These days, you could get snow into July, even into August. Snow—it’s not just for winter any more! Rob thought it made a terrific advertising slogan. For some reason or other—he couldn’t fathom why—it never caught on the way he wanted.
But, around half past May, the weather slowly began to gain on the calendar’s claims. It could still snow any old time. But it mostly didn’t snow all the goddamn time, as it did in the no-shit winter months. Daytime temps crawled above freezing. Sometimes, instead of snowing, it rained. The drifts that had covered the ground for so long started to melt. That happened first on south-facing slopes that got whatever sunshine sneaked past the clouds. Shadowed stretches stayed snowy longer.
Before the supervolcano blew, Maine had been a birders’ paradise. All kinds of feathered critters came here to raise families and gorge on the bazillions of bugs that hatched out as ponds and swamps unfroze. The unfreezing took longer and was less certain now. There were fewer bugs. Anyone who’d ever had Maine mosquitoes turn his face to steak tartare didn’t miss them a bit. The birds did, though. Only the hardier kinds came here for the abbreviated summer now. They found the times cold and hungry.
Well, Rob found the times cold and hungry, too. He was down to about 165 pounds. On a six-one frame, that wasn’t much. Jeans that had fit him fine once upon a time hung loose these days. He was about twenty pounds under what he’d weighed when he came to Guilford. He used holes in his belt he’d never thought about in the old days.
By pre-eruption standards, almost everybody north and west of the Interstate was skinny. People worked harder. If you had to go somewhere, you walked or skied or snowshoed. If you needed firewood, you chopped it. You didn’t—you couldn’t—hop in the car to go three blocks to the drugstore and another block to the Subway for a meatball sub with marinara.
Rob wondered when he’d last seen a tomato. Some canned ones had come in since the eruption—he was sure of that. Fresh tomatoes? Not even all of Jim Farrell’s magic with greenhouses would persuade them to grow in what passed for a climate around here these days.
Plenty of things wouldn’t grow. But some would. Some had: turnips and other roots, some of the extra-cold-weather potatoes for which they also had Jim to thank, onions, and, in the greenhouses, things like lettuce and garlic. Along with game and pigs and chickens, they meant the people in these parts might be skinny, but few were in any real danger of starving.
Rob ambled east past the Shell station. That wasn’t one of the many businesses that had gone belly-up since the eruption. Mort Willard, the fellow who’d run it as a gas station, was a skilled repairman, mechanic, and handyman. He could fix damn near anything, and did, often using the tools that had once performed surgery on automobiles.
Ralph O’Brian no longer worked for Mort. He made what living he made by chopping wood and shoveling snow and doing other things that needed a strong back but not a whole lot of brains. Rob felt a certain amount of Schadenfreude about that. He knew Ralph hadn’t shot him on purpose. Ralph had been aiming for the moose. He’d got a musician only by accident. Then again, Rob would carry that scar on his calf for the rest of his life. A couple of inches to one side and he might have lost that leg below the knee. So he hadn’t lost any love for good old Ralph.
Of course, if you sported no worse than a scar and no more than a mild dislike for one of your fellow human beings after he shot you, you were doing fine. It didn’t sound as if Dad had been so lucky. You always knew something like that could happen to a cop. But when it didn’t and it didn’t and it didn’t, when you moved the width of a continent away, you stopped worrying about it. And when you stopped worrying about it, naturally, that was when it happened.
Guilford petered out fast when you walked along Highway 6. Freezes and thaws had pitted the asphalt. Some of it still lay under snow; some peeked out. If any cars or trucks did come this way, they would have a tooth-rattling time of it. Rob wasn’t holding his breath. In the distance, somebody hammered nails into a board. That was the loudest noise he heard. No motor vehicles within earshot.
Off to the south lay the Piscataquis. The ice on the river was starting to break up, but not nearly done. Some pines and broad-leafed trees still grew along the riverbank, though others had been cut down for fuel. The pines looked like, well, pines. The maples and whatever else kept them company thrust bare branches into the sky. They would get leaves for a little while, but they hadn’t done it yet.
Rob stopped and looked around. Somewhere right about here, that Hummer had smashed head-on into the eighteen-wheeler. The resulting mess blocked the narrow road and made damn sure that Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles wouldn’t make it up to their scheduled gig in Greenville. They’d ended up in Guilford instead.
If their two Ford Explorers had come by half an hour earlier… My whole life would be different, Rob thought. All our lives would be different if we’d driven through Guilford without stopping. Several local women would have different husbands, or no husbands at all. Several children wouldn’t have been born. Others who might have come along had the band reached Greenville now never would.
And what was the difference? Just a little timing. There wasn’t a person in the world who didn’t have a story like that. If you’d been a little late or a little early, if you hadn’t had that fender-bender back in the days when you could bend fenders, if that woman in the store with you had bought the secondhand book that changed your life when you read it, if this, if that, if the other thing, your whole life would be totally changed.
It made you wonder. It really did. Ordinary lives were so easy to jerk around that way. What about the lives of nations? Could all that If the South Had Won the Civil War, The Man in the High Castle stuff be true? If your destiny could twist like a contortionist slipping on a banana peel, what about your country’s?
“Yeah—what about it?” Rob said aloud. His breath smoked. Suppose the supervolcano hadn’t decided to go off for another hundred years? Or another ten thousand years? What would I be doing now in that case? Whatever it was, Rob was sure he wouldn’t be doing it in Guilford, Maine, right this minute.
Little Colin Ferguson wouldn’t have been born. Millions of people in the middle of the country wouldn’t have been buried in volcanic mud and ash or died of HPO and other horrible lung diseases or got stuck in the refugee camps that, from the reports trickling up into this forgotten backwater, lay somewhere between Indian reservations and the Gulag Archipelago on the sorry scale of man’s indifference to man.
But the world had what it had, not what it wished it had or what it might have had. Rob crouched in the middle of a snowless patch of ground off to the side of the road. It wasn’t all bare, black, lifeless mud: primordial ooze. Here and there lay a green fur of moss. A small, corpse-pale mushroom stuck up phallically. That looked pretty primordial, all right, but lifeless it wasn’t.
And, here and there, blades of grass were sprouting. Their green was different from the moss’. It was paler and brighter at the same time. It made you think summer barbecues were right around the corner. It did till you looked at the lingering snow a couple of feet away, anyhow.
If the winters stayed harsh, one of these years the grass might not be able to come up at all. Even if that happened, though, by then whatever did come up in Labrador in the springtime might have found a new home here outside Guilford. One way or another, life went on.