by Ilsa J. Bick
Page 39
“All right, guys,” he said, gathering up Dixie’s reins. “Let’s go say hi. ”
Just as Tom knocked on the front door, Raleigh’s head jerked left. A rumble rose from the dog’s chest. Craning around, Tom glanced toward the ruined prairie barn with its stone silo and caught a quick orange slink moving right to left.
“Hey, come on, boy,” he said to the dog. “It’s just an old barn cat. ” Then the door opened, releasing a ball of warmish air that smelled of fried onions and something ripe and yeasty, like bread or maybe homemade beer, and he forgot about it.
Big mistake.
53
Wade King was passionate about swine. By the afternoon of the second day, a Monday, Tom knew more about hog farms than was probably good for him.
“Last coupla years haven’t been too good for the other white meat. ” Wade King was as large around as his Berkshires, with a belly that could have used a wheelbarrow. Dumping a load of corn and barley into a bin feeder, he waddled out of the pen as the hogs jostled and snuffled around their dinner. “First, people decide hogs are good eating. Then they decide they’re too dirty. But pig manure, it’s gold for a farm you do it right, only people don’t want to hear . . . ”
Count me in on that. Tom slid a shovel under the third and last pile of pig doo. The floor was sloped, poured concrete and designed for easy drainage in the days when water came out of pressure hoses. As the winter got worse and Wade just couldn’t keep up, the manure pile had multiplied from one to three, each nearly up to Tom’s knees. Wade had propane heaters for the hogs, so the shit was only partially frozen and a lot still steamed. The smell coated his tongue; he’d gone through a half tube of toothpaste already.
“Thing gets to me,” Wade said, as Tom turned back for another shovelful, “is those jackboots in the EPA . . . ”
Jackboots? He had no idea what Wade was talking about. That the man should rail against a nonexistent government struck him as vaguely ridiculous. God, he hoped Dixie appreciated this. At the moment, the mare was stabled with the other horse, her nose deep in a feed bucket.
Raleigh was a real problem, though. Neither Wade nor Nikki cared for dogs, which struck him as odd for working farmers. They hadn’t wanted Raleigh in the house, much less running loose around the animals. In the end, Tom had nailed together a rough shelter and put it and Raleigh out in the fenced-in vegetable garden. Raleigh had barked for half the night on the first day. When he’d let the dog out to run around, the golden had taken off for the ruined barn. Wade had a fit: That dog scares my layers out of letting go of their eggs, it’ll be eating buckshot for dinner. After that, Raleigh stayed in the dead garden. He only hoped the dog wasn’t getting sick. Maybe it was just excited by all the unfamiliar smells.
He was only aware that Wade had asked a question because the pause had spun out too long. “I’m sorry. What?”
“I said if you could see your way to stay a couple more days, I could use the help. Got that roof to fix, and I’m just no good on a ladder. ”
“Yeah. Look, Wade, about that. ” Tom slotted the shovel into the side of the wheelbarrow. “I think I’ve put you and Nikki out enough. ”
“You still upset about the dog?” Wade flapped a hand larger than a ham-hock. “Things are so quiet around here and then the dog starts in. Just got on my nerves. ” Wade brightened. “You know, we have some hamburger set by. I don’t know a dog doesn’t like that. We need to be friends is all. Get Nikki to mash some up with a couple eggs and—”
“No,” Tom said. “You should save your meat. I really need to be moving on come tomorrow. ”
“What’s your hurry?”
“Just like to get where I’m going. ”
“Where to?”
“East, I guess. ” Lifting the wheelbarrow, Tom pushed for the open barn door. “Then south. ”
Wade waddled after. “East Coast? Bad idea. They’re going to glow for about ten thousand years from what I heard. ”
“Oh, I probably won’t go that far. ” After the relative shelter of the barn, the wind cut his skin, and Tom blinked away tears. A gust snatched at the flagpole’s halyard rope. Snaps clanged against aluminum. Both the U. S. and now an old Colonial flag rippled and snapped like sheets on a clothesline. “I’ll probably stay in Michigan for a while and then maybe head down into Wisconsin again,” he said, only half of which was a b. Once he found Alex, they were heading north and away from this craziness: Minnesota, or Jed’s place on that island. Canada. “We’ll see. ”
“Family?”
Tom tipped the wheelbarrow, then began raking out the load of pig manure. “No. I need to find someone, that’s all. ”
“Oh?” Wade was balding, but he had eyebrows thick as furry caterpillars. One crawled toward his scalp. “Where?”
“I’m not exactly sure, but . . . ” He hesitated. He’d been deliberately vague about where he was headed. Why, he wasn’t exactly sure. “She went to Rule the last I know. ”
“A girl? In Rule?”
