The World Ends In Hickory Hollow (12 page)

Miss Vera had routed us in a large arc, so as to make all the farms we needed to make contact with, yet avoid backtracking. The
Satterwhites
were west of us, northwest of the Bolts. We rattled and rumbled over mud roads that were no better and no worse than ever, as they were always just short of impassable. We snaked back and forth, up and down hills, and when we hit Highway 69 we were less than five miles from the place we were aiming for.

There was a white gate, closed across a neatly graveled drive. In the distance we could see an immaculately white house, low and many-windowed beneath its green roof. No sign of life moved about it, no smoke curled from the stone chimney. We opened the white gate and crept down the drive cautiously, in case anyone there might be trigger-happy.

No one was. Not a living soul was on the place, though there was enough wood cut for the winter, the root cellar was full, and in the fields behind the house cattle scrounged through the winter-killed grass. The door wasn't locked, and Miss Vera, with the self-confidence of her age and class, tapped once, yoo-hooed, and walked in.

She walked back out immediately, her face white.

"Somebody's in there ... dead. Mighty dead. I don't want to know. Let's go look in the crib in the barn. " She turned on her heel.

The barn was tidier than my house usually stays. Everything was whitewashed that would hold still for it, all the woodwork was in good repair, and even the corncrib was clean. No cobwebs festooned the corners, no felted layers of dust lay on the piles of bags in the corners. The seed-corn was in coarse white bags, labeled clearly "popcorn" and "colored Indian corn."

We took a bag of each, feeling like thieves, even though we well knew that whoever came to live here again would not be a
Satterwhite
and would never know or care that part of the seed-corn was gone. While I manhandled the bags to the truck, Miss Vera, in her indomitable way, poked about the barn, then went into the stables.

Once again, her curiosity got her into trouble. I heard a stifled cry and dropped the last bag into the pickup, then hotfooted it for the stable. In the gloom I could see her round figure coming toward me, and her face was, again, white.

"It's Amos. Ella must have died of something, there in the house. When she was gone, Amos came out here and ... " She gestured.

In the corner a long figure swayed from a beam. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, I could see that it was a man of about sixty. He had been so thin that even the bloat of death hadn't made him look much larger than he had in life. The scent of the alfalfa hay stored along the wall muted the stink until it was little noticeable-or perhaps Amos had been so emaciated that there wasn't anything left to smell.

Two months before, I would have been profoundly shaken. Now I looked at him, looked at Miss Vera, and asked, "Do you want me to bury him?"

She shook her head. "I wouldn't feel right about doing him and not doing Ella. And she ... she'd be a terrible chore. As the Bible says, let the dead bury the dead. 1 never understood that before. Now I know."

I took her plump arm, and through it I could feel the deep quiver that shook her short frame. Putting my arm about her shoulders, I said, "Look at it this way, Miss Vera. They don't have to worry about anything. They're safe, now."

We climbed into the pickup and slammed the balky doors. Then she looked at me and a
quavery
smile crooked her mouth. She picked up her list of names and drew a firm line through
Satterwhite
. A vigorous check mark had tallied the Bolts. I hoped that we would find no more to line through before the day ended.

It was noon. Lantana had urged a lunch bag upon us, but after our last stop we found no appetite for it. That turned out to be a good thing. As we moved cautiously down the cluttered road, Vera suddenly cried, "Stop!"

Obediently, I stopped, and she motioned for me to back up. I halted again before an unpainted shack–what they used to call a shotgun house, because all the rooms were in one line, like the load of a shotgun shell. Now I could see a small face at the window, and I hurried after Miss Vera up the path worn through dead grass burrs.

When we called, there was a fumbling at the door, but whoever did it was either too young or too weak to open it. I heaved, and the flimsy thing gave way.. We faced a little black girl who must have been less than five, though she was so thin it was hard to tell. On a pallet in the corner were three other children, one little more than an infant. They were alive, but only just, and one of them was breathing so raggedly through chest congestion that it sounded as though it was shaking the floor.

"Is anybody else here?" I asked the girl, and she shook her head.

"Pa, he
lef
us here, say he gone for
he'p
. Never come back. We so hungry!"

I tore out for the truck and came back with the bag of lunch. In consideration of Miss Vera's uncomfortable dentures, Lantana had packed several biscuits that had been buttered while hot and soaked in honey. Those went into the listless mouths of the younger ones, while the girl, La-
Tonsha
, chunked into the roast pork and cornbread that had been put in for me. The infant was a problem. Finally, I soaked one of the biscuit bits in water until it was a watery mush. Then Miss Vera spooned it into the baby while I held him.

When everything edible was gone, we cleaned them up as well as we could with rags and water, wrapped them in the pieced quilt off the bed in the second room, and packed them into the truck between us. There was no question of going on. These children must be gotten to the house as fast as possible, and I retraced our way so that we'd lose no time in cutting away more fallen trees and debris from a new set of roads.

We were home before midafternoon. Zack was still working in the far field with Lucas and
Elmond
. Only
Suzi
and Mom Allie were in the house, for the children had gone to scrounge the last few hickory nuts and acorns along the creek.

When we started unloading little black children, Mom Allie came bustling out of the house with
Suzi
just behind her. "Lord have mercy!" she whispered. "These pore little things. Look starved to death. Let's boil a chicken,
Suzi
. Go catch one and kill it. I'll dress it while you help Luce get all these kids settled down."

Miss Vera, for all her seeming vigor, had had a killing day. We put her to bed in
Suzi's
place, and we noted that she made no protest.

Then we ran the tub full of good warm water and put all four of the chilled youngsters into it. The baby we held carefully, but we let him soak until the chill left his feet and hands, and his color returned to its natural burnt-caramel color from the ash-blue that it had been. By the time we finished, the chicken was on to boil and a pot of comfrey tea was steeped.

