World’s End
Book One of The Seed Mother
Chapter 2: Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving morning dawned clear and cold. Moira awoke to sparkling, dancing shafts of pale winter sunlight filling the windows of her small apartment. The little abode was not much more than a cubby built into a niche on the back side of the visitors center. From the inside entrance it was just a couple steps across a hallway connecting the administrative portions of the facility to a door into the main exhibit hall. The outer door to her personal space was more private, allowing easy and shelterd access to the park. A light snow had fallen in the night, sugarcoating surfaces and softening the edges of the stark end-of-autumn landscape.
Awakened by the chatter of juncos and chickadees at the feeders outside, Moira dressed hurriedly in Levi’s and cotton pullover and added a sweatshirt, gloves, a cap with earflaps, and blanket-lined denim farm coat. She was so eager to get outdoors, she nearly scalded herself trying to hurry her tea.
She poured the tea into an insulated mug, stepped into worn but well-treaded boots, and made her way outside, tongue still smarting from the tea and eyes blinking at the brilliant day. With a glance at her watch, she breathed in the icy breeze, strode over to the public walkway, and headed down the hill at a brisk walk. Even on a holiday, there was much to do and no time to waste.
Oddly, she’d enjoyed a good night’s sleep even after another evening contemplating the possibly coming fall into the abyss, if that’s what it was. This is how it must be in war-torn countries or similar places where catastrophes had already happened. Anxiety became such a dominant element in one’s thoughts that the body and brain just put up a damper to quell its effects, so no matter how bad the news, one could still function at a level close to normal. Just stay in the now, she told herself. Doomsday or not, the chores awaited.
Last night’s discussion with Rudy’s carefully selected group of highly intelligent “preppers” had not actually cheered her but had made her glad she had asked to join in. Some others appeared to feel the same, especially those who believed they might have found solutions to some of their own issues from the photos she’d provided of the heirloom farm tools and machinery.
“Far easier to put a wheel on an axle if you know what the hell it’s supposed to look like,” one observed.
There were fifteen of them, scattered from Nova Scotia to the Cascades, the Wasatch Front to the Superstition Mountains, all ensconced on carefully selected hopefully stable underpinnings and at elevations above 1,000 feet . Moira was surprised to hear about one other installation relatively close by, but farther up in the highlantds. Most were nearer the coasts. It gave a whole new context for “friends in high places,” someone joked.
Last night’s session revealed some had begun to get whispers of installations underway or being planned in other countries, notably Australia and Norway. If they were just now starting to plan, they were already too late, one group member observed. Hopefully that wasn’t the case.
Rudy had been doing his best, but they had not yet found a way to make contact with any of their counterparts in other lands. The outpost almost within hailing distance of Falling Spring, on the other side of Tom Sauk mountain, was an impromptu installation created by Jim Parsons, a retired park ranger, one of Rudy’s mentors, who had augmented his retirement plan after hearing from Rudy some of the dire speculations. Parsons had gathered his extended family (wife, mother and father-in-law, a younger brother and his family, and some family friends) for an extended “reunion” at their mountain cabin, which happened to be located near a substantial cavern system. Parsons had married a Mormon girl, and folks in that tradition were already accustomed to keeping food stored against possible world ruin, he’d said. Her people were already “preppers,” he had joked, but they sure didn’t expect it to happen like this. His entire extended family had spent most of the past month moving their combined stores into a dry area of the cave system, and were getting settled in. She hoped she would eventually get to know them all. If there was time. Another subject that didn’t bear thinking about.
Besides, her life was difficult enough on this day fending off the ghosts of Thanksgivings past. She made a wry face. Well, then, thank God or whoever was listening that there was work to do, enough that she might entirely avoid the spectacle of watching Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade through tears of self pity, as had been her recent experience.
Good grief, her inner self spoke, bringing to a halt her rambling thoughts. Self-pity,indeed. She should be giving thanks there actually was a Macy’s parade and it could still happen. After the disasters visited on the world’s people in these recent years, finding anything to celebrate was amazing. The human spirit might be twisted at times, but it was still strong; people were discovering a capacity for resilience in the face of troubles beyond anything she could have imagined. She was embarrassed at the paralyzing effects of the melancholy she sometimes felt over her family troubles. What were her small complaints compared to genuine tragedies?
“Get over yourself, kid,” she muttered through her teeth. “Your life – your family – not perfect. It is what it is. Deal with it and move on.” She continued muttering to herself as she strode down the asphalt path.
Some of the fault was her own, she’d be the first to admit. Her attempt to entertain her family with the stories of her newly found Ozarks alternative community had been a poor idea. After all, she had separated herself long ago from her family’s hidebound conservatism. Once out in the wider world, she had soon discovered that the communities her parents had spoken of with such disdain were just people, no more, no less, and certainly deserving of respect. At the university she had also been exposed to cultures and classes of folks far different from her own. And their food. My God, how could you not love people who made pad Thai and bulgogi and piroshkis. And tabouli! Then she had to laugh. She’d forgotten to have breakfast, so better lay aside any thought of exotic foods until the chores were done.
