The change in Alex, however, was much more profound—at least it seemed that way to me, because even though he hadn’t lost a family member, it was like it had been a life-changing event for him. Gone was the self-centered, self-righteous, self-important teenager. In his place was a caring, responsible, and even humble adult.
Alex didn’t wait to be told to do something anymore; if he saw something that needed to be done, he did it without hesitation or complaint. He was very helpful to Mom, carrying stuff up and down the stairs for her, helping her with the laundry, which was quite a chore by hand, and even pitching in to clean the house. He worked alongside Dad like he was a partner on the farm, something which, I’m sure, pleased Dad immensely.
He was especially tender and comforting to Robin, holding her when she cried, bringing her hot tea and food to her room when she didn’t feel like coming downstairs. And most baffling of all, he was nice toward Calvin and me.
It was like Mom always joked when we behaved a little too well for some reason: “What alien replaced Alex with you and where did he take the real one?”
We were all pleased with the change, although we didn’t know how long it would last. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Alex to box my ears or snatch some food out of my hands like he used to. But for now, we were happy with him.
A couple of weeks after Robin’s dad died, a big army Hummer stopped by the house. We heard it coming like a mile away since there was never any traffic anymore. We were all lined up out front when it drove up. A couple of National Guardsmen stepped out and asked if we needed any medical or emergency supplies. Mom said we could use some antibiotics, painkillers and such to have on hand in case of an emergency, so one of the Guardsmen got a small box from the back of the Hummer and gave it to Mom. Robin was apparently thinking how she wished they’d have come two weeks ago, when her dad desperately needed the painkillers, because she started to cry again and ran into the house.
Dad asked if there was any news from the rest of the country and the Guardsmen told us that it looked grim for the entire civilized world. Some power had been restored to parts of a few major cities, but it wasn’t enough to stop thousands of deaths from starvation, dehydration, lack of emergency medical care, and exposure to cold.
They mentioned that while we were enjoying a relatively mild December so far, there had been a severe cold snap and a blizzard in the Northeast that was causing all kinds of misery. One of the biggest problems, they said, was getting fresh water into the cities. After the water stored in the water towers ran out, there wasn’t any easy way to get water to citizens packed into the metropolitan areas.
A lot of people were pretty resourceful, collecting rainwater and snow in any kind of container possible on top of the buildings, but many places did not get enough precipitation to provide water for everyone. There wasn’t enough gasoline left for tankers to bring water into every city every day. It made me wonder what our little town was doing to get water, and I told myself to remember to ask Skylar the next time I saw her.
Heat was a problem too, since there were few trees to burn in the cities, and not very many houses had wood-burning fireplaces anyway. The Guardsmen said that many people were burning furniture, books, clothing, and even parts of their houses in their ovens and bathtubs. This caused a lot of people to collapse from smoke inhalation, and a lot of buildings to catch on fire, fires which then spread from house to house or building to building, without water to put them out.
Most communities set up shelters inside schools and churches and other community buildings where they put together safer methods of providing heat, though it wasn’t nearly enough to keep everyone warm. These shelters were the first places that power was restored to, when it was available, and became havens for many people living in the cities.
Food had also become scarce. At first, grocery stores had been reluctant to give out provisions, but after the first week, those that wouldn’t share were looted anyway, until there wasn’t any food left. And, of course, no way to get any more, as every community was facing the same shortages and could not share. The army had taken over the big grain silos countrywide and was rationing out grain to as many as possible. The Guardsmen thought that the army would soon start taking livestock from farmers to help feed people, even though that would financially ruin those farmers in the process.
They also warned us of roving gangs of looters wandering the countryside, taking whatever they could from everyone. Desperate times called for desperate measures, they said. They told us to arm ourselves and to be sure to save bullets, if we had any, in case we had to defend our property and, possibly, our lives.
Luckily, we had some rifles and shotguns for deer hunting, although we had totally forgotten about hunting season that November. It sounded like it was a good thing we had forgotten, so we still had the stash of bullets Dad had bought for the season barely a week before PF Day. When our freezer full of beef and pork ran out we would have to hunt with our compound bows, if the power was still off at that time.
After the Guardsmen had left to visit other farms along the highway, Dad got to thinking about old Mr. and Mrs. Caruthers. He said it would be best to make a point of checking on them once a week or so, to make sure they were safe and well supplied. We made plans to take the wagon with several sacks of grain to their house the next day and to spend the day fixing up their place for winter. Alex was reluctant to leave Robin, but she said it was time that she stopped being such a baby and started helping out around the house, and that Alex should go help the Caruthers’s. Of course, we all assured her that she was not being a baby and Mom gave her a big hug, saying, “Welcome back, sweetheart.” Robin seemed to really enjoy having a mother figure and she smiled for the first time since she had come to our house.
By the time Dad, Alex, Calvin and I had loaded up the wagon and were ready to set out to the Caruthers’s house the next day, Mom and Robin had made us thermoses of coffee and lunches to eat on the way. Gram and Granny also had made a cake from scratch and baked it in the coals of the fire in an old Dutch oven that we had occasionally used for camping. They told us it was a gift for Mr. and Mrs. Caruthers, and when we started to protest good-naturedly, they laughed and said they had made us one too; it was already stowed in our picnic basket. I hadn’t had cake for almost two months, and my mouth started watering immediately at the promise of one.
