by Cadle, Lou
At his new spot, he got some chips to fly off the branch with the hatchet, but at this rate, he’d be working a half hour to cut one small branch, this one bigger around than his arm, but not by much. He stopped, panting. An ax would be heavier and would help. It wasn’t the blade sharpness, he thought, but that he couldn’t get enough power with the lightweight tool. The problem was one of mass.
The tool didn’t have much mass. But wait—he did. He circled the tree, considering how the branches were lying. He studied the problem for a good five minutes and finally selected the branch he would go for. He climbed into the crossing branches of the tree, trying not to pierce his crotch on any pointy sticks, and found his way to a bowed branch he’d identified as a likely candidate. He climbed up on it, but slipped off before he could find his balance. There was still ice on it.
This was not going to be easy either.
But they needed wood, so he tried again. He kicked at it until the ice cracked off. And again he climbed onto it, until finally he was wholly balanced on the branch. He carefully bent his knees and then launched himself upwards. He came down right on the branch as he’d planned. Not planned was how he slid off immediately, hit the branch in the middle of his back, and had the wind knocked out of him. He lay there like a beached fish, trying to catch his breath, and finally air came in, in stinging big gulps.
Ow. Now that he could breathe, he could feel where he’d landed, and it hurt. His spine was probably bruised or something. But he could stand, and walk, and so he shook himself off and got back to work.
Where’d the hatchet gotten to? It took him several minutes of searching to find it, and by then, he was getting awfully cold again. Keeping one foot on the ground, he used the other leg to push at the branch he’d jumped on. There was a crack in it, but it wasn’t entirely broken off. Finally, the hatchet was of some use. He pried open the crack with his body weight, got the hatchet head in there, and stomped with one foot on the flat part of the hatchet several times. The branch cracked more, and cracked more, and finally it was detached from the tree.
About time!
He put the hatchet back on his tarp so he’d know where it was next time he needed it and went back to pull the branch he’d snapped off out of the tangle of other branches.
Easier said than done. It took him a minute to realize he had to grab the end of it—the growing tips—and pull from that direction. He pulled and he wiggled and he heaved and he leaned back. He fell again, but he got right back up, and finally, he’d dragged the thing a few feet.
At least all the ice had been shaken off it by this point.
Next he had to get rid of the thinner twigs by hand, snapping them off. At the end of that effort, he managed to make use of the hatchet, smashing off thumb-thick branches by using it backward, blunt end down. Finally he had a ragged ten-foot length of wood, short sticks poking out every which way, and he wrestled it onto the tarp.
He was exhausted already. The branch wasn’t that big—and it was too big, both. It wasn’t big around enough to burn for long, he feared, but it was far too long to get into the stove. He’d have to find a way to make it fit into the woodstove. Maybe he could pick the whole thing up overhead and drop it on the concrete several times? If he were lucky, it’d break into pieces. If not, he’d have to come up with another idea.
If this were a survival game, all he’d have to do is touch a fallen log with the controller and move his character to a fire pit, and instantly the wood would be in pieces and burning in a fire of orange pixels. That sure wasn’t realistic. The game version wasn’t running in real time, either.
He abandoned this tree temporarily and kept looking for downed dead wood, and he found some, but like the stuff from his backyard, it was thin, lightweight, and wouldn’t burn for long. So it was that one tree or nothing. He gathered the thumb-diameter branches this time, and piled them on, and used the hatchet to get even more of them off the tree. The tarp grew heavy with a big pile of small branches and the one big one, and it took him a ridiculous amount of time to drag it back to Eve’s house. He took it around back and carried in the hatchet and an armload of the smaller branches, dumping them on the landing floor for now.
He also checked the living room when Eve didn’t appear in the kitchen to see what he was doing. Eve wasn’t in her chair. He called her name. No answer. “Eve?” he shouted louder.
He’d left the inner back door open, and he wanted to get that big branch broken up, so he didn’t spend more time hunting for her right now. By the time his work was done, she’d appear. And if not, he’d look for her. Maybe she’d gone to bed or something, or was changing clothes or taking a cold shower.
Brr. The thought made him shiver. He’d rather smell like the locker room at school than shower in ice-cold water.
Getting the big branch into the kitchen was going to be impossible. But it had to be broken up anyway, so he dealt with that outside. He put one end up on the back stoop and jumped on the center of it. It snapped first try, to his surprise and delight. Now he had a four-foot length and a six-foot length. He took the longer piece and was able to snap it in half the same way. But the four-foot length wouldn’t break. And that was too long for the stove. He raised it overhead and smashed it down on the patio. He did it again. And again. The fourth time, it finally broke, along the length. And then he was able to snap those in half by standing on one end and yanking up on the other.
He carried those branches to the woodstove and put them in front of it to dry. It looked like a pitifully small amount of wood. But he still had more to carry in.
