by Mic Roland
“Huh? Oh, My clothes are in that canvas bag there, and my bathroom things in that pink bag. You’re such a dear, Martin.”
Margaret came down the front steps. “Hello again, Pastor. Hello Ruby. How have you been?”
“Oh, you know,” Ruby began. My legs have been acting up again and I’m just sure my Coumadin isn’t right. Those doctors keep saying it’s fine but I keep telling them I can feel it in the back of my throat…”
“Dustin,” called Martin. “Would you take Ruby’s two bags up to Lindsey’s room? Thanks, and help her up the stairs there.”
“You’re all so kind for letting me visit.” Ruby patted Dustin’s arm as he helped her slowly navigate the front steps.
Margaret peered into the plywood trailer. “Where’s her groceries?”
John winced. “That’s it in that little plastic bag there.”
“Three cans of ginger ale and a pack of saltines?”
“That’s all she had,” said John. “She doesn’t usually have much in her cupboards, you know that. She liked to walk up to the corner market every couple days, just to get out. She said she hadn’t been out since the power went out. I was surprised she still had that much left.”
Margaret turned to Martin with a frown. “This isn’t helping our situation.”
“I know, I know,” said John. “Why don’t you take back the food you donated and the other cans in the trailer? I know it isn’t much, but it’ll help.”
Martin gathered up the jars and cans. One armful of food was not a solution to the problem.
“Thanks a lot, you two,” said John. “I know this will be a bit taxing, but she had no one else. You really are doing the Lord’s work.”
“I know,” said Martin, suppressing a sigh. “As we have opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.”
“Galatians 6:10,” said John. “Exactly. Well, I’m off to check on the Hamiltons next. I’ll be praying for you all. If the power is still out next week, I hope to stop back in before Sunday to see how you’re doing.”
Martin and Margaret waved as the pastor’s motorcycle and bouncing trailer disappeared in the dust. “I’d better go recalculate,” said Margaret. “This won’t help our timeline.”
“Sit over here, Ruby.” Margaret pulled a chair out at one end of the dining room table. She glanced at the chair beside Ruby for Susan to take. “Martin, would you call in Dustin and Judy? They’re out in his car.”
“What did you make for lunch, dear?” Ruby asked.
“It’s nothing fancy,” Margaret lifted the cover off the pot. “Reheated Spanish rice and beans from last night. But, we have some of Connie’s sourdough bread to go with it.”
“Ah, rice and beans. That reminds me of when I was a little girl growing up in Maine. We were really poor, so my mother…”
“Sorry we’re late.” Dustin burst through the back door. “We were listening to the radio in the car and charging up Judy’s iPod.” Judy sat down, with one earbud in, looking sullen.
“Could you get any stations?” Martin asked. He handed around the plate of sliced bread. “We can’t get much on the handheld radio here at the house.”
“We got one,” Dustin stuffed a half a slice of bread in his mouth, but was stopped in mid-chew by a look from Martin. He slumped and bowed his head. Martin asked the blessing for the meal, for wisdom and especially patience. Dustin resumed chewing with a vengeance.
“We got one station out of Mass. I forget the call letters. They confirmed that the Vice President did die on that riot in Baltimore. Still no news on the President’s whereabouts.”
“Middle East summit, wasn’t it?” Martin had not been paying close attention to the news lately.
“En route to it, I guess,” said Dustin between chews. “No one seems to know if he made it there, or turned back, or what. Anyhow, the radio guy was talking about some program to move hospital patients from all the little hospitals to just a few big ones: Boston, Lowell, Worcester, and such. They’re trying to rig up temporary power for a few big hospitals. Sounds like they have a couple wind turbines and one solar farm that still work, but they’re afraid to connect them to anything.”
“No New Hampshire stations?” Margaret asked.
“I remember one time when I was in the hospital,” Ruby began. “The doctors said it was just a sinus infection, but I knew…”
Martin finished her sentence in his mind, in unison with Ruby. But it was my heart pills and my Coumadin that were out of balance. They thought an old woman couldn’t know such things…
“How did you know?” asked Susan as she scooped a spoonful of rice and beans onto Ruby’s plate.
Ruby lit up at the question. She had found a new best friend, even though she never asked Susan’s name or why she was there. None of that mattered. Susan was a new person to hear her stories.
With Ruby otherwise engaged, Martin returned to Dustin and a sidebar conversation. “Did you hear anything else on your radio?”
“Only a little.”
“It was so frustrating,” interjected Judy. “I just want to know what’s going on out there, but no one ever says. How can they just not know where the President is? They blab about highways or they blab about hospitals, but what’s going on? Why don’t they say?”
“Like what?” Martin wondered.
“I don’t know, normal stuff. Real life stuff. Like when will the banks be open again and we can get money to buy stuff? When will the stores be open again? When will the internet be back? Are they still taping TV shows so when this is all over we can see our shows? You know: normal stuff.”
