How I Spent the Apocalypse (36 page)

***

By the time the blizzard stopped we had five
and a half feet of snow and the drifts on the west side of the dome completely covered that side of the house. When we finally got to the birdhouse it was obvious that nothing had been out in days because we had to dig snow out of the doorway to get in. I had taken Billy with me because I wasn’t at all sure that anything would have lived through all the cold and the sight of a room full of dead animals would have crushed either Jimmy or Lucy.

But there was nothing dead in there and they even had a little feed left. The deer sort of looked at us warily at first, but by the time we had fed everything and brought in all the hay one of the does walked right up to me. It was clear that she wanted to be petted, so I did. Truth was that between the spring and all the animals while it wasn’t warm in there, it wasn’t freezing in there, either. The coons and possums—even the rabbits—had gone into hibernation mode, the birds were mostly still conserving energy, and the deer huddled together for warmth as soon as they had eaten what they wanted and got a drink. But all-in-all they were doing alright.

“Mom,” Billy started, as he put a new mineral block in one of the feeders. “Is it… Is it ever going to clear and warm up? Is the sun going to come out and is all this shit ever going to melt?”

“Sure it is,” I said.

“You know what I mean, Mom. Are we going to be alive when it clears?”

“Sure we…”

“Don’t blow smoke up my ass, Mama.”

“We should be.” I started throwing a five-gallon bucket of wood ash I’d collected from the stove over the layer of animal shit on the ground. That should work as a disinfectant as well as keep the stench down to a manageable level. “I’m thinking it will clear off by mid-summer, but that could be wishful thinking. It could be longer, might even be years. A lot of crap got thrown into the atmosphere. Now a lot of it has fallen, driven to earth by rain and snow, but a lot of it is still floating around up there as is evident by the fact we haven’t seen full sun since the day after it happened.”

“Can we make it that long? Can anyone else?”

“Yes and yes,” I said. He nodded but got real quiet. I just thought it was because it was a lot to digest.

***

A couple of weeks later the boys and I
had been working in the greenhouse when Lucy called us in for dinner. When I walked in Cherry looked close to tears, Lucy was looking worried, and was tight-lipped and Evelyn—well she had this mean little smile on her face like the cat that ate the canary without getting caught. I knew that anything that made Lucy and Cherry unhappy and thrilled Evelyn couldn’t be good, so I mostly ignored it.

I’ve found that you can almost always wait to hear bad news. There are exceptions like when a problem has to be addressed right that minute, but for the most part if it’s bad sooner is never as good as later.

I pretended not to notice all the tension and sat down to eat. I got half way through my dinner when I saw Billy looking at Cherry. Then Cherry nodded in Lucy’s direction. Then Lucy shook her head and gave Billy a dirty look after which Billy mouthed the words, “You tell her” to Lucy and I realized they weren’t going to let me just ignore them.

“What the fuck is going on?” I asked Lucy.

Lucy looked at Billy. “Your son has something to tell you.”

Well, Billy turned white and looked like someone had slapped him in the face with a fish.

“Spit it out, boy, you’re ruining my dinner.”

“Ah… I ah… I think Lucy should tell you later. Not at dinner.”

“You mean when you aren’t in the room.”

Any number of stupid-assed things he could have done that he didn’t want to tell me about ran through my head. Left a door open somewhere, left the methane generator running too long and emptied the tank, broke the heating stove, pissed in the water supply, but when I looked around the table at everyone and read their different expressions I knew instantly.

I sighed and said, “Key-rist! I put back enough rubbers to last three apocalypses and you couldn’t use them for one.”

“But I did,” Billy said. I glared at him my very best don’t-lie-to-me glare. “Only a couple of times…”

“A couple of times… You dumb ass, it only takes once.”

And this was why he was asking when the ice might clear why he was so worried, because he’d knocked his girlfriend up and I was the only thing close to a doctor that we had. He was about to be the father of a child born into a world he knew nothing about, that none of us knew anything about. Hell, the kid could wind up living the first three or more years of his life in the bunker. Or things might never get better and the greenhouse and animals might not make enough to sustain us and he might live and die here with the rest of us. It was a lot to comprehend. Kids are a huge responsibility at any time but bringing them into the world right at the start of the apocalypse… It was a lot to think about, and all because you didn’t want to take a few seconds to wrap your winky.

My first instinct was to be spitting mad, but what good would that have really done? Not that I don’t often throw a huge fit even though—like then—it would be like shutting the barn door after the horse gets out. I guess right then I just had one of my few moments of clarity. It was done, she was pregnant, and short of doing a chop shop abortion there was no undoing it.

“How far along are you?” I asked Cherry.

“Two, maybe two and a half months,” she said. She looked like she wanted to cry.

I nodded. “Well I have brought quite a few babies into the world; it should be a snap. Were you a C-section baby?” I said all this very conversationally, mostly I have to admit just to watch all of the wind taken right out of Evelyn’s sails.

“No.” she let a part of a sob out.

