2nd Earth: Shortfall

by Edward Vought

  Charity and Carrie say that they second that statement, even if their husbands are from the same world as she is they better stay away from her if they know what’s good for them. Ken asks Tim who they are talking about, then says the only pretty girls he saw at the party tonight are our wives so they have nothing to worry about.

  Carrie smacks his behind and tells him he is lying through his teeth, but if he knows what’s good for him he will keep it up. She says she is always catching him checking out the pretty girl’s behinds when he doesn’t think she is watching. He tells her that’s only because he is so shocked by the tight clothes that some of these girls wear now. He shakes his head and says it’s disgraceful, Tim and I agree with him and we all get smacked. Ramona tells the others that Billy knows better than to even look because she will kick his sorry butt if she catches him. He has to bend over just to kiss her. We all get a good laugh out of the conversation. Everyone agrees that we will probably never know exactly what the plan is for us. We may learn when we pass through this life, but that has yet to be seen.

  I have always hoped that when it is my time that I would be reunited with the Horton’s. I don’t know if when I die all the people from both worlds will go to the same place, or if I will go back to the world I know, or will I be able to be with my loved ones from this world. So many questions and so few answers, I am in no hurry to find out the answer to that last question. I’m sure I will find out soon enough, if that’s fifty or sixty years that will be soon enough. I keep remembering the time that Ma and Gunny visited the children, which gives me a lot of hope.

  19

  The days go by quickly with planting crops, gardens and helping our new neighbors do the same. They are really adapting to farm life and are all hard workers. We all not only share work, we share knowledge, and their group knows a lot about building and carpentry that we don’t know, so it works well for everyone. We visited a record store in town and found about ninety-seven million records and some more stereo equipment. Of course that’s an exaggeration, but there are definitely a lot of them. The young people spend a lot of their evenings in either our meeting house or in our neighbors listening to music and dancing.

  Dad and Billy’s mom, Roberta, are teaching them what they can remember from when they were kids. Naturally we have to tease them and ask if they had trouble dodging the dinosaurs back then. We are in the process of moving another metal building that we found to our new neighbor’s farm. When that is completed we will all have a place where we can entertain company if we ever have any. We don’t consider any of our neighbors as guests. They are family that is visiting.

  Dayna and I tried dancing, but her belly always gets in the way. We wind up laughing, but I don’t get out of dancing that easily. Robin or Melissa are always more than happy to keep me on the dance floor when we have a party or just when we are enjoying ourselves. Sara and Ken are more than carrying their part of the load. They went into a movie theater that we saw in town and came out with several movies and the projection equipment. We told them we already tried the projector and it didn’t work. They jokingly tell us, “that’s the difference between you and us; we know how to fix the projector.”

  Everyone enjoys watching the movies when we get together usually on a Friday or Saturday evening. We have gone to every movie theater that we have found and gathered the equipment and any movies they happen to have on hand. We are so starved for entertainment that we don’t care what kind of movie it is, unless of course it is the kind the children shouldn’t be seeing. Luckily we found some cartoons which we kids of all ages enjoy very much. Another great thing we have started doing is country line dancing. The McEvoys are square dance callers, and really know how to do all the country dances, so they have been teaching us.

  All three families have our crops in now and our gardens planted as well. We spend a lot of time making our farms better and getting ready for harvest time. We found some recipes for canning different kinds of meats so we have been doing a lot of canning using a pressure cooker or several pressure cookers is more accurate. It seems like every house in all three farms have several hundred jars for canning as well as the ones that are already full. The biggest problem for a lot of the items we use is that they are not renewable, so every time we use one there is one less to be used. We have managed to find enough to last several years, if not decades, but with no way to get them when they are gone we have to use them properly and not waste any.

  We think we found out who the puppies daddy is, we got up one morning and there was a male dog that looks very much like Princess sleeping on our front porch. The women were afraid that if I went out to see if he was friendly or not I would get attacked by him. My logic is that if the children see that dog they are going to rush out and not even think about whether or not he is friendly. As it turns out we have nothing to worry about, he just looked up at me and wagged his tail when I walked over to him. Princess came out a few seconds later and they seem to know each other. I had to lecture Prince, that’s what the children named him, that if he is going to get Princess into trouble the way he did then he is going to have to be a man and own up to it.

  I think my talk had an effect on him because he has been hanging around ever since. The effects of the cold winter are definitely starting to show, there are at least ten expectant mothers amongst the three families. We think Dayna is the farthest along; we get teased a lot about not even waiting for it to get cold before we started. The twins have assured us it’s a baby sister for them. Every evening they put their ears up against Dayna’s tummy and act like they are talking to the baby. They always look up at us and say that it is definitely a baby sister. The days turn into weeks and the weeks turn into months. We get to harvest our first crop of winter wheat about the same time our onions, green beans, yellow beans, cucumbers, and lettuce are ready to pick. Now I know why farmers say they are busy sun-up to sun-down.

