The World Ends In Hickory Hollow

by Mayhar, Ardath

  Though we tried to speak to him/her, there was never any answer, even to offers of help and food. Whether it was a fanatical custodian or a crazed librarian we will never know. Perhaps, even after all this time, that grim guardian still stands off nonexistent book pilferers. By the time the children need what is there, old age should have solved the problem.

  (When we were sitting around the heater one night, wondering what the library guard ate, Sukie solemnly suggested that he/she likely subsisted on the offspring of the bats in his own belfry. Then we sat around debating whether that, in this case, might not be called cannibalism.)

  Of course, there was much that needed to be done that couldn't be tackled in the winter. Even with the small store of antibiotics that we had been able to winkle out of the drugstores' debris, we feared pneumonia. Without available doctors, hospitals, and stores of fresh penicillin, it would, we felt sure, revert to its old status of killer. So we didn't spend long hours in the cold and wet.

  That left long winter days for talking and reading and writing. The talented among us took up whittling, and we soon had a store of bowls and spoons, hairpins and knitting needles, figures of man, beast, and what's-it. Aunt Lantana often walked the damp way over to spend the day with us, and she proved to be a genius with a knife.

  I see that I've not described Lantana, and she well deserves description. She was, by her own calculations, somewhere approaching eighty. She was the color of warm copper, a result of her Indian admixture of blood. Tall and strong, even yet, she had the dignity of a pagan queen. And she knew everything there was to know about the plants native to the area, plus a great deal about medicinal herbs that had been brought in by early settlers or used by her Indian ancestors.

  Under her direction, we gathered willow bark for tea (the original aspirin). We saved the husks from the black walnuts that we gathered from the woods far making dye later. We even garnered some of the big acorns, so that she could show us how to leach away their bitter taste and make meal from them.

  "When you gets to my age," she said, "you can't tell for sho' how long you're goin' to be around. Now you need to know what I can teach you, and we'll do it just as if I won't be here another year."

  So we went with her through the winter wood, learning to identify even the leafless bushes and trees, making lists of their uses. She showed us where the dry stalks of cattail rustled at the edges of the river shallows. "Every part of the cattail is good," she told us. "You can eat the root, boil the young 'tail' like sweet corn, catch the pollen for flour, eat the young green shoots. And make baskets from the fibrous green leaves."

  Where we went with Aunt Lantana became magical, for she could see the nub that would grow into next year's poke sallet. She knew where the lamb's quarters would grow next summer. She could gather the resiny wads of sweetgum from a scarred tree and chew it up with stretchberries to make real bubblegum. All of us, young and old, went about with sticky teeth for days after that lesson.

  Most of all, she showed us treasures around our own home that we had lived with unwittingly. A bed of comfrey grew in profusion between the horse lot and the garden fence. We had meant to clear out "those weeds," but had fortunately been too busy. Now we had hot comfrey tea at bedtime, particularly when we felt as if a cold were coming on. And she laughed when we grieved to her that now we couldn't order any start of Jerusalem artichoke. We had a fencerow full of it that Zack's great-grandmother must have started and succeeding generations hadn't recognized.

  All in all, Lantana came near to being the most valuable of us, for she showed us the thousands of edible, useful, helpful growing things that our culture had discarded as unsophisticated. And they worked!

  So when her dark face was bent over her whittling, we listened to her tales and her advice, for we were trying to soak up all we could while we had her. And her tales were wonderful, all about great catfish that her father had caught from the river when she was a girl, expeditions to catch snakes to sell to "them perfessers" at the college, dark nights when hoot owls called and "de Boogeyman" lurked in the shadows on the way to the privy as they went with the lantern.

  There were many of these dark days, for the winter was stormy past all recollection. Even at the risk of a wetting, we did much visiting back and forth, for all of us, I think, felt a need for other human beings. And on one such gloomy day, Lantana put aside her whittling and held her hands to her face.

