Parched

by Lou Cadle

  “We dig the stalks back in, right?”

  “Not my favorite part of the process, chopping the plants to dig back in. I guess that’s easy work, though, compared to clearing all this.”

  “It won’t be that bad. We can definitely get it done by the beginning of autumn if we keep at it.”

  “Lot of debris from a job like this. Do we burn it?”

  He sighed. “I tell you, I wish we had gas—and that what we had still worked. I know Pilar has a chipper, but it runs on gas. We’d have as much mulch as we wanted if we could use that.”

  “Burn what we pull up?”

  “I wouldn’t risk it. Just drag it to the edges. Make a big, ugly fence with it.”

  “So, we’ll need axes and shovels, plus the come-along. What else?”

  “Little hatchets as well. And spades, not square shovels.”

  “Those pines are awfully big.”

  “We can work around them. The root system isn’t extensive, so they won’t steal a lot of moisture from our plants. Leave them for now.”

  “They’d provide a little shade if we do,” she said, squinting up at the tops. “But not enough to harm the crops.”

  “By the time we plant the grain, we’ll know exactly where the shadows fall, so we can avoid the morning shadows. Late afternoon shading wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.”

  “Okay. Want to partner with me? Dev and one of Joan’s kids, or two if she can spare them, would be the other team.”

  “Arch is still fit enough to do it too.”

  “I’d rather my father didn’t.”

  “Is he not feeling well?”

  “No, he’s fine. Fit, strong, all of that. But if something went wrong, I’d heal quicker from an injury. He twisted his ankle last year and it took weeks for him not to limp.”

  “I vaguely remember.”

  “The years are starting to blend together, aren’t they? Every year is the same. Only Zoe growing keeps me tracking time.”

  “You like having her with you?”

  “It’s nice.”

  “That sounded like it had a ‘but’ in it.”

  “No, it’s nice. I’m sure she’ll be happy to go back to the Quinns once the visitors are gone.”

  “I haven’t seen the healthy one out and about. Becca, is that her name?”

  “Yeah. They’re keeping her close to home. Don’t want her seeing what they have. What we all have.”

  Curt said, “I wonder if they’re trusting her in there alone or keeping someone there to guard the two of them.”

  “Depends if Arch got his way or not.” She smiled when she said it. Despite how difficult he could be, she was fond of Arch. Not only his caution, but his pessimism was something she understood. And sometimes he amused her with it. He was a Scrooge with a heart underneath all the gruffness.

  “So, you want to start this afternoon? Mid-afternoon to whenever you have to make supper?”

  “Sure. Big axe to start with? I haven’t chopped down many trees in my life.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it quickly.”

  “I’m looking forward to it, in a strange way.” Doing the same work over and over grew boring. This might be hard work, but for a few days, it would feel like an interesting change.

  “Wear long sleeves so you don’t get scratched up. I need to work on your condenser before that.”

  She felt a bit sick as she remembered the fridge wasn’t working. “I’d forgotten about it for a minute.”

  “Okay, so mid-afternoon? I don’t have a working clock anymore, so I go by the sun. Two-thirty in normal people time, but I might be ten minutes either way.”

  “I don’t know about normal people. We’re falling back into the state people must have been in for five or ten thousand years. I’m surprised you don’t have a sundial built, by the way.”

  They turned around to walk home. “Don’t really need one. I can stand out at my well, look at my house, and if I know the date, the sun’s position against the roof makes it clear what time it is. Or I could pick a tree to act as gnomon.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The bit of a sundial that projects the shadow.”

  “You’re well read. I never had the chance. Kelly should have Zoe go to you for advanced vocabulary lessons.”

  “I don’t think your kid will ever need to know what a gnomon is. Or antidisestablishmentarianism.”

  “I guess not. She will need to learn how to use the come-along. Once the dangerous parts of clearing are done, the parts that involve axes, maybe I’ll bring her out here to work.”

  They split off and went their own ways.

  Chapter 14

  Arch said to Dev, “So he doesn’t think the part can be fixed?”

  “No. Pilar and Sierra are going to have to live with only a freezer.”

  “I could take a look at it, but if Curt can’t fix it, I doubt I can.”

  Dev nodded. It was a sign of his father’s respect for Curt’s engineering ability that he didn’t think he could do it better.

  His father said, “Damn. They’re taking the brunt of it right now. Crap falling apart.” He glanced at Becca, who was drinking tea at the table while Janine napped. “It’ll be our turn soon enough.”

  “The batteries won’t last much longer,” Dev said. “And once there are no batteries, our fridge may as well be broken too.”

  “As long as we leave it shut overnight it’ll take us to morning.”

  “In the summer, when we have plenty of sun.”

  “And in the winter, it’s not as important. There’s less to refrigerate and room temperature is cool enough for most things. But I wish I’d stockpiled more salt for preserving meat.” Again he glanced at Becca.

  “I’m not a spy,” she said. “And honestly, it’s obvious you did some smart preparation here. The eggs you feed me would have told me you keep chickens, even if the rooster didn’t crow over in the next yard. And that rabbit last night was too tender to be wild, so I’m guessing you breed rabbits as well.”

