Mindy McGinnis: Not a Drop to Drink

Lynn glanced at the shelves of the root cellar while Mother packed away the guns. The dim light that filtered in didn’t show her anything reassuring. The glass jars from last year’s canning were almost gone. The few carrots and celery Lynn had pulled from the ground earlier in the harvest were covered in sawdust, their green tops wilted.

“We need to get out to the garden,” Lynn said. “The second planting is out there waiting.”

“I know it,” Mother muttered into the gun trunk. “But I don’t like being so far from the house with those men from the south about.”

“I don’t like the idea of starving.”

Mother’s answer was to give her a handgun. “I’ll come with you. We work fast and get back to the house. You should be purifying today too.”

Lynn stuck the handgun into her belt. “I can’t take a day sitting next to the tin when we should be harvesting. For all you know it’s wasted time anyway, the water could be just fine.”

“That’s how people in Africa cleaned their water, back when we still knew what people on other continents were up to.”

“Hell of a lot hotter in Africa,” Lynn argued. “Their water probably just about boiled on sheets of tin.”

Mother snapped the lid of the gun trunk shut. “You ever had cholera?”

“No.”

“Then it must be working,” Mother said.

“Either that or the water’s always been fine,” Lynn said, hating the idea of useless hours spent watching over bottles of water that didn’t need purifying.

“Only one way to find out, and if you’re wrong we’re both dead. Now let’s get out to the garden before I change my mind about that.”

Mother’s mouth stayed down in its normal position, not inviting conversation as she stripped husks off sweet corn. Lynn was shelling the last peas while debating the pros and cons of breaking the silence. Though they spent most of their days working side by side, they hardly spoke to each other if they weren’t on the roof. Voices could attract people, or cover the sound of someone approaching. Mother kept her rifle within reach, the safety off. Only the right words could be used to break the silence.

“We had four cords of wood, this time last year.”

Mother stopped shucking, her hands still for once. There was a small grunting noise that Lynn took for agreement.

“We’ve got two.” Lynn ventured. “It’s not enough.”

“No,” Mother agreed. “It’s not.” Her hands kept working, building up their store even in the face of futility.

“So why bother?” Lynn’s voice shook as she tossed the last pea pod into the bucket. “Why gather water? Why pick the vegetables?”

Mother smiled thinly, hands still working. “If I’d thought like that sixteen years ago, I’d have drowned you the second you were born, then shot myself.”

“But you didn’t.”

Mother snapped another ear of corn from the stalk. “Plenty did. ‘ I took the road less traveled by—and that has made all the difference .’”

Familiar with the glance Mother gave her, Lynn asked the question. “Who wrote that one?”

“Robert Frost.”

Lynn tossed another handful of peas into her bucket, where they barely covered the bottom. “Why do you always quote poetry at me when all I want is a straight answer?”

“Because I need to use my English degree,” Mother said, then cracked a smile when Lynn’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Yes, I’ve thought about quitting once or twice. Then I remember how they looked when they died—others who quit. It’s not an easy death.”

“I’ve seen people die.”

“Not slow, you haven’t. Not people who know they’re dying and have got the worst of it ahead of them still.” Mother kept working, calm hands unfazed by the images in her mind. “No, I’ve never really considered quitting. Not after seeing them.”

Lynn began plucking tomatoes off the vines, the spicy scent of the broken plants making her belly rumble. She talked over it quickly so that Mother wouldn’t notice.

“So what are we gonna do?”

“Tomorrow I’m going to start turning the little outbuilding into a smokehouse. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll pull up some flooring and put some stones for a fire pit between the joists, cut a hole in the roof for ventilation. It won’t be airtight around the door, but it’s better than nothing. Like I said before, I can kill a deer sooner if we smoke the meat instead of freezing it. You’ll do the canning over an outside fire and we’ll keep a lookout while we work. With luck, we’ll have everything we need for the winter squirreled away sooner rather than later, then spend most of our time on the roof and wait for them to try again for us. Meantime we hope they starve or freeze to death.”

“And what about us? What’s to stop us from freezing to death if we don’t have enough wood for the winter?”

“There’s always ways to get warm, Lynn. We’ve got blankets, our own body heat. We can go back to sharing a cot like we did when you were a kid if we have to.”

“Or you can let me take the truck and go cut wood on my own.”

Mother shucked the last piece of corn, her mouth back down in its usual position. “I could,” she said. “But I’d worry the whole time you were gone. You haven’t been running a chain saw that long, and you can’t cut wood and hold a gun at the same time. The noise would bring people to you like bees to honey.”

“What if I took the ax and looked for smaller trees?”

“Smaller trees mean smaller pieces of wood.”

“Smaller pieces burn better than nothing,” Lynn shot back.

Mother didn’t answer; instead she looked at the pile of tomatoes beside Lynn, and the heap of potatoes between the two of them. “It’s not a bad harvest. You get all the root crop down into the cellar, and the canning done here before the day’s out, and I’ll let you take the truck and ax out tomorrow.”

It was a bittersweet victory, Lynn had to admit by her sixth trip out to the garden and back down to the root cellar. She raised the woolen blanket they kept dropped over the entrance to their pantry, sidestepping past the huge plastic drum that held the purified water supply. Even though her arms were shaking, she was careful not to drop the buckets loaded with potatoes for fear of bruising them. They went into a pile beside the crooked shelves made out of stacked cement blocks and mismatched lengths of wood. Canning was a hot job whether done indoors or out, but Lynn didn’t complain since Mother had taken the water-gathering duties for the day in return. She dragged the cast-iron pot up the basement stairs with the last of her energy and started a fire with one of the matches taken from the dead man. The tomatoes came to a red boil as Lynn started a second, smaller fire to sterilize the glass jars.

Work calmed her fears as usual. The feeling of doing something always overcame the fear of nothing. There would be vegetables for the winter, and if Mother let her have her way, plenty of wood as well. The purified water still had to be moved down to the basement tank, but they weren’t lacking. Soon the days would be short, and the breezes would bite.

Lynn had never minded the cold. Winter meant diving back into the much-coveted books that lay untouched on the shelf the rest of the year. Mother had used the encyclopedias to teach her something of the world beyond their small borders, but Lynn had no interest in what surrounded them. Not after seeing the globe.

Mother had rummaged in the attic for it when she was making an argument for heading south, hoping that an illustration might sway her. The vast expanse of blue that covered it had fascinated Lynn, and she’d asked Mother wondering why they didn’t seek out this unending expanse of water called “ocean.” Mother had knelt down to her height and held her face in her hands.