James Rawles - Liberators

Joshua said, “We are here at the invitation of Deputy Sheriff Dustin Hodges. He is an old friend of mine.”

The roadblock sentries glanced at one another and one gave a nod, but the man who first hailed them pulled out a public service band radio from a belt pouch and said, “I’ll have to check on that. Your name, sir?”

“Joshua Kim.”

While they waited, Joshua and Megan sized up the roadblock. It was positioned on Highway 337, which was also known as Gravel Switch Road. The highway paralleled the North Rolling Fork River, which was now brown and churning, from recent rains. The roadblock was positioned to command the highway, the bridge, and the end of Wheeler Road to the north. The river was a natural barrier to the north, and the roadblockers had a clear view up a long straight stretch of the highway ahead of them—a great kill zone. There were also open fields to their right and across the river to their left, so there was little chance of their position being flanked.

Dustin arrived fifteen minutes later on horseback, wearing his sheriff’s department SWAT BDUs. He was riding an unusually tall gray Appaloosa mare with a black nylon endurance riding saddle, and a leather scabbard holding a scoped bolt-action rifle.

As the mare’s hooves clattered up to the roadblock on the asphalt pavement, Dustin exclaimed, “Hi, Joshua! If anyone was going to make it here, it would be you.”

Dustin dismounted and gave Joshua a hug. Dustin said, “Sorry that I didn’t bring my pickup, but we’re still quite short on gas. One of you must be Megan.” Introductions lasted the full twenty-minute walk to Dustin’s house, as the horse was led by her reins. Dustin was pleased to hear that Joshua was married, and delighted to meet Megan, Malorie, and the boys. As they pushed the deer carts down the main street, Dustin explained that Bradfordsville was a simple farm town with just three hundred residents. It had been founded in 1777 by the Kentucky Longhunters as they established forts on the Rolling Fork River.

Dustin lived in a small house on an oversize lot at the west end of town. Even before they reached his house, Dustin mentioned that a young widow had just arrived in town and opened up a store selling vegetable seeds. “Her name is Sheila Randall. A very gutsy gal, if you ask me, to open up a store in the middle of all this chaos.” From the tone of his voice, Malorie and Megan both immediately recognized that Dustin might have Sheila in mind for marriage.

Dustin’s 1940s-vintage house was only eight hundred square feet, so clearly there was not enough room for Joshua’s five-member party to “camp in” comfortably for more than a couple of nights, and “camping out” in the yard was precluded because the property’s large backyard had recently been converted into a one-third-acre horse corral. The corral was surrounded by three strands of yellow “hot wire” nylon fabric tape. Oddly, this fence was electrified by a Parmak solar fence charger that sat inside Dustin’s south-facing living room window. (The fence charger, he said, was now precious and almost irreplaceable, so he couldn’t risk leaving it outside and having it stolen.) The constant “tick-tick-tick” sound of the charger took some time to get used to. And the presence of the charger and the electric fence required a lot of time to explain to Jean and Leo, with repeated “look, but don’t touch” warnings. Naturally, the boys were fascinated by both the fence charger and the horse.

Dustin said that he had bought the horse, tack, fences, posts, and fence charger just as the Crunch was setting in. He explained, “I knew my life savings was about to melt away into oblivion, so I sank it all in the horse. She, along with all of her horsey accessories, cost me thirty-eight thousand dollars in cash, thirty ounces of silver in one-ounce silver rounds, and six hundred rounds of nine-milly. In retrospect, I’d say I got a good deal. And, since part of the deal was in the form of tangibles, I knew that the seller wouldn’t get caught holding a bag of cash that would soon buy exactly squat. Oh, and the bonus is that I bought her already bred, so I should have a foal out of her in July.”

With no other destination in mind—at least for the foreseeable future—Joshua asked about finding a house to rent. Dustin mentioned that there was a vacant house just two doors down. The elderly man who had lived there had died in January, from a diabetic coma for lack of insulin. The nearby vacant house was just one of three in town where there were no relatives living nearby, and currently there was no way to contact them. The town council had “emergency deputized” a local retired soils scientist to rent out the vacant houses and put the collected rents (denominated in pre-1965 silver coinage) in a special escrow box in the city hall’s vault, once a month, under the oversight of the city treasurer, acting as a “Guardian for the Property and Best Interest of Missing Heirs.”

While the courts would surely have great trouble sorting all of this out later, it provided badly needed space for “relatives from the big city” (Joshua and his little group were not the only recent arrivals), and would keep every garden plot in town fully utilized. They soon learned that there were also already plans to rip up many of the lawns in town and turn them into vegetable gardens in the coming weeks. For now, most of the residents of Bradfordsville were living on feed corn, venison, and alfalfa sprouts.

The eighteen-hundred-square-foot house on West Central Avenue was perfect for their needs, since it had a large, well-developed garden plot, three bedrooms, and a working fireplace insert that could burn either wood or coal. The house’s oil-fired heater still had two-thirds of a full tank, which would get them through to spring, when they would have to get busy cutting and hauling firewood. Utilities were not an issue. The water was gravity-fed city water (currently at no charge), and neither the electricity nor the phone was working. The rent was set at two dollars per month in pre-1965 silver coin.

They moved their scant possessions into the house two days later. They were pleased to see that the owner had loved books, so there was plenty for them to read—except that Jean and Leo would have to plunge into books that were quite advanced for their age. The house was fully furnished, right down to linens and tableware. They all considered the availability of the house an act of divine providence.

Joshua was soon hired as a deputized roadblock guard, for twenty-five cents per day in silver coin. Malorie and Megan split a forty-hour job, doing records writing and filing for the Sheriff’s Department’s new substation in Bradfordsville’s overbuilt storm shelter and community services building. The pay for their shared job was $1.50 per week.

Megan and Malorie met Sheila Randall in her sparsely stocked two-story general store, which had SEED LADY painted on the front windows. Her store seemed to be the only business that had been able to fully adapt to the rapidly changing marketplace. Instead of cobbling together multipliers for prices in the now almost completely destroyed U.S. dollar, she priced all of her merchandise directly in pre-1965 silver coin. The only mathematical calculation came into play when someone wanted to pay in one-ounce (or fractional) .999 fine silver trade coins or bars, or in gold.

Sheila had exotic good looks and wavy black hair, which she attributed to her Creole ancestry. Although she could pass for white, her son was much darker skinned and much more obviously African-American. Megan asked Dustin if this would prove difficult for her, as a young widow in a rural southern small town, but her store had been an immediate success. With the economy in tatters, people desperately wanted to trade. And her starting inventory—countless thousands of seeds in small paper packets—was quite sought after. She had the right business mind-set, in the right place (a secure small town), at the right time. And she had her son standing by with a shotgun to back her up.