But, as she brought herself back to the point of that thought, the fact was her family had disapproved strongly of her friends from the very first time she came home to visit. Soon after assuming her current post, she had met, through Steven, a group of highly entertaining and unique individuals of disparate origins, most of whom had moved to the Ozarks in the 1970s and 80s, lured by real estate ads offering cheap land, lower crime rates, and a pristine rural lifestyle. Finding themselves surrounded by some unexpectedly xenophobic, often backward thinking folks who were among their neighbors, they had joined with other like-minded locals and newcomers in a loose-knit tribe of liberals, libertarians, and a fair scattering of lesbians that had created over the years a low key but tightly knit community—a family of choice, who called themselves the back-to-the-landers. They were colorful, well read, and living in relationships diverse enough to defy description. And they held great affection for one another despite their many differences.
Local color wouldn’t describe the kinds of folks one was likely to meet at a potluck, she’d told her folks at the Thanksgiving dinner table a year ago. There were Wiccan potters, Buddhist vegetarians, Scientologist greengrocers, Unitarian lesbians, PhD carpenters, goat-raising social workers, and everybody in between. She had never at any of her past postings or any other time of her life experienced such a mutually respectful community of friends. All their various opinions and world views seemed happily gathered in a general spirit of generosity and good will. And above all, they were kind to each other and to their surroundings, whether people, animal, plant or planet.
She had told them she was blessed to have stepped into a true communion of spirit, as these lovely folks with their high-minded but homespun ways welcomed her into their midst. It was amazing to her that they, and she, had landed in such an unlikely place as these hard hills, characterized as they were by isolation, poor prospects, and poorer resources.
Here, in this improbably thriving community, a cultural counterpoint to the surrounding poverty and difficult circumstances, she had come to discover a new level of comfort with her own views, in a kinship based on shared vision, open minds, and kindness. The transformation in her thinking over time had been so natural, so comfortable that she had been a little stunned when her parents had behaved as if she had suddenly decided to reject all they took to be holy and take up the trappings of a terrorist. But that wasn’t it at all. She’d just found and taken her own path, a way to which she had always been drawn. It was an admittedly unorthodox but very natural set of country ways, and she’d settled in as though born to it.
Of course you’d have to know these folks to realize how harmless they were. What was the big deal about a Solstice gathering, for instance? She’d taken a liking to some of these freethinking pagans, actually, and had enjoyed their conversations about the origins of Christianity, the gender of God and other head-bending topics. But as for going over to the Devil, she’d discovered the religion of the most pagan among them was actually earth-based, in other words, in their belief system there was no such thing as a devil. In their view, such a being simply didn’t exist. Sure, there was evil in the world, but it was in us, not something apart. It was part of human nature and our mission was to rid ourselves of its influence. How cool was that? She’d tried to explain that to her tradition-bound kin, but they weren’t having it.She wished she’d just kept her mouth shut about the whole thing.
She was still muttering under her breath as she rounded the turn, but she stopped short with a gasp, rocked back on her heels by the sudden opening of the scene before her. “Mother of God,” she whispered, astonished anew at the view into the long river valley, with its rock bluffs, its broad vistas and deep hollows. She would never get used to this pristine manifestation of a perfect heaven.
The snow had brought the clouds to earth and set into them an enclosed bowl rimmed by tall pines and wide crowned oaks. At its center was the mill pond built centuries ago by the first European immigrants to capture the outflow from Falling Spring. It was more than an abandoned historical site. It was the magical heart of this ancient house of the spirit. It was because of this, without question, that the First People had gathered here in ancient days, this the reason the village had been built and rebuilt, and now was why the museum and the park that protected it existed.
It was certainly why she had felt called to take on the job of steward of this isolated place. From the moment she had glimpsed the first photos, she had lobbied hard for this posting. And now there it lay, available to her every morning and now spread doll-sized below her — the historic limestone bluff with its unique spring that spouted out from a channel between the rocks, and the dark pool that reflected the scene in reverse. The entire shadowed length of the bluff had been transformed into a cold cathedral of icicles wreathed in thick hoar frost, created as the fifty-degree column of falling water roared through the twenty-degree air and plunged into the rippling waters of the pond. If God wasn’t here, then where was He? Or She. Or Whatever name one might call the most high, the most holy.
She stood transfixed, watching the smoking, swirling currents of air as they rose from the water’s surface. Away from the spring’s outflow the pond was calm, its waters rimed with ice and thatches of frosty foliage along its grassy banks. Overhead, scattered wisps of cloud punctuated a clear sky. But the sun had not yet penetrated this deep hollow. Some of the icicles that hung from the north-facing rock bluffs were six feet or more in length. Out of the sun’s reach, they could grow until the January thaw. If there was one. She shivered and resumed her trek down the path.
As she descended the last loop of trail, a trio of tan, heritage-breed Campbell ducks bobbing on the pond announced her presence to the world, their braying calls sounding more like coarse laughter than the quack-quacks attributed to them.
