by Cadle, Lou
Back at Eve’s, he noticed how few logs were left to burn. He hadn’t been paying attention to her feeding the logs into the stove today, but there weren’t all that many left. They’d be warm until morning, she had said, but after that, he wasn’t sure. “Should I go back out and try to collect fallen branches to burn?” he asked her, before he took his jacket off.
She shook her head. “They’d be wet and green.”
“Green?”
“Not seasoned. You can mix green and seasoned wood to burn, wood more than a year old like what I have here, but there’s a fire hazard with the fresh stuff. So you can’t use much and you shouldn’t start a fire with nothing but green wood.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“How could you know if you’ve never had a stove or fireplace?”
“What do people do in places where they do their heating with wood, or cook with it? Do they all have to pile up wood and wait a year to use it?”
“Over an outdoor fire, you don’t care if it’s green so much. It’s smokier, and if the weather is damp, it’s hard to get burning, but you can hang a kettle over a green wood fire and still have dinner that night.”
“So none of those branches laying around outside can be burned?”
“If the tree was dead or dying, a branch would burn okay. You can usually tell that by the brittleness of the smaller branches, and by the color of the bigger wood, which is darker than normal for its variety.”
He wouldn’t know what normal color was, but he’d know brown from blond wood. “Then tomorrow morning I’ll go hunting for some.”
“How would you get it?”
“Do you have an ax?”
“I think you might be surprised how hard it is to limb a tree with an ax, or worse, to chop a big tree trunk in half with one.”
“I could try.” It sounded better than sitting here and freezing. If he could find dead wood, or a dead tree, that was.
“If you were hurt, your mother would be angry at me. And rightfully so.” She shook her head. “We’ll make do with what I have on hand. Surely by tomorrow at this time, the roads will be clear. Maybe the electricity will be on. But if not, we’ll be able to get out of here when the roads are clear. If the electricity stays off, we might have to go to a shelter, if there’s any space left in them by now.”
He hadn’t thought about shelters. Or about how they’d fill up quickly with people wanting to get warm. “I guess everybody is in the same shape that we are, or in worse shape. I didn’t hear any generators going any longer when I was out there just now. It might be they all ran out of gas already. So everyone must be inside and cold. Except people like you who were smart and had a woodstove.”
“If I was smart, I’d have realized winter wasn’t quite over and ordered another face cord of wood!” she said.
“If it got really bad, could you burn furniture?”
“It wouldn’t be healthy. There’s all kinds of glue and coatings that you don’t want to burn and breathe.”
“That’s what they did in a movie I saw. They burned furniture and books.”
“Touch my books and you’re in trouble!” she said, but she was joking.
“I wouldn’t.”
“It’s the way we live that limits our options. In many parts of the world, furniture is crafted locally, and it isn’t glued or stained. It was the same way here in the colony days. That furniture, you could burn.”
Another tree snapped in the distance, and she started again, and got that haunted, far-away look again. He needed to keep distracting her. “What do you like to read?”
She focused on him. “Oh, old stuff mostly.”
“Like, uh….” He thought through school assignments. “The Scarlet Letter?”
“What a boring book. Are they still forcing kids to read that dreck? No. I read 20th century novels mostly. I’m a big Edna Ferber fan. Nevil Shute. Willa Cather is about the oldest author I like. Steinbeck. That sort of thing.”
“I read Of Mice and Men. It was pretty sad.”
“It is that.”
“I mean, they both find a friend, but then….” He shook his head. “It’d be bad enough just to lose the friend.”
“Which one do you see yourself as?”
“Well, not Lenny. But if you mean, do I get shot, or do I do the shooting?” he said, shaking his head. “Neither. I’d never shoot a friend. I’d stick by him and try to get him out of the trouble. Or figure some way to run away with him.”
“I think Steinbeck made that impossible, the running.”
“Then I’d stick by my friend and make sure he had a fair trial. I wouldn’t abandon him.”
“Neither did George. Abandon Lennie. Don’t you think he was brave at all?”
“I don’t. There’s always a better choice than shooting someone. There has to be.”
“We should all hope to live in a world where that’s so.”
“You don’t turn your back on a friend,” Ray insisted.
She cocked her head and peered at him. In the dim light he could see her eyes, boring into him. “Did someone abandon you, Ray?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “But I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. We can each have our secrets.”
They sat in silence for a time. Ray shook off dark thoughts. “Well, at least he didn’t shoot me on his way out the door.”
“That’s looking at the bright side.” She smiled at him.
Ray laughed, though it sort of hurt to. “That’s me, Mr. Optimism.”
“Let’s figure out what’s for supper. It’ll give us something to do. What did you bring, and what do I have on hand?”
They ended up eating a meal of her chicken broth to begin, warmed on the stove, and grilled cheese sandwiches made on a cast iron skillet on the stove with the last of his cheese. She fixed that, and set him to sectioning oranges for them to snack on in the evening. They finished quickly, for it wasn’t much food.
Ray was still hungry, but he didn’t say anything. He was a guest, and he’d take what he was served.
