by Doug Kelly
“Mary said we can’t play in the backyard,” said Brad.
Dylan was in the front yard, near the end of the driveway. He looked into the garage and saw that it was full now. Joel, David and Amy Taylor, and Linda Foster were all in a circle discussing what had just happened. Kevin saw Dylan and walked over to him after they made eye contact.
“You’re not supposed to talk to strangers,” Dylan said firmly to his children.
“He didn’t scare me,” Brad replied.
“I don’t care.”
“He promised to take us to a place where we could play all the time, be happy, and never be hungry again,” Jennifer added.
The first word that came to Dylan’s mind was abduction. Anger and fear coursed through his body again, his hands began to shake, and he yelled at his children, “Stay where someone can see you!” He walked toward Kevin, meeting him halfway up the driveway.
“Ever seen that guy before?” asked Kevin.
“No, and he’s long gone now.” Dylan pointed to the trees. “Everyone needs to keep their children in sight at all times.”
Inside the garage, Dylan looked at the group and announced, “There’s a lunatic out there. Keep your children close.”
Joel looked at his wife. They had let their oldest son go out on his own to hunt on multiple occasions. They each had a knot in their stomach as they thought about their children possibly getting hurt.
“Any idea which way he went?” asked Kevin.
“No, I went into the woods and saw nothing. He’s gone.”
“Dylan,” said Mary, “I’m sorry. I should’ve watched them more closely. We are just so busy with all the grain.”
“I understand. No one is blaming you for anything. We just have to be more cautious.” Dylan looked at the pile of grain and said, “I’m going to leave you alone. You’re busy.” He picked up an empty bucket. “Alright, gentlemen, grab a bucket. We’re going into the woods. The tree nuts have fallen, and it’s time for another harvest. I saw walnuts, acorns, and pecans.”
“No hunt this morning?” asked Joel.
Dylan thought for a moment. He knew they needed meat, but the falling leaves were covering the tree nuts. It would be better to get them sooner rather than later. “Get your oldest son, and I’ll get Brad. Let them hunt in the woods while we gather the fallen nuts. That way, we can keep an eye on them.”
“I can get him now,” said Joel. “I’ll also bring the other boys so Kim can watch the two youngest.”
Kim nodded.
“We’re on our way,” said Dylan. “Meet us in the woods. Oh, one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Find Jim and have him taxi our buckets back and forth with the wheelbarrow.”
“I’m on it.”
Dylan, Kevin, and David left for the woods. Each man carried empty buckets stacked one inside the other, several deep. Brad followed close behind, excited to leave the yard and hunt in the forest. At the edge of the woods, Dylan spread the empty buckets around under the nut trees as David began to work under a large walnut tree, clunking the dark hulls into the bucket one thud at a time. Joel arrived with his son, bow and blunt arrows in hand. Aaron smiled and waved to greet the group. He rarely spoke, self-conscious of his voice because of his profound deafness. Aaron and Brad went to hunt squirrels only after another stern warning to stay close. Joel settled under an oak tree towering over mounds of fallen acorns. He flicked the top off each one before dropping the little brown spheres into his buckets. Dylan motioned for Kevin to follow him, and they went deeper into the woods and under a pecan tree. They randomly spread their buckets on the ground, and each man crouched down and began to gather the pecans.
“Hey,” said Dylan in a low voice, wanting to keep his conversation with Kevin private.
“Yeah.”
“What do we do with Tom?” Dylan asked.
“What do you mean?”
“He needs sugar for his still, and we don’t have any.”
“You really want to get into that business?” asked Kevin.
Dylan thought for a moment before he answered. Kevin understood the hesitation to mean that his friend had doubts. “Maybe.”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“He’s going to let us plow all those acres behind his house,” said Dylan. “If we have enough food, then…why not? It’s not illegal. No laws anymore.”
“Maybe,” Kevin replied.
“Maybe? Now you don’t sound so sure. Do you want to do it or not?” Dylan realized he was speaking loudly and looked up to see if the other two men were listening. They did not appear to have noticed the conversation.