Back to drag in the smaller branches. When he had them all inside, he brought the paltry two bits of food from home inside, shutting the back doors behind him and locking them. He’d have to sweep in here, for there were flecks of wood all over the floor, and he’d tracked in some snow, but first he went looking for Eve. He found a cold bedroom and a cold office, but she wasn’t in either. The bathroom door was closed. He knocked on it. “Eve? I’m back,” he said.
No answer. “Eve?” he said again.
Nothing.
After a moment’s debate, he tried the doorknob. It was locked. So she was in there. She wouldn’t not answer him. She’d have said, “Be right out,” if she was okay. So she wasn’t okay, and now he was really worried about her. He pounded on the door and shouted her name.
“What?” came a groggy voice.
“Are you okay?”
He could hear her make a waking-up noise, sniffling and grunting. “I’ll be out in a second.”
He hesitated, and then backed off to give her privacy. He’d be able to clean up the stuff he’d dragged onto the kitchen floor before she saw it, at least. But as he wiped up and tossed away his mess, and gathered a few tiny sticks to feed into the fire, he worried about her some more. Had she fallen asleep in there? In the bathtub or something?
It struck him that she was old. That meant she might be frailer than he thought, or have some disease. A couple of days ago, Eve had been lifting a case of water and a wagon onto her porch, but she’d needed him to carry wood. Maybe something was wrong with her. Cancer? A heart condition? What were other old people diseases she might have?
And he understood that if something was wrong, and she needed medical care today, he wouldn’t be able to call for help. If she fell and broke an arm, he’d be helpless in the face of even that simple problem. If she had a heart attack or stroke, or just had a bout of—whatever it was old people got. Weakness, or fainting? Normally he’d have his mom drive her to an urgent care if she fainted. But no mom, no car, no clear streets.
And no phone to call an ambulance.
It might as well be the year 500. Or 500 BC. Or 10,000 BC, with them living in a hut and huddling around a fire. Old people didn’t live long in that world, did they?
A distressing thought.
He heard her come into the living room again and sit down with a sigh, and he realized he’d been standing there in the kitchen a few m
inutes, imagining the worst. Tentatively, he entered the living room. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I was sitting down and just… fell asleep.” She shook her head. “Funny. I slept enough last night, and I’m not doing anything to tire me out.”
“Do you have some kind of medical condition? Pills you forgot to take?”
“I’m fairly healthy for an old broad,” she said. “Just a baby aspirin a day and some Aleve for arthritis now and then. Those are the only pills I take.”
“So you’re not sick?”
“No, I’m fine,” she said. “Just tired today. Maybe it’s sitting around inside and not doing anything that’s making me tired. Or maybe it’s the low light. I usually keep curtains open to get daylight in here.”
“I could open the curtains.”
“No, that’ll let the heat out. Heat is the most important resource right now. That then water then food.”
“I brought a little more food over from my place. We’re almost out of food too. Which reminds me, I need to check something,” he said, and he went back into the kitchen to get the frozen dinner. It still wasn’t defrosted enough to come out of the plastic, but he thought it would be in another half-hour or so. And then he could wrap it in foil and heat it on the stove, and offer her a hot meal. That might make her feel better. She’d skipped breakfast. Maybe that was what was wrong with her. He left the meal defrosting on the counter and returned to the living room.
Eve was asleep again, lightly snoring.
Should he wake her up? It didn’t seem right for a person to sleep that much. But maybe her body knew what it was doing. Like when you had a head cold and coughed, that was your body trying to keep you from drowning in your own snot. Or when you had a fever, that was your body burning away the infection. Maybe Eve’s body knew she had to conserve energy right now, so it made her sleep. On one hand, he wanted to wake her up, but on the other hand, he wanted to let her rest. He decided it was best if he let her nap a little while.
He sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the woodstove and loaded in a few of the thinner branches he’d found, then shut the door on the fire. They hissed and pop. Too wet. He kept sitting right there, though, next to the warmth, until he dried off, opening the door every once in awhile to make sure the wet branches hadn’t put out the fire. They hadn’t, but he wouldn’t do that again until the branches had dried out a little more. He couldn’t stop changing his mind about Eve. Should he wake her? Or not?
He returned to the sofa and curled up with the book from earlier and kept reading. People fell in love. They went on patrol. They laughed with friends. Sad things happened. There was a war on, but it only intruded sometimes. Right up until the end of the book. And then nearly everybody in the book you had liked died.
On another day, it might have made him cry. But today, he had his own problems, and he was aware that the book was only a story. Yes, real men and women had died in that war, and in every war before or since, but a story was just a story. He was here in his real life, and in real life, the room was getting colder, and his elderly friend wasn’t herself, and he didn’t know how to chop the dead tree up to get it into the fire to keep them warm all night. Failing seemed like more tragedy—real tragedy—than a bunch of words on a page.
In the kitchen, he made broth and dumped the barely-defrosted dinner into foil, and then he carried them in and put them on the woodstove. He ate two slices of Eve’s cheese off a paper plate, standing in the kitchen, and carried the plate in to put in the stove. Might as well burn everything he could. He woke Eve up and gave her a cup of broth.