On the way, we all decided to eat the cake first—who knew when we would ever get something so wonderful again, we reasoned. It was probably the most delicious cake I’d ever eaten, although there is a good possibility that it was just because of the rarity of cake these days. Between the four of us guys, we devoured the entire thing and, for the first time in a couple of weeks, we were content.
We found Mr. and Mrs. Caruthers doing fairly well, although Mrs. Caruthers complained that her arthritis was giving her a lot of trouble since she was out of her medicine. I told her that I would ask Mom if she knew of any herbal remedies that would be of some help, and Mrs. Caruthers said, with tears in her eyes, “God bless you, dear.”
With her mind a bit more at ease, she asked us what we were planning to do for Christmas. I was surprised by the question, because I hadn’t even remembered that the holidays were coming up. Christmas used to be my favorite time of the year, but now it seemed so superficial and artificial.
When I shrugged my shoulders, Mrs. Caruthers said, “If I know your Mom, she’ll have something special planned.”
That got me to thinking. For the rest of the day, while I worked on chopping wood, fixing loose shingles on their roof, and setting bales of straw around their foundation to help insulate the house for winter, I thought about what I could make or do for each person in my family for Christmas. For the first time in my life, I started thinking—really thinking—about Christmas as a time of giving to others instead of a time to get the latest toys and gadgets. As ideas for gifts started to form in my brain, I began to get excited about the things I could do t
o make the people I love happy. I decided not to say anything to anybody about Christmas so I could surprise them with my gifts.
When we got home that evening, satisfied with our hard work and the chance to help out our neighbors, Mom and Robin, with the help of my grandparents, had already decorated the house for Christmas. It was as if they had somehow overheard me and Mrs. Caruthers talking earlier. Mrs. Caruthers had been right—there was no way Mom would forget Christmas.
Even though there were no lights on the tree, it looked beautiful anyway, covered with all of our old ornaments to remind us of our normal life. Mom said Christmas was in just four days and she had been planning, for some time, to surprise us with the decorations. I had kind of lost track of the time. I mean, I knew it was December, but I hadn’t looked at a calendar in weeks. There was really no need to: no school or work to have to go to, no church services to go to on Sunday, etc. The fact that the year was practically over with had caught me off guard.
I wondered if our church would plan something for Christmas Eve, as they always had in the past. When I asked Mom, she said we’d just go there on Christmas Eve and say a prayer, whether anyone else was there or not.
Since our church was in the country instead of the town, it had remained closed for the two months since PF Day, but Mom was pretty sure people would gather there if they could, even without electricity. After all, she said, it was a candlelight service, not an electric light service.
The next day, after my regular chores were done and I had finished the schoolwork that Mom had assigned me, I got to work on the Christmas gifts I had planned for everyone. It was hard to keep everything a secret, and Calvin ended up catching me working on a gift for Mom in the barn. He begged me to let him help and wouldn’t let up until I said he could. We worked together on presents for everyone in our family except each other and, though I had originally wanted to do the job all on my own, I had to admit that we were able to make much better gifts together than I could have by myself. We worked for the next three days and, in the end, we were pretty satisfied with the results.
We arranged with our grandparents to keep Mom busy in the basement while we carried her present into the utility room and covered it with a blanket and a sign to not open it until Christmas. The other gifts were easier to wrap in old newspapers tied with ribbon and would be placed under the tree on Christmas Eve. I was hoping to be able to ride over to see Skylar the day after Christmas to give her present to her, but I was going to have to wait and see about that.
Chapter 7
On Christmas Eve everyone was in a festive mood. The women shooed us men out of the house while they cooked and baked all day. When we were finally allowed back in to eat a quick, delicious dinner and get dressed to go to church, I couldn’t help but enjoy how wonderful the house smelled.
Even though we dressed in our nice Sunday clothes, it really wouldn’t have made any difference. No one would be able to see them beneath the heavy coats, hats, gloves, and even the blankets Mom had us wrapped in for the ride to and from church.
Calvin and I rode on the bench with Dad while everyone else cuddled up in the back of the wagon and we all sang Christmas carols in between sips of the hot coffee in our thermoses. Our church is only six miles from our house, so the trip took a little less than two hours, which seemed incredibly fast after traveling four or more hours everywhere we wanted to go.
We could see from a half mile away that there were indeed people at the church—it was all lit up with candles and we could see shadows of people walking and standing in front of the windows. We were excited to see friends again, some of which we hadn’t seen since the Sunday before PF Day.
When we arrived, we were surrounded and greeted warmly, everybody acting especially nice to Robin as they expressed their sympathy at the loss of her father. Apparently, despite the distances between farms, the Jenkins’s had spread the word and Robin was made into a bit of an unwilling VIP that night. Even with the food shortages, people had brought gifts of canned and baked goods for Robin and our family. We all felt immensely loved and cherished and full of the spirit of the season. It seemed even our circumstances couldn’t stop Christmas.