“Then odds are good you won’t have any trouble. If you do, well I have the books that tell how to do just about any kind of delivery,” I said. I hoped I sounded a whole lot more confident than I felt. Truth was I’d delivered and even pulled dozens of goats but I’d only delivered one infant in my time as an EMT and that child was the fifth child the woman had given birth to so he just sort of slid out. I’m not even sure she had to push. I must be a better actress than I think I am because Cherry seemed to calm right down, Billy was obviously just glad I wasn’t going to scream at him, Jimmy and Lucy looked puzzled, and Evelyn just looked totally deflated—which made the moment a perfect score.

I just went back to eating my dinner as if nothing were wrong. “Hopefully the snow will melt by mid-summer at the latest, we’ll put out some crops, and the baby will be born before the snow starts to fly again.”

Because you see, best-case scenario, I knew for the next few years we were in for shorter growing seasons and longer colder winters.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Billy said.

“It was a stupid thing to do, Billy, but you didn’t do it by yourself. We’ll get through it and it’s not like I don’t love babies.”

That’s the truth by the way. I know it doesn’t fit my persona, but I love babies. The truth was that since my boys had grown up and I’d been branded the craziest woman in the world I hadn’t been able to be around many infants. Part of me was really looking forward to being a grandmother. But I looked at Jimmy and I meant it when I said, “You… a rubber every time.” Last thing I needed was a grandchild with fly girl for a mother.

He nodded, and the look on his face told me that if he hadn’t been being careful before he had just for sure gotten the wake-up call he needed. He was in no hurry to have the responsibility of a child and certainly not with Evelyn. So the truth is Jimmy was a whole lot smarter than I had given him credit for.

***

I had dried the goats up in the middle
of February because they were due to kid in April. We had made plenty of cheese and had frozen plenty of milk, enough to last us, Matt and his clan, and the folks in Rudy till the goats came fresh again. My barn was full of hay again because I’d been trading Matt milk and eggs and such for hay. I didn’t know if I’d need that much hay but I wasn’t going to take any chances.

It was mid-March, and though we had settled into life inside and had fallen into familiar new patterns, we were all a little more worried about the future than we had been before Cherry and Billy had stupidly gotten pregnant. Something about that baby maybe being born and never seeing the real sun, never being able to run through grass, really got us all to thinking about what the future might really be like for all of us. We didn’t talk about it as a group, but Lucy and I talked about it a lot when we were alone and I figured they were all doing what we were. Why? Because it’s human nature to think that everyone handles things the same way you do. It isn’t true, but it’s what we all think.

The animals were all acting off. The billy goat was bored and depressed in his eight-by-sixteen pen, and the chickens were tired of their coop, and it wasn’t just us that were going stir crazy. So one day I stuck the billy-goat in the wood hall just to change his scenery. Then I opened the chicken coop and let the does run in and out of the buck pen and chicken pen and let the chickens and guineas have the run of the whole barn. Now I had to hang out in there with them to make sure the two roosters didn’t fight and that the does didn’t get into too much mischief because there are few things that goats delight in more than doing something you absolutely do not want them to do.

Now some of you might be asking why the buck wasn’t running with the does. After all, they were already bred so what real harm could he do? Well a billy-goat is one of the most cantankerous things on Earth, and it’s not beyond a billy to beat a doe and make her abort just so he can breed her again. Even though I was watching them, he weighs in at about two-hundred pounds and I try to stay out from in between him and what he wants to be doing. If he’d given me too much trouble that cold-assed winter I would have butchered him. I had a freezer full of frozen goat sperm from several different sires and I didn’t actually need him. So why did I keep him at all? Because I don’t like doing artificial insemination at all, and I sort of liked the asshole.

There was another reason for keeping him separated from the does. Billy goats have scent glands and they piss on their heads. When they’re in rut they are the foulest-smelling things you can imagine, and even when they aren’t in rut they don’t smell too pretty and will make the milk smell and taste off. So I just always kept him penned separate from the does except for the one month a year I ran him with them to breed. Normally he lived in a one-acre pen and had his own small pond and an out building to protect him from the weather. I usually even let him have an extra rooster for company, but we had eaten his extra rooster for Christmas dinner because I couldn’t afford to feed extra mouths that weren’t producing.

Yet I was feeding that billy goat. I know it doesn’t make any sense.

So now you’re asking why did I have to stay out there to keep the two roosters from fighting. Two reasons really. First, what if you only had one roster and it died? Well eventually there would be no chickens at all because I have to tell you that except for me and a few of my cohorts who managed to keep flocks alive through the apocalypse—one of them by moving the chickens into the house with them—there were no chickens, no live ones after the snow cleared. Not in our part of the world anyway. Also I have two different kinds of chickens—Production Reds for eggs—so I have two-dozen hens and a rooster at any time. And I also keep four silky hens and a rooster at all times because a silky will set on a golf ball. See I want my laying chickens to lay all the time, and with the light in the barn making sure they always have at least twelve hours of daylight they do always lay. I’m tricking them but I don’t care. What I don’t want my laying hens to do is to go broody because you see when they go broody they stop laying and they set on the eggs. It’s just a pain in the ass to try to break them up, so they bred the setting gene out of laying hens. However I still need to raise chicks and I don’t want to screw with an incubator—though I do have one—so I have the Silkies who lay about a dozen eggs and decide it’s time to set. I take all but one of their eggs and give them the Production Red eggs to set on and hatch. That’s how I get new hens and extra roosters to eat and to keep the billy-goat company.