  "Law, Miss Luce,- we've been lettin' our heads just set on our shoulders without workin'. You know what? Down this here river there's many a little old farm like this 'n. Now there's some folks on some of em, and that's all right, but on lots of em I feel like everybody's done gone off, just like Mrs. Yunt and the old gentleman up the road. And every one of them has livestock!"

  I looked at her in astonishment, amazed that we could have been so preoccupied that it hadn't occurred to us. "What was penned up is dead, by now, but there's got to be lots of cows and horses and mules and calves all over, fenced into big pastures, slowly starving to death for want of the hay in the barns that they can't get to. We've got to get out with the wagon and tools, Lantana, and see what we can do."

  A break came two days later. The sun shone forth, weakly but with enough persistence that we felt the rains were over for a little while. Then Mom Allie, Lantana, Lucas, and I loaded hay hooks, wire cutters, pitchforks, and assorted halters and ropes onto the big wagon that Zack and I had built, hitched it behind Maud, and took off down the wagon track that followed the river for miles.

  I hadn't known that other farms could be reached by that route, but Lantana insisted that nobody had ever gone any other way in her youth.

  "You can go 'way round by the road, twelve or fo'teen miles, and get there by car, but in the old days, we had to walk or ride a mule, and this was the short way.. Go five miles along this old track, and you'll see ten or eleven little trails cuttin' into it. They goes to farms that's not more than a quarter mile from the water."

  While we had no hope of covering the entire count of farms, we intended to go as far as we could and to do as much as possible in the space of a day. The first track we spotted some half mile from the point at which our own trail intersected the river track. We had to break out the axe, for saplings had grown up between the old wagon-wheel ruts. Lucas and I soon had them down enough for Maud to negotiate, and I ranged ahead, then, chopping out and laying by whatever blocked the way.

  That first farm shook us. Penned closely in a new, tight barnyard had been ten weanling calves. They lay in a bunch, their skin hanging over their bones like spotted leather. The cold weather had kept them fairly well, but there wasn't enough flesh left on them to raise a stink.

  We knew that nobody could be there, but I rapped on the doorframe just the same, so deeply ingrained is the habit of knocking before entering someone else's home. The door flapped open in a gust of wind, and I jumped, but there was nothing alive in the house. And no vehicle was left in the garage.. Whoever had lived here had gotten into the car or truck and gone away down the oil-topped county road.

  "Why, why, why did they leave here where they had survived and could keep surviving, given a little luck, to go out into who knows what and take their chances?" I cried aloud. There was no answer then. There never has been. Not one of those who left has ever returned, and I suppose we'll never know what drove them out into the bombed chaos that was "out there."

  We walked out into the pastureland, cutting fences wherever we found them.

  "In the old days, this would have gotten us hung," laughed Lantana. "Used to be, if they caught you with wire cutters, they'd put you in jail."

  Now, we opened the way to any surviving cattle to wander over wide reaches of country, and down to the river, where there was always browse. Then we took down the bars that closed off the big hay barn, so that they could reach the tons of baled hay that waited for them there.

  When we felt that we had spent as much time as we could spare, we got back into the wagon and returne
d to the river, picking up my cut saplings all the way. We were learning to waste nothing, even whittling material.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The river was high and brown with the runoff from the past weeks' rains. Most of the leaves had fallen and lay in yeasty drifts and piles, starred, still, with an occasional scarlet sweet-gum leaf or golden spray of hickory. It was easy, with the bushes bare, to spot the next trail, which was well-used, beaten down to the bare earth.

  We stopped, and Lucas got down to examine the tracks in the yellow-brown clay. "Pony track," he opined. "Cows, too, and calves. Sneaker tracks, big and little. Been used since the last hard rain."

  Cheered at the prospect of finding another enclave, we turned up the lane. Even Maud seemed to sense welcome ahead, for she stepped out at a better than average pace. We emerged from the belt of woodland that lined the river-bank onto a sloping meadow, through which the track curved upward toward a brown house that topped a low ridge. Smoke curled from a central chimney stack, and seldom have I seen so welcome a sight. Before we were halfway up the slope, we could see the figures of children pelting down the way to meet us.