After a beautiful service, during which the entire congregation had to cuddle together for warmth, my family and I climbed back into our wagon to make the journey home. We gave a ride to a couple, Johnny and Crystal Phillips, and their two young daughters, who live on the way to our house and had walked the mile and a half to the church. We sang Christmas carols again, with them joining in until we let the family off at their house. Mrs. Phillips invited us in to get warm by their fireplace and drink a cup of hot tea before we took off again. We were all quiet after that, and Calvin, Robin, and Granny even fell asleep before we got home.
We decided to wait until morning to open presents since we were all wasted from the long trek in the cold night air. We went to bed, but Alex snuck out of my room after a while to be with Robin. I had a little trouble sleeping after that until Alex came back a couple of hours later. I didn’t ask what he had been up to; I was pretty sure I already knew.
In the morning, we all gathered around the fireplace in the family room as usual, sipping coffee while Mom, Robin, and the grandmas made and baked homemade cinnamon rolls in the Dutch oven. The smell drove us crazy, and we almost burned our tongues devouring them as soon as they came out of the fire.
Mom told us kids to open our presents first, and we all had a good chuckle about the video games and movies she had bought us before PF Day. We were hopeful that we would be able to use them before too long. She, Robin, and the grandmas had also made each of us a dozen of our favorite type of cookie, although she said we were about out of flour and sugar now.
Alex gave Calvin and me some of his old belongings that we had wanted, like his Xbox 360 and video games. He said he wouldn’t need them anymore, even when the power came back on, because he was getting too old for those kinds of things. He looked at Robin and put his arm around her shoulders when he said it. Even though we couldn’t use the video games right then, the fact that he had given us something of his we had always wanted made it special.
Calvin gave me an elaborately drawn certificate worth two weeks of math homework, which Mom frowned at and then laughed at. I gave Calvin a cartoon drawing of us riding horses side by side. Dad gave each of us boys a hundred dollars and told us to save it for when we could go shopping again. Papa gave us each fifty dollars more and chuckled while saying, “Don’t spend it all in one place, now.”
Then it was time for Calvin and me to give out our presents. We handed Granny and Gram and Papa a large wooden plaque, on which we had engraved “Home Sweet Home” to hang in their common room. They oohed and ahhed over it until we were a little embarrassed, although we were proud of ourselves at the same time.
We had made Alex and Robin a plaque that read “First Christmas Together,” to which Robin started crying, a big smile on her face that was matched only by Alex’s. For Dad, we all went out to the barn. Calvin and I had cleaned up the old steel buhr mill used to crack corn for chicken feed and attached it by a belt to an old bicycle whose tires were flat. We had made a stand for it to keep it stationery so that, when you rode the bike, it turned the crank on the mill, making grinding grain that much easier. It would come in handy in grinding wheat for flour or corn for cornmeal now that we were almost out. Dad was beaming with pride, but I don’t know if it was pride in his new gadget or pride in his resourceful sons. I hoped it was both.
We saved Mom’s gift for last. Everyone filed back into the kitchen, and Calvin and I dragged it—still covered in the blanket—out of the utility room. Mom uncovered it to find a homemade washing machine.
Laundry was such a chore for her; she had been leaning over the bathtub after pouring boiled water over the clothes, then rubbing each piece of clothing together until they came clean. She then had to rinse them several times with more boiled water. It took her nearly an entire day at least once a week, and
at the end of the day her hands were red and cracked and sore.
Calvin and I had made a washing machine of sorts from a five-gallon plastic bucket with holes in the bottom and a paddle fashioned out of an old oar stuck through a hole in the lid. This bucket was placed inside another five-gallon bucket. We had found a big mop pail in the barn, the kind with the roller wringer on top, and we placed it and the buckets in a small, oval, metal tub that was once used for water for the goats. Mom still would have to boil the water for it, but she could now keep her hands out of the hot water for the most part. After agitating the clothes with the paddle, she had only to lift the first bucket out of the bottom one, allowing the water to drain out through the holes, empty the bottom bucket and refill with clean water, and place the top bucket back in to rinse the clothes. Then she could remove the lid and paddle, dump the clean, but soaking wet, clothes into the mop bucket and feed each piece of clothing through the rollers to wring them out.
Mom was so happy that she began to cry. Robin went over and hugged her, saying, “You so deserve this.”
Maybe it was the emotional moment that prompted him, but Alex then took Robin’s hand and led her to the fireplace, where he asked for everyone’s attention. “Robin and I have an announcement to make,” he said.
Everyone held their breath; I think we all were expecting them to announce that Robin was pregnant or something, but instead, he said, “Last night, I asked Robin to marry me and she said yes.” He tenderly gave her a kiss on the forehead.
After a long, stunned silence, Mom recovered enough to say, “That’ll be great in a couple of years, but you’re both only seventeen now.”
“I’ll be eighteen next month,” Alex countered. “And Robin will be eighteen in March.”
Teenage Survivalist Series [Books 1-3] Page 5
