"I'Il turn her over to Lantana and Mom Allie. Did you ever see somebody break a colt to the plow by hitching him between two big mules? He'll do his best to buck and snort, but the wise old heavyweights just amble along without even knowing he's there. I can't see Cheri having the spunk to even tackle the two of them, much less bother either one."
First, of course, 1 consulted my "mules. " They laughed at the notion, but both agreed to try their hand at civilizing! our invalid. As the cabin was now less closely tenanted since the children had moved out, we put her in Lisa's old pantry bedroom. Though it seemed sheer callousness, I felt that we might as well get the idea across to her, soon and early, that she was an added burden, not an honored guest. That tight, dark cubicle should tell her something, I thought.
It did. Then she told us, at length and at the top of her voice. Complete with obscenities that I had thought well lost with the outside world. When I finished washing out her mouth, I grabbed the foot of the army cot on which she lay, Lantana took the head, and we zipped her out of the house, down the backyard, and behind the smokehouse.
"Now you can say just what you think," Lantana said sternly, "without contaminatin' our ears. We'll check on you, now and again, to make sure you're all right. And when you think you can behave, we'll bring you back inside. " Then, turning to me, she asked, "Have we got an old tarp we can throw over her if it rains?'
We left her screaming after us. I, for one, felt like a villain, but I knew this was necessary. She must either shape up or be sent out.
She was brought back inside three days later. Her head, be it known, was the harder sort. She kept thinking, every time one of us went down to feed her or to help her relieve herself, that she could talk us into submission. It wasn't until we left her out in the rain all night that she capitulated. It wasn't a real storm, thank heaven, but even a light drizzle must seem like a cloudburst when you lie out under a tarp and hear it pattering on top of you for five or six hours.
After that, she quieted down and stopped demanding. Still, I'd catch a strange expression on her face, now and again, and I'd wonder.. She looked just like old Rock, my dad's setter, who would never dream of killing a chicken–as long as we were watching.
She healed quickly, though her arm would never be exactly straight, and she had lost some motion in it. The ribs gave her trouble for a long time, probably as a result of her struggle when they were first broken. But her leg mended without trouble, and she was able to walk fairly soon, for Skinny and Josh built her a walker out of old pipe.
We were all, understand, busy as ticks in a tar bucket, all the time. Our efforts on her behalf were matters of a few minutes here and there, taken from our scanty leisure. And while she had ceased her demands, I never had the feeling that she truly understood her situation. Mom Allie's three dressings-down, delivered to Cheri in no uncertain terms, were enough, I felt, to keep her in line for a long time to come. But she didn't really understand. You could see it in her face.
They must have been a strange household, the Londowns'. Curt sure that he was God's anointed, and Cheri certain that she was the exact center of the universe. How the three young ones could have come out of it as nearly sensible as they had done was a wonder.
As Cheri became well, our problems increased. It wasn't that she refused to work. She just didn't. A pan of potatoes left for her to peel would sit there until someone else grabbed it up and tended to it. She hated to wear her clothes more than once. We had come to terms with the matter–we could either be immaculate or get the important work done, not both. For her there was no question. She must have clean clothes, and the fact that the clothes were Suzi's made no difference.
At last, I reversed Annie's journey and took my problem to her. She listened to my tale with a grave face. "Whatever we do with her, Luce, we mustn't put her back with her kids," she said when I had finished. "The one thing in the world they were scared to death of was their mother. Not their dad. I've sat and rocked little Cookie more nights than one when she got to thinking about her dad being gone. Carl and Carol loved him. Really loved him. But you want to see faces go pale as ghosts, just ask them if they want to go visit their mom."
Well, that was that. I'd thought of setting up the remainder of The family in Nellie's house, after proper work was done on it, of course, with maybe Elmond or Josh as live-in father figure. But now I saw that it wouldn't do at all. It had begun to look as if we were going to have an albatross hung around our necks, for good and all.