His tone made Tom look up. “There a problem?”
“You might want to reconsider. ” Wade wore glasses with thick lenses and the kind of birth control goggles only the military could love. Wade hawed on a lens and scrubbed with a dingy red kerchief. “Way’s lousy with Chuckies. Thicker than ticks on a ginger mutt. ”
Tom thought of the two he’d killed, and the half-munched corpse of the old woman. “How many are we talking?”
“A lot. Look, Tom, I don’t want to tell you your business. ” Wade hooked his glasses behind his ears. “But it wouldn’t hurt if you stayed put a couple more days. Smells like another storm coming anyway. ”
That Wade could smell anything over pig manure would be a miracle. “Maybe that’s a reason to go. The Chuckies will probably hunker down, and Rule’s only a few days away at most. If the weather holds, I can be there even sooner. ” Tom scraped out the last of the manure and tossed the shovel back into the wheelbarrow. There were still the cow and horse stalls to clean out, and if he wanted a jump on the weather, he needed to get his gear together. “I appreciate your offer, but I really do have to leave in the morning. ”
“Suit yourself. ” Jamming his hands in the pockets of his worn barn coat, Wade shrugged. “I’ll just go tell Nikki to put by some hardboiled eggs, and I know we got a couple jars of—”
“You don’t have to do that, Wade,” Tom said, feeling instantly guilty.
“Forget it. ” Wade waved off his objections. “Least I can do. ”
By the time he got to the chickens, he was working by flashlight. The straw in the coop hadn’t been changed in months, and the ammonia reek almost knocked him over. For such a slovenly farmer, Wade was very particular about separating out his manure, and chicken crap went into the woods to compost.
Which figures. Pushing the wheelbarrow through deep snow was impossible, so he’d had to go out on snowshoes first, follow the trail he and the animals had already broken, and stomp until the base layer was firm enough for the barrow not to sink. On the way out, he’d spotted Nikki slogging toward the vegetable garden with a bowl for the dog and returned her wave. Now, huffing toward the woods with the loaded barrow, he swung the yellow beam toward the garden and saw that the dog had tucked itself into the shelter, its tail fluffed over its nose.
“Right, sleep it off,” he said, but he was also relieved. Better that the dog should rest up and start out with a full belly.
It was when he was scattering scratch feed for the chickens that he noticed something.
Wade had a lot of feed: barley, corn, good hay, scratch for the chickens. He stared down at the handful of seed and cracked corn raining between his fingers. But how was Wade getting it? Wade’s only wagon had a broken axle. Even if the wagon had been in good repair, there was no way that one horse—not even a dray at that—could pull very much for very long in deep snow. Plus, there just weren’t enough animals to justify a
ll this feed. Despite his talk about maybe building up his hogs, Wade wasn’t exactly energetic. The old guy couldn’t care for the animals he already owned.
And why wasn’t the feed stored in that stone silo? It was perfectly sound, yet Wade kept all his feed binned in the barn off the main paddock. All of it.
Then Tom really thought about all that manure he’d shoveled, all those poop piles scattered around. So much crap—and not one burn barrel. Instead, the Kings had Porta-Johns: not one or two but three.
So he hauled those here? That was a possibility, and it would be good thinking. Emptying chamber pots would get pretty old, and he bet there weren’t many farms with outhouses before the Zap. He and Jed had built an outhouse with a removable barrel just like Tom had used in Afghanistan, and traded off on burn shitter duty. But if Wade had hauled the portable toilets to his farm, how had he done it?
Maybe another wagon in that old barn? After closing up the coop, he trudged out to the wheelbarrow. That was probably it. At the back of the hog barn, he slotted the wheelbarrow, then glanced in the direction of that prairie barn. He couldn’t see it beyond the limits of the flashlight, but he sensed it silently brooding in the snow.
Of all the jobs Wade mentioned, he’d never once suggested they work on the barn. Why was that? Sure, there were more immediate problems. But any farmer took care of his tools and machinery.
He flicked a quick look at the house. The front windows were dark, although the kitchen window in back fired a dull yellow. Nikki would be there and Wade, too.
He slid the flashlight out of his hip pocket.
Just a peek.
54
It was a machine graveyard.
Tom fanned his light over a tractor, a manure spreader, and two Ford F-150s. Racks of farm implements and tackle lined the right wall. He even spotted a branding iron, which made him pause. Had those hogs been branded? He searched his memory. No, a farmer notched a pig’s ears. Some complicated system; he didn’t know what. Branding was for cattle and horses. So maybe the milkers or that bay. He just couldn’t remember.