by Mike Mullin
The point is that I’m a great driver. I’ve got thirteen years of practice. So when I ran over the old lady, it was almost as shocking to me as it was to her.
Mom saw her before I did, screaming “Darla!” which snapped me out of my daydream about Dad and tractors. I slammed on the brake, but not before I heard the thump of the engine cowling hitting a figure in a long dress, cloaked in gray shadows by the ashfall.
My whole body was shaking with adrenaline. How could this happen? Had I just killed someone? As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t wind back and redo the last few seconds. But maybe I could keep from making it even worse. It looked like she was trapped under the small front wheels of the tractor: if she was alive, would it do less harm to free her by backing up or pulling forward? I couldn’t tell from the driver’s seat. I set the parking brake and vaulted out of the seat to check.
“Can you hear me?” I yelled.
She moaned, and I let out a huge sigh of relief. I hadn’t killed her—yet, anyway. I knelt over her—every part of her but her bright blue eyes was covered, swathed in cloth to protect her from the ash. The corners of her eyes were crinkled and gray—I guessed she must be at least fifty. She was trembling, probably from shock. Her feet weren’t visible. I patted her legs, touching delicately here and there, trying to figure out if her feet were pinned under the tractor wheels. And gasped in pure relief when I found her feet intact. The tractor wheel had caught her dress, and by some lucky instinct she’d pulled her feet up as she fell. That plus my quick stop had saved her.
I grabbed the pleats of her dress, trying to pull it free or rip it. That didn’t work—the dress was made of a heavy fabric and thoroughly trapped under the wheel. I fished out the pocket knife I carry everywhere and hacked her free, leaving a ragged hem on the dress and a swatch of cloth stuck under the wheel.
“Can you stand?” I asked.
She nodded hesitantly and started levering herself up. She wore a child-sized backpack stuffed nearly to bursting, the bright pink Hello Kitty logo smeared with gray ash. Halfway to her feet, she collapsed. I caught her—she’d passed out.
Mom slid off the truck to stand beside me. “Is she okay?”
“She’s passed out. Maybe she hit her head when she fell down?”
“Let’s take her home.”
I nodded and ducked my shoulder, getting it under her waist to heft her like a feed sack. She was lighter than I expected, about like lifting two grain sacks. There was no good way to carry her on the tractor; I climbed into my seat awkwardly and rolled her off my shoulder, holding her across my lap. Mom climbed up behind me, so we now had three people jammed into a space meant for one.
Luckily the house wasn’t far. Getting off the tractor proved to be almost as tricky as getting on had been. Mom slid off first, and I wormed my way out from under the woman, leaving her draped across the seat. Then I ducked under her torso to load her onto my shoulder again.
As I trudged into the house, she started coughing, a dry hacking noise like the asthmatic wheeze of a smoker. In the living room, I rolled her off my shoulder and onto the couch. Ash fell from her dress in clumps—it was going to be a nightmare to get the living room clean again. Which made me wonder: Who wore a dress to hike around in an ashfall? I would never wear a dress again if Mom would let me get away with it. Overalls would be way easier to clean up. And for that matter, who hikes through an ashfall—and down the middle of the road, no less?
Mom carried a cup of water into the living room. I levered our guest upright, and Mom held the water to her lips. She drank deeply, draining the whole thing. Then she collapsed back onto the couch, her eyes closed.
Chapter 9
Mom tried to shake our guest awake—we thought she’d be more comfortable if she got cleaned up before she slept—but she moaned, batted at Mom’s hand feebly, and went right back to sleep. She was lying on her backpack with her head askew. Mom levered her up, and I worked the straps off her shoulders. Mom checked her legs over, making sure nothing was broken, while I set the backpack beside the couch and unwrapped the scarves she’d been using as breathing cloths. She was older than I’d thought, her mouth and corners of her eyes creased with laugh lines. She looked pleasant and friendly, like everyone’s favorite grandmother.
“You recognize her?” I asked Mom.
“No.”
“She’s not from around here, is she?”
