Mindy McGinnis: Not a Drop to Drink

“Hey there, little one.” His voice had been thin and weak. But still it set her back and she’d tripped in alarm, landing on her bottom. “It’s all right,” he said. “I need help. Get Lauren.”

The last word had meant nothing to her, a foreign mixture of two syllables she’d never heard before.

“Your mother,” he added patiently. “Get your mother.”

That word she knew, and she had bolted home, a panicked message on her lips that Mother had deciphered after a few moments. Lynn remembered the shock that had passed over Mother’s face; it was the first time she’d ever seen that Mother could feel fear. And then she had turned and run, leaving Lynn to follow as best she could. The strange man was propped on his good leg and leaning against Mother by the time she caught up. The sight of a metal trap, its jaws embedded firmly into swollen, stinking flesh just above the man’s ankle, had brought Lynn to a screaming halt.

The two adults had shuffled awkwardly back to the house, Lynn carrying both their weapons and following behind. The man’s foot had banged against the cinder-block wall of the cellar as they clumsily helped him down the stairs, and he’d howled so loudly that Lynn had run back to the landing, peering down into the basement as Mother eased him onto her own cot and looked critically at his ruined foot.

Mother had ordered Lynn back downstairs, and she had been put to work ripping a rag into shreds for binding, boiling water, and then to the upstairs kitchen for their sharpest knife. After that, she’d been banished to the upstairs bedrooms, somewhere she’d hardly ever been before. A thick coat of dust covered the room that Mother called “Lynn’s room,” even though she’d spent most of her life on the roof or in the basement, where the only windows were inches above ground level and easy to defend. She’d sat on the dusty frame of her unused bed and tried not to listen to the screams coming up through the vents.

The memory still had the power to chill her. The stranger had passed out under Mother’s ministrations, and a shaken, pale version of her mother had come upstairs and sat next to her on the bed for a few moments before speaking.

“That man is named Stebbs, and he’ll have to stay with us for a little while until he gets better,” she had said calmly.

It was the first and only time Lynn could remember speaking to anyone other than Mother. She had very little memory of him, only that she’d had a fascination with his stubble that seemed to amuse him, once he was healthy enough to be amused by anything. And then he was gone, someone she would only see for years afterward through the lenses of binoculars or the crosshairs of a scope.

The constant grating of Mother’s handsaw came from within the outbuilding as Lynn cut maple saplings out of the fencerow with her hatchet. Mother needed green wood to smoke the meat, and Lynn’s hands were soon slick from working with the living trees. The hard bulk of the handgun tucked into her waistband chafed against her ribs as she worked.

Making brine for the meat before smoking it was the next job, which required an unheard-of sin: pouring salt into water. Lynn balked at the thought, even after Mother had explained that it would kill the bacteria in the meat. The logic wasn’t enough to stop her from bristling as she watched Mother pour twenty gallons of water into buckets loaded with salt.

“Gotta keep the brine cool,” Mother said idly while she stirred. “We’ll leave it down here in the basement once I’ve shot a deer, and it’s curing. Should take about a week.”

Lynn only muttered in response. Gallons of the purified water she’d hauled into the basement bottle by bottle were ruined. Salted. As useless as ocean water.

Mother glanced up at her. “I know you don’t like this, but it’s for the best. It’s worked in the past to shoot a small deer and freeze the meat, but this way I can take something bigger down. We salt it, we smoke it. We can take it with us without having to worry about spoiling.”

“Take it where?” Lynn asked, her tone dark.

Mother kept stirring the brine, even though Lynn could see that all the salt had dissolved. “We got lucky the other night, Lynn. Real lucky. They weren’t expecting us to be anything less than an easy target. We put them down, and they’re not going to be happy about it.”

“But you said they’re set up in that little town that the stream runs through. Why would they want the pond?”

“Because the stream isn’t dependable,” Mother answered. “Those people to the east will learn it soon enough, I’m guessing the men from the south suspect it. But also they’ll come because we beat them. Because they’re men.”

Lynn ground a naked toe against the stone floor of the basement, ignoring the pain as it bent backward. Men . Mother always spoke that word with such malevolence that Lynn could not imagine what they must be like. The dangers they posed to her survival she was aware of. Other threats, only hinted at by Mother, remained a mystery.

“So what do we do?”

“We go south with canned food and enough meat to take us as far as we want.”

“You go on and make all the brine you want,” Lynn said, pushing hard enough on her toe to bust the nail. “You can salt up a damn bear and pack him into nice little bundles. I’m not going.”

Mother glanced at Lynn, her mouth twitching in a flash of humor. “Then I guess we’ll have to kill the assholes.”

Butchering was work. Mother had shot a much larger deer than usual, and the stripping of muscle from bone was exhausting. Once all the meat was immersed in brine, they looked at each other critically. The basement had a drain, but most of the blood was on them rather than down it. Even Lynn’s face had splotches on it where she swiped at her hair while working. Her arms were slick with blood, and it squelched between her bare toes.

“I’ll bring in some unpurified water,” Lynn suggested. “We can use the tub.”

Using the upstairs of the house was typically off limits. When it was warm, they rinsed themselves in the pond, and during cold months there was a claw-foot tub in the basement that could be used for bathing. But that would mean dragging it out from the backroom, and neither of the women had the strength. Mother nodded in agreement, and Lynn began gathering buckets.

“You go ahead,” Mother said when Lynn came back with water. “I’ll keep a watch.”

“You sure?”

Mother nodded. Rivulets of sweat ran down her face, cutting salty tracks in the deer blood. “I could use a break. I’ll be up on the roof.”

Lynn went inside, turning right on the landing instead of going straight to the basement. Five steps led up to a door that opened onto the kitchen, a door she’d walked through only a handful of times in her life.

She’d been taught to call out upon entering any house, something that had saved her skin once or twice when scavenging for food. “Hello? Anyone here?”

Nothing answered. Her voice echoed off the empty wooden cupboards. Even so, she felt a strange sort of comfort as she walked through the kitchen into dining room. It was still her house, even if she lived underneath it. In a different life, she would’ve known the creak of these wooden floors as intimately as she did the hatchet marks in the wooden beams that held them up.

Lynn made her way to the bathroom, leaving footprints in the dust behind her as she went. The bathroom was a minor miracle in her eyes, to think that water had once come out of the faucet at the turn of a knob. Mother had even said that it was hot or cold depending on how you turned the knob, not on what season it was outside.

She twisted her finger around the faucet, imagining how amazing it would be to turn it and hear the splash of water into the porcelain tub. Mother had seen such things, had lived in a time when taking a hot bath was a relaxing thing, not a job that required hauling and heating water. Mother had used this room when she was Lynn’s age, soaking in the heat and not worrying whether someone would kill her that night.