  The house sat in the midst of a young orchard, bare, now, but showing promise. A big garden divided the rear part of the orchard, and I could see great green collard plants still heavy with leaves. The rest had been cleared and turned to catch the winter rain. Someone else was looking toward survival, you could tell by the condition of the land and the plants.

  Three youngsters escorted us up to their home, chattering all the way. Carl was the oldest, a towheaded twelve-year-old with prominent ears and eyes that knew more than they intended to reveal. Carol, his just-smaller sister, must have been ten or eleven, blond and vivacious. The youngest, Cookie, was not more than four, as fair as her siblings, but tongue-tied at being among so many strangers.

  They had been so cordial that we expected welcome from their parents. That, however, was not the case. They met us at the house-yard gate, which remained firmly closed. Their eyes were also closed–on the inside, which is hard to cope with.

  "Curt Londown," the man greeted us. "Wife Cheri. We're doing fine, and we don't need a thing. Good of you to come by, but there's not a bit of good your wasting your time here."

  Mom Allie can handle any situation ever conceived by God or man. She managed to engage the taciturn couple in conversation for a full five minutes. I said nothing, just used my eyes, and at the end of our very short visit, I knew that they were probably well-fixed for foodstuff, had plenty of fuel cut and stored dry, were preparing for crops in the spring, and were terribly afraid of something. Wariness fairly popped from the pores of both the adults.

  I also discovered that Carl had met us with a small .32 pistol in his jacket pocket. As I looked down at him from the wagon seat, I could see its distinctive shape in the pocket of his jacket. As the other pocket bulged just as much, its weight hadn't called attention to itself. Who notices a boy's loaded-down pockets, anyway?

  The discovery filled me with a foreboding that I hadn't known until now. What could have made a healthy, well-equipped young family so cautious–unless some danger was abroad, some immediate, here-and-now danger, unconnected with fallout and such?

  As we turned the wagon and headed back the way we had come, I felt the weight of my own pistol lying against my thigh in my jacket pocket and was glad, now, that Zack had insisted that I bring it. And when we reached the river track again and turned to go farther along it, I got out and ranged ahead, as if I were merely stretching my legs.

  The next lane had been used frequently, we could all see, but was now drifted over with dead leaves and sweetgum balls. I looked back at Mom Allie, and she looked at Lantana, who nodded.

  "The Sweetbriers lives up here, if I don't misremember. Old folks, most as old as me. Their folks been on that place since heck was a pup. If they're there, they'll be mighty glad to see somebody, I know," she said.

  Maud was, by now, weary of her new duty and ready to turn and go home. I took her by the cheek strap and led her into the track, and we meandered through yet another stretch of wood-land. Around the first bend, we found our way sloping steeply to climb a sharp ridge that was lined with venerable hickory trees. Crossing over, we found ourselves in clean-floored pine woods ... big woods, such as I had thought to be gone forever in the wake of the lumber companies and the pulpwood haulers.

  Lantana looked up into the whispering roof far above us. "I see they never sold their timber stand," she mused. "They love these old trees. Went hungry, many's the time, but they wouldn't sell 'em. Down here, so far away from a road and so close to their house, nobody could get in to steal 'em. So here hey be, still straight and tall and talkin' to the wind. And all the lumber companies and the pulpwood haulers and the paper mills are gone a-gallagin'."

  We moved among the giant trees, even Maud's hoofbeats muffled to quiet by the carpet of needles that lay thickly on the forest floor. Then we saw watery blue sky before us and came out into a narrow field that separated the pine wood from the garden fence of a small gray house that huddled among leafless chinaberry trees. There was no smoke.

  Lucas pulled Maud up before the barbed-wire gate of the garden, and we all, moved by some strange instinct, went together into the heavily mulched rows, picking our way across to the yard gate. That stood open, and as we went through it, a small gray-brown form came trotting around the corner of the house bleating joyfully. It was a Nubian doe, and her narrow face was alight with greeting.