“Probably not.”
Mom arranged a pillow under her head, and we let her sleep. And sleep. And sleep. She woke once late that evening, and I gave her more water and helped her stumble to the bathroom. I asked who she was, but she wasn’t coherent enough to give me her name. Other than that, she slept solidly through the night, too.
Mom made pancakes for breakfast the next morning. Well, actually they were more like tortillas—we were out of eggs and milk, so we couldn’t make real pancakes—but they tasted okay.
Not long after the first pancake hit the skillet, the old lady appeared in the kitchen doorway. Ash still clung to her clothes and to the narrow band around her eyes that had been uncovered, making her look ethereal: a masked ghost ready for some netherworld ball.
“You sleep well?” Mom asked.
“Where am I?” She leaned into the doorway, as if the jamb were holding her upright.
“You’re safe,” Mom replied. “I’m Gloria. This is my daughter, Darla.”
“Where am I? Where’s the bathroom?”
“You don’t remember? Waking up last night?” I replied.
Mom started to bustle over to her, but I jumped up to show her the bathroom. I didn’t want to get stuck cooking.
In the bathroom, I had to explain the squat tube again, and when I put a pail of clean wash water in the sink, she drank from it. I offered to get her a cup, but she shook her head between gulps of water.
Mom had me fetch some clean clothes for her—jeans and a blouse, not a ridiculous dress. By the time she’d changed and cleaned up, there was ash all over the bathroom. I groaned inwardly; ashfall or not, Mom would insist on cleaning the bathroom until it was spotless.
Finally, we were all seated at the kitchen table, a plate of steaming tortilla cakes sitting between us. Mom blessed and served the food, and then the interrogation began.
“We didn’t get your name,” Mom said.
“Ruth,” she answered between mouthfuls.
“Where are you from, Ruth?” Mom asked.
“Champaign.”
“Illinois? You’re a ways from home.”
“I’m not exactly sure where I am.”
“About five miles north of Worthington.” Ruth’s face looked blank, so Mom went on. “Iowa. Southwest of Dubuque.”
“A long ways from Omaha?”
“Omaha?” I said. “You’re not even close. All the way on the wrong side of the state.”
Ruth sighed, deflating a little in her chair. “I thought I’d gotten closer. Before my minivan broke down.”
“Omaha’s a lot closer to Yellowstone,” I said. “It’s going to be worse there.”
“I know, I know. I tried to fly out, but nobody was at the airport. Can you imagine that? We’re in the middle of a disaster, and they closed the airport!”
“Um, yeah.” I lifted my eyebrows at Mom, and she gave me a stern look in return.
“Well, that’s just when we need to fly the most.”
“Planes can’t fly in an ash cloud,” I said. “Don’t you remember that volcano in Iceland a few years ago? That shut down all the airports in Europe?”
“Well . . . yes,” she said so hesitantly. I was sure she had no idea what I was talking about. “But they could have sent just one more flight to Omaha. Instead of abandoning the airport.”
“Sure they could’ve,” I said. “And instead of being here, having this delightful conversation, you’d be a few dozen hunks of blackened flesh on a crash site not far from the Champaign airport.”
“Darla!” Mom glared at me.
“I
’m sure it would’ve been fine,” Ruth said.
“Christ,” I muttered.
Mom hurried to change the subject. “You have family in Omaha, Ruth?”
“Yes, my grandbabies. There’s Esther and Rachel and the newborn, Peter. Such beautiful children. Let me show you.” She glanced around, “Where’s my pack?”
“In the mudroom,” Mom replied.
Ruth got up from the table, and I showed her the door to the mudroom. She grabbed her pack and brought it back to the table, setting it beside her chair. From it she produced, of all things, an electronic picture frame. “Where do I plug this in?”
Mom and I just stared at her; I had no idea what to say.
“Oh, there.” She noticed one of the outlets above the kitchen counter and plugged her frame in. Of course it remained blank. “Your power is down? Mine was off when I left. But I was sure it’d be back up by now. It’s been what, seven days?”
