. They’re buried at the edge of the farmyard. You can ask the kids to show you, if you want. I avoid that spot. . . It was horrible; I didn’t want to waste a shotgun shell. . . I used a knife. I don’t want to think about it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. The corners of his mouth and eyes drooped. Sorry didn’t seem to cover it. I put my hand on his arm and squeezed.
Uncle Paul blinked and turned back to the goat carcass hanging in front of us.
Chapter 57
It took Darla two weeks to finish her gristmill. It worked so much faster than the mortars and pestles that it freed up a lot of time. Since it took two people to operate—one to feed grain into it and one to pedal the bike—I got nominated to help her run it. Not that I minded. It meant we got to spend more time together.
We ground the farm’s entire stockpile of corn in one afternoon. The next day, Bill Jacobs, the guy my uncle had borrowed the stone-working tools from, brought six bags of corn to us. We ground it all as payment for the use of his tools.
The other time Darla and I saw each other was in the middle of the night. Most nights, like the first, I’d wake up, slip downstairs to the living room, and find Darla there napping on the couch. We’d sleep through the wee hours curled up together. Darla was a light sleeper, so she’d wake me when everyone else in the house started to stir, and we’d return to our separate rooms.
Before the volcano, I would have thought a secret rendezvous to make out with my girlfriend in the middle of the night would be thrilling. But most of the time it wasn’t like that. Well, some nights it was, and yeah, that was fun, but usually we’d talk for a few minutes, snuggle up together, and drift back to sleep. For one thing, we were both tired; we worked crazy hours during the day—grueling physical labor that left us exhau
sted.
For another thing, the most important part of seeing Darla every night wasn’t the fooling around. It was the few minutes we talked while holding each other, the feeling of security I got with her, the feeling of being understood and loved. Before the eruption, I wouldn’t have believed that I could cuddle up every night with the girl who starred in my dreams and not be totally preoccupied with sex. But the trek across Iowa had changed something. I wanted, needed to see her so badly that it woke me up at night. But making out was incidental to my need— nice when it happened, but secondary to the simple pleasure of sleeping beside her.
We’d been in Warren a little more than a month when Uncle Paul discovered what was going on. I woke on the couch one morning, not to Darla shaking me but to my uncle clearing his throat. I was on my back with Darla halfway on top of me, also on her back. My right arm lay across her shoulder, and my hand cupped her left breast through her shirt. I snatched my hand away, waking her.
“How long has this been going on?” Uncle Paul said.
My heart was thudding, and I could feel the heat in my face, but I answered as calmly as I could, “Since we left Worthington.” I stared my uncle in the eye.
“Hmm. Get ready for breakfast.”
Darla got up and scurried toward the guest room. I plodded up the stairs to get my boots.
All day I waited for the hammer to fall. I could sense it hanging above my head, dangling from a thread like the sword of Damocles. But my uncle didn’t say anything to me except instructions about where to stack the wood that Max and I had chopped. His silence on the subject persisted until we’d finished dinner.
“I’ve talked to everyone involved today,” Uncle Paul said. “We’re going to make some changes to the sleeping arrangements. Rebecca’s moving upstairs into Anna’s room, and Alex will be moving into the guest room.”
“Dad found out you haven’t been sleeping in my room much, anyway, huh?” Max whispered to me.
“Yeah, you knew?” I whispered back.
Max smiled.
“Thanks for keeping it quiet.”
“Sure thing, cuz.”
“Alex,” Uncle Paul said, “I want to talk to you.” I stayed behind at the kitchen table while everyone else left for the warmer living room. “Um—”
“Thanks for changing the sleeping arrangements,” I said.
“Yes. Well, even I can see the obvious, sometimes. Caroline and I aren’t totally convinced it’s the right call. What if you or Darla change your mind?”
“I don’t think that will happen, but if it does, I’ll tell you, and you can change the bedrooms again.”
“Okay. Look, there’s a doctor in Warren, but without electricity and supplies, he’s pretty much practicing 1800s-style medicine. If Darla got pregnant . . .”
Oh, God. Not this again. My face was burning. “We aren’t doing . . . well, we’d like to. We talked about it before we even got out of Iowa. But I don’t want to add a baby to this mess any more than you do. I mean, someday maybe we’ll get married and maybe have kids, but—” I quit talking, shocked to silence by my uncle’s face. He was blushing.
“That’s, um, responsible. I know how I’d have felt about it at your age. I’m not sure I would have made the same— the right—choice. Here.” He pressed something into my hand. I looked down: two foil-wrapped squares. Condoms.
“You shouldn’t feel pressure to use them,” he said. “Abstinence is perfectly fine, preferable actually, as young as you are. But if you should . . . you know, I wanted you to have—“
“Thanks.”
“I can only spare two.”
“Okay.”
“And if you decide not to use them, I’d take them back.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t trying to be terse. I just had absolutely no idea what to say. Uncle Paul apparently didn’t know what to say, either, because he clapped me on my shoulder and fled the room.
I found Darla in the guest room, helping Rebecca move her stuff.
“Why are you blushing?” Darla asked me.
“Well I, um . . .” I looked at my sister.
“Mind giving us a minute?” Darla said.
“Sure.” Rebecca left without a peep of protest. Boy, had she changed.
I pulled the condoms out of my pocket and opened my hand to show them to Darla.