  “You haven’t been wandering around outside.” His father didn’t quite make it a question.

  “No, but I’m willing to help out there if you let me. You could at least set me to pulling weeds in the garden. Or let me do the cooking in here, if you don’t want me seeing your property.”

  Dev watched his father think it over. Because he knew his father so well, he knew he was thinking about the woman poisoning them in the kitchen. Which was ludicrous. It was not as if they’d been hiking however many miles, dragging a wagon, with a vial of some poison in their pockets, just waiting for the chance to use it after ten years of keeping it safe. He said, “How’s Janine?”

  “She’s in pain. It’s her lower back. Maybe early contractions or fake contractions, Kelly says.”

  “I guess it’s going to happen soon then,” Dev said.

  Becca dipped her head and nodded.

  So different a mood about it from when Sierra went into labor. It was exciting and Dev had been happy about the baby arriving. These women were not happy about the baby, and childbirth might mean Janine’s death. “Mom will do everything she can,” he said.

  Another nod. She stared into the tea as if there was some answer to her problems there.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Dev felt sorry for her. “Either of you?”

  She shook her head. A second later, she swiped at her eyes, and then she took a gulp of tea. When she raised her face, it was splotched with red patches, as if she’d been weeping hard for a long time, rather than fighting back tears for a few minutes.

  He felt the need to reassure her. “Mom’s a great medic.”

  “She’s been straight with us. I appreciate it for myself. I’m not so sure it has helped Janine any.”

  Dev would want to know that he might die in a few days. “I can’t imagine.”

  His father got up and went through the door fast, his tread heavy on the steps.

  “Did I say somet
hing wrong?” she asked.

  “Maybe I did,” Dev said. “He’s a hard man. It was good for us that he was. It had us prepared, as you say, and we were running nighttime patrols when we were attacked, and we didn’t hesitate to defend ourselves. That was largely his doing.”

  “How many times? Were you attacked, I mean?”

  “Two, three. Four? You know, it’s hard to remember.”

  “And none of you were hurt?”

  “No, a bunch of us were hurt. My dad was shot in the arm, and he has a touch of nerve damage from it, though he can do everything he needs to. My mom was hurt. I had a hell of a concussion that it took me two weeks to recover from after I had to be in a firefight with it.”

  “From what? The concussion, I mean.”

  “Rocket launcher.”

  “Man!” Her eyes were wide. “You really were attacked.”

  “So you can see why my father was reluctant to help you. We worked hard to build our homes, we worked smart to build it to resist what happened, and without it, we’d be like you, wandering the roads and wondering how we’d make it another day—terrified of getting shot, desperate to find something to eat.”

  “I appreciate your sympathy.” She wasn’t being snide.

  “It’s too easy to imagine. And with my kid—” He stopped and shook his head.

  “I’m sorry you don’t trust me enough to let me meet her.”

  “It’ll happen. If nothing else, she’ll probably sneak by us to do it. She’s a curious little thing.”

  “I’ll be kind to her if she does.”

  She did seem like an okay person, despite that she must be as worried as anything over what his mother had told her. “If you stay, and things go okay, who knows what the future will bring for all of us?”

  “You’re thinking of letting us stay? For good?”

  He shrugged. “Until the baby can travel, for sure. And Janine. Then we’ll see.”

  “I hope that’s all we’re worried about—if she’s healed enough to travel.” She bit her lip. “I hope everyone is okay back there at that place. Your grain farm. I know my brothers will be worried about me. And Janine, of course.”

  “They have a roof, and beds, and water. Amaranth leaves to eat, and there’s small game out there. And we haven’t had an attack—not even beggars dropping by—in years now.”

  She finished her cup of tea. “We had fish for a while.”

  “I’m surprised that there’s water in any stream in the whole state.”

  “It was a lake. Or pond, really. It once might have qualified as a lake, but it definitely had shrunk.”

  “And no one was living on its shores?” That surprised him. A water source was rare enough that you’d think someone would have claimed it.

  “It looked like someone had lived there, once, years ago. But for whatever reason, they’d abandoned the camp. It wasn’t much more than that—a camp. No real houses. Shacks, falling down by the time we found them.”

  “Interesting.” He wondered what lake Becca’s group had found, and where it was, and why they’d left the site. Sounded like a good place to start a new home, but those questions would have to wait for another day. He stood. “I have work to do. Excuse me.”

  “Don’t mind the dishes. I’ll do them. Gives me a way to partly pay you back for feeding us.”

  “We can hardly sit here and eat and let you both starve.”

  “No, I can see you’re not the kind of people who would.”

  “I guess that’s our fortune, you know. Had things gone another way—let’s say the chickens had all died of disease—we’d be in a world of hurt.”

  “A world of hurt. That’s a good name for the new world. How things are now.”