  It’s a very good thing that we have the wheat combine, and it works, or we would be doing a lot of hand beating the wheat to separate the buds. It looks like we will have plenty of wheat for all of the families and that doesn’t even count the spring wheat we planted. Our neighbors each planted spring wheat, but we planted different types so that we would have a variety. We all enjoy the fresh vegetables out of the gardens. We have to can most of the green beans because we can only eat so many of them. We staggered the planting so that they would be getting ripe at different times of the summer and fall. We were also afraid that the seed we used wouldn’t work, but it did so we are in very good shape.

  I am beginning to think that we are really in heaven. Not only have I found the family I always wanted and the most beautiful son in the world. Dayna gave birth this morning shortly after breakfast time. I have delivered six babies since we moved here, but I was too nervous to deliver my own. Dr. Don came over and helped us bring Timothy William Kenneth into the world kicking and screaming. The twins who have been saying the baby would be a girl scolded the baby for not telling them the truth when he was in Dayna’s tummy. To finish my thought about being in heaven, we have been eating ripe tomatoes from the garden for a while now and believe me there is not much that tastes better than a fresh tomato. That is unless you have good fresh bread and mayonnaise to go with it, and now we have those things as well as all the tomatoes I can eat.

  Sara showed us how to make mayonnaise and her recipe is excellent. I told her that now I know for sure why she was sent to our world. She laughed and said she was hoping that maybe she was on a somewhat nobler mission, but if that’s her lot in life she will accept it. Our pond is being used regularly for a swimming hole. We had to hang a bell on a tree a couple hundred yards from the pond and it is required to ring it when you are going to the pond. One day I went to the pond to take a dip and found several of our women swimming without being encumbered by bathing suits. I’m not sure which of us was more embarrassed at the time, I do know that afterward I got teased for a couple weeks though. Now we ring the bel
l and if anyone is skinny dipping they can get dressed before we get there.

  We have been busy with not only harvesting and canning; the women decided that we need to clean up the farm that is directly behind ours. It’s like five miles away on the road because you have to go a couple miles and then turn left, go a couple more miles, then turn left again, then go about a mile down that road. If we cut across the field and the orchard it is about a mile and a half. You can get there making two rights, but it’s the same distance either way. Anyway when we get through cutting wheat and picking beans for the day we head over to the farm and start cleaning it up.

  With people from all three families, which we all really consider one big family, the work goes fast. We clean out the houses and cut the grass, which is more like hay, in around the houses just like ours were when we first got here. We have to set up the two windmills that they used for electric power and make sure they work. The stove and hot water heaters in the houses are propane so we go into town and replace them with electric. We do have some propane, but we have no way to replace what is used so we use it very sparingly. There are three houses in this farm and two barns. They are all in pretty good shape considering that no one has lived in them for a very long time. Ken and Sara get the tractors running and make sure the trucks in the yard at least run. I spend a good half hour every evening telling Dayna, Robin, and Melissa what kind of progress we are making.

  They are excited because we all expect to have a whole batch of new friends coming any time now. I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical about it, but the women called it when the doc and his group came down. Tim has been reaching more people on the short wave radio; we have quit lying to them about where we are now. We figure with all three families we are now strong enough to defend ourselves against anything short of a small army. Heck we have enough ammunition and guns to give a small army a run for their money.

  On Saturday we are putting a lot of the wheat in large fiber reinforced plastic bags to store it when we get a call on the CB radio. Tim answers it and is happy to hear a familiar voice that says they are from Buffalo, New York. The person Tim always talks to is a woman named Barbara, she is always joking around about finding our family and moving in when they talk. Naturally we invited them to join us, but that was back in May or June and we haven’t heard much from them since, so this is a pleasant surprise. Well it should be a pleasant surprise, only they are asking where we are, and if we mind terribly if they come to see us even if they are being chased by some mean looking men on motorcycles.

  Our people know what to do at a moment’s notice. They run to get their guns or bows and arrows whichever they prefer while Tim explains to them how to get here. We also decide that four or five of us will take the motorcycles in the barn and meet them. For that we want shotguns with buckshot so that we don’t have to aim. Sara insists on going with us, we have tried to stop her from doing things in the past, now we don’t even bother to argue about how dangerous it could be. We find out they are less than five miles away coming our way the same way we came in as well as the others.

  It takes less than five minutes to find them and they are right, there are several guys on motorcycles trying to make the four vehicles pull over. We ride straight at the other riders hoping to shake them up enough to leave them alone. There are eight motorcycles in the group with a couple of them riding double. Five of them swing off to meet us, while three of them continue harassing our friends. I was hoping to settle this without bloodshed, but that’s out of the question now since they are firing at us as they come. We have been very lucky so far, and since none of us want to die because of scum like this, we each pick a bike and fire our shotguns at point blank range. The one that was riding straight at me flies off the back of his bike at about fifty miles an hour and rolls at least a hundred feet before coming to a stop.