“Tell me another one,” she called to them and received more brassy guffaws in return. Shaking off her earlier mood, she grinned and applauded their tipsy maneuvers as each popped beneath the surface and bobbed up again moments later, mouths full of greenery. It was too cold to stand still for long. She stamped her feet, chilled even in their insulated boots, and continued on to the farmstead, where a unique collection of farm animals awaited her attention. She admired, in passing, the broad lines of the well-kept late 19th century farmstead home, with its long front porch and summer kitchen, but she had only one errand there and it was soon accomplished. She trotted down the stone steps that led to the farmhouse basement and banked the fire in the wood furnace. With the tourists gone there was no one to be kept warm, and no plumbing to freeze. Once that was done and its doors were shut tight, she moved on to the next task – breakfast for all.
First stop was the hog pen, where the wiry and excitable Tamworth shoats and sows bumped and jostled one another, jockeying for position at the trough, waiting for their morning meal of cracked corn and wheat middlings. Unappealing as they were, these beasts were a welcome change from the nasty creatures they’d replaced, she thought. The museum’s mission was to show Ozarks life as it had been in pioneer times as realistically as possible, down to the animal breeds and the plant varieties that had been common in those earlier days. That mission had figured prominently in her having scored highest among applicants for the job as administrator, as she was the only agriculture specialist who applied.
But one look at the ridge-backed porcine monsters residing at the museum when she arrived had been enough for her to issue them their walking papers. Rare they were, but too dangerous to be just a rail-and-wattle fence away from the public. She’d recognized the treacherous beasts by the breed’s reputation – a cross between the descendants of Ossabaw Island hogs stranded by a Colonial-era Spanish shipwreck on an island off the Georgia coast, with wild Arkansas razorback hogs left by other Spanish explorers who had traveled up the White River valley through Arkansas and southern Missouri in the 1540s. It was an evil combination that accentuated the toughness of both breeds but tended, coming as it did from two very small gene pools self-selected for survival skills, to accentuate such undomestic traits as aggressiveness, wily intelligence, and a general hatred of anything that moved.
Behind an electric fence they might have been relatively safe to keep on display. But with only the rail fences of the 1880s, even reinforced by the 19th century’s version of barbed wire, they were an accident waiting to happen. In fact, a pair of young boars had made their escape not long before she arrived, destroyed a patch of turnips in the farmstead garden, and killed a cat before taking to the woods. They were never recaptured. In her opinion and that of the employees who worked with them, the whole bunch had already overstayed their welcome.
Everyone had been happy when the remaining beasts were hauled away, traded to a more secure facility in return for the marginally less authentic but vastly more personable Tamworths. The worst these homely little red critters could do, she thought as she dodged one squealing shoat and dumped the last of the grain into the trough, was to run you over in pursuit of their corn. That one action, ridding the museum of the hoodlum hogs, had earned her many points with her crew.
The other animals who occupied the demonstration farmstead now had mostly been selected before Moira’s arrival, but she was very satisfied with the rest of the breeds presented here. And the criteria made sense. Would they have been in the Ozarks in the 1880s? was the question. If the answer was yes, most of the other questions were moot, except for a critical look at how they interacted with humans. They didn’t have to be friendly but they were at least required to be civil. With the Ossabaws gone, they were. That, and the fact that it was feeding time, made them all very happy to see her.
She methodically parceled out grain and kitchen scraps to the rare red bourbon turkeys and speckled “dominecker” chickens, then started on the residents of the big barn. The first duty was to the equines because they were the most vocal. She clambered up to the hayloft in the main barn to toss down hay for the massive Percheron draft horses and the quicker, smaller Morgans. Below the loft’s other side were the cattle and oxen, some of whom had calves but were separated from them overnight by a sturdy fence. She filled their mangers, too, and hopped down to add some grain for all but the milkers.
From the bins in the granary she filled a bucket with mixed grains sweetened with molasses, poured it into a series of feeding pans in the milk parlor, gave some to the lonely calves, and led the friendly Jersey and milking short-horn cows from their stalls into their stanchions to take the morning milk. Because no visitors were present she used a small portable milking machine instead of milking by hand as was done in demonstrations, and finished quickly, leaving some of the milk for the eager calves. She emptied the result into a pair of tall buckets, noting in passing that the back door to the milk house was ajar. Steven may have done it on purpose so the barn cats could complete their mousing chores, so she left the door open and poured the last dregs of the foamy milk into a shallow pan for their breakfast. Then she opened the stanchions and let the calves in with their mothers. Moira welcomed the sun’s rays peeking over the ridge as she carried the buckets outside, but she knew it would be hours before the cold abated. The sooner she could get her aching toes to somewhere warm, the better.
It was mid-morning by the time she finished and trudged back up the hill to her cozy apartment, a pail in each hand. In the meantime the sun had retreated again behind thickening clouds, suggesting that more snow was on the way. No matter, she thought. Most of her day would be spent indoors, and the outdoors could use the moisture. The heavy buckets went straight to the small commercial kitchen off the warehouse where the farmhouse food served to visitors was actually prepared. By long habit, she slipped a filter into the milk strainer and poured the pails of fresh, still slightly warm milk through it into a series of wide-mouthed urns, which she then stowed in a large commercial cooler alongside several similar jugs. It was almost time to make more cheese. But that chore would be someone else’s. At least she hoped so.
