Darla's Story (3 page)

I took another tiny sip of water as I
thought. It was cool, soothing my throat. I knew I was swallowing
ash and hoped it wouldn’t hurt me. I figured I’d be okay; little
kids eat dirt all the time. Breathing the ash, though—that scared
me. I’d heard about that disease miners get—black lung or
something. Maybe wetting down my mask would keep the ash out of my
lungs, but we didn’t have enough water for that.

There was water in the house pipes. There had
to be. The well had a backflow preventer, so the water couldn’t
drain out of the system. I could cut a pipe in the cellar ceiling
to drain the water, but my hacksaw was in the barn.

Suddenly it hit me: I’d forgotten about the
hot water! The water heater wouldn’t be working, of course, but it
held tons of water. Fifty gallons, I thought. I threw open the
cabinet beside our stove and started rummaging through Mom’s
pans.

“What are you doing?” Mom asked.

“We’re out of water—”

“I noticed that.”

“I need a flattish pan with sides—like this.”
I held up a Pyrex casserole dish.

“What for?”

“Hold the flashlight for me. I’ll show
you.”

I led Mom to our cramped laundry room. The
water heater was in the corner. I set the pan under the drain
valve, cranked the handle open, and was rewarded with a stream of
fresh water.

Mom shook her head, her quizzical smile
visible in the backwash of the flashlight. “How did you do
that?”

“What? I just opened the drain.”

“No, I meant how did you know to open it?
That there was water in the tank?”

“Dad.” I paused. We usually didn’t talk much
about him. It’d be kind of like picking each other’s scabs. “He
installed this water heater. I helped. I remember draining the old
tank—carrying endless pans of water to the kitchen sink, because we
couldn’t get enough drop for a hose to flow right.”

We refilled all our water bottles and two
plastic gallon jugs that Mom normally used to water her plants. I
stuffed the gallon jugs into my school backpack and shouldered it.
Then I was ready to try again. I shook the ash off my breathing
rags and wetted them down, tying them back in place around my nose
and mouth. It was harder to breathe, but I figured that was a good
sign—maybe my mask would keep out the ash this time.

I found the ball of string where I’d left it
in the ash by the back door. The end was still tied to the
storm-door handle. I stepped slowly into the ashfall, paying out
string as I went. The wet rags worked almost perfectly. I moved
steadily across the backyard, aiming in the direction of the
barn.

After three steps, I couldn’t see anything in
front or behind me. Just the dim glow of the flashlight beam and a
never-ending blizzard of gray ash. My eyes burned and I blinked
incessantly. I counted my steps, trying to guess how many it would
take to reach the barn. Forty or fifty, I thought.

My count had just reached forty-six, with no
sign of the barn, when the explosions started again.

The noise was so loud, so visceral, that I
reacted without thinking, flinging my hands to my ears. The string
went taut and snapped. I was forty-six steps from my house without
a lifeline home.

I started cussing at the top of my lungs but
couldn’t even hear the words over the horrid noise. I was forty-six
steps from home. It struck me that I could die out here. If I tried
to take those forty-six steps without the string to guide me, one
slight turn—only ten or fifteen degrees—would be enough to miss the
house completely. I’d wind up as an ash-covered lump for Mom to
find when this God-forsaken ashfall finally ended. I fell to my
knees. My ears hurt, and the mask made breathing difficult. I
couldn’t get enough air—it seemed suddenly far harder to inhale
through the mask than it had just a moment ago.

You’re panicking, Darla, I thought. You do
not panic. Not anymore. It all flooded back over me then: Dad’s
funeral. Standing when I was supposed to say a few words. Taking
two halting steps toward the altar. Freezing, utterly unable to
move. Some well-intentioned soul had taken my hand, tried to lead
me back to my seat. Instead I’d fallen, hit my head on a pew, and
awakened in the hospital.

Never again, I’d promised myself. At least
not in public, when people are watching. Even though I was
desperately alone—forty-six steps from Mom, utterly isolated by the
dense ashfall and the all-consuming noise—the thought comforted me
somehow. I could pretend someone was watching me. In that moment, I
felt certain it was true, that I was being watched over. And that
feeling was enough to calm the storm of panic rising within me.