However, once she had regained her strength and agility, she solved the problem for us. She ran away.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
At first, it was a great relief. Though we did worry, of course, about her and checked downriver to see if she had taken refuge with the Jessups or the Fanchers. She was noplace we looked. We even saddled a couple of horses, Suzi and I, and went up the little-used road toward Mrs. Yunt's house, checking the bare patches of earth for tracks now and again.
Mrs. Yunt's house was just as we had left it, plus a winter of emptiness. Though it was a stoutly built place, clapboard laid over the original log structure, it had a look as if the starch had somehow gone out of it. Obviously, nobody had been near it since the last time we had checked it.
We rode on up the road, around the persimmon sprouts that were springing up in its middle, over the Bermuda grass that was encroaching onto its surface from the ditches. Grandpa Harkrider's house was gone. Burned down to fine ash, the shrubbery about it withered and dead on the side next to the house.
"Lightning?" asked Suzi, as we drew rein in the front yard and looked at the devastation.
"Maybe," I answered. "Or possibly Ungers. Grandpa's fields go right on back to the river. It makes a big loop here, before swinging west just south of our place. If those hellions use the river for their road, it would make sense. I often wonder why they didn't burn poor Nellie alive when they raided her place."
Suzi looked down across the fields that were now visible with the removal of the house. Her delicate face looked very oriental as she said carefully, "It may be ... that was their first. They had not yet ... refined ... their techniques."
A forgotten fact popped into my mind. Suzi had been a psychology major at the University of Colorado when she met her husband. She, if any of us, would probably know the proper terminology for the Ungers' aberrations. Then I dismissed the thought. Terms are irrelevant; it's effects that count. And preventive measures.
The same thought came to us simultaneously. We recognized its shape as we looked, eye into eye, considering the appalling notion.
"She has gone to the Ungers!' I don't know which of us breathed the words.
We turned our mounts and fled back down the road as fast as was safely possible. We knew that we must lay this terrible possibility before the others as soon as we could, for Cheri knew, from the inside out, our defenses. Ours and Fanchers', though not, praise be, the Jessups'.
We rousted our clan from field and garden, house and barn and wood, young and old together. And once they realized what we were saying, they were as intent as we.
"I'll lay odds you're right," sighed Lucas. "She used to listen real close when we talked about 'em. Could be she thinks she's smart enough to walk in down there and take over where the death of the old Unger left a gap. Have a whole swarm of slaves at her command. Come back, maybe, and make us pay for expectin' her to behave like a human bein'. That little gal lacked somethin' ... somethin' I can't rightly put my finger on, but necessary."
Our first order of business seemed obvious. We must do our best to make the complex defensible. And knowing our adversaries' penchant for attack with fire, we must make our defenses unburnable. Two crews began work on that immediately. All the children except Joseph, who was elected overseer, divided themselves into bucket brigades under Elmond's and Skinny's supervision.
The two men dug down to the red clay in two spots, one near the cabin, one not too far from their own house. Then the children hauled buck
ets full (or as full as they could carry) of water and dumped them into the clay holes until the men could mix up a good red glop of mud. The rest of us hauled buckets of mud and daubed the stuff onto everything. Every exposed inch of wood in the two dwellings was covered thickly. Not just once, but over and over until it was thick as adobe. Luckily, both houses had overhanging eaves, which would keep the rain from doing much damage over the short haul. And we had other plans for the long haul.
By the time we were finished, we and the houses both looked like complete messes. However, the stuff dried to a pleasant sandy red color, and we shaped it by scraping off lumps and blobs, rounding corners smoothly, and squaring it off about the windows. In two days we had things fairly well squared away. We had also built an earthwork, using the slip and old Maud, across the approach from the creek and the river. It wasn't too high, but it was thick enough to stop a slug--we hoped.
