by Mike Mullin
We sat in the closet for hours, nestled close together. We couldn’t talk—it was too loud. Couldn’t write notes or pantomime anything, because I’d turned the flashlight off to conserve its batteries. I passed the time by braiding three strands of string together, working by touch. Tripled, the string was strong enough that I couldn’t break it by hand.
I don’t know how long I sat in the closet before the aural barrage finally ended. Long enough that I’d braided the whole roll of string, creating a coil of thin, makeshift rope. It must have been late—I was exhausted—but tired or not, I had to try again to get to the barn, to get food and water to my rabbits.
I wet a rag, tying it around my face. Mom came with me to the back door. She stood just inside, taking a firm grip on one end of the coil of makeshift rope. I gave her a hug, took the coil of rope, and stepped into the ashfall outside.
It took a half-dozen tries, but eventually I found the corner of the barn. I followed it to the door and tied the end of my rope to the handle. Inside, I tried taking my mask off, but ash was swirling through gaps in the barn siding, making the air uncomfortable and possibly dangerous to breathe.
My rabbits were alive but suffering—panting, tongues lolling in the wan light of my flashlight. As soon as I refilled the bottle for each cage, they scrabbled for it, jostling and climbing over each other in their haste to be the first to drink.
“I came as soon as I could,” I said apologetically. They couldn’t understand me, of course, but the tone of my voice seemed to calm them—the ones that had already gotten water, at least. I filled their food bowls and then made my way back along the line strung between the barn and house to Mom. She pulled me into a hug, clinging as though I’d been on a trip to France or somewhere, not just to the barn. As soon as I could, I broke the hug and took the rope from her so I could tie it off to the door handle. Now we had a permanent line strung from the house to the barn: a lifeline for my rabbits.
***
When I woke the next day, I thought it was morning but wasn’t sure until I checked Mom’s watch. It was still pitch-black outside. One thing had changed—it was raining. When I saw the water glistening on the outside of my bedroom window in the beam of my flashlight, I hoped it signaled an end to the ashfall—hoped the rain would wash the ash from the sky. But it didn’t. The ash was still falling, about as heavily as before. The rain seemed to fall amid it, somehow.
After I took care of my rabbits’ morning feeding, I was covered in a goopy slurry of wet ash. I tried to knock the ash from my clothes, but it clung, and ultimately I had to strip down in the entryway and trudge up to my room in my underwear for clean clothes. Which got me thinking: how were we going to do laundry? But more importantly, where was the water going to come from?
I found Mom sitting at the kitchen table, clutching her Bible. A candle threw a calm light over her. She wasn’t reading, just gripping the Bible’s cracked, black leather cover. A spray of long, brightly colored ribbons fountained from the book’s spine, like a peacock wearing a funeral suit. Mom’s eyes were closed and her lips were moving. She knew the Bible so well, she could probably read it without opening the cover.
“I need a ball,” I said.
“Amen,” Mom murmured.
“About an inch and a half in diameter. Two inches would be better.”
“I was praying, you know.”
“It can’t float. A ball bearing from a combine would be perfect. I could get one at the junkyard in Dubuque, but I’m not sure how I’d get there in this mess.”
“Sit down. Pray with me for a bit,” Mom held out her hand.
I started pacing, Mom hates it when I pace, but I had to let the nervous energy flooding my body escape somehow. “Prayer isn’t going to get water out of the well,” I said. “I’ve got to build an inertial pump. And I need—”
“Darla! Prayer most certainly will get water out of the well. Prayer brought you to me—”
“I’m pretty sure that involved Dad and sex,” I muttered.
Mom glared at me and kept talking. “And gave you your father’s love of machines. Pray with me for a minute, and then I’ll get you a nonfloating ball about the right size.”
I had no idea where she’d find the ball I needed. I’d been racking my brain, trying to think of a way to make one. It had to be heavy enough to sink and perfectly spherical—incredibly difficult to fabricate without specialized tools. Mom obviously wasn’t going to tell me what she had in mind until I prayed with her, so I sat and took her hand.
