Renewal 7 - When the Student Is Ready (2 page)

The noise was louder than ever. Charlie knew he would have no chance to speak again for a while. He stepped down from the bumper and fielded shouted questions and arguments nearby. Maybe he convinced some folks. Maybe he didn’t. In any case, he climbed higher, onto the hood of the truck, and stood silently, until he was noticed again and the crowd quieted.

“One last piece of business, and I promise this is the good news. We know that you have been robbed of your aid supplies for many years, which is why we came down fully armed to make sure that everyone gets his or her fair share. Each one of these bags contains enough food for a family of four for a month, along with some personal items. It’s not fancy, but it is good food. I ask that each family only takes one, unless you have more than four people in your family. If that’s the case, you’ll need someone to vouch for you. We are making a list to keep the cheating to a minimum. We will not use the list for anything except to better judge how much to send next time. If you’ll please line up behind the trucks, we’ll stay here until every family gets a supply. Those of you who are not in line, please spread the word. We want to reach as many people as possible today. Thank you for your time and attention.” Charlie nodded to a new round of enthusiasm. There was no moral dilemma in free food.

The crowd began to shift immediately, talking to each other about the revelations of the day and a new sign of hope for the future, the first that anyone could remember. However, like everything else, hope has a cost.

Chapter 7 – 2

Martha Carroll never really felt warm again. With the woodstove stoked to its max, we could get our underground home in the barn up into the fifties, but that was it. The earth protected us from the savage outside cold, but it also took any excess heat right back. George spent the majority of his time huddling next to his wife, sharing blankets, coats, or anything else he hoped would make her feel warm. The old ex-Marine was losing the battle. He could feel her joy, her hope, and her will to live, seeping steadily out through her ice cold hands. She refused to crowd around the stove in the third stall, saying that all the important work was being done there and she had no right to get in the way. Every adult in the group had pleaded with her to take advantage of the warmth. She always put on a false smile and said, “If I face the stove, my hands burn, and my butt freezes. If I turn around, I’m rump roast.”

Everyone knew she was giving up, and Mom tried a number of tactics to keep her interested. Her main trick was to send in Tommy and little Jimmy, knowing full well Jimmy would not miss a chance to entertain anyone who would pay attention. We spent a good portion of January listening to his nonsensical made up songs, and song from cartoons that would never be seen again.

We lost our certainty of the date. The endless wind and heavy skies made it hard enough to notice when daytime rolled around, much less count the days. There were always other concerns. Dad was developing a hard sense of firewood paranoia, as he watched the stacks in the barn disappear. Mom did the same with the food, and after our best guess at Christmas, she reduced our meals to the minimum. Kirk and I lost a great deal of the muscle we had built in the fall, but the adults looked even worse.

Despite the realities of our diminishing food supply, Mom tried to keep Martha well fed. Martha refused the extra share at first, with sharp arguments when pressed, and then slowly started giving more of her food to George. He was a big man before the Breakdown, but he was looking more like a great uncle we had visited right before he died of cancer. George, even through the layers of clothing, was clearly wasting away.

At the end of January, he stumbled out of their tent. In the dim red glow from the woodstove, we could see the tears on his old hound-dog face. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, and said, “She’s gone.”

Mom covered her own tears at the news, but no one else did. I saw my father crying. It shook me to my own free flow of tears. Thinking back, I wondered how much of the crying was for Martha, how much for George, who clearly adored his wife, and how much it was for the symbol of loss in our own desperate situation. It was nighttime when it happened, and we simply could not go outside until the next day. George wrapped his wife in a blue plastic tarp and we helped him carry her up into the barn.

George was our version of a pastor. He was in charge of all prayer and blessing. We stood around Martha’s body, all of us rapidly chilling to the danger point, and waited for whatever words he would say. He did not speak. After a minute or so, we understood that he could not or would not speak. Mom jumped in with a rough version of her own.

“God, please take care of our Martha. Take her to a warm place and keep her safe. Amen.”

Even Jimmy understood the seriousness of the situation. He walked stolidly across the barn floor, without any of his usual skipping and hopping, and climbed down the ladder.