I looked for my footprints. They were already
filling, nearly invisible through the ashfall. The end of the
string was still clutched in my right hand, which was clamped
against my ear. I hadn’t lost the flashlight, thank God; it was
wrapped in the fingers of my left hand, and my palm was jammed
against my left ear. Maybe I could follow the string backward. It
would have broken at the knot, I guessed—the bend in the fibers
would stress the string, make that spot weakest. My flailing arm
must have moved it, but maybe I could follow the string back to
somewhere near my house.

I bent low, crawling awkwardly on my knees
and elbows, with my face just a few inches from the ground. I’d
only shuffled a few feet before the string disappeared beneath the
ash, buried in less than a minute by the dense ashfall. I moved my
hands away from my ears, intending to follow the string by touch,
but the noise burned in through my ears like a pair of misaimed
blowtorches, meeting in the center of my head in a molten glob of
pure pain. I clamped my hands back over my ears.

I bent even lower. My backpack slid forward,
smacking me in the back of my head. I shrugged it off, hooking one
arm through the strap so I could drag it alongside me. I brushed at
the string with my cloth-covered nose. It was painstakingly
slow—crawling along with my face thrust against the ground,
following the string—but it might get me back to the general
vicinity of the house.

I’d been following the string for ten or
fifteen minutes and had probably covered only a few feet, when the
string ahead of me pulled free of the ash, snapping taut. Mom.
She’d found the other end of the string.

Gasping with relief, I stood and let the
gentle pull of the string guide me to her. She held a flashlight in
one hand and the string in her other. She wore one pair of the
hearing protectors, and the other pair hung from her wrist like an
oversized bracelet. I seized the headphones and slapped them on,
releasing a pent-up breath as they reduced the noise from actively
painful to merely deafening.

Mom hugged me and I clung to her, crying the
tears I hadn’t allowed myself when I was alone. It was as if all
the fear I’d been suppressing had decided to pour out of my tear
ducts, mixed with some of the joy I felt at seeing my mother’s
cloth-wrapped, ash-coated face.

When I raised my head from Mom’s shoulder, I
realized something was missing. Where was the house?

“Mom, which way’s the house!” I screamed at
the top of my lungs, my breathing mask pressed against her
headphones. She didn’t even flinch. The noise was so powerful, she
probably couldn’t even tell I was talking.

I held her out at arm’s length and gestured
broadly with the flashlight, trying with body language to ask if we
were lost. I had a sinking feeling that I knew the answer.

Mom held a hand in the beam of the
flashlight, palm out, gesturing to stop. Then she turned and groped
behind her, coming up with the kitchen broom, of all things. What
good a broom would do was beyond me—a thousand Paul Bunyans armed
with oversized brooms instead of axes wouldn’t be able to sweep up
all this ash. Babe the Blue Ox with a bulldozer blade wouldn’t have
made a dent.

But Mom surprised me. She held the broom out
behind us, arms outstretched so it was parallel to the ground. Then
she swung it in an arc. When it suddenly stopped, jarring her arms,
we walked in that direction. It turned out that we were only three
short steps from the house. She had used the broom to stay in
contact with the house while searching for the broken end of the
string. If she hadn’t found the string, I might never have found my
way back.

When we got back inside, we huddled in the
closet off the master bedroom. The noise abated some when we closed
the door, although it was still far louder there than it had been
in the cellar. I had no desire to return to the dank, dirt-floored
cellar, and Mom made no move to leave the closet, either. Not that
it was clean in the closet—we were both filthy with ash, and the
sulfur stench hung around us in a noxious cloud.

You might think it would be impossible to get
bored in the middle of a volcanic roar, but you’d be wrong. There’s
a limit to how long you can stay terrified, and I’d reached it. Or
maybe I’d just gotten used to the roar—it’s astonishing what you
can get used to, given enough time.

We sat in the closet for hours, nestled close
together. We couldn’t talk—it was too loud. Couldn’t write notes or
pantomime anything, because I’d turned the flashlight off to
conserve its batteries. I passed the time by braiding three strands
of string together, working by touch. Tripled, the string was
strong enough that I couldn’t break it by hand.