Kevin stood up, flexed his lower back, and shrugged his shoulders. “Doesn’t matter. We don’t have sugar anyway.”
“You’re right. I’m going to forget about it. Besides, we’d be partnered with that asshole, John. I heard what he did to Mary. You should’ve knocked his teeth out.”
“What I did was better. A guy like that thrives on attention. He has a sociopathic desire for control. When I dragged him out of that barn and dropped him in front of the crowd…well… that was it for him. Everybody saw his true colors. They turned their backs and walked away.”
Dylan stood tall. When he did, he noticed that Jim had arrived with the wheelbarrow. They placed the full buckets in the wheelbarrow and filled the empty spaces around the buckets with loose pecans. They repeated the process throughout the afternoon and stopped when the boys killed their fourth squirrel. The fathers sent their sons home with the squirrels and told them to wait there. They watched the boys walk into the tall weeds and then emerge on the other side at Dylan’s garage. The men sat on their buckets, stacked high with more nuts, and waited for Jim to come back for the final trip.
“When do you want to crack all these open?” asked David, as he inspected his hands, stained black from the walnut hulls.
“Not now, I’m starving,” said Kevin.
Dylan felt his hunger twist a knot in his gut. He could not have agreed more. Dylan stood up, ready to carry the buckets back. Just as he did, Jim parted the tall grass with the wheelbarrow like an icebreaker cutting a path in the Arctic Ocean.
“We’re done,” announced David.
“Good, so am I,” replied Jim. He dropped the wheelbarrow’s handles. “Load me up, and let’s get out of here.”
Jim dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow in the middle of Dylan’s driveway, and it stopped with a thud. He flexed a cramp out of his callused hand and took a long drink of water from a container he had placed on the driveway earlier in the day. He sat down and leaned back, supporting himself with the palms of his hands. The concrete felt warm from a full day of sunshine.
Dylan remembered the bow he had dropped behind his house and hurried to retrieve it. He turned the corner to see John holding the bow, inspecting it curiously.
“Hey!” exclaimed Dylan. “Are you sneaking around my house?”
Startled, John dropped the bow and turned quickly around. “No, just walking around the neighborhood.” John pointed to a small pile of wood by the concrete patio. “Looks a little low. I’ve got extra.”
“You shouldn’t be around here,” warned Dylan.
“Yeah, I figured as much. I’ll be on my way then.”
John went slinking through several backyards before walking back onto the street to make his way home. Dylan picked up his bow and suspiciously looked around his backyard. His eyes went across the garden and stopped at the walnut tree at the edge of his backyard. He did not believe John.
Dylan bent down at the edge of his garden to inspect what remained. Tomato vines had slithered across their rows onto the brown remnants of the bean plants. Mary had picked the last of the red tomatoes days ago. Only green tomatoes remained, and the weather was cool enough to keep them from ripening. He picked an armful of what remained and set them on the concrete patio. A small fire was smoldering there. Delicate tendrils of smoke wrapped around the metal grid above it. D
ylan placed a few logs into the fire ring, and tiny red embers jumped free, then slowly floated back to earth as gray ash. He was hungry, and it was time to cook some of the milled corn.
Kevin brought a small pail of the corn flour to Dylan and tipped the edge down for Dylan to see inside. Dylan pinched the yellow powder and rubbed it between his fingers over the fire. The flour quickly flared up the red embers.
“Hungry?” asked Dylan.
“Starving,” replied Kevin.
“Put it in a large pot, fill it with water and bring it to a boil.”
“What’s it called?”
“Mush,” answered Joel. Joel and David had just come from the garage to see where Dylan and Kevin were. “I’ve eaten that before.”
Joel was as hungry as the others were, but had a nostalgic smile on his face. When he was performing missionary work in South America, he lived and ate with the indigenous population. All too often, boiled corn flour was a staple, and he had grown tired of it. Now he understood true hunger and was ready to welcome back the familiar taste of the thick, warm paste.