Then we set our other plan into motion. The stills, being sun-heated, worked all the summer at top speed. We had big batches of mash cooking off every day, to be replaced in the fermenting vats by mushy potatoes, overripe watermelons, green cornstalks, extra beans and vines ... anything and everything that grew and would ferment. The stills worked all day, every day, fueling the tillers, the old tractor, even the lanterns that lighted our nightly prowlings. They also made Molotov cocktails.
We worked doubly, now, for our regular labors couldn't be neglected. Our survival depended on keeping up with the harvesting, preserving, sewing, wood gathering that would make our winter livable. But those fermenting barrels and stills were our first order of duty.
One morning, while swilling out the biggest barrel, I had an idea. "Let's fuel up the big tractor rig that we used to bring in the Burrow and pull it right into the middle of the driveway, just in the narrow part of the bend between the embankment and the swampy spot. That will stop anybody from coming at us in a bunch from that direction. I'd feel better with that route bottled up."
Nellie, who was working with me, nodded "Soon as we're through," she grunted, rolling one barrel aside and beginning on another.
When Zack saw what we had done, later. he grinned. "Good thinking," was all that he said, but later he told me, "I'm glad you got it running and out so that we can move around in it. I'm thinking that we need a boat."
"We have a boat," I objected.
"I mean a big boat. Maybe a catamaran. One that will take a bunch of us downriver, slide low on the current. Ride over a lot of the logs and debris. Down to the lake. One that will, if need be, take off like a scalded cat."
I looked at him, and my heart began to thud uncomfortably "You mean to go downriver. " It wasn't a question.
"Got to, Luce. We can't wait for them to come at us, choosing their own time and opportunity. No, tomorrow I'm going after a boat, if I have to go all the way to Nicholson."
"You won't have to, I said. "I'Il bet you anything you like that the Greens had several boats, all of them the best money can buy. Everything else they had was the best and most expensive of its kind–why should their boats be any different? Where there is a boathouse the size of theirs, there are boats, believe me."
We headed out the next morning, by the road. Once more we found ourselves on the oiltop, passing those places whose rear approaches had become so familiar to us. We stopped at the Jessups' to pick up Horace. He had keys to everything, it seemed.
We'd never been down the drive beneath that ornate gateway. It was covered with white shell that had obviously been kept neatly edged. The house itself was a red-brick monstrosity. The tall blank facade faced the road, with narrow windows and stingy portico giving it a disapproving expression. The blinds were closed, and I could imagine the musty smell of mildew that must hang inside that stuffy building.
We followed the drive around the sweeping arc to the back. Strictly ornamental stables and pergolas cluttered up what should have been a clean sweep of magnificent view to the river. I decided that I wouldn't have liked the Greens very much.
As we drove up to the boathouse, I asked Horace, "Why in thunder haven't the Ungers raided this place? I'd think it would tempt them past endurance."
He laughed. "There were always watchmen. Right until the blowup. The Greens had them here, day in, day out, around the clock. Everybody on the river knew better than to look cross-eyed at this place. " He grunted and looked out toward the mud-brown water.
"I can't prove it, but I happen to know that somebody tried to come in the back way to rob this place, a couple of years ago. Got shot doing it. The bodies went into the river and came up in the lake. It got credit for being a hunting accident, but I knew the men. They weren't hunters. They were thieves. I sat on juries when both of them were tried, the year before. We sentenced them, but they were out before you could say scat. " He spat as he opened the door.
"Anyway, the Ungers aren't bright. It hasn't dawned on them that things have changed so much that there aren't any watchmen anymore. They're gone, but those dimwits haven't figured it out and probably won't."
We found three boats in the boathouse. The catamaran was slung for repair, but Zack fell in love with a low, fast-looking fiberglass job whose motor kicked over the first time he touched the switch. That was, of course, the last breath of the battery, but Horace heaved on the manual starter while Zack nursed the engine along, until both were satisfied that it was in good shape. We went home in triumph, pulling the boat behind our rig on a custom-built trailer.
We put the whole thing, temporarily, up in Grandpa Harkrider's garden. Then we took the truck back and plugged up our drive again. By then it was midafternoon.