George had no interest in surviving his wife. He had a quiet conversation with Dad that night, and three days later, he died without a mark on him. His body rested with Martha’s, outside, under a plywood crypt that Dad and Arturo built when the temperature rose high enough. I’m still not sure what we lost when they died. Some sense of security, or continuity, or just the pleasure of their cheerful company, but I do know that winter felt even colder after their passing.

***

The thermometer twitched in May. By that time, a mere twenty below was practically sunbathing weather. Not that any of us had the energy for lying in the sun, which had begun to show on occasion. The endless dark cloud cover had retreated to a state I can only call, ‘nearly endless.’ I was dragging myself to the outhouse in a fog of fatigue, when I looked at the big thermometer hanging under the Carroll’s eaves and saw that it read seventeen below. I looked again. It actually had moved, for the first time in six eternal months. I forgot all thought of urination, and ran back into the barn, yelling, “The thermometer moved! The thermometer moved!”

Dad stuck his head out of the pit in stall three, with wide eyes, and asked, “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Come see!”

Dad strapped on his cold weather gear and followed me back outside. We stood in the middle of two feet of crystalline snow and stared at the thermometer for a good three minutes. We were lucky. If the device had hung on any other side of the house, we would have never seen it. The ceaseless wind kept the back of the house relatively clear of snow. Only six feet of the stuff was piled against that wall. The yard was on a gentle hilltop and was scrubbed by the gale winds. Most of the snow had piled into the low spot beyond the old homestead, which was completely buried. Dad guessed that the bottom of the valley had collected thirty or forty feet of snow. If the next winter was as bad, he liked to say, we’d have glaciers in Tennessee.

The news triggered a slow-motion party. We were all skeleton thin, and had no energy for any real celebration. We had managed to keep the young boys in better shape, but they seemed to have adopted the tired movements of the rest of us.

I don’t think about God nearly enough, but as we enjoyed our seventeen below, the sun broke through a gap in the clouds and shone on our little band of survivors. Sign from God? You tell me.

Chapter 7 – 3

Terry and Seth escaped from the square after three that afternoon, both with a bag of food from the State. Seth’s family was aware of his community ties. All he needed was to swing by his uncle’s house and drop off the food. He introduced Terry and gave them a quick update on the news. Seth’s uncle decided to ride his bike down to the square to get his own bag of food, and that effectively ended the visit.

Terry’s folks, and Terry himself, officially, lived in a scrap built-cabin in the scrub woods just northeast of the old Central High School. There were no roads into the patch of hackberry and white pine. It had once been called “The Barrens” for good reason. Nothing decent wanted to grow there. Terry’s family got by on raising goats and chickens, and an occasional pig. They traded the excess for other kinds of food. Terry knew that his father was a lousy trader, and somehow always ended up with less than most. The problem was, he was a Shelton, known historically as the best of local horse traders, and no one could tell him otherwise. They settled for laughing when he turned his back. Terry’s father had lost many friends over the arguments that ensued when they were just trying to help him out.

Terry’s mother was an even forty years old, but she looked at least sixty-five as she limped out the door. She had heard the truck approaching, and emerged to see the cause of an engine  in a corner of the county that hadn’t seen a truck in her entire lifetime. Terry was becoming a decent driver, and slalomed expertly through the little trees near his home. He could see his mother and waved at her through the windshield. She didn’t seem to notice. In fact, when she realized the truck was heading for her house, she ran back inside to fetch a shotgun. He stopped the truck a hundred feet short of the goat pen, well out of range of the shotgun, and shut down the engine.

He got out, leaving Seth in the cab. He waved again and said, “Hi, Mom!”

It took her a few second to connect her son with the massive armored truck, but when the linkage was made, she broke into a snaggle-toothed smile and waved back at her son. “Terry, is that you?”

“Sure it’s me, Mom. Who else would find you back here?”

“Well, the truck...”

“Sorry if I scared you, Mom. It’s the fastest way to get around and there’s a lot happening.”

“Oh, sure...” Mrs. Shelton said, the obvious questions waiting to escape.

“Where’s Dad?”

“Oh, he heard they are giving out food on the square. He went to get some.”

“Wow, word travels far and fast.”