Back in her quarters she put the kettle on to boil and, reneging on her earlier vow to avoid televised holiday celebrations, reached for the TV remote. The signal was clear and the picture perfect, but it wasn’t the parade. Instead, a news bulletin was being broadcast. She put down her spoon and the sugar bowl and moved closer to the TV.
“. . . an apparent shift in the earth’s magnetic field was discovered yesterday in data recorded at the space station . . . a possible malfunction in a sensor on the station was at first . . . ” The signal dissolved into snowy reception, as it sometimes did in these hills, and Moira puzzled over the announcement. What were they talking about? What data? And if the magnetic fields were changing, what did that mean? She searched her memory for some context. As if in answer, the picture and sound returned, this time revealing someone she recognized, a top NASA scientist, being interviewed. ” . . . never seen anything like this, so we’re still examining the data, but at this point we just don’t know. It could be related to recent solar activity. Or it might be something to do with the Wyoming disturbances. We should have more information within a few hours.”
“Disturbances? What disturbances?” she snapped at the screen. Again, the answer to her question came swiftly, and the next speaker’s voice seemed strained. In the brief moments when the picture was clear, he looked pale, like someone who’d been up all night with a colicky baby.
“We don’t know if it’s related to whatever is going on out there. We’re also seeing some unusually high tides as this “anomaly” comes nearer, and there’s a bit of an increase in earthquake activity as well. But we really don’t anticipate anything too spectacular . . . but in truth, we don’t know any more than you do. We’re having to watch and wait, just like you. In the meantime, we’re picking up some really spectacular video from our satellites up around the Arctic rim. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Aurora Borealis like this in my lifetime. I hope we can bring some of this to our viewers. . . . should be able to get a better picture of the whole situation by the weekend.”
But when an interviewer asked what else the magnetic upset might be signaling, she thought the scientist seemed worried as he looked off-camera and said “That’s all I’m at liberty to say right now.”
Cursing, Moira muted the sound, went to her desk, removed a small box from beneath a pair of directories, opened it to reveal her satellite phone, and pressed speed dial. If this was a signal that the end had begun, she needed to know about it, and she knew the number to call. Should she batten down the hatches, or just mind her own business? It was time to talk to Rudy again.
“Is there something new I need to know this morning?” she asked when he picked up the phone. “What’s up?”
“Something, for sure,” he said. “How big a something we don’t know, so I can’t tell you much. I’ve been listening to the news feeds since before daylight here and I can’t make any sense out of them. Everybody’s telling a different story, but they’re all obviously shooting in the dark. Whatever it is, it’s happening very fast.”
“Wait. Let’s back up. First of all, what’s the confusion? Last I knew we were watching the Northern Lights because of increased sunspot activity or whatever. But this guy on TV looked like he was in a real sweat. What is he not telling?”
“Something’s … moving. Up north. It’s something to do with the ice cap, what’s left of it. Something’s way off up there under the ice. And Wyoming is jiggling like the cap on a pressure cooker. Little quakes, too many to count. Normally that’s a good sign, that means pressure is being released gradually. But I don’t know. I keep listening, waiting for somebody to drop the ball and give us a real clue about what they think might be happening. So far, nobody has. But if my ear is any good, those who have the most information are about to wet their pants.”
“Um, are you telling me, dear friend, that we should be kissing our asses goodbye?”
The security chief made a disparaging sound through his teeth.
“You know those guys. If it was, they’d not say so for fear of stirring up a panic. Even if we hadn’t seen too many disaster movies, the hits we’ve taken these past few years have already screwed some pretty significant real estate. People are still in shock from that.”
And then his voice lowered, and he cleared his throat and seemed to hesitate.
“On the other hand…” he hesitated. “Look, I don’t want to spook you, but I’ve been doing some lurking on the secure channels for the past few hours, and, you know, I don’t think they’re holding back. I think they just really don’t have a clue what’s going on, because nothing like this has ever happened before, at least in human history. Have you opened all the stuff in your stash?”
“I’ve been putting it off, to tell the truth, and I’m not sure I’ve even found it all yet. It’s on today’s list, after dinner and the parade. I had just turned on the tube when this stuff came on.”
“Well, you won’t find anything particularly reassuring. But you’ll see we’ve been reaching out in a lot of different directions, putting together this “survival kit.” We realized early on we needed to respond to the possibility, which seems to be increasing as we speak, that some significant areas of the planet are becoming unstable on a very dangerous level. I told you that the possibility of major earth movements were being projected not only in the Pacific rim but in formerly quiet areas like the New Madrid fault zone and along the White River up near you. And in addition to the swarms of quakes, the lava dome in Wyoming has risen significantly as the quakes continue. And there’s a large area of the Great Plains from Nebraska clear down into Texas that appears to be subsiding, very slowly but enough to measure.
“The combination of all these effects is enough to cause some of us who’ve been sending you these little care packages to consider seeking shelter for ourselves pretty soon. A few are already headed for the hills. The rest are tryin’ our best to figure out if we’ve done enough and stored enough and made enough available in enough different places for some of us to make it. We hope we’ve done enough. But I think we’re about to run out of time.
