The World Ends In Hickory Hollow

by Mayhar, Ardath

  We avoided distressing details, as we unloaded the necessary part of the truck's cargo and stowed it away in the spare bedroom that we had set aside for Mom Allie, if and when she decided to come to us. The kids, though, picked up distress signals out of the air. Their antennae would put radar to shame. They knew that we were unhappy about something, and I knew they knew. But I had had all I could take for one day. The world would have to end for them tomorrow. I simply could not tell them now, and I knew that Zack and Mom Allie felt the same..

  Jim and Sukie are fine children. They still didn't feel well, but they had potatoes boiling for supper, the cold chicken from yesterday stripped off the bones and simmering in browned gravy, and a jar of corn ready to be frittered in the black iron skillet. That's another thing we held against the world we'd turned out backs on. It carefully trained its young to be incompetents – or worse. In the four years we had lived on the farm, our now eight-and ten-year-olds had grown into far more effective people than most of their teachers.

  That was a strange supper. I kept trying to realize that the world had ended, but for us it hadn't even changed to any marked degree. The things we had brought back from town on our monthly trips had been, literally, unnecessary luxuries. I could find it in my heart to regret only smooth, effortless toilet paper. Even the electricity had been expendable for Zack and I had studied our Mother Earth News for years and had adapted many of their scrounged-part, homemade methods for generating heat and electricity to our own needs. We distilled our own fuel alcohol, built pedal-powered tools. Our systems, as they were, could give us much of what we needed. With a bit of work they could supply far more energy than we were presently in the market for.

  Now I looked around the table at my family. Together. Secure, for this single moment in time. A part of me that had half wakened when we moved away from the city was now coming fully alert. An excitement was building, down deep, exulting at the opportunity to exert itself to the fullest. What greater satisfaction could there be than that of supplying the wants and needs of those you loved by your own efforts, energies, and skills?

  As if he were reading my mind, Zack reached under the table and took my hand. His fingers were warm and steady, and a surge of hope pulsed through me. Given just a bit of good luck ... winds that carried the debris of radiation away instead of toward us and rains that were reasonably free of contamination ... we would survive. Both of us knew it with a knowledge that was ninety percent hope.

  The wind died in the night. The misting rain stopped. We woke to white frost and a sky that was filled with a high haze. In normal times it would have been clear and dazzlingly blue, but now it was a pale gray. The sun was a paler blotch on the horizon. Dust-colored light filtered down the sky, looking almost normal, though dingy for such a frost-bright day. Ordinarily, the edges of the sky would be shades of shell pink, shading to lavender, while the sun rose in scrubbed clarity. Still, we couldn't quarrel with what we had. The sun did rise for us. For how many millions over the earth did it never rise again?

  I shook off that thought quickly and went about getting things ready for this first (for us) day after Armageddon. The children must be told, I knew, and I waited for them to descend their steep ladder-stair from the loft bedroom.

  When the first pair of slippered feet appeared, my insides seemed to squeeze together with dread. Zack's grip on my hand was so tight that I knew he felt the same. We managed to smile, though, as Sukie jumped the last three steps, landing on top of Jim, who went down in a storm of giggles and squirmings.

  If it had been a normal weekday morning, instead of the Saturday after the end of the world, I would have said, "Aha! You're well enough to go to school!' And they would have given mock groans and halfhearted protests. Then they would have gulped their oatmeal, grabbed their books, and made ready for the long pony ride. But I said nothing, and something in my expression caused the two grins to fade, as they stood looking at me.

  "Something has happened," Zack said, his nervousness making him abrupt. "It's pretty unbelievable ... and it's very terrible. " Here he stopped and looked to me for help. I took up the burden, though my voice wasn't very reliable. "When we went to town yesterday, there wasn't anybody there. Not to mention. We hurried to Mom Allie's, and she had stayed, waiting for us to come. She told us ... she told us that last week–remember the night the lights went out?–last week they dropped the bombs. All over this country. Likely all over Russia, too. Maybe all over the world. The radio isn't saying anything much, she says. But it means that everything has changed."

