Mike Mullin - Ashfall

Darla whittled a shallow groove into both my poles about five inches from the bottoms, using my mother’s mini-chef’s knife. She cleaned off the bark from two sticks and cut them about eight inches long. Then she lashed the sticks to one of the poles in an X shape, wrapping twine in the groove so the sticks couldn’t slide up or down.

I handed her stuff and cut twine for her. She talked while she worked. “This reminds me of working with my dad. He used to let me do everything-well, everything I was strong enough for. He’d hand me tools and tell me what to do with them. I’d usually screw it up, at least the first time, but he’d just tell me what I was doing wrong and let me try again.”

“What’d you guys work on?”

“All kinds of stuff. We built a hydraulic tree-digger when I was ten or eleven. Big thing with four blades on it that you could hook up to the tractor and use to move live trees around. That’s when he taught me how to weld.”

“You learned to weld when you were ten?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I don’t think I was allowed to touch the stove when I was ten, let alone use a welder.”

“Yeah, well. With your amazing mechanical aptitude, I wouldn’t have let you touch a stove, either.”

I might have taken offense, but she was smiling at me in a way that made it impossible to be mad. “Why’d you want to learn all that stuff?”

“I dunno. I’ve always been interested in machines. And Dad was a great teacher. He’d smile when I got to the barn after school. He had the most amazing smile-it lit up his whole face. Then he’d turn everything over to me, show me where the project was at. It was probably a lot slower than doing it himself, but he never once complained. We did everything together-fixed the tractor, mended fences, built stuff…”

“It must have been hard when he died.” The moment I said it I realized how stupid it sounded. Duh. But Darla didn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah. I tried to keep the farm going. At first the neighbors came by all the time to help. But that didn’t last long.”

“The farm? I thought you only had the rabbits.”

“You didn’t think all that corn we were digging up planted itself, did you?”

“You did all that?”

“Yeah. Got crappy grades at school. Kept falling asleep in class. Almost had to repeat sophomore year.” Darla frowned. “It got better junior year. Mom and I sold off the cows and leased out some of our land, so it wasn’t as hard to keep up.”

“Junior year… how old are you?”

“I’ll be eighteen in February. You?”

“Um, I dunno.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“What’s the date today?”

Darla thought for a few seconds. “It’s the fourth of October.”

“I guess I’m sixteen then. My birthday was two days ago.”

“Wow, missed your own birthday.”

I shrugged. “So… I’ve fallen for an older woman? You going to take me to prom?”

“Yeah, right. Even if there was a prom, I probably wouldn’t be going. Probably be too busy.”

“So much for the benefits of dating an older woman.”

“Happy birthday.” She leaned over and kissed me, a quick peck on the lips. I hoped we’d keep kissing, but Darla returned to working on my ski poles. She tied a series of strings connecting the crossbars so that when she was finished they looked like diamond-shaped dream catchers.

When Darla finished she said, “Ta-da! New ski poles. For your birthday. Not much of a present, I know, but it’s all I’ve got.”

“When you followed me out of Worthington, that was my real birthday present.”

The poles worked great. The combination of crossbars and string grabbed in the snow, so my poles only sank a few inches. It didn’t do anything for my skis, of course. They still had an annoying tendency to dive under the powder instead of gliding on top of it, but if I stayed in Darla’s tracks, we made progress.

Early that afternoon we came to an intersection. A wide road crossed our path. A sign poked about a foot above the snow. Darla knocked the ice off it: U.S. 151.

That startled me a little. The snow on 151 was completely undisturbed-no one had used it since the blizzard had ended. Shouldn’t a major highway have had some kind of traffic? People walking along it, at least? Was everyone dead? The east-west road we’d been on for a while, Simon Road, had been deserted as well, but it was a minor county lane, probably not even paved.

“Highway 151 goes to Dubuque,” Darla said. “We should head north.”

“I dunno. Didn’t Mrs. Nance say there’d been riots in Dubuque?”

“The only bridges across the Mississippi within thirty miles of here are in Dubuque.”

“Crap. Okay.” We turned north.

Two hours later, we still hadn’t seen signs of anyone on the road. We passed two farmsteads that had tracks in their yards, and two more that appeared to be deserted, but it was too early to stop for the night.

Every now and then we passed a big rectangular shape covered in snow. I asked Darla what she thought they were.

“Abandoned cars,” she replied. “Buried in ash and snow.” That made sense-why hadn’t I thought of that?

We hurled ourselves up a ridge, duck walking. At the top, a glorious downhill slope stretched out below us. Darla grinned and pushed off. I carefully fitted my skis into her tracks and shoved hard with my poles, racing to catch up. We flew down the slope, wind burning our cheeks, freezing air filling our nostrils. Darla laughed, and I let out a whoop.

About halfway down, Darla stood up on her skis and quit pushing with her poles. I started to yell, to ask what was wrong, but she held up a hand, motioning for quiet. That didn’t make sense until I caught a glimpse of what lay ahead of her.

Someone was coming up the road toward us.

Neither of us was much of an expert in cross-country skiing. I didn’t think I could stop myself on the downhill slope without falling over. Anyway, Darla was in the lead and had a better view of the approaching people, so I left it up to her. She kept going, and I followed.

As we got closer, I could see them better. A woman plodded toward us through the deep snow. She was bent almost double, straining against a rope looped around her waist. The rope led to a toboggan. There was a suitcase at the front-a big black one with wheels on it, the type that people used to drag through airports. Three kids sat behind it.

The two kids near the front of the toboggan were tiny, maybe two and four years old. They were bundled up tightly in hats, gloves, and warm-looking snowsuits. A larger girl, maybe six or seven, rode at the back. She had on a good snowsuit, too, but no hat and only one glove. Her head lolled to one side, long blonde hair whipped by the wind. Her gloveless right hand dragged in the snow beside the toboggan.

I didn’t think the woman had seen us. She was making a heroic effort to move up the hill in snow that deep, let alone pull a sled loaded with kids. Darla was fifty or sixty feet from them when the woman finally looked up.

She screamed-a wordless yell of surprise and fear.

Darla kept skiing toward her as slowly as the hill allowed.

“Stay away from me!” the woman yelled. She turned away from the crown of the road, pulling the toboggan toward the ditch. Somehow she managed a burst of speed. “They’re my babies! Mine! You can’t have them!”

The snow had drifted deep in the ditch. The woman fell into it, floundering in snow over her head. The toboggan tilted and came to rest at a steep angle, halfway in the ditch. The girl at the back of the toboggan toppled sideways.

I expected to hear crying, but it was eerily silent. The woman thrashed in the snow, trying to right herself. The two little kids stared as Darla and I approached, their eyes shining with fear. The older girl still hadn’t moved.