The Silent Years [The Complete Collection]

by Jennifer R. Povey

  The Silent Years

  Three Novellas

  by Jennifer R. Povey

  @2014 Jennifer R. Povey

  All Rights Reserved

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  To my father

  Who has always liked a good end of the world story

  Table of Contents

  Book One

  Book Two

  Book Three

  Chronicler's Notes

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgments

  Book One

  Mother

  Chapter One

  Voices shattered the quiet of the summer day as if it were glass. Dorothy wanted to hold herself back, but the heat was up and tempers with it.

  "You should never have married him." Her voice sounded rough and sharp even to her.

  "You're a racist who doesn't like the idea of her nieces and nephews being yeller." Her sister's retort was staccato, like a hunter's gunshot.

  "And what if I don't? That doesn't make me a racist!"

  Dorothy took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm. Laura, so similar to her in appearance, was still blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh. The same light brown hair, the same greyish blue eyes, the same tendency to put weight on around the hips. The bone of contention between the sisters was that Laura, the younger, had married a black man.

  "It makes you..." Laura tailed off. "Dammit, Dorothy."

  "Don't blaspheme. That's his influence, no doubt. What language are any kids you have going to grow up using?"

  "Who cares? Dorothy, you're just a prude. Everyone talks like that these days."

  "Not in this family, they don't. You want to be part of this family, act it." The two glared at each other like a pair of bulldogs separated by a wire fence. "And get your husband to act it, more the point. He ain't just black, he's rude."

  "Would you care if he was white?"

  "Yes! For the sake of little puppies, Laura! Listen to what I'm saying, not what you're putting in my head."

  "You said you don't like us being mixed."

  "That's only after you called me a racist."

  They might have continued in this vein for some time — they had before — but at that moment the bone of contention himself walked in. Leroy Clark was a tall and admittedly handsome man - Dorothy knew what her sister saw in him, but how could she consider a black man like that? As she was not inclined to do so and had a perfectly good husband of her own, she fixed Leroy with a perfectly good glare.

  The look he gave her back said that he knew full well why she was angry at him, and was not about to let her get to him. She sighed inwardly. Leroy Clark. Who had taken their sister from the family.

  Well, that wasn't true anymore. Laura had been exiled by their father, who had forbidden Laura's name to be mentioned and crossed it out of the family Bible. After his death, they had welcomed her back at the funeral, but the tension remained. Toleration was all Dorothy could offer Laura's husband.

  "Leroy," Laura greeted him, her voice like a guitar string tuned too high. Still, she turned towards him.

  Dorothy nodded. She might not approve of the man, but she approved of the relationship. One wife, one husband, parted only by death. Dorothy thought of her own husband. She thought of the troubles of the world and felt her irritation with her sister fade. It was, after all, a smaller concern than everything else.

  She turned on her heel, offering no parting word as she left the two of them together. She would eternally wish her sister had chosen otherwise. Or, at least, that they would not have children to be victims of the same prejudice she herself showed.

  -#-

  Dorothy did not go into town often these days. Her rather beat-up old Ford did not get the kind of mileage modern gas prices demanded. She knew she should save up and buy one of the new electrics, but somehow there was always another crisis in the way of such a large purchase.

  She blamed that in no small part on her two very handsome boys. By their nature children were expensive, and she did not get the kind of support she really needed. Of course not. They saved the support for welfare mothers who popped out as many children as they could in the shortest possible time, each child another paycheck. Hard working families? They were expected to stay hard working.

  At least her husband, Thomas, did not work in the chicken plant south of town; that had been the best her father had aspired to. Her husband had achieved the lower fringes of white collar, a salary that would allow her sons to go to college. Thomas and Dorothy had already decided to send their sons to college, even if it was only community college. The boys had no say in the matter; children needed these decisions made for them. When they and their wives and kids had bigger houses and new cars the boys would be grateful.

  Maybe she should have gone herself, but her parents would not have supported it. Especially not for a girl. Her parents had still believed men provided and women got married.

  What if Dorothy had a daughter? Best she went to college, too. What if she couldn't find a good man? What if she found a bad man and got dumped with a kid?

  She pulled herself out of her thoughts as the car rumbled into town. Town was a mess. Town was always a mess. Most of the vehicles in the area crammed into the Walmart parking lot. When people were broke, Walmart did great business. Right now, most people were broke.

  Ah well, the economy would turn up again. It always did, a roller coaster. The media had talked about depressions for years, but it always seemed to lurch from recession to recession, never quite finding depression or boom. The government sucked, but at least it could keep them from the worst doldrums. Her family considered it an article of faith that the government wasted their tax dollars. Wasted them on kickbacks to big companies and making the rich richer.