  When I paused to collect my thoughts, Sukie looked at Jim. Then she said in a small voice, "No more school?"

  "Not the school you've been having, " I said. "There will be school, every day, for a few hours, but it will be here, and you won't have anybody but Vera Nicholson's grandson Sam and, in a while, Candy Lambert. Of course, if there's anybody around close who hasn't left and has grandchildren or somebody staying with them, they'll be welcome to come, too. We won't know for a while just who has stayed around and who has gone."

  "Why did they go, Mama?" asked Jim, his gray eyes puzzled. "If we haven't even known anything was wrong, then this must be the best place there is to be safe. Why would anybody leave?"

  "No way to know," I said. "Unless they're like Mrs. Yunt, who happened to have to go tend to family business at just the wrong time. Or maybe they had family near Houston or Dallas or even farther off, and they felt like they just had to go and see if they were still alive and needed help. Well never know, unless some of them come back and tell us.

  "Can we listen to the radio?" he asked, though he knew that his little battery radio was his to do with as he pleased.

  I nodded. "Just remember that the batteries we have won't last too long, and the ones in the stores, if any are left, will go bad, too. Don't ... get too attached to the idea of listening. And don't expect to hear something all the time. Your gramma will tell you what times there's something to hear."

  They pounded away to bang on Mom Allie's door, and Zack and I sighed with a combination of relief and letdown. Children are always so much better equipped to handle major upheavals than adults. We keep forgetting that. As long as their own small unit is together and functioning, they seem to be cushioned against the traumas that attack us through worry and conscience and our strange arrays of undeserved guilts.

  Breakfast was ample. There was so much to do, to see to, to rearrange in our small world that I felt we would need full bellies, if nothing else, in order to cope with the stresses of the day.

  It was too cold for the children to be out for long, so I set them to loading the wood sledge with split stove wood from the extra pile at the edge of the newly cleared ground. That would go to Dad's house for the use of our new – what were they? Family, I suppose they must be. Today being sunny, our own wood fires would be unnecessary, as our heat-grabbers would be sending warmed air into the house all day through the south windows, to which they slanted upward like slides for midgets. That meant the children wouldn't be required to check the fireplace heater for fuel. I indicated sternly that the sledge should be fully loaded by the time we got back with the newcomers, unless one or both of them became certifiably shaky.

  "No goofing off," Sukie hummed under her breath.

  "Exactly."

  "Now ... now it doesn't seem like any fun to goof off," Jim said in an almost inaudible voice.

  I knew what he meant. I felt, myself, that I should be working at peak capacity, making up, in some esoteric way, to those who were gone by my panting effort, as if that might ease their startled spirits in whatever dimension they might exist. I had an idea that all of us who had survived were feeling a bit of that compulsion to go out and prove our fitness for the lonely gift we had been given.

  That went well with the amount of work there was to do, if our new "family" were to be comfortable in Dad's long-vacant house. Though they could have stayed on at Mrs. Yunt's indefinitely, that was a good three miles fr
om Hickory Hollow. Too far for most of the older ones to walk in bad weather. And the pickup, though it could run on our home-distilled fuel alcohol, was a luxury we felt should be saved for foraging trips to town.

  The three of us left the children hard at work and walked down the old path that ran up the creek, through the low-lying hickory wood that had first given the Hollow its name, out across a meadow that had been grown up to persimmon sprouts and sassafras, until we had brush-hogged the past summer, getting it into shape to make hay for our small herd of Jerseys. We picked our way through the chilly stubble toward the low ridge beyond, where the huge old pecan trees marked the place where my own great-grandfather had built his home, after following his distant cousin from Tennessee to the Promised Land that was Texas.