“You got . . .? Wow, I didn’t see that coming,” she said.
“Yeah, me neither.”
“Your uncle gave them to you?”
“Yeah.”
“Only two?”
“He said it was all he could spare.”
“Do you think they’re reusable?”
“Gross!” I said. Darla cocked an eye at me. I thought about it a moment then added, “I’ll ask.”
Darla smiled. She stepped to the guest room door, closed it, and twisted the handle to lock it. Then she took my hand and led me to the bed.
* * *
So I thought I’d feel different afterward, after the invisible neon sign proclaiming “virgin” had blinked out on my forehead. I’d spent years obsessing about it, so it seemed like something should have changed. Maybe it would have if I’d still been at Cedar Falls High surrounded by the gossip and braggadocio of teenage boys.
But on my uncle’s farm, nobody noticed, or at least nobody said anything. The next day, like every day, we dug corn, chopped wood, and carried water. And it didn’t even really change much between me and Darla, either. Yes, making love was fun, but it wasn’t really any more fun than anything we’d already been doing together. Just different.
I was glad nobody had noticed. I might have been offended if my uncle had punched my shoulder and said something inane like, “So you’re a man now.” Besides being unspeakably embarrassing, that would have missed the true date of my passage into adulthood by a month or more.
One thing did change. After Darla and I moved into the guest room, I slept better. It was colder than the living room, but I didn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night anymore to move. She was never more than an arm’s length away.
Chapter 58
A few weeks later, another winter storm blew through. The wind ripped a series of huge holes in one of the greenhouses. Uncle Paul and Max worked on patching the plastic skin of the damaged greenhouse. From the outside, they leaned an aluminum extension ladder against one of the rafters. Paul stood at the top of the ladder, trying to tape the tears from above, while Max steadied the ladder’s base.
Most of the kale had frozen at least partially. Rebecca, Darla, and I spent the morning inside the greenhouse plucking mushy leaves off the plants. We hoped they’d survive if we excised the frozen parts.
“What a waste,” Rebecca said, plucking off another ruined leaf and dropping it into a bucket.
“At least the goats will eat well today,” Darla said.
“Yeah, but what are we going to eat?” Rebecca’s face reddened, and her hands started to tremble. “What if the storms only get worse? We could lose all the greenhouses at once. And even if the storms don’t wreck the greenhouses, it’s only getting colder. Will the greenhouses keep working? What if there’s no spring next year? What if—”
“Rebecca.” I grabbed her shoulders and gripped them gently. “Don’t think like that. We’ll make it.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t know that. I keep thinking Mom and Dad are going to come back. I look down the driveway all the time, expecting to see them walking up, but they never come. Maybe they’ll never return. Maybe they’re dead. Maybe we’ll die, too. Starve to death or freeze in this never-ending winter.” Tears rolled from her eyes.
I pulled my sister into a hug. “We won’t starve to death. Or freeze. And if Mom and Dad haven’t shown up by spring, I’ll go find them. I promise.”
Rebecca was sobbing now. Darla stepped up beside her and hugged us both.
Uncle Paul stopped his work and looked down at us through the clear plastic greenhouse roof. “You guys okay?” he shouted.
“Yeah, we’re fine,” I yelled back.
He nodded and returned to his work, stretching out to patch another hole. I heard him yell and glanced back up just in time to see his left foot slip, falling between the rungs of the ladder alongside the rafter. He overcorrected and fell, landing on the greenhouse roof with a whump and the pop of breaking plastic. The ladder twisted as he fell, violently wrenching free of Max’s hands and hitting him in the side hard enough to knock him to the ground. Uncle Paul’s left leg was trapped between the ladder and the rafter. I heard a nauseating crunch, like a bunch of celery stalks breaking at once, as Paul’s leg snapped just below the knee. He was left dangling into the greenhouse between two rafters, held upside down by his broken leg.
Paul moaned, a sound that started low and pained but quickly grew into something approaching a scream. I shoved away from Rebecca and ran to him. Darla stood still for a second, taking in the ladder that had trapped Paul’s leg and Max in the snow outside the greenhouse. Then she ran toward the greenhouse door.
The greenhouse roof was low enough that I could reach Paul. I grabbed his shoulders and tried to lift him to relieve the pressure on his snapped leg. It protruded from between the rafter and ladder at a sickening angle, as if he’d grown an extra knee in his shin, turned ninety degrees in the wrong direction. I couldn’t see any blood on his jeans, so perhaps the bone hadn’t come through his skin.
Darla reached Max just outside the greenhouse. He had jumped up and was wrestling with the ladder. Darla grabbed the ladder and helped, trying to force it sideways off the rafter to free Paul’s leg.
Uncle Paul screamed as the ladder shifted. Sweat rolled off his face and splashed against my cheek below him. Darla and Max heaved on the ladder again, and Paul’s leg popped free. He fell, and I tried to catch him. Rebecca was there, too, reaching up to grab him, but he fell through our arms and landed with a thud amid the kale.
I knelt by his head. He was sweating, panting, and shivering—all at the same time. “I think he’s in shock!” I yelled. “Get a bunch of blankets. And two poles we can use to make a stretcher.” Darla and Max ran toward the house. I noticed Max was holding his left side where the ladder had slammed into him. Rebecca looked at me, and I said, “I’ll stay with him. Go get Aunt Caroline.” She nodded and ran for the greenhouse door.