  She drove past the Walmart and the little strip of fast food places and cheap diners, all of which she had patronized at some point in her life. Patronized, that word had two meanings. It could also mean her patting her sons on the head. She tried not to do that. They had to be men someday.

  Men did not tolerate women patronizing them, unless they owned restaurants. She shook her head and turned into the parking lot. Not Walmart. She could get what she needed at Walmart, but if she bought it at Rose's it lasted longer.

  She was clothes shopping, one of those things that had to be done if one was to properly survive. For her, shopping for pleasure was a rare luxury, saved for Christmas and birthdays, rationed out in small doses. She got out of the car, hesitated, then changed course towards the newspaper stand. The only thing she got routinely was the county paper, which was a round of births, deaths and installations at the art gallery that brightened downtown. Sometimes, she felt the need for some actual news, more reliable than the internet. Now was most definitely one of those times.

  A bell over the door announced her arrival in a delicate chime, at odds with the faint hint of cigarette smoke that wafted through the room and, most especially, from the storekeeper's clothes. The storekeeper ignored her, shelving cheap toys and candy, pausing only to push his glasses up his nose..

  Dorothy glanced across the headlines. She peered at one, 'Government denies biotech spill.' Somebody was claiming some engineered virus had escaped in Washington State and made the scientists workin
g on it sick. Poetic justice. Well, she supposed it depended. If they were making a weapon, they deserved their fate. But, if they were trying to make a new flu vaccine...

  She placed it firmly in the reserved judgment category. Washington State? Unbelievably far away. Raleigh was far away. Durham might almost be in another country. That was as far as she had ever traveled, other than brief trips to the Outer Banks. Who cared what happened in Washington, State or DC?

  Dorothy picked up the paper anyway. She did not care about rumored leaks, but about the other top story, which had to do with, yes, fuel prices.

  She did care about those. They were up again, which meant that getting into town would cost her even more. She envied her brother, who was heading hard for self-sufficiency on his little farm. That sort of life wasn’t Thomas' thing though. He liked his job, his routine, and his commute, which was what cost most of the money.

  Maybe she could use this paper as ammo to get him to telecommute. He insisted that she distracted him too much. Distracted, yeah. Distracted right into bed half the time. It was a wonder she hadn't got knocked up again. Assuming she wasn't, which she was not entirely sure of. She was late again, but that was not news either. It happened at least once a year.

  Maybe what they needed was to build an office onto the house, so he could lock the door. Lock her and the world out.

  Back out into the warm day, too warm for her immediate liking. The sky was thin, that sort of grey-blue that indicated the presence of clouds not strong enough to produce rain, that elevated the humidity from annoying to almost unbearable.

  She hesitated there on the sidewalk, and the world seemed brighter. With the sun emerging from that same thin veil of cloud, the world was brighter. The trees seemed less desultory, their green leaves arching across the road as they reached for a sky lightening from grey to blue.

  The news was forgotten utterly. For now.

  -#-

  Sadly, that lasted only until she saw another human being. It was old Harold Palmer, who was always a little odd. His latest oddness was to talk to himself as he bumbled along the sidewalk, ancient tweed coat flapping around his knees despite the heat. Eh. He was not worth worrying about. Yet, she found herself watching him, and a cloud crossed over the sun. Perhaps it was some echo of a memory that made her so...uncertain all of a sudden.

  More likely it was her strong desire to never end up like that, to keep her mind intact. After all, it was her most valuable possession. The one thing nobody could take away from her.

  No, it was her second most valuable possession. Her children were the most valuable, and she would defend them with her life.

  Harold Palmer meandered past a couple of teenaged boys. They hurled verbal abuse after him, as many boys were inclined to do.

  Not her boys. As she stood there one of the teenagers got into Harold's face and shoved him. Dorothy stalked towards them. "Your mother teach you no respect?"

  "Stay out of this, mama," one of them snapped at her.

  "Oh, don't think I can't paddle your behind, young man." She kept her approach even, not running. She knew running would just make her look undignified and less intimidating.

  Harold Palmer did not really seem to know what was going on around him. He kept walking. The boys let him go now they had another target. One of them spat in her face.

  That did it. "I am going to find out who your parents are and why they haven't taught you anything." She was careful to speak more correctly than usual, to avoid giving them any ammunition. "Let me guess, you think you're going to impress some girl this way?"

  One of the kids flicked his cigarette, one he was too young to have bought legally, stepping into her face. "What makes you think you can say anything about it, mama?"

  This was where it could get really nasty. "I will find out who you are." A calm threat, her eyes flicking over them. Just kids, none of them carrying any kind of a weapon. Bullying kids who thought they could beat an adult.

  One of them lifted his hand, then thought better of it, and they stepped back as she walked past them, but once she was clear, they hurled more jeers and insults after her - too cowardly to attack, too rude to bow to authority. Some parents just did not raise their children right.