  She nuzzled at our hands as we followed the sand path around the house to the back porch. It was a screened enclosure containing a washer and a chest-type deep freezer. The door was unlatched, and we found the door into the kitchen unlocked–violently unlocked. Something had torn the door away from its own locking mechanism, splintering the door facing as well.

  I shivered, and Lantana laid her hand on my shoulder for a moment as I nerved myself to step inside. The kitchen had been ransacked. Cupboard doors had been left open, and broken glass, pots and pans, dishes, and loose flour lay in drifts across the bright linoleum. No sane person, scrounging for food, had done this. Pointless destruction had been the rule here.

  Into the hush that followed our entry, there came a moan. That released us from our shock, and Lucas moved quickly into the next room through the swinging door at his right. A very old woman lay propped against a leg of the dining table. She had pulled the bright cotton tablecloth down and covered herself with it against the cold, but she was almost blue with chill, as well as with loss of blood.

  Her short white hair was matted with dark clotting across the left side of her head, and the stroke that had split her scalp had closed her left eye with a purple swelling the size of a tennis ball. She had just enough consciousness left to know that someone had come and to let us know that she was there.

  "See ... to ... Jess," she whispered as Lantana lifted her against her shoulder, comforting her as if she were a child.

  Lucas took a knife from the kitchen, and I checked the load in my pistol. Then we moved into the living room, which adjoined the dining room. There was nobody there, so we went across it, down a short hall, and into a bedroom.

  Jess was there. He had been beaten to death with his own walking cane.

  The room was smeared and spattered with blood from wall to wall. Even the ceiling had dark brown drops across it in an arc, where the fouled cane had been swung high and down, scattering blood in its wake.

  Lucas knelt beside the dead man and felt his cheek, flexed one of the hands. The gaunt old fellow was as calm as any doctor could have been as he rose and said, "He's been dead most two days. I've seen a lot of dead men, child. I was in the war. But she's been lyin' out there in the cold and losing blood for entirely too long. We've got to get her warm, then take her home with us. Nobody can stay here, even if it might be safe to. Somebody mighty ornery is in those woods."

  "Now we know what the Londowns were so antsy about," I said. "They must have had a run-in
with whoever did this ... or could there be two batches of madmen running up and down the river or the road?"

  "Unlikely," he said, turning back to the dining room. " Let's look on the bright side. Let's say there's only one crew of murderers loose around here."

  In the short time we had been gone, Lantana had swept the worst of the debris out the kitchen door, and Mom Allie had lit a fire in the cookstove, rescued a kettle from the battered utensils, and set it full of water from the rain barrel. The bottled gas burned blue under its copper bottom, and it looked unnatural to me after the four years I had spent using wood to cook with.

  We brought a mattress from the second bedroom, which had been disordered but not destroyed as the other had been. With the blankets Lucas found in the quilt box beneath the kitchen windows, we made Mrs. Sweetbrier comfortable on the floor near the heater. As the iron grew warm, her color improved, and I blessed the big woodpile that had enabled Lantana to get a fire going in the potbellied heater so quickly.

  A canister of tea had been heaved out the back door and lay, still tight-lidded, on the entry porch. We made tea in a fruit jar, strong and hot, and Lantana found enough sugar spilled on the counter to make it very sweet. With this warming brew inside her the old lady revived quickly.

  One glance around her kitchen made her moan again, but she forgot the destruction when she looked up at me. "Jess?" she breathed.

  I've seldom felt so rotten. "He didn't make it," I told her. "He's in the bedroom. In a little, we'll bury him, if you'll tell us where he'd have liked to be put. You'll come home with us, and we'll take care of you, if you'll go."

  It wasn't soothing or comforting or even tactful, but at the moment it was all I could come up with. I kept thinking about our long ride back through the woods that would be getting dark in another two hours. I was in a hurry. She, more than anyone, could sense the reason for that.

  "Yes. Of course," she said quietly. "I knew, really, that he was dead, or he would have come looking for me. He'd like to be by the garden gate, under the big chinaberry with the rose vine up it. Then we'll go. It's getting late, from the look of the sky."