“Not us, as individuals, I mean, but us, the species, our various civilizations. Because this really might be it. The big Kablowski. We had to do something. We don’t wanna go all the way back to the Stone Age or worse. We don’t want to lose everything. Obviously there’s a lot we could stand to lose, but…”
“Jesus! You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“You bet your ass, sweetheart. I’ve been serious for a long time. I just couldn’t go along any longer with all the liars and fumblers. I mean, even now. We may be looking at the goddam end of the world, and the only thing some of them are working on is to somehow blame it on terrorism, or at least the other political party. Some of the paranoids up here in D.C. have decided someone’s been boogering the Hubbell scope and that what it’s showing isn’t really happening. But there’s a big hunk of something out there that they can’t make fit their theory, so now they’re working on who they should nuke.
“To be fair, it’s had our best minds baffled as well. Until now. From what I understand, they know what it is. They just don’t know what it’s going to do. From the chatter I’ve picked up, the folks on the station are seeing some things they’ve never seen before, and it’s got them pretty scared. They think it may be that rogue planet that’s just wandering along on its own path and passing by on a visit. I’d never heard of such a thing but it turns out there are a lot of them out there. We’ve just never had one visit before. It doesn’t seem to be on a trajectory that will hit us but it’ll be close enough to do some damage. I think we’re already beginning to see that. It should be visible very soon, I’m told.
“So, back to your very first question – I don’t have an answer. My training says I should tell you to carry on until we know more. My gut, on the other hand, tells me you might want to settle up with your nearest and dearest and get right with your Maker. I swear on my mother,” he said, and she could hear the emotion in his voice. “We’ve put everything we had into getting as many as possible as ready as we could make them in the event this turns out as bad as it could be, and now I don’t think nearly enough of us are ready enough, God help us. But we’ve done the best we can. I hope to God we’re not the only ones who’ve been trying.”
“Hey, my friend,” she said, trying to shake him from this dark turn of mind. “Don’t worry about me. The warehouse out here is bursting at the seams. I’ve got enough stock on hand to weather about anything. And I’m sitting on this big rock that is the Ozarks Highlands. So if this business turns out to be really bad, at least I won’t go hungry or run out of toilet paper,” she added with an attempt at a laugh, which he joined. Then they went quiet, thinking about the possibilities as yet unknown.
“Take care of yourself, my friend,” he said softly.
“Yeah, you too. And thank you. For everything. If we have a chance, it will be because you gave us one.”
“De nada. Vaya con Dios, commadre.”
She smiled at his attempt at the feminine inflection but found tears suddenly springing to her eyes.
“You too, man,” she answered, and rang off. A brief flash of memory struck her then, of a much younger Rudy lifting a stein of ale in her direction at the party on the night they graduated from the academy. Despite her gender, he said, she would always be the toughest nut in the bunch. It might have been so, she thought, but she certainly didn’t feel like it now.
It was the remark about getting right with your family that got to her first. She would never be right with her family, planetary emergency or not. There was too much distance between them to ever make it right. It wasn’t just their opinion of her friends. There was also her divorce, in which they’d taken her ex-husband’s side, because, after all, he was perfect. After that she’d stretched family ties to their limits by putting distance both emotional and geographic, between them. No calamity, natural or otherwise, could heal or change that. Add to that the fight over religious sacred cows, and there wasn’t much left to be repaired. She still smarted from the shouting match when she had suggested their version of Christianity had been shaped by ignorant fundamentalism. It might not be what her home church believed, she had said, but its leaders certainly weren’t taking any pains to challenge medieval thinking that was out of touch with the modern world. She had known things had gone too far when her sister called her a Satanist. It was ugly. And that had happened just last Thanksgiving, come to think of it. God, Goddess, whatever. Talk about the ghost of Thanksgivings Past. She’d not sat down to dinner with any of them or had a civil conversation since. Maybe she should call and attempt some fence mending. Or not.
She turned back to the television to see that this time there was a parade. Macy’s Thanksgiving Day extravaganza was underway, but she no longer wanted to watch it. She turned off the television, finished making her tea, and stood at the window next to her breakfast table looking out at the bird feeder, watching the cardinals, finches, chickadees and titmice duke it out over their seedy repast. She stood like that for a long time, her hand cupped around the mug, staring past the birds to the barren hillside and the icicles hanging from the rocky outcrops.
“Ah, the hell with it,” she said aloud, shaking herself out of her morose reverie. “You can be bull-headed and full of yourself, or you can just do the decent thing and break the ice. After all, you’re the one who’s been giving everyone the cold shoulder,” she said into the small oval mirror that hung next to the window, angled so she could give her hair a last look every morning before venturing out to meet the public. “Besides, if you’re all that hot about this Mother Earth thing, shouldn’t you be, well, more . . . nurturing, or something?” She made a face at the mirror, whirled and reached for the phone, this time the land line. If she hurried, she could catch at least some of them before they headed out for the day.
“Hello, Mom? Hey, happy Turkey day.”
By noon she had talked to the whole family, or all the ones that counted, with varying outcomes. Her mother still lamented about Moira’s divorce but was glad to hear from her and responded in loving tones. Forgotten, it seemed for the moment, were questions about her soul. Just as well. But also absent was any mention of possible upcoming calamity. She quickly realized she knew both too little and too much to attempt that conversation, and no one seemed interested in bringing it up.