“Looks like you just volunteered to be the cook tonight, Joel,” Dylan suggested.
“Don’t expect much. It’s just boiled corn flour,” replied Joel.
Dylan unsheathed his knife and handed it to Joel. “What do you think? Slice up the green tomatoes and mix it all together?” asked Dylan.
“It won’t make much of a difference.”
Dylan shrugged his shoulders and picked up two spades. “I need to turn more soil over to expand the garden for next year. Any volunteers?” asked Dylan.
David raised his hand. “I’ll do it.”
“I better get busy, too,” said Kevin, handing the pail of flour to Joel. “Yell when it’s ready. I’ll crack some of these nuts open with Jim.”
David followed Dylan to the far edge of the garden. The garden was a rectangular shape and its long dimension was parallel with the back property line. Dylan pointed to the old walnut tree in the distance and explained to David that eventually, the garden needed to go as far back as that old tree’s roots would allow.
“That’s going to take a lot of work, Dylan,” moaned David. He leaned on the spade’s handle and stared at the distance between himself and the back property line like it was an enemy.
“I know, and I don’t expect to get it done today. We’ll stop when the food is ready.”
“Alright, I’ll try.” David stopped leaning on the handle. He tested the ground with the tip of the spade.
Dylan walked several paces away to give David room to work and, standing behind David, watched him struggle with the spade. David tried to push the spade into the ground and nothing happened. He put the tip on the ground and, holding the handle vertical, jumped up to land on the footrest of the spade. The spade barely moved. He was too weak to push it through the turf, and his body was too light to do the same. He stopped trying. The spade was vertical again, and he put both hands on the end of the handle and leaned forward, resting his forehead on the back of his hands.
Dylan stopped shoveling and went to David’s side. “You okay? Need some water?”
David had closed his eyes and was still resting his head on the back of his hands. “No. I don’t have anything left. I’m spent.”
Dylan heard David’s stomach roar with hunger. “When was the last time you ate something?”
David did not answer. He remained attached to the spade, balancing against it.
“Anything today?” asked Dylan.
David took in a long breath and slowly exhaled. “I gave it all to Amy. She’s pregnant. I don’t need it, but she does. Way more than I do.” David opened his eyes and stood as straight as he could. “When that baby comes, what am I going to do then? I’ve been living off the charity of others.” He looked toward Joel, thinly slicing the green tomatoes and dropping them into the pot over the fire. “That man probably saved my life. He gave us food.” He looked at Dylan with empty eyes. “Why would he do that?”
“What do you mean?”
“He gave me food,” replied David. “I’m a stranger. I’m nobody to that man.”
“Maybe he sees things differently than most people. Would you have given him any food if you had plenty of it?”
David hung his head low and slowly shook it side to side. “I don’t know.” He raised his head and looked away as if he was ashamed. “But I do know that this kind of hunger changes a man. I used to walk around after dark. I’d tell my wife that I was going out to look for food, but I knew I wasn’t going to find any.” David swallowed hard. “I would just walk around. If there was a candle flickering in a window, I went up to it and looked inside. You’ll never know how many times I stood there and watched people eat. I almost…I almost…oh, Dylan…one night I almost went into a house to take their food. I was going to kill them if I had to.”
Joel walked across the yard, holding Dylan’s knife. He stood between the men and gave the knife back to Dylan. “Flames are higher,” said Joel. “Won’t be long now.”
“Take a break, Dave,” said Dylan. “You’ve worked hard enough, go have a seat.”
David slowly walked away, shoulders hanging low.
“He doesn’t look so good,” said Joel.
“He is starving himself.”
“I’ve given them food,” said Joel.
“He told me that. But he’s been giving his share to his wife. She’s pregnant.”
Joel nodded and looked back down to the patio at David, slumped to his side in a chair by the fire. Joel sighed.
“What’s wrong?” asked Dylan.
“They lost their first child,” replied Joel.
“I know.”
“She delivered the first by caesarian.”
“And?”