Zack called a meeting of the clan when everyone came in for supper from various chores around the farm. "We've got to make up our minds as to what we're going to do," he said to Mom Allie. "We can't just let those bitches keep chewing up anybody they've a mind to. I want to hit them, all together, one great big go-for-broke lick."
Mom Allie didn't say a word, though I realized that Zack kept watching her out of the corner of his eye when he thought she wasn't looking. That told me that he was worried about her reaction to his proposal. She had always had a thing about turning the other cheek. But I thought that he was mistaken, this time. Mom Allie had a good eye for survival.
We cleared away the debris of the meal. We had eaten on the tables we had built under the trees in the back yard, and once we'd settled down all eyes turned toward Zack. He looked troubled and seemed to have a problem thinking how to begin.
Lucas spoke before Zack could. "I think most of us know what's on your mind, Zack. It's been on ours, too, for a while. Since before the Fanchers got burned out, that's for sure. We've been havin' some of the same problem that I think you've been sweating. Been talking it over a lot. It's not the same world it was, you know, in a lot of ways we haven't even discovered yet. Tell him, Alice."
Mom Allie fiddled with a sweetgum leaf that had settled beside her plate while Lucas was speaking. She didn't look happy, but then again she didn't look incurably depressed, either. It took her a minute to get her thoughts together, but we all waited quietly.
"Look, son," she began at last, "I know I taught you patience and forbearance and brotherly love and turning the other cheek. In the world we had then, that was good, sound sense, no matter how little anybody else lived by it. I think you managed to live a full and happy life because of those teachings, even with Vietnam and that time in Houston subtracted from the total. Those things were true then, and they're true now ... to a certain extent. They'll be true again, completely. Someday."
Another leaf planed down and settled into Lisa's lap. It was the cool green that only sweetgum achieves, and Lisa held it to her cheek while she listened.
"Now we've got to make a new life from scratch. There are problems we never thought we'd have to cope with, and one of 'em is the Ungers. They are going to kill us all out, family by family, person by person, house by house, if we leave them to their own devices and just wait for them to choo
se their own time and place to hit us. When you told me that this afternoon, I knew it was true, even if I hated to admit it. Now we've had a chance to talk it over, we old ones. We're with you, all the way. " She looked at him for a moment, and her eyes looked sad, behind her glasses.
"Get together with Bill, why don't you? The two of you saw a lot of action overseas. Sneaky, double-dealing kinds of war. That's what we need. We can't afford to waste decent lives on cleaning out that trash."
Skinny cleared his throat. So seldom did he venture to speak when we all were together that everyone turned to him in surprise.
"That damn Cheri's with 'em, too. Don't ever forget that. She knows our defenses. She knows the way we go about doing things. She was smart, that one, no matter how side-slung her mind was. If she's gone off to them Ungers, she's got some kind of plan for getting back at us. The only reason they ain't wiped us out, before now, is that they didn't have no brains. Now they got one. Don't forget that."
And that was the last nail in the box. We knew that, much as we didn't want to admit it. The danger that had been intermittent would probably become constant. Nobody could afford to go off on a job in the woods or the far fields without several people with him. Our manpower didn't stretch that far.
I looked at Zack. "Tomorrow you can go see Bill."
He shook his head. "I'm going to blow the trumpet. I want to see Bill and Horace tonight. I'll go to meet them, to save time. You cover me, Luce, from the last fencerow. There's almost a full moon. There'll be enough light."
We left the others to do the last of the evening chores. Then I watched Zack trudge away across the fields toward Bill's house with my heart thumping uneasily. The trumpet blast had brought a faint answer from Horace's end of the line, so we knew Bill had heard. Before Zack reached the second fence, I saw a dim shape moving toward him from the direction of Fanchers'. They went together to meet Horace, and I stretched myself in the honeysuckle of the fencerow to wait for their return.
The World Ends In Hickory Hollow Page 15