Her parents had divorced during the previous year and when she contacted her father he, too, seemed happy to hear from her and told her how proud he was of her in her new job. But he soon changed the subject to complain about the awful time he was having trying to live alone. “You women have it so much easier making a home, you know?” he said, and she laughed, remembering his long and steadfast refusal to learn anything about any job he considered part of domestic life.
She did her own changing of subjects when the conversation seemed headed toward their troubles with one another, the break-up of their marriage, or anything even remotely resembling religion. “I can only imagine what you’re going through. It’s hard for everyone these days,” she said pointedly, then fended off firmly anything that seemed headed toward her beliefs, her relationship prospects, or her own failed marriage.
Stop that! she admonished herself. It wasn’t a failure. Staying would have been the real failure. She had chosen to get out because it was the only sane option left. Not that Keith had cared all that much if she was sane, so long as wifely duties and other personal services were attended to. If ever there had been a man with a toxic level of self-esteem, Keith was it. She pondered calling just to offer a truce and wish him a happy Thanksgiving, but then in her mind she heard his voice, drawling “Of course you do, Darling. Fetch me a drink, would you?”
Her holiday sentiments were getting out of hand. There was really only one more number to call. But when she reached her sister’s answering machine instead of Fran herself, she was relieved. She had been dreading this call most of all because conversations with Fran were, even at the best of times, difficult. Fran nursed grudges, always had. Even against her own children when they failed her. And of course they did. Everyone failed her. No conversation would be complete without a few swipes at Mom and Dad for not giving Fran the attention she’d needed or the training to grow into a good and loving mother. She was sure to have some ugly crack saved up about devil worshippers, Moira knew. So she whipped out a cheery greeting, offered good wishes to the answering machine, and got off fast, just in case Fran was merely screening her calls and deciding whom she would deign to answer. Cut to the chase, Moira thought, warbling a too-cheerful goodbye, and get the hell out of Dodge.
But once it was done, she placed the receiver in its cradle, closed her eyes, and leaned her head against the wall. This must be what it felt like to die, she thought. Every conversation had felt like a last goodbye that was understood but could not be acknowledged. “I’ll see you,” she had said to them all, knowing the chance of that was like a leaf in a strong wind, eluding capture as it swept along on currents far beyond the power of humankind’s control.
She sat like that for some minutes, beyond tears, seeing their faces, wishing she could somehow hold them up to some sacred light so that whatever happened, they would not be hurt by it or made afraid. They were not bad people. And they were hers, or had been. But there was no power on earth that would let her step between them and their likely fates in the coming maelstrom. After a while she huffed a sigh and stood. It was time to prepare her tiny homage to Thanksgiving dinner.
She set the precooked turkey breast out to finish thawing, topped off her tea with a jot of hot water from the kettle, and swept through the interior doorway, headed for the warehouse like a woman on a mission. The mission was to cheer the hell up, get busy, and get some work done. She set to with a vengeance.
Doing the family thing hadn’t exactly cheered her but it had certainly helped reinforce her perception of her dysfunctional family. Hell, none of them had even mentioned the news or the possibility of impending planetary doom. They’d probably decided it didn’t concern them, she thought. She heard the self-righteousness in her unvoiced pronouncements. Hmmm. Could it be that this particular acorn wasn’t falling all that far from the tree?
“Ahem,” she said aloud, “could we quit with this introspection nonsense and get to work, please?” She willed her thoughts to attend to the tasks at hand.
By two o’clock she’d succeeded in creating a virtual city of stacked boxes; toilet tissue and paper towels soared in tall columns, joined by lower stacks of heavier items: cases of vinegar, scouring powder, baking soda, and soap-making ingredients. Good choices, all. Low-impact cleaning supplies saved money, met with historic parameters and gave the environment a break. A triple win.
She surveyed her just-created “cityscape,” then used the hand-operated fork lift to move three pallets of rock salt into the maintenance area. One more to go, and that one was going for a ride. After a side trip to brew another cup of tea, she would slide the last pallet of salt into the back of her little red truck, fork lift and all, and drive it out the paved road that connected Falling Spring historic site and heritage farm to the rest of the world. The county-maintained roadway went all the way up to the top of the ridge, where it met the main highway four miles away. But she didn’t intend to follow it that far. Instead, she would go a little more than a mile to a turnoff down an unmarked graveled track that wound its way off the ridge top to meet the old road to Falling Spring Village whose track lay down along the bottom of the hollow, following the river. Most of that road was now on park grounds and was no longer a public thoroughfare. It was only maintained for trips such as these. She would enter the fenced portion of the museum grounds from that lower road and store the salt in a maintenance shed out near the lower gate. There the salt could easily be accessed for use in curing meat, brining pickles, and other pioneer-day tasks demonstrated at the living history farmstead. The salt kept here up top would mostly be used for clearing the museum parking lot of ice in winter.