“Eight,” I answered.
“Shameful. Just shameful. When I was a younger woman, the power was never down for more than a few hours. Those linemen would come out in the middle of the night, in any kind of weather, and fix it. They wouldn’t have let a little ash stop them.”
I had no idea what to say to that, either. I looked into her pack—it was stuffed with more electronic picture frames. “You brought nothing but picture frames?”
“Well, I had more of them in the van. I couldn’t fit them all in the backpack. So I just brought my favorites. The baby pictures, the ballet recital, the Lion King performance—oh, you should see Esther in her Zazu costume. Adorable! I do hope the power comes on soon.”
“So,” I said, “you’re walking across Iowa in a dress—”
“It’s Esther’s favorite. The one she likes to hug.”
“And you brought nothing but useless hunks of plastic and metal?”
“They’re not useless—they’ll work fine when the power comes back on. I had water and snacks in the outside pockets, but I ran out.”
I leaned down, cradling my forehead in my hand, trying to hold my thoughts inside my brain. Unsuccessfully. “When they taught common sense in kindergarten, you were in the timeout corner, weren’t you?”
Mom and Ruth erupted into simultaneous protests.
Ruth: “Well, I’ll be—”
Mom: “Darla Jane Edmunds, you apologize. This instant! I’d most certainly trek to Omaha if you were stranded there.”
I glared at Mom for a moment and then turned to Ruth. “Ma’am, I am most sincerely and wholeheartedly sorry if I in any way offended your sensibilities by stating too baldly what any reasonable person would find obvious.”
“Darla!”
“May I be excused, please? I need to try to harvest some corn. Unless you’re both planning to eat picture frames?”
“We will talk about this later, young woman,” Mom said. She made a shooing motion with her hands and turned back to Ruth. “I do apologize for my daughter’s rudeness.”
“Why, Rachel is only four and she would never . . .”
I closed the mudroom door so I wouldn’t have to hear whatever else our addlepated guest said.
Chapter 10
The ash scraper on my tractor worked okay. It took some getting used to; I could only drive about twenty feet before the ash overloaded it, and I had to stop and pry it up, leaving a ridge of ash behind. And it took two passes to clear a section. Still, it was way more efficient than digging up the corn by hand. Within two hours, I’d hung six gunnysacks stuffed with corn ears off the side of the tractor.
I drove back to the house and shut down the tractor. The cloth covering the extra air filter was almost completely jammed with ash, so I took it to the pump to rinse it. Then I hauled all six bags of corn into the mudroom. By the time I got cleaned up, Mom had set up a mortar and pestle—unfortunately a small one, designed for grinding spices, not corn—two plastic laundry baskets for the husks and silks, and pans for the kernels and meal.
“Can I help?” Ruth asked.
“You’re our guest,” Mom said.
“Sure, you can help,” I said. “I’ll husk the corn, you get the kernels off, then Mom can grind it. Sometimes you can just twist the ears in your hands, or you might have to use a knife.” I thought about the fact that Ruth had dragged electric picture frames along on her trek from Champaign, so I added, “Make sure you don’t hold on to the sharp end of the knife, okay?”
Mom silenced me with a glare. And maybe I was being a bit unfair. I didn’t hate Ruth—she was just so . . . impractical.
The operation went fine—better than I expected. I’d shucked all six bags of corn before Ruth had finished removing the kernels from the first bag’s worth. Grinding was going even more slowly. We needed more mortars and pestles, or better yet, a real grinder with a stone. The finished product was a little mushy—we’d have to dry the cornmeal to preserve it.
“I’m going to head out to the barn,” I said. “See if I can improvise some kind of gristmill.”
“Thank goodness,” Mom said. “I don’t know how much more of this my hands can take.”
“Would you like to trade for a while?” Ruth asked.
“Yes, thank you.”
I slogged out to the barn, thinking about grinders. Maybe I could hook one to my bicycle? And I thought I might be able to make the grinding stones with the bags of Redi-Mix concrete I kept on hand for fixing fence posts.