Mom got something from her prayers—they relaxed and calmed her. But when I sat with her to pray, I always had the urge to jump up and do something instead.
Maybe I was a little fidgety, because she cut her murmured prayer short. She didn’t scold me, just dropped my hand, picked up the candle, and led me to her bedroom.
“Pull the box out from under the left side of the bed,” Mom instructed. “No, the one closer to the headboard.”
I slid an ancient box marked Ivory Soap Flakes out from under the bed. Mom opened the top of it and pulled out a Mason jar full of marbles. They seemed to glow in the candlelight, tiger’s eyes and whorls gleaming even through the dusty glass of the Mason jar.
“Where’d you get—”
“They were my mother’s. I got them out once when you were little—three or four, maybe—but you weren’t interested in them. You inspected them for a few minutes and then went back to following your dad around, carrying that plastic hammer you used to lug everywhere.” Mom’s eyes gleamed in the candlelight, like the marbles, but wetter.
“Are you . . . okay?”
“I’m fine.” She wiped her eyes.
I pulled her into a hug. “I wasn’t always a very good daughter, was I?”
“No, Darla. You were the very best daughter. Are the best. And I love you, even though I don’t always understand you.”
“I love you, too.”
“I never told you, did I? Why you’re an only child?”
“No . . . I just figured you only could handle one of me.”
Mom smiled ruefully. “That’s probably true, but . . . I got pregnant again only a year after I had you. A boy. We were going to name him Tom.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of this strange confession. I pulled away from Mom, wrapping my arms around myself.
“He came early. It was a horrible birth. Everything went wrong. Tom . . . he died, and I couldn’t have more children after that.”
I hugged my arms around myself tighter. “That’s . . . terrible, Mom.”
“We never told you because we never wanted you to feel like you weren’t enough. And your dad, he latched onto you as if you were Tom. You seemed to like the attention, and you picked up mechanical stuff so fast. Still . . .”
The look on her face was heartbreaking. I flung my arms around her. “I should have spent more time with you.”
“No, Darla. You did exactly what you should have. I see so much of your father in you, it’s like a part of him is still with us.”
I gripped Mom tighter, holding on until I was afraid I’d drown in her maudlin mood. The embrace went on so long that I started to get antsy. “Well, this pump isn’t going to build itself.”
“I guess not.” Mom released me.
I dumped the marbles on the bed and sorted through them, selecting the three largest—Mom called them shooters. They were perfect—more than an inch and a half in diameter. As I thought through what else I’d need to make an inertial pump, I muttered to myself, “Thank God the well’s not too deep for this.”
“See,” Mom said.
“What?”
“I told you prayer works. Who do you think gave us a high water table?”
“Christ, Mom.”
“Darla!”
Chapter 7
Now I had a marble the right size, but it still took the rest of the day to finish the pump. I cut up the washing machine’s drain to get a piece of pipe large enough for the body of my pump. I made a huge hole in
the wall, getting at the drain, but when I shoved the washing machine back in place, the hole was hidden. I’d have to remember to tell Mom before she used the washing machine. And trek to the hardware store in Dyersville to get parts to fix the damage I’d done. If we got our power back, Mom probably wouldn’t mind. Much.
I chopped up an old pair of Dad’s boots, making an O-ring from the leather. When I put it in place within the pipe, it leaked like a sieve. I soaked the leather in olive oil for a while, and that helped, but it still didn’t seal well enough to work. Then I hit on the idea of carving up the rubber soles of the boots. I made three rubber O-rings—cutting up both boots—before I got good enough at it to make one that didn’t leak.
I attached a reducing fitting to the end of the drain pipe with PVC cement. The O-ring nestled against the inside of the fitting nicely. Then I used a rope of plumber’s epoxy to lock the O-ring in place. I dropped the marble in the pipe, made sure it was free to move up and down, and my pump was done.
Mom went outside with me to help me pull off the well cover and lift the submersible electric pump out of the well. We tied wet dishtowels over our faces and used a roll of baling twine to make sure we wouldn’t get lost in the dense ashfall.