  His bike crashes into a tree on the side of the road and bursts into flame. Of the others, only one is still on his bike and he has stopped and has his hands raised in surrender. The other three are all down and it doesn’t look like they will be getting up again. The three bikes that kept after the group from Buffalo look back and decide to call it quits. They take off down the road without even looking back to see if their friends are dead or alive. We tell the one who surrendered that he can go with them if he would like, he says he would rather not. He says he didn’t start riding with those guys to cause trouble and hurt people. He was alone and met these guys a few days ago.

  We tell him if he doesn’t mind honest work he is welcome to join our family, but if we find out he is lying to us, or if he hurts anyone, we will either throw him out or depending on the seriousness of his actions he will wind up like the others. He says he doesn’t mind hard work and would love to be part of a family; he has been alone too long. We escort the people from Buffalo to our farm and the others are a little disappointed that they missed all the action. We are all happy to meet our friends from Buffalo though, and they are very happy to be out of Buffalo. There are fifteen in their group, seven males and eight females; this is including children of which there are five. They range in age from four to eleven, three girls and two boys. The others are all married couples so it works out well for them.

  They are given some lunch and a nice cold drink before we show them around. They are very much impressed with everything they see and admit that when we told them all about what we are doing here, they thought we were exaggerating. We talk for a while then they ask us if there is anywhere near by where they might be able to settle. They say they realize that it will be a tough winter because they got a very late start getting here and now won’t have time to plant any crops that they could harvest before winter.

  We tell them we think we know of a place where they can live if they don’t mind hard work. They assure us that no matter how much work it is, spending the winter here has to be better than in Buffalo. Everything there is under snow all winter and it’s very difficult to find enough food or heat to stay warm in the winter. We tell them that we use electric heat here because we have lots of that and no way to make propane. Most of them have never seen electric lights or even knew that you could heat with electricity. We explain about the windmills and tell them that we do use wood stoves to heat as well, because there is nothing like a nice fire in woodstove or fireplace to heat a room and make it more homey.

  Seeing how we live makes them want to live like that as well and do anything they have to do to make it happen. We decide to take them cross country to their new home so we all load into the pickup trucks that want to go. Some of the family decides to drive around because it is a rough ride going the way we are going. We get there at about the same time, but going cross country we were able to show some of them the orchards which are full of fruit that is ripening and will be ready to pick soon. Actually, we already have picked peaches and cherries and now have a couple hundred jars of them each for the winter.

  When they see the houses and the work that has already been done on them they are afraid that someone else has moved in already. We assure them that we did the work because the girls said they would be coming. They go from house to house; they are each on a little over a half acre of land in a row, talking about how great it is going to be to live here. They ask us when they have gone through all three houses how much of their crops we will want for the houses. We all laugh and tell them that as far as we are concerned they own the farm right now. We hope they will want to be part of the family as we call ourselves, but there are no strings attached. Well maybe one, if anyone moves in and causes trouble they will be dealt with severely. All any of us ask is to treat everyone with respect and help each other when it is needed, if you are able to.

  We help them move in then leave them enough food for a couple of days and leave them to plan their future. They keep repeating that they never expected anything like this. They are not complaining in any way, this is just way beyond anything they could have ever imagined. Dr. Don says he will let the
young man who came with us move into their family. Some of the young men have built a dormitory out in the biggest barn loft which is quite comfortable. They enjoy living out there away from the old married couples as they call everyone who is married. The young man’s name is Gary, he reiterated that he had just met those guys a couple days ago and was only riding with them because he had no one else. He says if he had known they were going to hurt people he never would have started hanging with them at all. He was wondering how he could stop them from hurting the people in the cars when we came up. Sara says when the others fired at us he stopped his bike and raised his hands, if he hadn’t he would have gotten a chest full of buckshot.

  When Sara says that, we tease her and say that we thought she had simply missed him when she shot; after all she is just a girl. She is used to being teased because she is like our sister. We all tease each other unmercifully at times. She punches me on the arm, which hurts by the way, and tells me that SEAL has-beens are not the only ones who can shoot. I notice that Gary is surprised to hear her say that, he doesn’t say anything, but the others notice the same thing I do. When they are getting ready to leave I follow Gary outside and ask him if he has ever heard the term SEALs before. He looks at me and says he has, but we would never believe where.

  Sara, Tim, and Ken are all within hearing range. They come up to us and tell him to try us. He smiles, but declines and starts to get on his motorcycle. I ask him casually where he was going when he wound up in this world. He looks even more surprised so we continue.

  “Let me guess, you were riding a train or a subway when you fell asleep, when you woke up the train had stopped and there was no one to be found. While you were looking for someone, you went through a very heavy fog, and then found yourself in a world where very few people live, and everything is familiar, but strange at the same time.”