Mike Mullin - Ashfall

When we got close, a man carrying a rifle detached himself from the diggers. He held it casually in front of himself, pointed at the ground between us. “You have business in Worthington?”

“Since when do I have to have business to visit Worthington, Earl?” Darla replied.

“That you, Darla? Didn’t recognize you under all that ash. What’ve you been doing, rolling in it?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“How’s your ma? I’ve been meaning to get out and check on you folks, but things have been a mite busy.”

“Good as can be, I guess. We’re getting by, anyway.”

“Glad to hear it. You can head on into town if you want. Guess I’ve got corn to dig.”

“What, you don’t care what my business is now?”

“Now, I’m sorry about all that, but there’s been folks coming down off Highway 20, thinking there’s corn in those silos-”

“There’s not-” I shut up midsentence when Darla gave me a withering look.

“Not right before harvest, there’s not. It’s all been sold and shipped out,” Earl said.

“We’d better get about our business,” Darla said. “See you later, Earl.”

We passed the granary and then a couple of large metal commercial buildings that had been squashed by the ash. A block farther the houses started, small ranch-style homes on big lots on either side of the road. The second one we came to had a sign out front: Smith Veterinary.

From a distance, the house looked fine. The roof was mostly clear of ash. The metal barn beside the house was a different story. It looked as though an angry giant had smashed down his fist, punching the roof into the building. All four walls were standing, but the sliding metal doors had come off their tracks and hung cattywampus in the opening.

Darla turned, and I followed her across the front lawn-well, the front ash field. When we got closer to the house, we could see that the lock was broken off the front door. It stood slightly ajar, and a breeze carried ash inside.

Darla pushed on the door with her fingertips. It swung slowly open. The front hall was coated in a blanket of ash, smooth except for a raised rectangle that concealed the entry rug. Farther inside it was too dark to see anything.

“Hello? Anybody home?” Darla called.

“This doesn’t feel right,” I said, thinking it was downright creepy and wanting to move on.

“No.” Darla pulled the door closed. It wouldn’t latch, but it was good enough to look shut from the street. She looked right and left, studying the neighboring houses. There was a curl of white smoke twisting out of a standpipe on the roof of the house to the left. We walked toward it across the ash field.

The front door to this house was closed, and the lock looked intact. A piece of particleboard had been nailed over the upper part of the door, where perhaps there originally had been a window. Darla knocked.

A rotund woman with a ruddy face answered the door. Two things caught my attention. First, she carried a rifle, but she was holding it by the barrel, so it dangled from her left hand. In no way was she ready to use it. Second, she was clean, shockingly clean-not a spot of ash on her face, hands, or apron. I hadn’t seen anyone that clean since I’d left the Barslow place over three weeks ago.

“Can I help you?” she said.

“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” Darla replied. “We were looking for Doc Smith-”

“And you are?”

“Darla Edmunds. My mother’s Gloria.”

“Oh, yes, your mother knows Mrs. Peterson?”

“Yes ma’am, they used to play euchre together.”

“I’m Jean. Jean Matthews.” She put down the rifle, leaning it in a corner.

“Pleased to meet you,” Darla replied.

“I’d invite you in but-”

“We’re a bit dirty,” Darla said. “Sorry.”

“Come around back, to the deck. You can help me get lunch out to the harvest crew.”

“We were just looking for…” Darla said, but the woman had already turned away and closed the door.

At the back of the house there was a big white propane tank beside their modest deck. A sliding glass door opened onto the kitchen. All four burners on the stove were in use. My mouth watered at the smell: bacon and corn.

“It smells delicious,” I said.

Mrs. Matthews smiled. “It’s only hasty pudding. I’d have been embarrassed to serve it before all this, you know. But now… well, it will keep a belly full.”

Darla said, “About Doc Smith-”

“I’ll tell you all about it on the way to the field,” Mrs. Matthews said. “We’ve got to get everyone fed.” Somehow it had become our job to help her feed everyone. I looked at Darla, and she shrugged.

Mrs. Matthews bustled around the kitchen, packing a couple of big canvas bags with a mismatched assortment of spoons and ceramic mugs. She shut off the stove and handed the pots out the back door to us. There were four of them: big, heavy Dutch ovens. I wasn’t sure if I could carry them on skis, so I unclipped my boots and left my skis, ski pole, and staff on the deck.

The three of us walked back out of town to the field where we’d met Earl. On the way, Darla asked. “So is Doc Smith working in the field? We stopped by his place, but the front door’s broken and nobody’s home.”

“No, dear, Doc Smith passed on.”

“Dead? Wha-how?”

“He fell off his shed roof trying to shovel off the ash.”

“Oh, God.”

“Lottie, she moved into the school. There’s a bunch of folks staying there now. But she doesn’t say much these days. Took Doc’s passing hard, poor thing.”

“Hmm,” Darla said. “My rabbits are sick. I was hoping to ask Doc what’s wrong with them.”

“The closest thing we have left to a doctor or vet is the paramedic down at the fire station. I hear he’s pretty good at setting bones and whatnot, but I don’t know if he’d be any help on rabbit sickness.”

“Probably not.”

“A lot of folks used to see a doctor up in Manchester, but I don’t know if he’s still there or not. We aren’t getting any news from them these days.”

“Is the library open?” Darla asked.

“Rita Mae’s library? Just try to shut it down. Mayor took her assistant to work in the fields, and the front porch of her house collapsed, but she still opens that library every day. I hear she’s living on a cot in the back now. Her ghost will probably be in there lending books fifty years after she’s passed.”

“We’ll see what we can find out there, thanks.”

Darla and I helped serve lunch to the crew digging corn in the field. Hasty pudding turned out to be a sort of cornmeal mush flavored with bits of pork. After we’d served everyone else, Mrs. Matthews scooped a couple mugs of it for Darla and me.

I didn’t recall volunteering, but somehow we wound up helping Mrs. Matthews haul all the dirty dishes back to her house. When we got to her back deck, she reached inside the sliding glass door for a broom. She handed it to Darla, telling her, “Beat the dust off that boy and then have him try to clean you off.”

Darla took the instructions to heart. I felt like an old threadbare rug by the time she finished thwacking me with that broom, avoiding none of my parts except my side and my manhood-what was left of it, so to speak. I endured it without complaint by reminding myself that my turn to use the broom on her would come next. Mrs. Matthews was using a whiskbroom on herself, not that she needed to. Despite the hike to the field, everything but her pants legs was mostly clean. I couldn’t figure out how she did it-dust just didn’t stick to her.

By the time I’d beaten most of the ash off Darla, Mrs. Matthews was already inside. When we stepped into the kitchen, she was carefully scraping out the remnants of hasty pudding from the Dutch ovens into a plastic leftover container. She finished the Dutch ovens and started on the mugs people had eaten out of. Most of them were already licked clean, but when she found even a speck of food, into the leftover container it went.