The World Ends In Hickory Hollow (2 page)

I loaded our
rattly
old pickup (we'd traded the car for something useful) with canned stuff and shelled hickory nuts and quilt scraps for Mom Allie; then we climbed in and took off for the fifty-mile jaunt. It was a perfect November day, chill and damp and gloomy, as it had been ever since the night the lights went off.. The low-hanging cloud seemed, once we got up into the higher ground, to be oddly colored, thicker, and somehow dirtier than I could ever remember seeing it.

It was a shame the children couldn't go, but they had both come down with the long-lasting sort of miserable colds– maybe flu–just in time to miss more than a week of school, and I wasn't about to let them get out into this weather. They were still looking dragged-out and pale, and I was hoping to get them in shape to go back to school by Monday.

We went bounding along our track, up to the dirt road that the county "maintained" in summer when the fishermen were going back down to the river with their boat trailers, then out onto the
oiltop
, some eight miles from home. You couldn't say that we were overrun with neighbors, but there were a couple of houses along the way, and I'd always waved at Mrs.
Yunt
and Grandpa
Harkrider
as we went by. Nobody seemed to be at home, though. No face appeared at a window as we clattered by, and even more strangely, Grandpa
Harkrider's
front door was swinging open to the wind.

We stopped, and I went up the path and closed it firmly, thinking that somehow this day was starting out to be one of those odd ones. It got stranger as we went along. Penrose was so small that if you hiccupped as you went through you'd miss it entirely, but there was always a car or two at Mrs.. Benton's gas station-store and two old codgers sitting on an uprooted slab of concrete watching the weather and the cars on the highway.

Except today.

There wasn't a soul in sight in Penrose or Manville. Mrs. Benton was closed – and Mrs. Benton was never closed on Friday. Not even the day of Mr. Benton's funeral. The neat consolidated school halfway between the two hamlets should have been parked all around with cars and buses, and the long stretches of glass should have been lighted on this dark day. The parking lots were empty, the windows dark.

By now, we were feeling more than a little unsettled. I kept opening my mouth to say something about it, and Zack kept looking closely at every house we passed. Not one of them showed a sign of life. It was like some sort of dream, and I kept thinking that I'd wake up and really start the day. But the closer we got to Nicholson the more I realized that I was never going to start a day with the same feelings again.

Nicholson looked like the morning after a carnival. Stuff was blowing around the streets in sodden drifts. Dogs were wandering around, lost and forlorn-looking. One house in maybe ten had the front door closed, and wary-looking faces would show for a minute at a window when we chugged by.

We lit a shuck for Mom Allie's. When we pulled around the drive and into her backyard kingdom, we saw with relief that her door was firmly closed, and a dim light was glowing inside her kitchen. She heard us coming, too, and the door flew open as soon as we pulled to a stop.

"Knew you'd be
comin
' in this week. Knew, too, that you never turn on Jim's little radio. Come in, come in, and let me tell you about the end of the world. " She bustled us into her kitchen, where she had a coal-oil stove set up on top of her old steamer trunk, with a teakettle steaming away over one of the burners.

We took cups of hot tea into our numb hands and sat around the meager warmth of the burner, while she cut a piece of her Christmas fruitcake. I knew by that the news she had to tell was horrendous. Saving the fruitcake until Christmas week was ironbound ritual with Mom Allie.

While she settled herself and drew a deep breath, I held onto the teacup to keep from springing up and running out into the dismal day. My insides were squirming with dread, but I sat there and sipped the hot stuff and held myself down by main force.

CHAPTER TWO

Mom Allie took a scalding sip of tea, cleared her throat, and looked at us.. Her gray eyes, usually so sharp and sparkling, were misted with unshed tears, and her hand jerked, clattering the cup against its pink-flowered saucer. She took several deep breaths before she found the courage to begin.

"You know–or, being you, maybe you don't know–that there was a real set-to in Korea last week?" We shook our heads. We'd given up, long before, on politics, international relations, and news. "Well, there was. We were sending notes to Russia, and they were protesting to the UN, and nobody knew what had really happened, even the ones who were there, I feel certain. Anyway, the President finally pulled up his socks and said straight out that any further encroachments into South Korea would mean war.

"They believed him, I guess. Or maybe some of our generals talked him into a 'preemptive strike'–neat way to get around saying an act of war, isn't it?–and the next thing anybody knew most of the East Coast, a lot of Colorado, a big chunk of the Middle West, and Houston went up in smoke. What else, I don't know. A few radio stations are still on, but they only broadcast twice a day, and what they say sounds like hindsight guesswork to me. Most of the reliable stuff comes from CB, or it did. Not many are still moving across country, now. Out of gas, most likely, and don't know how to get into the tanks at stations."

"But where did the people go who were here?" I interrupted. "We evidently haven't had serious fallout right around here, but who knows what might be in the next county? It seems ridiculous to me that anybody would pick up and leave a spot that's obviously comparatively safe and take off for the unknown!"

Mom Allie grunted, and Zack looked thoughtful. "The
norther
!" he said. "I'll guess that it carried the Houston and Gulf Coast fallout away from us. But what about the Colorado stuff? It's a long way off, true. Almost a thousand miles might do it, but with something that carries so high into the atmosphere, I wouldn't have thought so."

"The jet stream!" exclaimed Mom Allie. "There was a lot of comment on the weather news on TV about the jet stream looping down lower than usual. What if it was lying along a track, say, across North Texas? That just might catch up most of that contaminated crud and whisk it away to who knows where, mightn't it?"

It made some sense, at that. I've never found it in my heart to look too closely into the mouth of the gift horse that let us survive.