We loaded cups of the hot beverage with honey and gave it to the now-revived older children. The baby's had a bit of milk added to it, and Mom Allie had found and boiled out the bottle we had bought for feeding an orphaned pup. That was just the ticket. The little fellow showed the first sign of real life when the nipple went between his lips, the warm brew gurgled down his throat, and his shriveled belly began to fill. We didn't let any of them have much, for they had been empty for too long. Still, you could see life pouring back into them.

As we put them to sleep on a long pallet in the loft room, we were smiling, but when we stepped back and saw the wall-to-wall sleeping place that the never-spacious loft had become, we realized that some accommodation must be made. We seemed destined to bring home waifs, and they couldn't be stood up in corners. Either we must build onto the cabin or we must provide another entire house. With the new four, there would now be eleven people crammed into our log home. As I pondered the problem,
Suzi
began to crack her knuckles, a sure sign that she was having ideas.

"All right, Su, what's going on in the old skull?" I asked her. "I know you're cooking up something in there."

She giggled, then said, "You know, I was thinking about how much time it would take to do any building, with time for putting in crops so very nearly"–she caught herself–"near. So why not go into one of the towns and take one or two mobile homes that are just sitting there on their wheels?"

I backed cautiously out of the narrow slot in which I stood and began retreating down the ladder. The lower I went, the better the idea looked.

When we were down in the kitchen getting supper on the table,
Suzi
said, "You know the steep bank to the east–the one that slants down so fast to let the roadway pass?"

I nodded.

"Why couldn't we dig out a hole in it and push the trailer back into the bank–to keep out the cold, you know, and to keep wind from"-she thought a minute–"oversetting it?"

As that had been my only quibble with the plan, I smiled broadly.. "You are hereby nominated our planner-in-chief," I told her. "We'll bounce it off Zack when he comes in, and Miss Vera can take it up with her household in the morning when she goes home."

Any man who returns from a hard day's plowing to find that his family has grown by four is in an iffy mood. We waited until he was
suppered
and bathed and relaxed under his reading lamp, an old issue of Mother Earth News on his lap. Then we proposed
Suzi's
plan.

We needn't have worried. Any plan that would have increased the floor space without taking valuable time for building would have made him happy. And in his sleep, instead of muttering "Gee!" and "
Giddap
!" and whacking me with his still-active elbows, he mumbled about trailers and earth-sheltered homes and sheets of vinyl to keep out the damp.

The Hardeman Home for Stranded Survivors was under way.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Our foray into Nicholson to search out a suitable trailer was delayed for several days. Our four new members were not well, not at all. The three-year-old, Lillian, was the one with the terrible cough, and we were antsy about pneumonia. She was not only all but shaken apart by her coughing fits, but she was so frightened of being left, once again, by herself with no adult that she wasn't satisfied unless she was in somebody's lap.

La-
Tonsha
held her more than anyone, but the fragile five-year-old tired quickly. Lillian was almost as big as she was, and her fever made her restless. Mom Allie,
Suzi
, and I were called in all directions at odd moments, so that we made highly unreliable laps.

Miss Vera solved the problem when she came over to see how our charges were doing. She hadn't really recovered her vigor since our outing, and she seemed happy to sit in the old Lincoln rocker, rocking quietly and crooning old songs to the child in her high, cracked voice. There was something hypnotic in the combination. La-
Tonsha
and the other girl. two-year-old
Jashie
, would sit as near as they could get without getting pinched by the rockers ... and Lisa would draw nearer and nearer until she was among the group too.

Joseph, the baby, was amazing. He was less than a year old– maybe ten or eleven months. Though he had been starved almost to the point of no return, once we had him warm and clean and eating again, he simply relaxed and took turns eating, sleeping, and trying to walk all over the house. We made play-pens of turned-over chair backs. He blithely bumped them out of the way and moved on like a small bulldozer. We rigged barriers across the doors. He tugged and tugged until they gave way. He recognized nothing as impossible. As I said, an amazing child.

We kept pouring comfrey tea down the four children, with milk from Nellie Sweetbrier's goat, Tillie, who had freshened and provided us with almost two quarts of milk a day. Her twins were a couple of imps that we named Punch and Judy. Their antics, seen from the kitchen windows, were almost as good for the children as her milk was.

We began to relax when Lillian's chest stopped sounding like bagpipes. By that time, the others had recovered a bit of their spirits, and good food and plenty of cuddling when the nightmares woke them seemed to be handling things well. We arranged for Skinny Trotter and Josh Nolan, who had both been "down" with rheumatism so that they had trouble moving about, to come and stay with Nellie and the smaller child while Mom Allie,
Suzi
, Lantana, and I went to find supplemental housing.

Miss Vera declined to go. She had moved into our house now, to be with Sam, and she sat in the rocker with one or another the children on her lap. Even Lisa had been enticed into that plump spot, and now she took her turn, along with the small children. But Miss Vera's eyes were no longer bright and young in her wrinkled face. Now she looked farther and deeper than the surfaces she saw, and I felt a chill premonition that she would not be with us for too long now.

However, we drove off, one morning in late January, in the Plymouth, to which Zack had attached a tow bar that we had scrounged back in November. The car ran well on our home made alcohol, and we found the roads into Nicholson to be in better shape than the lesser ones we had been traveling. To our astonishment, though, the power lines were all to pieces. Evidently there had been windstorms during the bad weather that we hadn't realized were so strong. Or it might have been that only the constant maintenance of the TP & L crews had kept the intricate network of lines intact. However it was, the poles still stood, but the lines sagged, where they weren't all the way down.