“The way I see it,” Chester said, tugging at his denim jacket with long yellow fingernails. “We’re in for another bunch of strangers comin’ to tell us what to do, trying to take away our freedoms.”
Rodney looked over Chester’s porch with the eyes of a carpenter, but kept his focus on Chester and his libertarian fears. As eccentric as the new people around town seemed, Rodney couldn’t easily tuck them into the same category as the previous administration. Even if they were from some other planet, they didn’t seem as sinister as the Dictator and his cohorts, at least not so far.
Now Rodney was anxious to get back on the road, to do some thinking about how Anna fit with these new strangers, as well as to talk to Emma about what they had seen back at the house.
“Well, we’ll keep an eye on ‘em, to make sure they don’t get away with anything,” Rodney said. “I’m not so worried about this lot as the last bunch.”
Chester’s usual scowl only deepened at Rodney’s tolerance. “You remember what I said, when you see ‘em settin’ up their new taxes and laws. You just watch.”
Rodney nodded, and stepped away from the porch, waving at Chester, as he headed for his car. “Alright, Chester. Have a good day.”
He didn’t stick around to hear what Chester muttered after that, reversing his vehicle in an arch, and then curving back down the driveway, toward the county road. Passing between the dense trees that lined the drive, Rodney grabbed hold of the question that bothered him the most. If these strangers, with their healing powers and instant transportation, were really aliens, then what about Anna? Was her reappearance completely independent of these strangers? Or was she somehow with them, or like them? This is where the whole alien theory fell apart for Rodney, but he also noticed that the more time passed since he saw Anna, the more his doubts multiplied regarding what he had seen in his van that night.
Rodney wanted to discuss these things with Emma, to hear her thoughts, after seeing both he and Daniel healed by the two young visitors. He wanted to explore these questions with the person he most trusted to see straight and speak honestly. This desire to seek answers in company with Emma felt significant to Rodney. Like a mark on a doorpost, measuring the height of a growing child, he could see his feelings for Emma approaching the height reached by Anna, and no one else.
In the late afternoon sun, the December sky turning toward sundown, Rodney saw the partial skeleton of his new house on the horizon. Daniel and Emma would be there waiting for him, even anxious for his return. That was real and certain. Little else offered those qualifications lately.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rodney’s house east of town replaced one of many buildings that the government had ripped from their foundations, as a punishment for the owners. Other barns and houses still showed the black stains of fire, frosted gray in the early winter mornings, stark and decaying in late evening rains. The electrical infrastructure had tumbled down one leg at a time, accidentally broken here and sabotaged there. The resistance would blow up a transformer to disrupt the government, then the government would send planes, whose bombs and missiles would take huge bites out of a road, topple power cables or poles, or even demolish a power station.
A significant minority of folks had their own wind turbine or solar array. A few of these independent energy sources survived the war, the earthquakes, the land hurricanes and the volcanic activity to the west. Now, that homemade electricity might run over long cords to a farm across the road, or to a neighbor across the fence. Much of this ad hoc electrical grid had required scavenging high capacity cable from somewhere else, often leaving a gap in the utility company’s network.
When Rodney heard that the new ruler had sent people out to begin repairing the electrical grid, he didn’t expect significant results any time soon. But he didn’t yet understand the new regime, nor the sort of people who worked for them.
As Christmas day approached, one morning brightened to the sight of an inch of snow on the ground, though that covering disappeared in the forty-five-degree sunshine of the afternoon. What Rodney had grown up knowing as winter, had not yet arrived.
With just a day or two until the holiday, Rodney, Emma and Daniel finished a temporary peaked roof above the first floor, which now included all the rooms framed in: kitchen, dining room, parlor, living room and two small bedrooms. When the second floor was finished, the downstairs bedrooms would become an office and a sewing room, or perhaps a family computer room.
Daniel and Emma each occupied a bedroom. Rodney slept on a well-padded bed, rolled out on the living room floor. A wood and coal-burning furnace had survived in the basement, providing heat to the house, once Rodney, Daniel and Pete banged some ductwork back into a usable shape. Jay had helped reconnect the plumbing, such that there was one flushing toilet, a shower and two sinks working, mostly. None of the house’s occupants expected luxury, having survived through some of the most trying and dangerous years in modern history. Like the post-war people that they were, they appreciated every day of peace, every slice of bread and every clean glass of water.
The house had once drawn electricity from a large wind turbine west of the barn, but the government had destroyed it, intentionally. Rodney found evidence of a missile strike near the base of the tower. He knew of no one who could rebuild the turbine or erect the tower, and he stayed clear of do-it-yourself projects that involved electricity, leaving that to the experts. Unfortunately, he knew of none in the area. He had recharged his vehicles using the small amount of current he collected with the old-fashioned farm windmill that remained.
On what Rodney discovered, from Pete’s intermittent monitoring of the Internet, was Christmas Eve, he returned from helping a couple in town with several small carpentry jobs. They needed doors hung, cracks filled and floors reinforced, all because of an explosion next to the house the year before. As he parked his van in his driveway, Rodney saw Emma standing in the front door talking to two people, neither of them familiar.