Mom Allie wasn't through, though. "You know, Luce, most folks just don't know how to live when the electricity goes off. All my neighbors ran around like chickens with their heads off. Kept saying that there just had to be someplace where everything was working normally. I will say those folks who spent all those years working with the poor little Civil Defense program did their best. Tried to make folks see that it was best to stay where they were and feel out the situation. Nobody listened, though.

"CD did get all the old folks out of the nursing homes and the little kids out of the Care Center and put them all together in the armory. They've got emergency generators there, and those kept some of the sick ones going for a while – the ones in respirators and such. But they've lost most of those who were going to go, now.

"Anyway, everybody who had a camp house or a farm lit out for there, which is sensible. The others just took off. Lord knows where they've ended up. But that's not any worry of ours."

She finished her tea in one long gulp and set aside the cup. "CD came by trying to get me to go with the rest of the incompetents. I told '
em
I'd been
livin
' without conveniences all my life, up to the last few years. The lack of '
em
wasn't going to kill me. Besides, I have enough fruit and vegetables canned and dried in this house to feed me almost forever."

I looked at Zack. He looked at his mother. "Now I suppose you'll come back to the boondocks with us, Mom?"

"Only thing to do," she grunted. "Can't warm this house – all electric. Got to go out in the shrubbery with a shovel, and in the weather we've been having that's no fun at all. All the water I have is what I caught in the bathtub, right off as soon as I realized what was
happenin
'. Farm's the only place to live like a thinking being, anyway."

Zack had been sitting there with his wheels going around. I could tell without even looking at him. So when he said, "What did they do with the old folks? You said, but I had other things on my mind," I was way ahead of him.

"Armory," his mother said, and her eyes began to sparkle. "Folks like Lucas Barnhart and Skinny Trotter and old Aunt Lantana
Pinnery
. All the brains and know-how in Nicholson are
sittin
' there in a corner
waitin
' for a chance to die decently and get out of the young folks' hair. A good six of eight of '
em
who're still able and well, just older than their families were
willin
' to put up with."

"You still got that tarp you used to cover your root cellar with?" I blurted.

"And a good many old boards and pieces to make a frame with," she finished for me. Down went teacups, up came fannies from chairs. In less than an hour we had made a fair job of converting the bed of the pickup into a temporary camper, complete with Mom Allie's couch and chairs.

When we had that done, she went to one of her many cupboards and opened it. "How you fixed for winter?" she asked over her shoulder.

"If we ate all the time, we might get a tad tired of the same kind of thing, but we'd make the winter and part of next," I answered.

"Then
I'Il
send all this stuff to the armory. They're
feedin
' those poor souls bought stuff."

I stifled a giggle, while we loaded the cases and cases of beans and corn and squash and jams and jellies into the truck. While I agreed, in principle, with Mom Allie's views on "bought stuff," I had lived on it for too long to believe implicitly that it was rank poison.

Then Zack went away to the armory, while Mom Allie and I went about salvaging what we could of her life. What could go onto the truck, we packed into small cartons, of which she always had a store, for she hated to waste them. The majority of the things, her lovely quilts and china and glassware and silver, we packed into the trunk and locked it, feeling rather silly as the locks clicked. When Zack came back, as he must, to scrounge tools and hardware, he could pick it up.

It took a while. Our stomachs told us it was about noon, when we were done, and Mom Allie turned up her coal-oil stove again, put on a huge pot, and began dumping every sort of vegetable you can think of into it. Before long, the smell began to make my inwards rumble with anticipation.

"Figure we'll need a good-sized lunch," she said, sitting down to wipe the steam from her glasses. Then she held the glasses up and said, "We'll need to go by the Good Will and pick up a mess of these. Old folks need new ones just to see, pretty often."

Then it really hit me. If Jim and
Sukie
needed glasses, we'd just have to try our best to scrounge some. If they needed medicine, we'd have to make do on our carefully learned herbal remedies, for the stocks in the drugstores would be good for only a limited time. Dental work would go by the board, unless I could learn something about it. Zack was entirely too squeamish to mess around inside anybody's mouth.

Some of us were likely going to suffer ... maybe die ... for lack of the things we had taken for granted for so long. Well, people had survived for a long time without anything except their native wits, and I figured that we were well ahead of the game. We could find out what we needed. If not from our own thousands-of-volumes library, then from the nearby school libraries. Or from the one here in town.

I suppose my adrenals were taking up the slack, for I began to feel more vigorously ambitious than I had since our move from Houston. By the time Zack got back, I was pacing the floor with impatience to get started ... with what, 1 don't quite know. Maybe survival.

The truck groaned around the curve of the drive, and Mom Allie beat me out to meet him. It was still
mizzling
rain, just above the freezing mark, but people started coming out of the pickup-camper. Old and young, dark-skinned and light. Lucas and Skinny, sure enough, their long thin faces so alike that they might have been brothers instead of cousins. Aunt Lantana, short and round, her dark-walnut face alight and interested. A young woman who was definitely Oriental – ah!
Suzi
Lambert, the Japanese student-bride Chuck had brought home from the University of Colorado. In her arms was a toddler with silken black hair.

Vera Nicholson,
grande
-dame of the town, descendant of the first family to settle here. Married her cousin so as not to lose the name, most thought. She hopped out next and shook her skirt down to a decent level. She held by the hand her little great-grandson, Sam Volpe. Behind her came two elderly gentlemen who were total strangers to me, though Mom Allie went up and hugged them both.

That seemed to be all, though I peeped into the truck to see if anybody had been stifled in the crush. Except for the cases of canned goods it was empty.

Zack looked over my shoulder. "I decided that all these extra mouths might run us short. 1 held onto this. They had canned stuff all over the place down there. A lot of the folks had left, and the ones who were still there seemed pretty numb, except for this bunch. They were just aching for a way to get out and do something.