Chapter 12
While the dogs barked insistently, Rachel stood on the landing at the top of the basement stairs, her hand on the doorknob, but she paused there, and Mary waited impatiently, pulse hammering. When Rachel at length opened the door, the dogs spilled out, claws scrabbling on the oak floor. But there in the chill, dim silence, their barking ceased, and Mary looked around the house with the daunting sense that she’d never been here before. She noted the open cabinet doors in the kitchen, the disarray left in their hurried evacuation. Only two weeks ago? It seemed like something remembered from her childhood.
She made her way into the living room. The drapes were closed. There was an emptiness under her ribs, and she wondered whether to call it hope or fear. She turned, saw Rachel behind her, then pushed the drapes aside and opened the sliding door. A rush of wind billowed the cloth as she went out onto the deck and into the outside world she’d been waiting so long to see.
September. She had to remind herself that this was September. Indian summer.
The wind, thick with stinging snow, pummeled her, the cold like a knife blade at the back of her neck. The deck was an untracked plane of snow, the lawn a rippled dune of snow, the beach, except for the dark band cleared by the waves, a swath of white and gray, snow and ice.
She had to remind herself that this was morning. Her mind balked at that as it did at Indian summer. Her mind recognized this somber light as winter dusk. The horizon was obliterated by sullen clouds and a fog of snow, and she could see only a few hundred feet past the breakers, where the northeast wind blew fans of riffles against the shoreward surge. And the sea was steaming. Whirlwinds of vapor rose from the roiling surface, danced ahead of the wind.
“Rachel…” The wind whipped the word away into the snow.
Rachel stood beside her, staring out at the sea, eyes shadowed with dread. “I’ve seen snow here. Only three times in twenty years, and only in December or January.” She looked up at the oppressive clouds. “But I’ve never seen it so dark. I’ve never seen that color….”
Mary saw the odd brazen cast of the clouds. Two words came unbid and clear into her mind. She didn’t say them aloud, although she saw Rachel’s lips move as if to form them.
Nuclear winter.
The implications in those words were stunning. They numbed her mind as the cold numbed her body. She said dully, “Rachel, we’ll have to go down to Shiloh and see if anyone there can tell us what happened or what’s going on now.”
“If anyone there knows.” She swept up a wad of snow from the railing with her gloved hand, then turned and crossed to the door. “Before we go anywhere, we have to find out if any of the animals survived.”
Mary started to protest the delay, but she couldn’t bring herself to argue with Rachel. Not now. They went to the garage first, where, in that hour of frantic preparation that seemed so long ago, they had pushed the van out and moved the chickens and rabbits in. The air was sour with the smell of droppings, and their entrance set the chickens flapping and squawking, while the rabbits scrambled for cover, eyes gleaming in the beam of Rachel’s flashlight. The living left in their wake scattered heaps of the dead.
For the living, the first problem was water; the water basins had frozen. Mary went into the house to fill a bucket at the kitchen sink, a task that took an inordinate length of time. The pipes hadn’t entirely frozen, but only a gurgling trickle flowed out of the faucet. And while she waited for the water to slowly, slowly fill the bucket, she thought of Shiloh. They had to get to Shiloh, had to find out what had happened and what was being done.
Finally she took the bucket to the garage and broke the ice out of the basins, filled them with fresh water. Rachel had replenished the feeders and begun picking up the carcasses. Mary helped her carry the small, stiffened bodies to the chicken coop where predators couldn’t reach them, and the cold would preserve them. She stared at the mound of dark feathers and fur turning white with snow, and all she could think of was Shiloh. All the answers were there. The only answers they could hope for.
But Rachel had already set out through the drifts toward the barn. Mary caught up with her. They passed the garden, a jumble of frozen leaves and stalks, and the snow-blanketed beehives near the orchard. Rachel said, “If any of the bees survived, they’ll need extra honey.”
“Won’t they freeze to death?”
“They can keep the temperature in the hives around ninety-eight just with their body heat. But they can starve to death—if the radiation hasn’t already killed them.”
Mary didn’t respond to that. She plodded on through the snow toward the barn. Shadow and Sparky were barking in play, leaping and rolling in flamboyant showers of white, and Rachel smiled. “Look at them. They’re so happy to be outside.”
Mary watched them with a feeling close to resentment.
Shiloh. She held on to that. The Apie station. Yes. Harry Berden would know what had happened, what to do.
As they neared the barn one question was answered: Pan was alive. They could hear his throaty bleating. When they went into his shed, they found the feeder empty, the water trough covered with an inch of cracked and refrozen ice. Rachel broke the ice with a shovel, and it was a measure of Pan’s thirst that he began drinking immediately, putting aside his usual fastidious preference for impeccably clean water.
Then they went into the barn, where the other goats and Silver milled about them, complaining noisily, but they were all alive, even Josie’s kids. Both Persephone and Josie had full udders. The kids had been weaned, but would turn to that source of sustenance and liquid again under these conditions. So would the other does. Rachel greeted them all like long-lost friends and called it a miracle.
Mary thought of Shiloh Beach.
Again, water was the first problem. It seemed warm in the barn—relative to outside—but a skim of ice covered the trough. Rachel cleared it, and Silver and the goats crowded in to drink. Mary climbed up to the loft and pushed three bales of hay down, and while Rachel dragged one out to Pan’s shed, Mary impatiently forked hay into the feeders.
She knew Rachel would want to rake out the barn now, to milk the goats, to take honey to the bees, to check the reservoir, to build fires in the house, to waste time on the myriad chores she could find to do here, but Mary could tolerate no further delay. She plunged the pitchfork into the ground and strode out of the barn, met Rachel on her way back from Pan’s shed. “Rachel, please, we have to go to Shiloh.”
Rachel studied her a moment. “Mary, don’t… well, just don’t get your hopes too high.”
Mary bit back an angry retort, but she couldn’t stop the clenching of her hands. “We have to find out what happened.”
“Yes. Well, the van won’t start.”
“Then we’ll walk.”
“Not in this weather. We’ll ride. Silver can carry both of us, but we’d better get more clothes on before we go. And the guns.”
They made a strange procession, Mary thought. A horse, two women, armed with rifles, riding bareback, two dogs trailing them. Mary rode behind Rachel, swaying with her in rhythm with Silver’s steady gait, Rachel holding the reins in one hand, the other resting on the bundle of rope and burlap sacks slung over Silver’s withers.