“Yeah, the Jones told us about an hour ago.”

“That was nice of them,” Terry said, knowing the Joneses went well out of their way to pass the word. He supposed it was exciting news to share with anyone.

“We don’t see them too often, so it is nice that they came over here to tell us.”

“Well, I could have saved Dad the trouble. I brought some of that food with me.” Terry said, walking around to pull the heavy sack out of the back. “It’s good though. That way you’ll have double.”

Mrs. Shelton smiled at the thought of having double anything, especially food. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been working on things. It’s a long story, and I have to do one more job today. I promise I’ll tell you all about it later.”

“Ok.”

“One thing I have to say, though. Ya’ll have plenty of food for a while, so I want you to stay here. There’s trouble brewing and this back corner is the safest place. Don’t go to town until I come out and tell you it’s safe.”

“Where’re you going to be?” Mrs. Shelton asked.

“I’m kind of in the thick of it, Mom. But it’s alright. I’ve got good friends keeping me safe.”

“I don’t know if that’s...”

Terry waved Seth out of the truck. The big man walked over with a friendly smile on his face, but Terry’s mother didn’t really notice. Instead, she lost her attention in watching a man grow into a mountain as he approached. By the time he reached the pair, he had passed the point of her ability to believe what she was seeing.

“Hello, Mrs. Shelton. Seth’s my name.”

She stared.

“Mom, pick your jaw up. This is my friend, Seth. He’s big, but he doesn’t bite.”

“Oh, sorry. Hello, Seth. Pleased to meet you.”

“My pleasure, Mrs. Shelton.” Seth looked from Terry to his mother, twice, and came to the conclusion that here was a once-lovely woman who had sacrificed the food off her plate for her child. “Terry here is a good man. I think you raised him up right.”

Terry’s mother clicked into gear. “Why, thank you, Seth. How nice of you to say so.”

Seth almost blushed at her sudden emergence. “Just one of those things that needs saying, ma’am.”

“Well, I surely do try to keep him out of trouble,” she said.

“Well, I hate to drag him out of here, but we have some more work to do today. I’ll try to keep your boy out of trouble too, ok?”

“Thank you, Seth. Will I see you next time?”

“You never can tell, ma’am. Never can tell.” Seth gave her one last smile and effortlessly hoisted the food sack over one shoulder, walked it over to the open cabin door, and set it inside with one hand.

“Ok, Seth,” Terry said with a grin. “Quit showing off. That’s my mom, you know.”

“Yeah, I’m just wondering how you turned out so ugly,” Seth replied.

“You haven’t met my dad yet.”

***

Highway 55 was the fastest route from Manchester to Tullahoma. It was completely abandoned, allowing Terry to drive Big Bertha as fast as he dared, which really wasn’t that fast. Seth had some serious misgivings about going to Tullahoma. It was one of the towns that had recovered and collapsed again. Some wealthy family in town had grabbed control early after the Breakdown, and organized the 2000 remaining citizens into a fairly effective society. They had shared food and resources, and stayed smart enough to know that it was better to rule through loyalty than fear and hunger. The problem was that their greed took a different form. After ten successful years, they went conquering across the countryside.

According to the local wisdom, they took Lynchburg easily, since there were only three hundred people in the whole of Moore County after the long winters, and that victory artificially pumped up their confidence. The Tullahomans marched on Manchester in ’27 and managed to hold their own. Unfortunately, it takes more to conquer than it does to defend, and Manchester finally wore them into a retreat back to Tullahoma. They stayed home and licked their wounds for a decade, and then some bright bulb decided that they could take Shelbyville instead.

The top secret plan was to blow a hole in Normandy Dam, dumping the entire lake down the Duck River and flooding Shelbyville before the attack. Three major problems occurred. First, someone told Kirk Carter. The Carters had been trading with Tullahoma during most of those years, and had working relationships with some merchants who naturally thought those relationships were solid. From Kirk’s point of view, everyone in Tullahoma had an excessively arrogant attitude, and that made trading in Tullahoma more difficult than anywhere else. They had stupid rules for everything, and Kirk had zero patience for red tape. Shelbyville was far more pleasant and lucrative, and Kirk made a special trip over to pass the word.