I don’t know how long I sat in the closet
before the aural barrage finally ended. Long enough that I’d
braided the whole roll of string, creating a coil of thin,
makeshift rope. It must have been late—I was exhausted—but tired or
not, I had to try again to get to the barn, to get food and water
to my rabbits.

I wet a rag, tying it around my face. Mom
came with me to the back door. She stood just inside, taking a firm
grip on one end of the coil of makeshift rope. I gave her a hug,
took the coil of rope, and stepped into the ashfall outside.

It took a half-dozen tries, but eventually I
found the corner of the barn. I followed it to the door and tied
the end of my rope to the handle. Inside, I tried taking my mask
off, but ash was swirling through gaps in the barn siding, making
the air uncomfortable and possibly dangerous to breathe.

My rabbits were alive but suffering—panting,
tongues lolling in the wan light of my flashlight. As soon as I
refilled the bottle for each cage, they scrabbled for it, jostling
and climbing over each other in their haste to be the first to
drink.

“I came as soon as I could,” I said
apologetically. They couldn’t understand me, of course, but the
tone of my voice seemed to calm them—the ones that had already
gotten water, at least. I filled their food bowls and then made my
way back along the line strung between the barn and house to Mom.
She pulled me into a hug, clinging as though I’d been on a trip to
France or somewhere, not just to the barn. As soon as I could, I
broke the hug and took the rope from her so I could tie it off to
the door handle. Now we had a permanent line strung from the house
to the barn: a lifeline for my rabbits.

When I woke the next day, I thought it was
morning but wasn’t sure until I checked Mom’s watch. It was still
pitch-black outside. One thing had changed—it was raining. When I
saw the water glistening on the outside of my bedroom window in the
beam of my flashlight, I hoped it signaled an end to the
ashfall—hoped the rain would wash the ash from the sky. But it
didn’t. The ash was still falling, about as heavily as before. The
rain seemed to fall amid it, somehow.

After I took care of my rabbits’ morning
feeding, I was covered in a goopy slurry of wet ash. I tried to
knock the ash from my clothes, but it clung, and ultimately I had
to strip down in the entryway and trudge up to my room in my
underwear for clean clothes. Which got me thinking: how were we
going to do laundry? But more importantly, where was the water
going to come from?

I found Mom sitting at the kitchen table,
clutching her Bible. A candle threw a calm light over her. She
wasn’t reading, just gripping the Bible’s cracked, black leather
cover. A spray of long, brightly colored ribbons fountained from
the book’s spine, like a peacock wearing a funeral suit. Mom’s eyes
were closed and her lips were moving. She knew the Bible so well,
she could probably read it without opening the cover.

“I need a ball,” I said.

“Amen,” Mom murmured.

“About an inch and a half in diameter. Two
inches would be better.”

“I was praying, you know.”

“It can’t float. A ball bearing from a
combine would be perfect. I could get one at the junkyard in
Dubuque, but I’m not sure how I’d get there in this mess.”

“Sit down. Pray with me for a bit,” Mom held
out her hand.

I started pacing, Mom hates it when I pace,
but I had to let the nervous energy flooding my body escape
somehow. “Prayer isn’t going to get water out of the well,” I said.
“I’ve got to build an inertial pump. And I need—”

“Darla! Prayer most certainly will get water
out of the well. Prayer brought you to me—”

“I’m pretty sure that involved Dad and sex,”
I muttered.

Mom glared at me and kept talking. “And gave
you your father’s love of machines. Pray with me for a minute, and
then I’ll get you a nonfloating ball about the right size.”

I had no idea where she’d find the ball I
needed. I’d been racking my brain, trying to think of a way to make
one. It had to be heavy enough to sink and perfectly
spherical—incredibly difficult to fabricate without specialized
tools. Mom obviously wasn’t going to tell me what she had in mind
until I prayed with her, so I sat and took her hand.

Mom got something from her prayers—they
relaxed and calmed her. But when I sat with her to pray, I always
had the urge to jump up and do something instead.