There was a hint of manic in her voice, so Martin thought it best to change the subject. “Are you two set up okay downstairs? Need anything?”
“Yeah.” Judy raised her voice. “Like when will the water will be on again so we don’t have to flush with that stupid bucket?”
Martin gave Dustin an expectant look. He seemed to understand. “I think we’re still pretty wiped from our all-nighter, dad. We’re gonna go catch a little nap, right Judy?”
There was a flash of a look that said, are-you-nuts? But then must have realized that in naps there was escape. “Yeah. That’s it. Tired.” She put in both earbuds and fussed with her iPod as the two of them headed down the stairs.
“…so that’s why I’ve never made rice and beans for myself,” continued Ruby. “It always reminds me of those days when we were so poor that my mother wouldn’t even buy us an ice cream cone on the hottest day of summer.”
“Oh, that must have been a hard life,” Susan said sympathetically. Margaret tried to conceal one of her ‘oh-brother’ looks.
“Why don’t you help Ruby get settled into her room,” Margaret said to Susan. “I’ll clear the table.”
“I’ll get the warm water from the stove for washing the dishes,” Martin said.
—
Martin knocked at the office-bedroom door and cleared his throat.
“Come in,” said Susan. She sat on the bed with a book in her lap.
“Hey, sorry to disturb you, but I needed to get something in here.”
“That’s okay. I was just reading one of your books.”
“I’ve…um…got to get something out of this black cabinet here. It’s the…gun safe.”
“Oh?” Susan sat up alert. She had clearly had not wondered why there was a black metal cabinet in the room, or what might be inside.
“So, maybe you want to look the other way?” Martin offered.
Susan hesitated, as if that sounded like a good idea, but she stopped. “No. That’s okay. If I’m going to be a Country Person, I guess I need to get used to seeing them.” Her last few words had a hesitancy to them.
“That’s true, you will.” Martin opened the safe and took out his .22 rifle. “It’s just a .22,” he tried to sound reassuring. He opened a box of bullets to put a few in his pocket. “It shoots little bullets like these. It’s what I use on
the squirrels.”
“Oh.”
“That’s all. I’m done disturbing you now. You can get back to your book.” He turned to go, but stopped. Proudly displayed on the center of the nightstand was her jar of olives.
“In case you get hungry at night?” He pointed to the jar.
She chuckled a little, nervously. “Hehe, no. It’s just that…well…this whole outage thing is still a little freaky and I have trouble getting to sleep. So, I look at my little jar of olives and…well, it’s kinda hard to explain.” She looked away and began twirling her hair. Kinda crazy, huh?”
He wanted to make a joke to lighten the awkward mood, but no jokes came. Her sad-puzzled look shut him down again. Rather than figure out why that look of hers shuts him down, he stuffed that mystery into his already over-stacked mental inbox of things to think about later. He had things to do.
“Um. I guess if that works for you…well…I gotta go.”
“Okay. Bye,” she said softly, as if it were a secret.
Babe in the Woods
While Martin buttoned his coat over his heavy sweater, he had not quite let go of wondering what Susan’s sad-puzzled look was all about. He had thought that somehow, she was done with that. Apparently, he was wrong again.
Dustin came tiptoeing up the stairs. “Judy’s sleeping now. She’s just really really tired. Hey, where are you going with the .22?”
“Figured I’d go out in the backwoods and see if I can find anything for the pot. Your mother was saying how we need more protein sources.”
“Can I come?”
“Sure. Dress warm, though. I’ll meet you out by the steps.”
Martin did not have to wait long. Dustin closed the front door as quietly as he could. “She’ll feel better after some more rest. I think the whole creepy-guy thing has her more freaked out inside than she wants to let on.”
“Understandable.” They crunched through leaves, across the little wooden bridge which spanned the now-dry stream bed.
“We’ll need to get out to the tree line along the swamp, I think,” Martin said. “Won’t see much in these short pines.”
“Judy was better after I charged up her iPod,” Dustin said. “She really misses her tunes and being online. I don’t think I noticed before how much she watched TV and spent time on the ‘net. That is, until she couldn’t. Kinda seems like she feels lost.”
“Maybe if we get her involved in the day-to-day stuff. That might help.”
“It might. We were hearing on the radio, scratchy as it was, about FEMA trucks delivering food and blankets at distribution centers in Lowell and Worcester. Judy talked about how much she wanted to see a FEMA truck here, like it was a lifeline to the outside world, or something.”
“Okay.” Martin whispered and slowed his pace. “We need to start being quiet now.”
Martin stood very still, slowly scanning the line of birches and alders that marked the edge of the swamp just beyond his property line. He saw no movement other than what the gentle wind caused. He motioned for Dustin to follow him back around behind some fluffy white pine so they could re-emerge further down the tree line.
Moving quietly on carpet of pine needles was easy. Avoiding the brittle lower branches was not as easy. Their progress was slow, but Martin was okay with that. He wanted to surprise a squirrel or some other furry creature, so slow was good.