  There was still the stone he had painstakingly chiseled – HENRY HAZLITT, HIS PLACE, standing at the corner where garden met meadow. It made me stop, as I always had since I could read, feeling the realness that had been Henry Hazlitt, Aaron Hardeman, Zack's great-grandfather, and all the line of family that had culminated in the two of us. And now that was an eerie feeling, sure enough. Perhaps with us and our two youngsters that tough and tenacious line might come to an end.

  I shook off the morbid thought and went forward to open the gate for Mom Allie, then we both waited for Zack, who had stopped to check on Hazel, our youngest heifer, who was carrying her first calf. The pecans littered the ground, half lost in leaves and the berry vines that our best efforts hadn't been sufficient to keep out of the yard.

  "They'll be out gathering these up first thing," Mom Allie grunted. "Your mother's grinder is still in the pantry – I saw it when I was cleaning up after her funeral. Even the ones without teeth can eat ground-up pecans. Give 'em a treat to change off on canned stuff."

  Then Zack caught up with us, and we went into the house, opening the shutters and even the windows to let the cold freshness of the morning sweep the musty-old-house odors away.

  Though mice had done a bit of nibbling, and dust was everywhere, we had kept the house in fair order, considering all the other work we had to do. I'd thought to keep it usable for one of the children, perhaps, when they grew up and had families. Now it took only vigorous sweeping and dusting, some judicious scrubbing, and then checking the flues for birds' nests and soot. Luckily, we had swabbed them down at the time when we were wondering which house to use, so after we had poked the old fish pole down the kitchen stovepipe to remove sparrows' nests it was ready for fires to be lit, as soon as there was wood.

  The sunlight, stronger and brighter now, beamed through the windows in a flood,

  lighting my mother's reproduction Persian rugs to brilliance. The simple Grecian Revival couch and chairs spoke to me of home, parents, the endless safety of childhood, until I turned and walked outside, almost choked by the tumult of feelings that the past day had brought to the surface.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It took a bit of adjusting to get the newcomers settled in. At first, drawn together, I would guess, by their traumatic stay in the armory, the nine thought that they'd stay all together in Dad's house. That was fine, but it was crowded. Then Miss Vera Nicholson realized that Sam, at six, was beginning to talk and walk like and have the symptoms of his elderly companions. She got together with Suzi Lambert and they took us up on our offer to house any who wanted to come.

  So it was that Suzi and her two-year-old Candy moved into Mom Allie's room, and Sam, to his great delight, went upstairs with Jim and Sukie. It was all her mother could do to keep Candy downstairs with her, for the black-eyed young one wanted desperately to be one of the "big kids."

  This arrangement worked well, neither household being too crowded for comfort. Miss Vera, true to her steel-backboned traditions, stayed on to see that her old cronies kept their noses clean, and Suzi was kept busy and comforted by her task of keeping a supervisory eye on the children. Her husband's fate was, and likely would be, a mystery; yet, as he had been stationed in Colorado Springs, we felt his death to be almost a surety.

  After three dazzling weeks that encompassed the end of November and the first week of December, the weather turned again. By now, we hoped, the worst of the radiation from the upper atmosphere would be cleared. (Our government's assurances that we used "clean" nuclear bombs had been heard with skepticism. Russia's, we felt, would likely be horrendous.) Only debris had been forced into the upper atmosphere. There was no way in which we could find if we were being slowly poisoned.

  We were so busy, though, that we truly didn't spend any time in worrying about it. If we died, we would die working. If we lived, then everything we accomplished was that much to the good. So, while the clear weather lasted, Zack and Skinny, who had spent his life as a pulpwood logger, worked down in the big woods along the river, cutting firewood. Lucas and the two other men, Josh and Edmond Nolan, drove their frail bodies hard, splitting stovewood, hauling and stacking fire logs. And they all seemed as happy and healthy as boys, taking turns with mallet and wedges, loading the sledge behind Maud, our mule, calling and laughing as they went by our house on the way to add another stack of comfort to the burgeoning pile at Hazlitt's Heaven, as they had christened my old home.