The ash was thick over the pump cover—three or four inches. It was heavy, far heavier than wet snow, and it stuck to my hands, turning them a ghostly shade of light gray.
We got the useless electric pump out of the well, and I cut the water supply tubing and electrical wire with a hacksaw. Mom and I trooped to the barn, carrying the pump and the tubing we’d pulled out of the well.
The dollhouse was still on my workbench. It looked alien somehow in the ashen haze of the flashlight’s beam. Too pristine to be part of my world now. Mom and I moved the dollhouse to the barn’s storage room to make room to work on the pump. Our ash-stained clothes left long smears of gray on the dollhouse’s white paint.
I replaced the electric pump with my inertial pump, paying special attention to the joint where my pump connected to the tubing. I didn’t have any fittings the right size, so I used a lot of epoxy and duct tape. It would hold, I thought. It had to hold—I couldn’t bear the thought of losing my pump.
Mom helped me haul the contraption back out to the well. She held a flashlight for me while I threaded my pump down the shaft and duct-taped a pole onto the tubing where it emerged from the well, to make it easier to pump. Then I took hold of one end of the bamboo pole and started pumping.
Nothing happened at first, of course. I pumped for one minute . . . two . . . nothing. It seemed like it was getting heavier—harder to pull up after each downstroke—but I was getting tired. And then, finally—water! It splashed out the end of the tube Mom held, glistening in the light of the flashlight, soaking her left pant leg.
Mom laughed, her voice a distillation of pure relief and joy. “You’re a wonder, Darla.”
“It’s a really simple machine, Mom.” I turned my head to hide the grin spreading across my face before I realized Mom couldn’t see it through my breathing rag, anyway.
“We’d be mighty thirsty before I figured out how to build that ‘simple machine.’” She had redirected the tubing into a bucket, but we’d barely wet the bottom of it before we noticed that way too much ash was falling in, fouling our water.
So I spent the next hour making a bucket cover with a hole just the right size for the pump tube. We worked well past midnight, according to Mom’s watch. It was impossible to tell by the sky—noon was just as dark as midnight. We filled almost every waterproof container we owned. If my pump failed at some point, I wanted to have enough water on hand to last until I could fix it or build another.
***
When I woke in my bed the next morning, Monday, I wasn’t sure what was going on. For a moment, I forgot about the eruption, despite the grit clinging to my skin and the omnipresent sulfur stench. I was seized by a ridiculous panic—I hadn’t done my homework. Then I came fully awake and realized it didn’t matter. I didn’t need to worry about school; I needed to focus on surviving.
So that’s the way I spent the next few days. I got up early every morning, fed and watered my rabbits, worked on mechanical projects all day and most of the night, then collapsed into bed.
After the water pump, I pulled the toilet out of the downstairs bath and built a squat tube—a piece of pipe and funnel—so we wouldn’t have to trek out into the ash to pee.
I started worrying about the roof, so I attached a series of poles to an old garden rake, lengthening the handle, and used that to pull ash off the barn and house roofs. I’d noticed how heavy the ash and rain were, and we had more than six inches on the ground now. Both the barn and house were old, sturdy buildings constructed of heavy timber, but if you put enough weight on anything, eventually it’ll collapse.
As I raised the rake for the first time, I bumped the gutter. It ripped free with a screech, narrowly missing me. As the gutter crashed to the ground, big glops of wet ash splurted out, splattering me. More fell off the roof, and I cursed out loud. The wet ash reminded me of the time a pigeon pooped on me in Dubuque. But for a pigeon to make droppings like these, it’d have to be elephant-sized. I ducked my head and stumbled farther back, waiting for the bombardment to end. When it did, I dragged my long-handled rake out of the muck and returned to clearing our roof.