  At least Harold Palmer was, thoroughly, gone. And at least they had not touched her. That would have been embarrassing at best, hard to explain and unpleasant...or worse. Her mind shied away from worse, feeling the danger of the situation keenly as her anger faded.

  No. She should not do things like that, and she knew it. She would not again, she vowed, as she always did. No. This would not happen again.

  Chapter Two

  Dorothy's brother's farm was a good way out of town. It was far enough that she did not get there often, and even less often as energy prices drifted upwards. Her family needed to buy more solar panels. Jason had his entire roof covered with them. Some days, his meter ran backwards.

  It was a shame solar cars remained just outside the edge of feasibility. Oh well. Jason had promised that if civilization collapsed everyone — even Leroy — would be welcome on the farm, as long as they pulled their weight. Dorothy could pull her weight. She always had, in her own, specifically female way.

  As Thomas drove towards the farm, she looked out the window. Fields alternated with pine woods, left there to provide cover for the deer almost everyone hunted. A small artificial lake glinted in the sun. The boys had their game consoles and were apparently engaged in some kind of high score war, but quietly.

  She'd always taught them to be quiet in the car. Not to disturb daddy or mommy when they were driving. She was proud of her boys and sure that they would not grow up to be those kids, the kids she had seen bullying old Harold. Her boys knew their place and were learning what it meant to be men. Real men, not emasculated city boy pansies. You could be a real man without violence, without disrespecting anyone. Those city kids, they did what they did because nobody had ever shown them how to be men, always given them too much of a pass. Boys would be boys, but there had to be a line. Parents had to show where that line was.

  There was something not quite right off to the side of the road. Realization slowly impinged on her consciousness: there was a fire in a place there should not have been a fire. Smoke rose into the sky and she could smell the scent of burning wood and heated metal. Not bonfire smells, those.

  "Thomas." She knew exactly how urgent to make her tone so he would take this seriously.

  He pulled over straight away, craning his neck to see what bothered her. The boys barely noticed. "Oh dear. I think that's the Mitchell place." With no discussion, Thomas hit the gas and then swung down the narrow road that led that way.

  "What's going on?" asked Junior.

  "The Mitchell place is on fire." She didn't shelter her children. Didn't keep them from knowing the things they'd need to know as adults. That was coddling.

  Of course, both reacted as only young boys can to such news. "Cool!" came twin soprano voices. They were boys. They would learn how serious it was.

  "Pipe down. And stay in the car."

  As they approached, it was not the Mitchell's house that was burning. It was their barn. Their daughter's horse was in the paddock, running the fence line, terrified. The daughter was trying to catch him to keep him from running right into the flames. Horses would do that. They didn't have much in the way of brains.

  Evan had a hose trained on the flames. His wife was talking on a cell phone, calling the fire department. Neighbors were helping, though. There was a pause, then: "Bucket brigade?" Thomas offered as he opened the door.

  "Can. Wish your boys were a few years older."

  "Don't have any of the animals in there, right?"

  "Got the cat, put her in the house. Just need to keep it from spreading."

  Dorothy glanced at her husband, then hissed to the boys, "Stay put."

  Jane Mitchell finally had the horse. She was leading it away from the fire. "I'll be back when I have him secured somewhere
." The poor animal bounced on his hooves, ears pinned against his skull, tail lashing.

  The house was the only source of water. It was pretty clear that their efforts were token against the force of the fire. They did it simply to be doing something. Dorothy threw buckets until her arms ached and only then did the blasted firefighters show up. Response times: another thing that had been going up lately.

  The world was falling apart and she knew it, but she also could do nothing about it. Besides, the world was always falling apart. Entropy. Like a satellite in orbit that fell constantly and always arrived in the same place. Junior was learning about satellites. They grew so fast.

  The firemen finally put the blaze out, while the boys watched. There was little left of the Mitchells' barn, or of Mr. Mitchell's bike, which had been in there. At least the family and the animals were safe. At least it wasn't their house. With each of those thoughts she half-filled her glass, determined not to let herself be brought down by this. The boys, of course, still thought it was cool.

  She showered in the Mitchells' bathroom, trying to get the scent of smoke off herself, trying to get her mind back on where they were supposed to go... Right, Jason's farm. Turning back occurred to her, but the boys would be upset and disappointed. She gathered her thoughts before emerging, a towel over her hair.

  "I called Jason," Thomas called. "He says we should stay over." Whether Thomas had asked, she did not know or care. The boys were still warring as if none of it had happened. True resilience that, and hardly surprising. They were children, and nothing ever seemed to affect them. She envied that resilience, envied not having to worry about anything.

  Sometimes, she wished she could just put everything in Thomas' hands. Wasn't that what marriage was about? It was how she had once imagined it - a man to provide for her. To care for her so she could focus on cooking and childrearing and worry about nothing else.