Down the hill, along with the salt, would go a half-dozen rolls of reproduction antique barbed wire, two shovels borrowed last week from down-slope and not returned, a dozen rolls of sisal baling twine for the horse-drawn baler, and the grain dolly she’d borrowed for unloading the delivery trucks. A second load of pig iron and assorted replacement blacksmithing tools would have to wait for another day, when stronger arms and a stronger vehicle were available. The iron would overload her small truck and she wasn’t sure, even if she got it loaded into the truck bed, she could actually get it out again without Steven’s help, as there was no loading dock at the smithy. Best to just keep the heavier materials around until needed, she reasoned. Meanwhile, she pulled, pried, and wrestled the small but extremely heavy wooden crates away from the doors and rolled the last pallet of salt out onto the dock.
Then she stopped. The plan was good but the timing sucked. She watched as a curtain of penny-size flakes of snow wafted lazily down to drop into a mass of their fellows, stacked an inch deep already on the uncovered end of the dock. There might be enough weight on the back wheels of the truck to make the trip down the hill. But with the weight off, how would she get back up? She sighed and pulled the salt back inside. Time to go to Plan B, and Plan B was turkey and trimmings.
Back in her tiny kitchen, she moved the pre-cooked meat from its plastic coffin to a stoneware platter, balanced a chunk of butter atop it, and put it into the oven, along with a pair of baking potatoes and an acorn squash, halved, seeded, and drizzled with butter, cinnamon and brown sugar. Two home-canned jars, one of corn and another of green beans, and a store-bought can of cranberry sauce would round out the meal. She set the oven dial, donned her coat, gloves and a cap with earflaps, and wound her way out through the public area to the visitor center’s entrance to savor a brief walk in this new snow.
The pinewood and buckbrush thicket alongside the lane between the visitor center and the paved county road was one of her favorite haunts after hours. If peace and serenity were to be found this day, it would be here among these whispering conifers. She offered her face to the snow-filled breeze and stepped out into the silence. Crunching her way down the lane, she startled a young doe, but it dashed only a short distance before stopping still within the cover of the pines. She flicked her ears in warning, but Moira made no move toward her and she stayed in cover.
Not a single track marred the county road, adding to the solitude. To her left, the road dead-ended at a canoe put-in on the Eleven Point National Scenic River less than a mile away. To the right, it wound about the shoulder of the hill, disappearing some distance away between two tall man-made rock bluffs carved out by the road’s builders. The original dirt track, probably an Indian trail, had reached Falling Spring from the bottom of the hollow after a circuitous crawl over steep and rocky terrain. The Ozark Mountains were the oldest on the continent, eroded to mere stumps, but mountains still. The route used by pioneers had been deemed too hazardous for tourists, so for the museum a new route had been laid out along the ridge. Large obstacles such as hilltops were blasted into submission and the rest smoothed, straightened, and asphalted into a more civilized thoroughfare.
She dawdled there at the end of the driveway, taking shelter for a while in the lee of the massive wooden signboard marking the entrance to the museum. It was not a stop on a larger journey but a destination she knew well and had visited often, just to savor the surprising level of activity in this sheltered little ecosystem. The hiss of new snow blown along windswept pavement, the sigh of the wind in the pines, the muffled conversation of winter-dwelling songbirds holed up in the dense greenery waiting for the storm to break, were all parts of nature’s own symphony. Chickadees, titmice, two kinds of finches, and a lone cardinal muttered quietly in the trees, while the little slate-backed juncos, the snowbirds, flitted across the woods understory, searching for dislodged seeds and an occasional mummified fruit to fuel their tiny furnaces. “Whatever the state of humans and planets,” they seemed to say, “It’s just another winter day in the Ozarks. Find the good in it, and weather the rest.”
Good advice, she decided. Breathing deeply of the sharp winter air, she bade them all farewell and headed back to finish preparing her meal, ready now to give thanks, if not to the God of her fathers just now, then perhaps to his Mother.
Dinner was satisfying, the turkey and vegetables accompanied by a fresh greenhouse salad and a favorite old movie, a comedy called “Outrageous Fortune,” sent to her by a friend as a “celebrate-your-divorce” present. She lingered over dessert, a thick slice of store-bought cake and ice cream roll drizzled with a homemade cherry topping. The topping was the work of Helen Walker, the chief cook at the farmstead during the summer harvest demonstrations. The cherries were put up the old way, boiled down with sugar almost to jelling stage, poured into straight-sided glass jars, and sealed with a layer of hot paraffin wax. It was tasty enough to generate thankful thoughts all by itself, she decided, scraping the last dregs off the plate.
When the movie ended she suited up again in her outdoor duds. It was nearing dusk and time for evening chores. She grabbed the plastic bucket of chicken treats, which now held a handful of greenhouse trimmings, a few baked and crushed eggshells, some stale bread, and the seed-laden middle from the acorn squash. The chickens would relish the snack and she needed the exercise after that kind of meal. Besides, it would be good to get the animals bedded down early for the night and see to her own rest and comfort.