  “More poetic than plain old Earth.” And with that, he left her. He’d check in again in an hour or so, but only after he finished replacing a board in the chicken coop he’d decided had seen its last useful day. If a fox had a fist, he’d be able to punch through the rotten spot. But first he had to make the replacement board with a hatchet and hand saw from a section of log they had dragged to behind the shed for just that purpose.

  Everything they did was more work than it had ever been before.

  Late that afternoon, his mother called him up to the house. “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “Janine went into labor.”

  Chapter 15

  The second afternoon of working with Curt, Sierra was standing side by side with him. They were both shirtless, though she was in a somewhat saggy undershirt, the elasticity of it having not very well survived the years. His body was interesting to look at, the way the disease had changed his joints. And then the muscles had adapted to that, so he was, while clearly a person, a differently put-together person.

  “Okay, crank her,” he said.

  Sierra worked the come-along, the chains rattling, and then the slack was eaten up and she braced herself for the next few hard pulls. Her arms burned with the effort.

  “It’s coming.”

  And the tree trunk and a root ball popped out, and she lost her balance and fell on her butt.

  “You okay?” he said, reaching down to offer her a hand.

  She took it and popped back to her feet. “Perfectly fine. It’s out, and that’s what matters.”

  “Yep. Let’s take a breather and a sip of water before we do the next one.”

  They were working across from Joan’s place, and they were taking out the bigger trees in one small section today. Tomorrow morning, two of Joan’s kids would clear all the smaller brush from the same section. The dead brush and stumps were piling up along the road.

  She took her sip of water and looked around for a cleared, flat place to sit. “I’m beat. It’s the heat.”

  “I know. Killer heat today.” He leaned against a tall stump they’d created yesterday by chopping down a decent-sized oak. For a moment, neither said anything.

  “I miss music, I was thinking the other day.”

  “I’m not much of a musician. I sang before, you know, in school and what-not.”

  “You don’t now?”

  “My voice is pretty awful-sounding. Maybe in the shower I manage a line or two.”

  “I used to like dancing as well.”

  “Me too. I took a ballroom class with my fiancé.”

  “Really? Like waltzing and so on?”

  “Yep. Haven’t we talked about this before?”

  “I can’t recall. But I’m getting older. Maybe my mind is going.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, you’re ancient.”

  “I’ll be thirty before I know it. And I’ll have never danced like that. Were you two just doing it for fun?”

  “To be able to dance at our wedding.”

  “I’m sorry that never happened.”

  “It’ll never happen for you either, will it? That seems sadder to me.”

  Sierra shrugged it off. “Or for anyone, ever again.”

  “There might be places, even in America, or whatever we should call this hunk of land now. Communities where a large group of people made things work, maybe even a few hundred living together without strife, and they marry there. Maybe they have instruments and a band, and they play so the couple can dance.”

  “And throw rice?”

  His smile was grim this time. “I’m sure not that. Waste of good food. But dancing costs little.”

  “Teach me.” She capped her water and hopped up.

  “Teach you what?”

  “How to waltz. Is it complicated?”

  He looked at her strangely. “There’s no music.”

  “So? Hum some.”

  “Maybe you should do those honors.”

  “I don’t know the right song.” She held her arm out and wiggled her fingers in an invitation.

  Slowly, reluctantly, he screwed his cap back on his canteen. She thought for a moment he’d refuse, but he straightened up, brushed his hands on his jeans, and then held his arms up, the left one bent at the e
lbow.

  “What do I do?” She realized she had softened her voice. Again, as she had before with Curt, she felt as if she was trying to tame a skittish animal.

  “Put your right hand in my left.”

  She did it.

  “And now put your left arm around my shoulder, and if you can stand it, put your hand on the back of my neck.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be able to stand it?”

  “I’m sure I’m filthy.”

  “I am too.”

  “You do have some twigs in your hair.” He reached out and plucked one out. “Now I’ll put my other arm around your waist.”

  “Okay.” She felt his touch, and as he put his arm around her, he drew them closer. The afternoon was hot, and it felt as if the space between them, as it compressed, heated even more. He left a space between his chest and hers.

  “You’re supposed to look at me,” he said.

  She’d been staring into his neck, so she lifted her eyes. They stood, for a moment, looking at each other. The world was still, the birds having been chased away by their noisy activity. No voices reached them from across the road. They might be the last two people in the world right now.

  “Your eyes are so blue,” she said.

  “I can’t help that,” he said. “Now, you’ll start with your right foot. Move it back. Then your left foot to the left. Last time, bring the right foot to the left. That’s one like, I don’t know what they call it, cycle. The beat is one-two-three, one-two-three.”

  That much, she knew, but she didn’t say so.

  He said the rhythm again. “So, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Got it?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said.

  “So I’ll say one-two-three once, and the next one, we do it, right?”

  “Right.”

  “One-two-three,” he said, and then he stepped toward her. A fraction late, she remembered to step back, but she managed the second and third steps, and he stopped. “Good.”

  “Marginal,” she said.

  “You’ll get it in no time. Second cycle, of course you start with your left foot, so two cycles puts us back where we began.”

  “Except I’m farther back.”

  “We’ll turn eventually. I won’t back you off a cliff.”