The World Ends In Hickory Hollow (5 page)

We cleared the paperback book and magazine racks of all the stores that had them.. I picked up this typewriter and boxes of ribbon and ream after ream of paper; pencils and pens and notebooks and every sort of textbook we could find anywhere. Dyes and thread and needles and extra bobbins and parts for my very old treadle sewing machine. Aspirin from the drugstore, where the large generic bottles had sat undisturbed by other lookers, protected by the forbidding "acetylsalicylic acid" on the labels.

But so many of the things we needed had been either taken for use, which was as it should be, or they had been torn and burned and destroyed, as if some of our fellows had taken out their terror and insecurity on anything that came to hand. And, strangely, we found that the doctors, as they left (whatever their reasons), had taken with them their most-used and valuable medical books. Perhaps they had gone or been called to places where there had been survivors ... on the edges of the devastated areas. Whatever the case, none of them left family behind, and not one has ever come back.

It is difficult, from our unusual situation, to speculate upon the fates of those who left this area.. When we arrived on the scene they were, by and large, already gone. Mom Allie had not been able to make any useful sense of the fragmentary and garbled bits she had picked up on her battery radio. The celebrated emergency broadcast system had evidently been left high and dry, with nobody who knew what had truly happened or what to do about it. They had tried, but they were useless.

So we scavenged, now and again, creeping like mice in an abandoned house about the town that had been a bustling college town of 30,000. As the winter went on, however, we found that there was no longer any need for these expeditions, and we abandoned them. Still, I thought with satisfaction, now and again, of my deed on the last trip in.

Nicholson had been blessed with a really first-class library. It had an excellent variety of books, well arranged. It had art prints for lending, along with records and tapes. Its building had been built, in the early twenties, for a post office, and the construction was solid and likely to stay that way. When I had thought of it, I had gone through and taken what I felt would be most valuable to us. Then I had fastened all the windows securely, checked all the outside doors, and made a sign, which I taped inside the glass of the front door:

The key is in the letterbox. Please use this library as you need it, but do close it tightly when you are through, so that the weather will not harm the books. This will be the way to the future for our children.

Maybe nobody would ever read the sign or use the place, but I felt better for it. Of course, the college had a fantastic library, there on the
parklike
campus. It was one of those windowless monstrosities that they built at the height of air-conditioner worship, and it was inhabited by someone who spoke only through the barrel of a high-powered ride.

Though we tried to speak to him/her, there was never any answer, even to offers of help and food. Whether it was a fanatical custodian or a crazed librarian we will never know. Perhaps, even after all this time, that grim guardian still stands off nonexistent book pilferers. By the time the children need what is there, old age should have solved the problem.

(When we were sitting around the heater one night, wondering what the library guard ate,
Sukie
solemnly suggested that he/she likely subsisted on the offspring of the bats in his own belfry. Then we sat around debating whether that, in this case, might not be called cannibalism.)

Of course, there was much that needed to be done that couldn't be tackled in the winter. Even with the small store of antibiotics that we had been able to winkle out of the drugstores' debris, we feared pneumonia. Without available doctors, hospitals, and stores of fresh penicillin, it would, we felt sure, revert to its old status of killer. So we didn't spend long hours in the cold and wet.

That left long winter days for talking and reading and writing. The talented among us took up whittling, and we soon had a store of bowls and spoons, hairpins and knitting needles, figures of man, beast, and what's-it. Aunt Lantana often walked the damp way over to spend the day with us, and she proved to be a genius with a knife.

I see that I've not described Lantana, and she well deserves description. She was, by her own calculations, somewhere approaching eighty. She was the color of warm copper, a result of her Indian admixture of blood. Tall and strong, even yet, she had the dignity of a pagan queen. And she knew everything there was to know about the plants native to the area, plus a great deal about medicinal herbs that had been brought in by early settlers or used by her Indian ancestors.

Under her direction, we gathered willow bark for tea (the original aspirin). We saved the husks from the black walnuts that we gathered from the woods far making dye later. We even garnered some of the big acorns, so that she could show us how to leach away their bitter taste and make meal from them.

"When you gets to my age," she said, "you can't tell for
sho
' how long you're
goin
' to be around. Now you need to know what I can teach you, and we'll do it just as if I won't be here another year."

So we went with her through the winter wood, learning to identify even the leafless bushes and trees, making lists of their uses. She showed us where the dry stalks of cattail rustled at the edges of the river shallows. "Every part of the cattail is good," she told us. "You can eat the root, boil the young 'tail' like sweet corn, catch the pollen for flour, eat the young green shoots. And make baskets from the fibrous green leaves."

Where we went with Aunt Lantana became magical, for she could see the nub that would grow into next year's poke
sallet
. She knew where the lamb's quarters would grow next summer. She could gather the
resiny
wads of
sweetgum
from a scarred tree and chew it up with
stretchberries
to make real bubblegum. All of us, young and old, went about with sticky teeth for days after that lesson.

Most of all, she showed us treasures around our own home that we had lived with unwittingly. A bed of comfrey grew in profusion between the horse lot and the garden fence. We had meant to clear out "those weeds," but had fortunately been too busy. Now we had hot comfrey tea at bedtime, particularly when we felt as if a cold were coming on. And she laughed when we grieved to her that now we couldn't order any start of Jerusalem artichoke. We had a fencerow full of it that Zack's great-grandmother must have started and succeeding generations hadn't recognized.

All in all, Lantana came near to being the most valuable of us, for she showed us the thousands of edible, useful, helpful growing things that our culture had discarded as unsophisticated. And they worked!