She rinsed dishes in water from the kettle and left them stacked in the sink. “When the heat is on, I’ll do them all up with soap.”
“I could wash them.”
“Too much of a hassle, bringing hot water back and forth. They aren’t very dirty, because we didn’t eat anything really messy. They’ll keep a week in the sink if need be.”
“I hope the electricity is back on before that.”
“You and me both. My arthritis has arthritis right now in this cold.”
He smiled. It was funny, even though it didn’t mean anything at all, and it triggered a memory. “When I was a kid, I used to say I was getting triple pneumonia. Because double pneumonia sounded worse than regular pneumonia, I figured triple was even worse.”
“Much worse!” she said. “You definitely don’t want to have three lungs.”
“Where would you fit them all?” he said.
“Though don’t you wonder why we don’t have two hearts? We can live on one lung or one kidney if we lose one, but if our one heart breaks down, we’re out of luck.”
“I’m sure there’s some reason, but I couldn’t tell you.” He shook his head. “See, usually, I’d Google that, and I’d know. A biologist would explain how when fish evolved, the symmetry thing didn’t apply to the heart because of something or other. And we’d both know the answer.”
“I’m fine with some things remaining a mystery,” she said.
Ray wasn’t. He wanted to know everything in the universe if he could, but this week had taught him that he needed to rethink what kind of knowledge was important. He was reprioritizing. Like how to keep warm in the winter if you didn’t have a furnace: that was important to know. “How do people—I mean, the people you met around the world—keep warm in winters and cool in summers if they don’t have electricity?”
“Many of them do have electricity, but it’s sporadic. We get all in a tizzy if o
urs is off for three days, but that’s pretty normal in most of the world. Parts break, and it takes a while to replace them, and they get stuck at airports or train stations, and people have to be bribed to release them, and so on.”
“Bribed? So you have to pay for a part, and then you have to pay someone to let you have it? Even though you already bought it, fair and square?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not right.”
She shrugged. “It’s the way the world is, more often than not, unfair in the extreme. The best thing to do with people who want bribes is to learn to be patient. If you don’t show up immediately, acting anxious, bribe in hand, demanding the part and revealing how much you want it, you’ll have to pay less than you would if you did show them your need for it. You mosey on over a few days later and yawn and pretend you don’t much care one way or the other if you get it or not. It all works out.”
“I guess.” It seemed like a terrible way to have to live.
“We’re the ones who are strange in a lot of ways. Many markets around the world don’t list prices. You negotiate them. They ask too much, and you offer too little, and you end up paying a fair price at the end. Here, you pay what the sign says or you go home without.”
“I saw a little bit of that in South Africa, on a big Saturday market that had food and used stuff like a garage sale and crafts and all sorts of things, like a combined flea market and farmer’s market, but mostly they have stores like we do. Different names than Food Lion or Walmart or whatever, but mostly the same indoors, with aisles set up like ours and signs about prices, and you pay with a credit card or money at the checkout.”
“A lot of places only have small markets, each specializing in something different. There’s a butcher, and that’s all he does. There’s a fishmonger who sells nothing but fish. A fruit seller. A baker. All separate in separate buildings, or sometimes in stalls in a temporary marketplace. Some places have no markets at all. People grow or catch their own food, and trade with neighbors who grow some different food, or they do without. Other places have one general store for flour and rice and oil and cigarettes and nails and everything else under the sun. Sometimes the stores seem out of everything except stuff that’s been there so long it’s coated with a quarter-inch of dust. But if that’s the case, people still go there, because it’s a meeting place for the town as well.”
Again, he felt the urge to travel. She stirred that in him. What was it called? Wanderlust. “I wouldn’t mind being someplace tropical today.”
“Then we’d be fighting off mosquitoes. We’d be complaining about how noisy the seagulls were, not about how noisy the wind and falling trees are. There’s always something that’s unpleasant. Today, for us, it’s cold weather.”
“My mom wouldn’t be missing on a tropical island.”
“I’m sorry that you’re worried. But there’s some kid on an island covered with palm trees who is worried because his mom went out to fish on a boat and it’s getting dark, and she’s not home yet. I think that’s universal. And I think your mom is fine.”
What if she wasn’t? What if she’d gotten in a car, and had a wreck, and died? Would he have to go and live with his dad? With his grandparents? He didn’t want to do either. He wanted his mom back, safe and sound and in their house. And he wanted his house to be fixed.
“Try not to fret so,” Eve said, her voice gentle.
Was she a mind reader? “I wish I could do something about it—about anything! I wish the phone at least worked.”
“You’re keeping yourself safe and warm. I’m sure that’s what your mom would want you to do.”
“Can I try your landline again?”
“Of course. You don’t have to ask. Pick it up every time you pass it, if you wish.”
“I’m trying not to check my cellphone very often. It’ll run out of charge if I do.”
“It’ll all work when it works.”
“I’m still confused that it doesn’t—my phone, I mean. There must be a few dozen cell towers in the city. They can’t all have been destroyed in the ice storm.”