Dustin tapped Martin’s shoulder and pointed ahead and left. Martin did not see anything until it moved slightly. He caught a glimpse of something down in the brush between some tall beeches. He and Dustin shifted to the right to get a better look. There was certainly something dark in the brush. Every few seconds it would hump up and shift to one side. It was too big for a squirrel. A fox, perhaps? It seemed pretty big for a fox too. The scope on the .22 did not help. Too many scrubby beech leaves were in the way.
Martin moved slowly closer and to the right, his eye to the scope, safety off. His finger was still off the trigger, with the half-thought that it might be someone’s dog pawing around. If it was a dog, it was a big one. Martin moved closer, gingerly taking small steps.
“Whoa! Hey man!” A scruffy young man stood up suddenly amid the brush: eyes wide, hands in the air. “Hey, don’t shoot ’n stuff, man. Like, take it easy. Okay? Amigo? Buddy?”
Martin lowered the rifle. “What are you doing here? You could have gotten…it’s really a bad idea grubbing around in the woods when…in hunting season.” Martin could feel a little tremble in his arms at the realization that he might have shot the stranger thinking he was an animal.
“Oh hey, um…Andy’s the name and I wasn’t doing anything sketchy. Honest. I was just gathering beechnuts here. These are a couple of primo trees right here.” He waggled the little cloth bag in his hand.
“You can put your hands down, Andy. But for future reference, this isn’t public land. My property goes from the fire trail over there, back to the edge of the swamp and down this way.”
“Oh, yeah, hey, like I didn’t know, you know? We were just all out doing a little foraging and there weren’t any signs or anything, so I just kept…and then I found these great beeches here…”
“We?” asked Dustin.
“Yeah, we’ve got our camp all set up down that little dirt road.” Andy pointed over his shoulder. “There’s a cleared space past some big rocks: dirt piles beside a pond…”
“The old gravel pit?” asked Martin. “You and some others made a camp in the old gravel pit?”
“Guess so. Sure. Yeah. Gravel pit. Guess that’s what it was.”
“But why?” asked Dustin. “That’s a pretty desolate spot.”
“O contraire, it was just what we were looking for,” said Andy. “Way out of the way, far from the artificial constructs of capitalist tyranny.”
“The what?” Martin asked. “And who is ‘we’?”
“That would be the rest of our primal group, eh? Me, Ash, Brandon and some more. We always knew the materialist empire was gonna crumble someday. It had to, right? What with the over-leveraged ponzi financial scam and GMO toxins and all. So we all figured that when it did, there was no more point to going to classes anymore. We’d carpe the diem and free ourselves from being slaves to the system — survivors to start the New Age.”
“By setting up a camp in a gravel pit?” Dustin asked with evident sarcasm.
“Oh, you gotta look past that, dude. It’s the perfect spot for a cell of the Age of Primal Peace to flourish. There’s, like, lots of water and a ton of cattail, nut trees, everything that a free people need for a proper paleo life. We just live in peace with nature and nature takes care of us. Give peace a chance, like it says in the bible, or something. We’re free from all the oppression of patriarchal industrial imperialism.”
“What?” Martin had reached a saturation point for trendy buzzwords. “Just stay on the other side of the fire trail, okay?”
“Andy?” called a woman’s voice. “Who are you talking to?”
Andy half-whispered to Martin. “Oh hey, that’s Mara. She’s like our leader, except we really don’t have leaders cuz that would oppress the rest of us, cuz we’re all equal and free and stuff.” Andy called out, “Hey Mara. Over here!”
Out from the pines stepped a slender young woman with long dark hair. She had the smooth beauty of youth and curves beneath tight flannel that were definitely not politically correct. When her gaze landed on Martin’s .22, her eyes flashed with a palpable rage. “What are YOU doing here?” she demanded.
“I could ask you the same question, seeing as how you’re on my property.” Beautiful and annoying was not a combination Martin had encountered very often. His old-school mind was prone to link beauty with charm.
“Property.” She spat the word. “A white privilege tool of oppression is all that is. No one can own the earth.”
Annoying was beating out charm. “Yeah, well, I’m not talking about the whole earth.” Martin wanted to call her ‘cupcake’, just to annoy her in return. He
opted for neutral diplomacy, instead.
“I’m just talking about this little piece of it,” said Martin. “I was just telling Andy, and I tell you too. My property extends from back that way, where my house is, over to the fire trail, and over that way to the edge of the swamp. I’d appreciate it if you’d stay on the other side.”
“And I suppose you plan to shoot us with your macho death tools if we don’t.” Her head waggle had a valley-girl sway to it.
“I don’t plan to shoot anyone. Just saying. This parcel here is mine. Stay on the other side of the fire trail and we can ignore each other all day long. How Mr. Bailey feels about you living in his woods is up to him.”