So when her dark face was bent over her whittling, we listened to her tales and her advice, for we were trying to soak up all we could while we had her. And her tales were wonderful, all about great catfish that her father had caught from the river when she was a girl, expeditions to catch snakes to sell to "them
perfessers
" at the college, dark nights when hoot owls called and "de Boogeyman" lurked in the shadows on the way to the privy as they went with the lantern.

There were many of these dark days, for the winter was stormy past all recollection. Even at the risk of a wetting, we did much visiting back and forth, for all of us, I think, felt a need for other human beings. And on one such gloomy day, Lantana put aside her whittling and held her hands to her face.

"Law, Miss Luce,- we've been
lettin
' our heads just set on our shoulders without
workin
'. You know what? Down this here river there's many a little old farm like this 'n. Now there's some folks on some of
em
, and that's all right, but on lots of
em
I feel like everybody's done gone off, just like Mrs.
Yunt
and the old gentleman up the road. And every one of them has livestock!"

I looked at her in astonishment, amazed that we could have been so preoccupied that it hadn't occurred to us. "What was penned up is dead, by now, but there's got to be lots of cows and horses and mules and calves all over, fenced into big pastures, slowly starving to death for want of the hay in the barns that they can't get to. We've got to get out with the wagon and tools, Lantana, and see what we can do."

A break came two days later. The sun shone forth, weakly but with enough persistence that we felt the rains were over for a little while. Then Mom Allie, Lantana, Lucas, and I loaded hay hooks, wire cutters, pitchforks, and assorted halters and ropes onto the big wagon that Zack and I had built, hitched it behind Maud, and took off down the wagon track that followed the river for miles.

I hadn't known that other farms could be reached by that route, but Lantana insisted that nobody had ever gone any other way in her youth.

"You can go 'way round by the road, twelve or
fo'teen
miles, and get there by car, but in the old days, we had to walk or ride a mule, and this was the short way.. Go five miles along this old track, and you'll see ten or eleven little trails
cuttin
' into it. They goes to farms that's not more than a quarter mile from the water."

While we had no hope of covering the entire count of farms, we intended to go as far as we could and to do as much as possible in the space of a day. The first track we spotted some half mile from the point at which our own trail intersected the river track. We had to break out the axe, for saplings had grown up between the old wagon-wheel ruts. Lucas and I soon had them down enough for Maud to negotiate, and I ranged ahead, then, chopping out and laying by whatever blocked the way.

That first farm shook us. Penned closely in a new, tight barnyard had been ten weanling calves. They lay in a bunch, their skin hanging over their bones like spotted leather. The cold weather had kept them fairly well, but there wasn't enough flesh left on them to raise a stink.

We knew that nobody could be there, but I rapped on the doorframe just the same, so deeply ingrained is the habit of knocking before entering someone else's home. The door flapped open in a gust of wind, and I jumped, but there was nothing alive in the house. And no vehicle was left in the garage.. Whoever had lived here had gotten into the car or truck and gone away down the oil-topped county road.

"Why, why, why did they leave here where they had survived and could keep surviving, given a little luck, to go out into who knows what and take their chances?" I cried aloud. There was no answer then. There never has been. Not one of those who left has ever returned, and I suppose we'll never know what drove them out into the bombed chaos that was "out there."

We walked out into the pastureland, cutting fences wherever we found them.

"In the old days, this would have gotten us hung," laughed Lantana. "Used to be, if they caught you with wire cutters, they'd put you in jail."

Now, we opened the way to any surviving cattle to wander over wide reaches of country, and down to the river, where there was always browse. Then we took down the bars that closed off the big hay barn, so that they could reach the tons of baled hay that waited for them there.

When we felt that we had spent as much time as we could spare, we got back into the wagon and returned to the river, picking up my cut saplings all the way. We were learning to waste nothing, even whittling material.

CHAPTER FIVE

The river was high and brown with the runoff from the past weeks' rains. Most of the leaves had fallen and lay in yeasty drifts and piles, starred, still, with an occasional scarlet sweet-gum leaf or golden spray of hickory. It was easy, with the bushes bare, to spot the next trail, which was well-used, beaten down to the bare earth.

We stopped, and Lucas got down to examine the tracks in the yellow-brown clay. "Pony track," he opined. "Cows, too, and calves. Sneaker tracks, big and little. Been used since the last hard rain."

Cheered at the prospect of finding another enclave, we turned up the lane. Even Maud seemed to sense welcome ahead, for she stepped out at a better than average pace. We emerged from the belt of woodland that lined the river-bank onto a sloping meadow, through which the track curved upward toward a brown house that topped a low ridge. Smoke curled from a central chimney stack, and seldom have I seen so welcome a sight. Before we were halfway up the slope, we could see the figures of children pelting down the way to meet us.

The house sat in the midst of a young orchard, bare, now, but showing promise. A big garden divided the rear part of the orchard, and I could see great green collard plants still heavy with leaves. The rest had been cleared and turned to catch the winter rain. Someone else was looking toward survival, you could tell by the condition of the land and the plants.

Three youngsters escorted us up to their home, chattering all the way. Carl was the oldest, a towheaded twelve-year-old with prominent ears and eyes that knew more than they intended to reveal. Carol, his just-smaller sister, must have been ten or eleven, blond and vivacious. The youngest, Cookie, was not more than four, as fair as her siblings, but tongue-tied at being among so many strangers.

They had been so cordial that we expected welcome from their parents. That, however, was not the case. They met us at the house-yard gate, which remained firmly closed. Their eyes were also closed–on the inside, which is hard to cope with.