He fed more small branches into the stove along with a piece of the old, dry wood. Eve didn’t say he was doing anything wrong, so he kept working in a way that seemed logical.
The wood was still wet enough that it spit and crackled more than her firewood had. There wasn’t a stick left on the hearth now, just the big pieces. It should see them through the night, barely. He should have stayed out longer looking for more wood to burn. But it would be dark soon. He’d have to run out now and at least get some thinner branches to dry out and take her through the morning. With the tools and knowledge he had, it would take him most of the morning to collect another day’s firewood. And the weather was supposed to get colder.
He turned over the foil packet that held their evening meal and took out the weather radio and cranked it up. They listened to the forecast. At least the snow had ended. The winds were dying down too. But the low tonight was going to be only twelve degrees. The high tomorrow would be twenty-five. That was far too cold to have no fire.
“I think I’ll need to take the ax tomorrow when I look for firewood,” he said. “The hatchet just wasn’t cutting it.” He laughed weakly at the bad joke. “Literally.”
“All right,” she said.
He was surprised she wasn’t fighting him any longer on the topic. “I wish I knew how to use a chainsaw. I wish I had one. That’d make it quick.”
“Mmm,” was all she said.
“Eve, are you all right?”
“Sure,” she said.
She didn’t seem all right. She’d lost her edge or something, her willingness to have conversations. She seemed suddenly tired and old. He didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “I’m going to plate up your dinner. You eat that, and maybe later we can play a game of mancala.”
“I’m not terribly hungry.”
“But you have to eat,” he said. “And something hot. You’ve barely eaten today. I’ll make you coffee if you want.”
“Water is fine,” she said, and she closed her eyes.
What was wrong with her? Maybe it was just a bad mood. Maybe she was growing tired of his company and wanted to be left alone to her own thoughts?
If so, he’d quit gabbing at her. He got a plate and put half the meal onto it, making it look as attractive as possible, though it was pretty mixed up. Broccoli that had migrated into the mashed potatoes. Handing her a plate and a fork, he hovered nearby to make sure she started eating.
When she’d taken a few forkfuls, he gulped down his portion and then put on his jacket and gloves. He took the tarp and hatchet back to the downed tree. He couldn’t get another big branch to move, and light was fading, so he just split off all the thinner branches he could reach. It took him until dark. His feet were freezing by the time he was done.
After bringing the load of wood inside to dry, he checked on Eve. She had been dozing again but woke when he said her name. “I have more wood,” he said. “I hope it gets us through the night.”
“Thank you,” she mumbled. She yawned and rubbed her face.
“Do you want coffee?”
“No, that’s fine.”
He sat in the quiet. No more noises of falling trees came from outside. No howling wind. Just still and dark out there. He went to the front windows and peered outside. Not a light shining in any window that he could see. Probably no one could see the lamplight in here, either, not with all the curtains closed against the cold. They might as well all be a hundred miles from each other, the neighbors, rather than just a few steps away.
For the first time, he wondered how everyone else on the street were all getting along in the cold. He considered knocking on doors and begging for food, but he thought probably not a lot of them had extra to give away to strangers. And they were probably all cold.
He wasn’t as toasty in here as he’d been the first day, but he’d bet he was plenty warmer than most people in Norfolk. Or in Virginia period, and in Delaware, and Maryland and D.C., and anywhere else the storm had hit. There might be a million people without heat tonight, or two million.
Tomorrow, if he didn’t solve the firewood problem, he and Eve would be two more of them.
Chapter 15
Eve didn’t wake up when he started moving again.
It was morning, and he’d been up and made coffee for her and hot water for him, the chocolate packets being gone. He’d eaten an apple for breakfast with a slice o
f Eve’s American cheese and it hadn’t helped his hunger at all. What he’d give for his mother to show up and take him out to breakfast. Thoughts of a big plate of eggs and hash browns and sausage and bacon and maybe pancakes too made him hungrier, but they were hard to push out of his mind. Soon, it would be bright enough that he could go out and hunt for more wood.
And he needed to load up the stove with the last of what he’d gotten last night.
Though when he checked the stove, poking around with a stick, at first he couldn’t see any glowing coals. But there was a hint of heat drifting out, and he loaded in a few sticks, and then a few more, and blew gently, until he saw a curl of smoke. Breathing a sigh of relief, he slowly loaded in more small sticks, and a few chips of the split wood that had fallen off the hearth, making sure the smoke was still rising before he added too much. He kept watching and finally saw a lick of flame. Good. He added more and more wood until he had a blaze going, and then he shut the door. Eve wouldn’t freeze to death in the next couple of hours.
Maybe some people already had.
He looked over to Eve, but she was still sleeping. He needed her to wake up and tell him where the ax was. They needed more wood than what he had just loaded in, which wouldn’t last until mid-morning, and the ax was the only way to get more thick branches off that dead tree. Or maybe she had a saw. It’d take some time, but he might be able to saw up the trunk. He went to Eve and said her name several times. Then he shook her shoulder, gently.
She didn’t even make a sound.
“Eve!” he shouted her name. “Get up!”