Pounding dust off his jeans with his baseball cap, Rodney thought to himself, “I wonder what the aliens want now,” smiling as he approached the porch.
Emma stepped forward to make introductions, though the first one was unnecessary. “Rodney, this is Billy and Jose, they’re here about the electricity.”
Billy stepped quickly off the porch and grabbed Rodney’s hand. “Good to see you again. I was so glad for your help the other day. I trust that things ended well with Mr. Butler.”
Rodney nodded, momentarily distracted by a slight tingling sensation up his right arm. Then, he said, “He was fine. He tends to be very suspicious of strangers.”
“Entirely understandable,” Billy said. “Entirely understandable.” He motioned to his partner, who also stepped off the porch.
Jose was a much shorter man, very stout and not as old as Billy. He looked like the tradesman he was, a man who knew hard work and enjoyed it.
“This is Jose, he’s doing the home side of the electrical restoration in this area,” Billy said.
As he shook Jose’s hand, Rodney felt that tingling sensation again and connected it, this time, to the feeling he had when his hand was healed. He also noticed that these guys had no truck parked in the drive, though Jose wore a well-supplied tool belt. Jose’s smile pulled Rodney back to the introduction.
All of these strangers that Rodney had met smiled a lot, but Jose’s smile seemed the friendliest and pure. In fact, that smile made Rodney feel like laughing. Emma, watching from the porch, knew exactly what Rodney was doing, suppressing laughter. She had felt the same urge when she met Jose.
“Pleased to meet you,” Jose said with a slight accent. “What’s the state of your connection to the grid,” he asked.
Rodney and Jose went around the house, to examine the hardware, and discuss what it would take to get the house reconnected. When they returned to the front porch, Daniel was there with Emma and Billy, and they were all drinking water. Rodney recognized the glass water tumblers he and Da
niel had recovered from an abandoned house up the road. Jose and Rodney found water waiting for them, as well.
After thanking Emma, and taking a brief drink, Jose finished his conversation with Rodney. “For now I will wrap things up from the transformer, so that when we connect this part of the grid you won’t have any kind of fire hazard or anything,” he said.
Rodney smiled. “That would be nice.”
As if sneaking off, Jose set his glass down quickly and said, “I’ll just be a minute,” and he headed back around the house.
Rodney could tell that Jose didn’t want to be followed, but that didn’t worry him. He merely assumed that the electrician didn’t want to be watched as he worked. Though he was tempted to sneak after him, Rodney held back, sipping his water. He could sympathize; having felt a squirm many times, as his clients insisted on watching over his shoulder.
Billy asked a couple of questions about the house and the rebuilding process. As Rodney finished his answer, Jose returned to them.
“Okay, we’re all set here,” he said.
Rodney stared at him, searching through that brief conversation with Billy to find sufficient time for the electrician to have completed anything. “You’re all done? We’re set for when the power’s turned on?”
Jose looked at Billy, smiled, and then answered Rodney. “I work fast. That’s why they gave me this job.”
Rodney nodded. Of course, that was an explanation, but who could work that fast?
“Well, we have lots of others to visit,” Billy said.
The two men said their goodbyes and walked down the drive. Rodney turned briefly to look at Emma, as Daniel passed between them, into the house. Then Rodney glanced back toward those two men, or where he expected them to be, but there was no one there. He looked back at Emma and Daniel, who had stopped at the screen door. They all three raised their eyebrows and Daniel shrugged. His healed hand left him viewing these strangers as curious but benevolent. Rodney, for his part, actually felt tingling in the restored tips of his fingers at that moment.
Even with electricity into the house, they still lacked all of the fixtures and internal wiring. Nevertheless, a feeling of promise accompanied the news of Jose’s fast work, and Rodney looked forward to using what power he could, through the single four-socket outlet installed on the exterior of the house.
That night, Christmas Eve, candles lit the house, candles collected from foraging, and held in reserve for special occasions. The long winter night, and the holiday, combined for the perfect reason to light extra candles, even if this Christmas Eve lacked the decor and splendor of childhood celebrations. Rodney, Emma and Daniel had all increased their efforts at scavenging from neighboring houses, producing an entire dining set, as well as a complete set of dishes. They still slept on mattresses laid on the floor, and rationed such luxuries as soap, but they had acquired a holiday feast with trimmings, down to the butter dish and the gravy boat.
Rodney had been in town when a truckload of frozen turkeys arrived. He had also traded carpentry work for carrots and potatoes, having to surrender the hope of sweet potatoes. One thing they had in abundance was apples, and Emma had promised apple pies, willing to brave the adventure of baking without electricity or gas, as generations long before their great grandmothers had done. The homemade wood-burning stove, built from parts of an ancient stove found in the basement, took some trial and error for both Rodney and Emma. The result, however, was heavenly. Mingled with the rich gravy smell of the roasted turkey, came the spicy-sweet smell of three pies, that is, the three that avoided scorching, or even ignition.
The furnace in the basement, stoked with wood from fallen trees on the property, supplemented by the fire place in the parlor, kept the little half-built house warm, as temperatures dipped low enough to bring the reality of the season to the three northerners. This evening meal would be their private celebration at home. The next morning, they would ride into town to spend the day with Jenny and Pete, and a few others.