She started down the snow-covered path, then hesitated, struck with indecision. What the heck. There was still some daylight left. Why not drive down with the maintenance supplies and worry about retrieving the truck after the snow was cleared? If she loaded the truck really tight, it would keep its footing even in a layer of snow this substantial. And unless she moved the supplies destined for down-slope out of the storeroom, they’d still be in the way as she tried to get the rest of the supplies situated. She headed back for the loading area, fumbling for her keys. Besides, she told herself with a grin, it’s a good excuse for a really beautiful drive. If the truck got stuck, Steven could haul it out later with the tractor.
A half hour later, the small truck groaning under the load but holding tight to the roadway, she drove out the main entrance and headed up the road toward the ridge. A small pine tree that had been bent into the roadway under its load of snow might have been an obstacle, but she was able to nudge it aside with the truck’s front fender and continue on. The gate at the bottom entrance was another challenge. The frozen lock faced the inside and she, of course, was outside. A few minutes’ fumbling, though, and it was done.
Once inside and at the maintenance shed, with the help of the manual forklift, everything was quickly dispatched. As she’d half expected, the truck didn’t want to go anywhere uphill once it had been emptied, so she parked it next to the smithy and gathered up the carton of leftovers for the chickens. Chores should be a snap.
But they weren’t, and getting the animals tucked away proved less simple than she’d thought. The chickens were nervous and didn’t seem to remember who she was, although she’d fed them just a few hours earlier. She got the same treatment from the bovines and decided it must be the intensity of the snow squall, which was beginning to worsen as the day darkened into an early winter twilight. The cows snorted and lowed in answer to the wind, which was now gusting strongly, and the calves refused to be separated from their mothers. “Oh, good grief, stay in there then,” she finally snarled at them, put down some extra hay, and stalked off to try her luck with the horses. There it was even worse. Every equine on the place was in a panic, starting at shadows, refusing to be touched, and bolting outside every time she tried to close the side doors into the barn. Realizing she could be injured by their increasingly frenzied antics, she threw up her hands in disgust. “Fine,” she snapped. “If you want to stand out there in the snow and shake your butts, just shake away. See if I care. What are you going to do if a bear comes calling and you out here and not safely locked in the barn, huh?”
But as she paused to give the horses time to reflect — an unlikely expectation, given their behavior — she did some reflecting herself and didn’t like what she came up with. A bear showing up in this weather wasn’t all that uncommon. The little black bears once native and now reintroduced weren’t all that aggressive and a horse might be too much to tackle, even if they were hungry. A cougar, now . . . that was another story. She shivered, dashed out into the corral, and began waving her arms. She ran at the horses and yelled until her voice was raw. It worked. The horses were so unsettled at her unexpected behavior, they decided the barn was the safest place after all. They fled wild-eyed into their stalls, still shivering, muttering to one another, and blowing great puffs of steam out their noses.
“Great,” she said to them sarcastically, “now what am I going to do to fend off the bear, or whatever? How ‘bout I climb over the rails and bunk up with you guys?” They had no useful comments for her, so she turned, grabbed up a broken shovel handle for a pretense at protection, and headed out into the snow-filled night. Not for the first time, she wished she had a dog. It wasn’t that they weren’t allowed, but it was hard to find one that fit the breed requirements of the museum — common to the area, in existence in the 1880s, good with cattle and people, and logical for a farm operation. She had made contact with a breeder who said he would research the question and get back with her, but he hadn’t. As the storm thickened and branches creaked and moaned with their loads of snow, she wished he’d already brought her a pup and she had it by her side.
No bears or cougars accosted her on the way up the hill. But just as she came near the end of the climb, she heard a far-off sound, a deep, heavy, groaning boom, coming from the direction of the farmstead but much farther away. It was an eerie noise, one she’d not heard before. A sonic boom at this time of night, she wondered? But she forgot about it as the warm glow of her porch light appeared. It would take more than lions, bears, and sonic booms to keep her from her rest tonight. Still, Rudy’s words tugged at her consciousness. If the end were really near, would anyone see it coming? Would it be swift or torturous? Or just a slow slide into oblivion, she wondered.
She exhaled, then bit off a scream at the sight of a shadowy figure beside her doorway. It was a dog, black with white muzzle and forelegs and a white blaze on its chest – a border collie, from the looks of it – sitting demurely at the edge of the light, smiling and wagging.
“Well, hello there,” Moira said, catching her breath. “You about gave me a heart attack.” The dog stood, wagged vigorously, and put out a paw in welcome.
Moira accepted the greeting. “Howdy, pardner,” she said. “Aren’t you a long way from home?”
She searched the dog’s neck for collar and tags, but there were none. More searching revealed burrs and tangles and skimpy flesh over the ribs. The dog had apparently not been home in some time.
“Oh, boy,” Moira sighed. “Well, you’re not exactly period-correct, are you? We’ll have to find you a home somewhere else. But that doesn’t mean I can’t offer you supper. How do you feel about turkey?” she asked, holding the door open. The dog walked in as though she’d been there a dozen times before, surveyed the room, and lay down on the rug by Moira’s bed.
Moira watched in growing amazement, her recent thoughts replaying in her head.
“Be careful what I wish for,” she muttered, assembling a supper for two. A meal, a bath, and a long comb-out session later, she fell asleep scratching the dog’s head.
Click here for a complete list of chapter links.
Read Full Post »
Yarnspinner Press 