  It kept the older women busy mending ripped jackets and torn gloves and ragged knees in britches. We were going through our store of extra clothing and scrap material in jig time, and we soon realized that among the crops that the men were so enthusiastically planning for the spring must be cotton. Where they were to find the seed, we didn't know, but we knew that we must resurrect the art of making cloth, though, thanks to our invaluable back issues of Mother Earth News, we wouldn't have to reinvent the spinning wheel and the loom.

  Three times we ventured the long trip into Nicholson, agonizing over the amount of gasoline we used each time. Though the pickup would eventually have to be made to run on alcohol, we feared that its advanced age might make it choke on a drink so different.

  There were some few people still there, though they were fewer and shyer each time. Where they lived and what they ate we never found out, for the grocery stores had been cleaned out before our first trip in. The hardware stores had been picked over, but few had seemed to realize the value of nuts and bolts, nails and cotter keys and hacksaw blades, the small things that make the difference between a slick fast job and a long slow one. Screen wire was one of the things we collected by the roll, for Zack remembered his grandmother's tales of the hell every summer of her girlhood had been in the pre-screening days when mosquitoes came and went as they would.

  We poked and pried into old storerooms and found remnants of obsolete stock–plow tools, harnesses and parts for them, clevises and pulleys for well ropes and all sorts of things that a machine-oriented life had found no need for. They were worth more than gold to us. We appropriated one of the U-Haul trailers from the lonely Gulf station and loaded it up with long-term necessaries every time we made the journey. But there were other things.

  We cleared the paperback book and magazine racks of all the stores that had them.. I picked up this typewriter and boxes of ribbon and ream after ream of paper; pencils and pens and notebooks and every sort of textbook we could find anywhere. Dyes and thread and needles and extra bobbins and parts for my very old treadle sewing machine. Aspirin from the drugstore, where the large generic bottles had sat undisturbed by other lookers, protected by the forbidding "acetylsalicylic acid" on the labels.

  But so many of the things we needed had been either taken for use, which was as it should be, or they had been torn and burned and destroyed, as if some of our fellows had taken out their terror and insecurity on anything that came to hand. And, strangely, we found that the doctors, as they left (whatever their reasons), had taken with them their most-used and valuable medical books. Perhaps they had gone or been called to places where there had been survivors ... on the edges of the devastated areas. Whatever the case, none of them left family behind, and not one has ever come back.

  It is difficult, fr
om our unusual situation, to speculate upon the fates of those who left this area.. When we arrived on the scene they were, by and large, already gone. Mom Allie had not been able to make any useful sense of the fragmentary and garbled bits she had picked up on her battery radio. The celebrated emergency broadcast system had evidently been left high and dry, with nobody who knew what had truly happened or what to do about it. They had tried, but they were useless.

  So we scavenged, now and again, creeping like mice in an abandoned house about the town that had been a bustling college town of 30,000. As the winter went on, however, we found that there was no longer any need for these expeditions, and we abandoned them. Still, I thought with satisfaction, now and again, of my deed on the last trip in.

  Nicholson had been blessed with a really first-class library. It had an excellent variety of books, well arranged. It had art prints for lending, along with records and tapes. Its building had been built, in the early twenties, for a post office, and the construction was solid and likely to stay that way. When I had thought of it, I had gone through and taken what I felt would be most valuable to us. Then I had fastened all the windows securely, checked all the outside doors, and made a sign, which I taped inside the glass of the front door:

  The key is in the letterbox. Please use this library as you need it, but do close it tightly when you are through, so that the weather will not harm the books. This will be the way to the future for our children.

  Maybe nobody would ever read the sign or use the place, but I felt better for it. Of course, the college had a fantastic library, there on the parklike campus. It was one of those windowless monstrosities that they built at the height of air-conditioner worship, and it was inhabited by someone who spoke only through the barrel of a high-powered ride.