Inevitably, all three of them thought of this as a sort of family Christmas, though none of them ventured to express these thoughts aloud. Rodney knew that he would enjoy the evening most if he focused on the details of each moment and forgot the questions about the future of this potential family. Across the candles on the table, and the plates of warm food, he smiled at Emma, her hair spun into a bun on top of her head, her eyes and mouth hinting of some foraged makeup. Daniel looked more like a boy than the young man he was becoming, a sparkle in his big brown eyes.
Rodney had taken responsibility for the turkey and dressing, Daniel the potatoes and carrots, and Emma everything else about the meal. Their ability to work together, each one fit to the others so that everything was covered, soothed sore and tattered nerves like a professional massage.
The wind picked up outside just enough to whistle a reminder of how grateful they were for the efforts to close gaps in their rough building project. The candle flames swayed but did not dance, the fire on the hearth crackled but did not roar. Then, as the last food was scraped into final fork-fulls, Rodney excused himself and returned with a surprise, a bottle of home-made blackberry brandy that he had finagled from Jay.
Emma granted her fourteen-year-old a special dispensation for Christmas Eve, with the caveat of a very small glass. And they enjoyed the warm liquor with its rich, fruity smell as the perfect benediction to the main course. They sat and talked about rougher, starker Christmas Eves they had endured over the past few years. Rodney remembered sharing a stolen ham in a barn with three other fighters, the previous year, in Texas. The only knife they had to cut the meat was the same knife he had used just days before to kill a guard at a makeshift prison camp from which they liberated a handful of rebels. Like so much about war, he pressed through that gut-wrenching juxtaposition to claim the redemption of survival, counting it toward his investment in a better world.
Emma and Daniel remembered that two Christmas Eves ago, Daniel, at the age of twelve, had to kill a man to protect his mother, and himself, from being violated by a mob in southern Illinois. The tyrannical tactics of the Dictator, intimidating his opponents by inciting mob violence, stained their holiday that year. But they smiled together in the memory, because they had survived and because this holiday served to heal some of that remembered fright.
That story helped Rodney to appreciate his two new housemates even more and to relish the closeness between mother and son, instead of envying their intimacy, as the one on the outside looking in. He felt welcomed by them, as they shared their most terrible and frightening memories with him, hand-in-hand with sharing the cozy enjoyment of this happier day.
Yet none of them could say, even in the midst of embracing smiles exchanged across the table, that all was well with their world. Lost loved ones, whose absence filled a space in the house, and whose memory wafted an odor of mourning, like incense lit in the next room, unseen but unmistakably present, moderated even their truest celebration. Rodney and Emma each felt the emotional weight of their lost spouse and the hesitation of unfinished grief. For Rodney, this was complicated by the recent visit from, what he thought of as, the spirit of his lost wife.
Daniel couldn’t recognize the invisible specters that divided the two adults and he longed for them to form a family, to build a home around him, such as he had lost and desperately craved again. He knew, nonetheless, to keep this feeling inside, to store what he could not fully understand and to silence what he could not articulate without emotional fractures in his words.
Given the circumstances, a makeshift kitchen, sparse supplies and her own lack of practice, Emma glowed with pleasure at the success of the pies. The three of them vanquished one whole pie that night by the time they were ready to sleep.
Living without electricity tends to shorten the days in the winter, sleep coming earlier because of the paucity of other things to do at the dim end of the day. But all three of them stretched this day as long as they could keep their eyes open. Daniel leaned a d
ining room chair against the parlor wall, Emma sat in the one stuffed chair in the house and Rodney dragged his mattress to the doorway between the living room and the parlor, where he propped pillows and lounged like an ancient Eastern potentate.
They all drank coffee, with powdered creamer, and told stories from the past, near and far. On the topic of family, they missed, Rodney finished the night with the story of the last time he saw his father. It was ten years ago, when he got a call from his brother, saying that their dad had suffered a third heart attack. Leaving Anna with David, their only child at the time, Rodney flew from Des Moines to Buffalo, New York, where his father had moved recently, to be with his youngest son, his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. This move had taken place while Rodney was in the army and after his mother died. Rodney had often joked with his father that he was supposed to retire to sunny Florida, not to snowplow alley in Western New York.
His father had been a construction contractor, but had injured himself on a job, when he was in his late fifties. Forced to retire, he became sedentary, confined indoors with constant back pain. At seventy, he was in very poor health, barely surviving from heart attack to stroke to heart attack. Rodney stood at the foot of his bed in the hospital, greeted by a weak but sincere smile. His brother left the room to stretch his legs and get something to eat and Rodney took the chair next to the bed.
“This is starting to be a regular thing with you, isn’t it,” Rodney had said. “You know you don’t have to go to the hospital for me to come visit. We were already planning to come out this summer.”
His dad nodded. He looked yellowish and lifeless. Rodney sensed that the summer visit might not happen. His father said little, but what he did say stuck with Rodney, teaching him a valuable lesson about well-placed words. Just before he left, his dad stopped him and pulled him close to listen.
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