Mike Mullin - Ashfall

At least the work varied a little. Some things had to be done every day, like pumping water. We filled three five-gallon buckets each morning: one for the rabbits, one for the kitchen, and one for the bathroom. Darla told me the pump for the well had quit when the electricity went out, before the ashfall had even reached their farm. She’d rigged up a bamboo pole that protruded from the pump hole. I had to grab the pole and push it up and down fast to get water to flow out of a PVC pipe.

Wood had to be hauled to the living room fireplace every day as well, from a huge rick behind the house. We spent one day cutting more with a bow saw and ax. Well, mostly Darla cut and hauled the wood while I stacked it-my side was still too weak to do much of the heavy work. There was plenty of timber nearby: immediately around the house a bunch of trees grew, and there were more along a creek in the valley. Darla checked each tree before we cut it, bending a few twigs. If they were green and springy, we left the tree alone. But most of the trees were dead.

We spent the lion’s share of our time digging corn. We worked our way along the ridge where the ash was thinnest, pulling bag after bag of corn down the hill. Even then the work wasn’t done. The corn had to be shucked, scraped off the cob, and ground to meal. Darla had built a bicycle-powered grinder that I’d seen in action when I first arrived at the farm. Now I ground corn, endlessly it seemed, either pumping away on the bicycle or pouring the corn into the mill. I was starting to feel stronger, but Darla could drive the grinder at least twice as long as I could.

On my twelfth day on the farm, Darla cut the stitches out of my side. Droplets of blood welled up here and there when she pulled the threads from my flesh. Overall, the wound didn’t look too bad. But it was going to leave a heck of a scar.

The rabbits got sicker. We killed and skinned eight more-the ones Darla thought were so sick they wouldn’t survive much longer. That was too much meat to eat right away, so I helped Darla build a smokehouse. Helping Darla meant holding tools for her, scavenging nails, and cutting boards where she told me to, not to mention enduring abuse when I didn’t know which tool she meant or couldn’t cut a board straight enough to suit her razor-sharp eye.

We ripped up a chunk of the floor in the hayloft to get boards for the smokehouse. Darla said it didn’t matter since there wouldn’t be any more hay for years. It took the better part of a day for us to knock together a ramshackle structure about the size of a short outhouse, which seemed like a long time until I considered that we’d had to salvage all the materials and do the work without power tools. From then on, we had two fires to tend: one in the living room that we relied on for heat and a smaller one in the smokehouse.

We hung the rabbit meat on crossbars at the top of the structure where the smoke would pool. While we were building the first fire at the base of the smokehouse, I asked Darla, “So how long do we have to keep this fire going?”

“I don’t know exactly. Never done this before.”

“Like, a few hours?”

“No, days at least, a week maybe? I’ll probably leave the meat out here until we eat it-it’s cold enough that it shouldn’t spoil, even without the smoke.”

“How’d you know how to build this thing if you’ve never smoked meat before?”

“I saw a smokehouse once. Guy was using it to cure hams. And how hard can it be? Fire in the bottom, meat up top where all the smoke collects.”

“I guess.”

“I don’t know how it’s going to work for rabbit. Not much fat on them. Probably going to be pretty dry and tough when we get done smoking them.”

“Better than nothing.”

“Yep, it’ll beat not eating.”

Since I’d spent two days on the way here not eating, I had to agree with her. Almost anything beats starvation.

The next day at breakfast, Darla proposed digging more corn. Mrs. Edmunds flatly refused. “Have either of you looked at the dirty clothes? If we throw one more thing on the pile, it’ll collapse the floor, and we’ll have to move to the barn.”

After Darla and I took care of the rabbits and fed the fires in the smokehouse and living room, we hauled water. Endless buckets of water, to fill the bathroom tub. Once we had it mostly full, Mrs. Edmunds tossed in the clothing, and we started scrubbing. Our clothes were so filthy, they quickly turned the water into a grayish sludge thick enough that Darla worried about it clogging the drainpipe.

We then had to wring out the clothing, rinse the tub, and refill it. Each refill required pumping six buckets of water, hauling the heavy pails across the yard, through the kitchen, and into the bathroom, and pouring them into the bathtub. We refilled that stupid tub five times before Mrs. Edmunds was satisfied that the clothes were “clean enough.” Then, of course, we had to wring the water out of the clothing and hang it on makeshift lines strung through the living room in front of the fireplace-the living room I’d been sleeping in. The damp clothes dripped onto the couch-my bed. I hoped it would dry before I turned in that evening.

After lunch, Mrs. Edmunds declared an afternoon of rest. She planned to read for a bit and maybe take a nap, she said. Darla frowned but didn’t reply. The nap bit sounded good to me.

It was not to be. As soon as Mrs. Edmunds settled into the easy chair with her paperback, Darla said, “Come give me a hand. I’ve got a project that’s perfect for this afternoon.” I sighed and followed her into the farmyard.

As usual, helping Darla mostly meant handing her tools. And, like when we built the smokehouse, I got yelled at whenever I didn’t know exactly what she was asking for or I couldn’t find it, which totally spoiled the good part of this project: watching her bend over the engine of the old F250 pickup parked beside the barn. The pickup was half-buried in drifted ash.

“Are we fixing it?” I asked.

Her voice came back muffled by the hood. “No, I don’t think I can. I drove it a bunch before the ash got too deep. The air filter is completely clogged, and I don’t have a spare. The ash probably tore up the engine, too. Might need a valve job.”

I didn’t know what a valve job was and wasn’t about to ask. Odds were, the answer wouldn’t make sense to me, anyway. “So why are we working on it?”

“I need the alternator. Gimme a medium ratchet with a half-inch hex head.”

I found the ratchet but couldn’t read the socket sizes in the crappy light. I put one that looked right on the ratchet and handed it to her.

She glanced at it. “That’s 15/32nds. Christ. Put on the next size bigger.”

I replaced the socket and handed it to her. “How can you even read the sizes?”

“Don’t need to. Honestly, any idiot could’ve seen that wasn’t a half inch.”

“Well, I couldn’t.” I raised my voice a bit and shot clipped words at her. “And I’m not an idiot. And this is getting old. I know you’ve probably got ash in your panties, but do you have to take it out on me?”

She pushed herself out from under the hood. “Huh? What did you-”

“Ash in your-well, you seem so irritated at me all the time.”

“Ash in my-” She laughed. “Yeah, I do. And it is irritating. And what are you doing thinking about my panties, anyway?”

I blushed, hoping the inevitable layer of ash on my face hid it. “Uh, sorry. But seriously, it’s not my fault I wound up here. And I’ll be moving on soon. I feel tons better already.”

“Good. Maybe I have been bitchy, but having you around hasn’t exactly been easy for me. Mom thinks we can take in all the world’s strays, but who knows how long this will last? We might still be eating cornmeal a year from now-or three.”