“What if she needs another?” asked Joel.
“You’re a surgeon.”
“Not anymore.”
“The hell you’re not!”
Joel sighed heavily again. “Look, Dylan, everything that helped me be a surgeon is gone now. It’s all gone.”
Kevin whistled loudly from the porch. Jim was holding a pail of nuts picked clean from their shells. “It’s ready,” yelled Kevin. The women and Dylan’s children were all around the fire, plates and spoons in hand.
“Don’t tell David what I just said about his wife,” begged Joel, in a hushed tone, even though they were too far from the patio for anyone to hear what he had said.
“I won’t tell,” Dylan assured him. “But you better promise me you’re going to try. If she needs help, you better try to help her. Promise me.”
Joel hesitantly nodded.
Dylan poked him in the chest. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Alright, I promise.” Joel abruptly walked away.
Hungry from all the day’s work, Dylan focused on the metal pot sitting on the grill over the fire and the thick yellow paste simmering in it. He did not notice his children and the Hales’ children playing around the other adults on the porch. Each plate soon held ladles of mush and boiled green tomatoes, sprinkled with nuts. Ready to eat, the children huddled together and the adults circled the fire, plates ready for food. At the corner of the patio, Linda Foster sat holding her child. Everyone ate quickly. No one spoke. The only noise was the sound of lips smacking from chewing the pasty meal and the clatter of spoons on the plates. Dylan licked his plate and spoon clean. Then he put them by his feet on the concrete patio and laughed to himself.
“What’s so funny?” asked Linda. Trying to feed her toddler a spoonful of the mush, she was the only person with food still on her plate.
“I used to hate going to fancy restaurants.” Dylan laughed again. “I’m not the kind of guy that ever liked to put on a suit or use a special fork for salad, but look at me now. I think I wouldn’t mind doing that right about now.”
David finally smiled. “What kind of wine goes with mush, Joel?”
“I don’t know, Dave, we don’t drink alcohol.” Joel touch
ed his wife’s shoulder.
“Oh, that’s right, sorry,” David apologized.
Jim quickly licked his lips clean and cleared his throat. He held up a thick finger and said, “Red wine. I’ll take a bottle of red wine. How about you, Dylan? What kind for you?”
“Wine,” Dylan mumbled.
“Yes, what kind?”
Dylan’s mind drifted away. It floated above his house, across the field, and over the tall grass to the golf course. It stopped at the eighteenth hole. In his mind’s eye, he could see a winery at the edge of the golf course. He just remembered, from years ago, seeing a winery and its orchard next to the edge of the fairway.
“Grapes,” Dylan mumbled again, as he came back to reality. “I know where there’s a winery with an orchard of grapes.”
“Dylan,” said Jim. “We were only joking. You don’t want to make wine, do you?”
“No, of course not.” Dylan rubbed his beard. “If those grapes were never picked, though, they’ll be dry on the vine. Raisins. A vineyard full of raisins.”
“It’s not that far away. Right?” asked Kevin.
“Right.”
“You want us to walk there? With buckets like we did for the nuts?” asked David, with a weary voice.
“No. We’ll get a truck and load it up. Raisins will keep over the winter.”
“Tom’s truck?” asked Kevin.
“Yeah, but he won’t go.”
“Harold has an El Camino,” Jim offered. “We’ll take that, too. Really get a load while we’re at it.”
“I’ll go talk to Harold,” said Dylan.
The thought of having to talk with Harold and tolerating his cantankerous attitude put Dylan in a foul mood. He frowned and looked over at the group of children. They had finished eating and gathered in a circle to chatter and play as children do.
“Children,” called Dylan. “Bring your plates here. We need to clean them.”
His children set their dirty plates and utensils beside Dylan’s plate. He curiously looked at his children, just noticing that they were wearing vine necklaces with cross pendants made from sticks held together with the same kind of vine.
He lifted a cross pendant from his son’s chest and rotated it between his fingers. He squinted at the necklace and asked Mary, “Did you make these?”