I spent Friday afternoon sketching out a plan for a bicycle-powered grinder and building forms for the concrete. I had to make two stones, a base and a runner. The runner stone needed a feed hole for the corn kernels and some way to attach it to the bicycle chain.
Making a circular concrete form is tricky. The only time I could recall Dad and I doing it, we’d run to the hardware store in Dyersville and bought a heavy cardboard cylinder the right size. That wasn’t an option, of course, so I figured I’d need to make some kind of template. I struggled for more than an hour to cut a misshapen, sort-of-circular chunk of plywood with an old coping saw.
While staring at the useless lump of plywood I’d cut, I had an epiphany. I wet down my breathing rag, tied it around my face, and trooped back to the house.
Mom and Ruth were barely a quarter of the way through the pile of corn ears on the kitchen table. As I came back through the kitchen, carrying one of our round end tables, Mom asked, “Do I want to know what you’re doing with that?”
“Probably not,” I replied.
I stopped to use the bathroom, which was lucky, because while I was in there, I noticed the vinyl cove molding that served as a baseboard in the bathroom. The molding was about four inches tall, thin, flexible, and strong—perfect for making a round concrete form. I ripped about five feet of it off the wall and carried it out to the barn with the end table.
Saturday morning, I finished assembling the gristmill—or at least did everything I could do while waiting for the concrete to set—and Mom and Ruth ground the rest of the corn we’d harvested the day before. In the afternoon, all three of us ventured out into the field to harvest more.
It took me less than fifteen minutes on the tractor to clear most of the ash off an area as big as we could pick in one afternoon. I shut the tractor down and hopped off to help pick the corn.
Ruth straightened out and looked my way. “That tractor handles the ash real well.”
“It’s made for muddy fields. That’s why the rear wheels are so big. Ash isn’t that different, I guess.”
“I’ve got to be going soon,” Ruth said.
“You’re welcome to stay with us,” Mom said.
“Oh no, I couldn’t. I need to get to Omaha, to make sure my Esther, Rachel, and Peter are okay.”
“They have parents, don’t they?” I said.
“Well, of course. But Bruce works all the time. Naomi might need help. And with the phones and Internet down, I haven’t heard from them in more than a week.
“I’m sure they’re all right,” Mom said. “T
he Lord will keep them in the palm of His loving hand.”
I looked away to hide a scowl, forgetting again that the breathing rags hid my face completely. Mom had no way to know they were all right—in fact, they probably weren’t.
“You could take me,” Ruth said. She stared at me with a hungry look in her eyes. “On your tractor.”
“Take you? To Omaha?” Ruth was nodding as I went on. “That’s more than 300 miles. And the top speed on this tractor is fourteen miles an hour. I don’t have enough gas—”
“I’ll pay for the gas.”
“Or time. And how were you planning to pay for gas? If there’s any for sale. Which I doubt.”
“I brought my platinum card.”
I couldn’t even think of a reasonable response to that.
After a moment of silence, Ruth added, “If you won’t drive me, how about selling the tractor?”
“No.”
“I brought my checkbook, too.”
“The tractor’s not for sale,” I said, staring her down.
She turned to Mom. “I’d pay well.”
“It’s Darla’s tractor, not mine. If she doesn’t want to sell, that’s her choice. And she’s right, you know. You won’t be able to buy anything with a credit card or check.”
“I’ve got to get to Omaha,” Ruth said.
“Maybe Darla would drive you into Worthington. Could be that someone there has a vehicle they’d sell.”
“Mom!” I didn’t want to waste half a day hauling Ruth to Worthington.
Mom gave me the stare that said, Don’t fight me on this.
“Okay,” I sighed. “After the grinder is finished. And we have all our corn ground. I’m not gallivanting off to Worthington before we have plenty of food laid in.”
“But how long will that take?” Ruth asked. “I was hoping to leave tomorrow.”
“A few days.”
“But—”
“Deal with it.”