“I don’t know very much about how they work. Do they need electricity? Maybe your one phone company, the one that you pay, lost power at some central point, so you can’t get into the—whatever, the network.”
“I was thinking a cellphone tower might fall like a tree if it had enough ice.”
“I doubt that. I think they’d be pretty sturdy. They don’t have branches like trees. They’re made of steel, I would guess, which doesn’t splinter like wood does. Or aluminum alloy, perhaps.” She frowned. “Though now that you mention it, there was that storm up in Canada. It was—oh, probably before you were born.”
“What about it?”
“They had ice for days and days. So much that it brought down not only local wires but the huge towers that carry high-power lines from their power plants across the country, or from Niagara Falls. Even a few of the huge towers crumpled as if they were made of aluminum foil. But I don’t think we had that much ice. They had inches.”
“Plus snow.”
“Well, in any case, we can’t solve the problem ourselves right now. So we have to trust that people who can solve it are working on it.”
“I wish we could see the news on TV.”
“So do I. I should have kept a small radio with batteries—I mean, a regular radio, not the weather one. We could be listening to local news, and they’d be updating power outage information, telling us when it would be repaired. But I didn’t. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are ‘what might have been.’”
“That sounds like a poem.”
“It is, but I think I’m quoting it wrong. Too long since my elementary school days.”
“What’s the poem about?” He wanted to be distracted once more from his worries. Even her talking about poetry would do as a distraction.
“A couple that didn’t get together. They met, they were interested in each other, but neither one spoke up. And they regretted it forever after.”
“That’d suck.” His mind flitted to the girl he’d met, Julia. He shouldn’t make the same mistake. He’d look for her once life got back to normal, and talk to her, and not go on to regret being too scared to act the whole rest of his life.
In lamplight, they played a few more rounds of Go, and then Eve said she was sleepy, and so she banked the fire and laid herself out on the recliner chair she was apparently sleeping in. He wondered if she always did, or if it was just now, while the stove was the only source of heat. “I didn’t throw you off the sofa, did I?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I was sleeping on this. It’s quite comfortable.”
“Good,” he said. He should have asked earlier. He used her bathroom, then came back and arranged his sleeping bag on the sofa and put the soft throw inside to be next to his skin. He threw the blanket he’d brought over that, and once he was ready, Eve turned off the lamp, dimming the room. Some light escaped through the grate of the woodstove, but hardly more than a nightlight’s worth.
He lay still, his mind active, fighting the urge to toss and turn. He was a guest here, and he should try to not to disturb his host. He fumbled around on the table until he touched his phone, pulled it in to the bag, hiding the light, and tried it again. Nothing. He had less than half charge on his phone now, so while he really wanted to play a couple of hands of some simple phone game, he shut it off to conserve the battery.
Maybe tomorrow he’d wake up to a surprise warming, and the street would be clear, and his mom would come home before noon. He didn’t mind staying here, and he knew he should be grateful for the warm place and warm meals. And he was grateful. But he wanted his mom.
The wind outside picked up again. Soon, it howled and howled.
Chapter 13
When Ray woke, Eve was still asleep. He was glad she’d been able to drop off easier than him. Or maybe it had been that the noise of the wind had kept her awake. The few times a tree or br
anch had broken yesterday, she had started. Did it help her to have someone to talk to, to keep her distracted? He wondered what she’d experienced exactly when she’d been hiding out from men with guns. Had they spoken to each other in that dark cellar? Had she been able to sleep then? Though he was curious, he respected her request to not talk about it. Imagine being shot at though. Fearing for your life for real. Her first stories had made him want a job that meant travel, but knowing she’d been in serious danger… well, now he wasn’t so sure that sounded appealing.
He used the bathroom, which was ice cold, and peeked out the bathroom window. The wind had blown the snow into deep drifts overnight, and the sky was still gray, but the snow wasn’t falling. It might be a lull, or the storm might be over, like the weather radio had promised.
Looking outdoors, he no longer believed that his mom would be home quickly, even if the storm had ended. It would take hours to fix everything that was wrong out there. At least it was still warm inside. Not in the bathroom. But in the living room. Warmer than outdoors, at least. Warmer than his own house. He let the curtain fall back into place.
He grabbed the lantern on his way past it, lit it the way she had showed him, and tiptoed with it into the kitchen. There he filled the kettle, and put it on the woodstove. He’d fix her coffee while she slept if he knew how. But he didn’t. The last two pieces of wood still sat on the floor by the back door. He didn’t realize they hadn’t moved it all to the stove. That was hopeful. The wood had dried off some but not entirely. These pieces had been at the bottom of the pile and had soaked up some rain. He carried them into the woodstove and set them by its side. A few dry pieces were on the hearth, and the stove still put out heat. He knelt down and peered inside, but he couldn’t see any red glows of coals still lit.
Should he put on another log, or not? He didn’t want the fire to go out. But he didn’t want to overstep or to mess up. It wasn’t his house or his decision to make.