By Thursday, it was a little brighter. At least we could tell the difference between night and day and didn’t have to carry flashlights and candles everywhere during the daytime. Which was good—all our batteries were dead, and we were running low on candles. We’d run the batteries out both in the flashlight and listening to the radio, trying to find a station. Either no radio stations were broadcasting, our radio was broken, or the ashfall was messing up the signal somehow. We had two sets of rechargeable batteries, but without power, they were useless. Maybe I could figure out a way to recharge them by hand—I filed that thought away for later.
I decided to use the daylight to work on my tractor. We were running out of food, both for humans and rabbits, but I’d planted over 190 acres of corn in the spring. The ears were mature, but the kernels were way too moist—if we had harvested this early, we would’ve had a horrendous drying charge at the co-op. But wet or not, the corn was perfectly edible, despite being buried under almost a foot of ash. Digging it up by hand would be an exhausting nightmare. I wished I had a bulldozer blade for the tractor. Instead, I used an old piece of angle-iron to fashion a long blade that I could drag behind the tractor on two chains. With one chain longer than the other, the ash would get scraped off to one side.
As I worked, I sent a silent thank-you to my dad, wherever he was, for buying an oxy-acetylene welding rig instead of the electric kind. An electric rig would’ve been as useful as a boat anchor, but the oxy-acetylene setup worked fine without electricity. I would feel so much better—so much safer—if he were here with me. Still, he’d left me the knowledge and tools I needed now, so maybe he was with me in a way.
Then it was time to consider the tractor itself. Its air filter was good, designed for dusty jobs like plowing, but no way would it hold up in this God-awful ashfall. I took the air filter out of our pickup, fashioned a cloth cover for it, and attached it over the tractor’s air intake. It was a bit of a spit-wad setup, but it worked okay. The tractor ran way too lean—starving for oxygen due to the doubled filter—but it ran.
I grabbed an armload of old feed sacks, hopped onto the tractor, and drove it right up to the house, the blade scraping through the ash behind me.
“You continue to amaze me, Darla.” Mom said when she saw the tractor running.
“I know—”
“And you’re humble, too.” Mom’s smile morphed to a scowl.
“Let’s go get some corn.”
“We should check on the Haymakers, see if they came through the eruption okay.”
“We’ve got maybe a day’s worth of rabbit pellets left, and what, two or three days of food for ourselves? And o
nly that much if we both eat your cream of wheat.” You have to be half dead of starvation to eat cream of wheat. Unless you’re my mother. Who’s weird.
“The Haymakers might have even less. And that fire we saw was over by their place.”
“We don’t have enough gas to go driving all over the place.”
“We’re not driving all over the place. Just a couple miles to check on the Haymakers.”
I sighed and went to unhook the blade from the back of the tractor. Arguing with Mom when she got all neighborly was hopeless. My tractor was an old model, a single-seater, so Mom and I had to squeeze in together, with me sitting at the front of the seat between her legs. Normally this would’ve been unbearably hot, but with the rain, ash, and dim light, we kind of needed to huddle close for warmth. In fact, it seemed way too cold for Iowa in the first week of September.
We rumbled down the road to the Haymakers’ place. I almost missed it, but I caught a glimpse of the mailbox through the ashfall as we passed.
The place was deserted. Mom and I both banged on the door and yelled. No one answered. The ash was smooth and untracked, although that didn’t mean much since it was still falling—filling in tracks and footprints fast. Their barn was gone; all that remained were a few sticks poking up from the huge ash-covered mound where it had been. We even checked their grain silos—there was no sign of humans there, either. We couldn’t tell what had caused the fire we’d seen. Maybe they really were burning brush, or maybe the fire hadn’t been here. Finally, we gave up and headed for home.
That was when I ran over the old lady.
Chapter 8
I’m a great driver; I’ve got thirteen years of experience. I learned to drive when I was four. I couldn’t reach the pedals of our old F150, of course, or operate the gearshift, but I loved to sit on Dad’s lap and steer while we checked our fields.
I wasn’t tall enough to drive on my own until I was nine. That was the same year I bought my own beat up ’63 Deere, trading two heifers I’d raised as a 4H project. Dad and I spent hundreds of happy hours getting that thing to run.
