The World Ends In Hickory Hollow (17 page)

So desperately did we work that in two days both
freeststanding
houses were clad in earthworks. We also set heavy stakes into the tunnels that led to the windows of the ex-mobile home that now housed the children, slanting them outward so that their sharpened ends loomed dangerously in the dimness. We found ourselves nodding with satisfaction. Fire or bullet could not, we felt, find a way to the little ones..

Now we dug into our scrounged arsenal and cleaned and loaded shotguns and rifles to keep in handy spots in all three places. With so many young children about, this was nervous work. In order to give them a true idea of the danger of the weapons, we took everyone over three out into the creek meadow and gave them shooting lessons. The blast of noise, plus the vicious kick, made them all cautious and respectful of the guns that lived in their homes with them. The very youngest were held in arms near enough so that they got the full effect of the shots. We could only hope that they would remember.

When we felt that we were reasonably secure, we knew it was time to check on the refugees at the
Jessups
'. We were not easy in our minds about having our only neighbors so distant from us. In case of another attack, only chance could warn those who were not directly involved.

On the third morning after the one whose work had been so violently interrupted, we set out again. Mom Allie elected to join Zack and me, leaving
Elmond
to oversee a new attack on the overflowing gardens. We seemed, as I looked along the line of horses (we had two pack animals with us, just in case they might be needed), like nothing so much as a gang of bandits from a Western movie. Our clothing had suffered; our skin was rough and browned from our long hours in the fields. All in all, we looked as mean and lowdown as the
Ungers
.

We went across fields, following our line of cut fences. As we came up behind that first farm that we had found untenanted on our initial foray downriver, we moved near, dismounted, and checked on the condition of the house.

The back door had locked itself when we closed it before. A bit of work with one of Mom Allie's huge wire hairpins had it open in a moment. The stink of mildew was horrible, and we set doors and windows wide to the April sun. If the
Fanchers
decided to settle here, we would have an all-hands-to cleaning bee, I decided. Aside from the smell, the house was nice. Big rooms, six of them, plus a sun porch across the back where pots of blackened stubble told of the deaths of many pot plants.

There was a fireplace in the den. Its chimney backed against the interior wall, and it was even pierced for a flue, though the opening was covered with one of those metal "pie plates" with a country scene pasted onto it ... ideal for setting in a wood
cookstove
. The high ceilings showed no leak spots. With a bit of earth-moving work, the place could be made pretty defensible, Zack felt certain.

Outdoors, we could see that someone had taken great pains with the place. There were several fruit trees, a grape arbor, and the traces of a big garden, where volunteer okra and cherry tomatoes and mustard were already growing in haphazard clumps. Evidently the soil was well conditioned and fertile. We left the house open, wondering why the
Ungers
hadn't bothered to raid it. Locking it would have invited a broken door, if they returned. Perhaps it had been just too much trouble for their unstable minds to bother with.

We moved on across the fields, and as we approached the
Londowns
' land we saw Curt and the boy looking at our makeshift gap in the fence. We hailed them before they saw us, for both carried rifles.

"We brought some staples to make that tighter," Zack called, as we rode up. "It's too dangerous to ride the river anymore. Did you know the
Ungers
attacked and burned out the
Fanchers
, down your road?"

Curt shook his head. His mouth was tight, and his eyes didn't look at all friendly.

"We're going to check on the family right now," I said. "We helped them fight off those women, then we took them to
Jessups
'. Bill and his little girl were badly wounded. We left some of our people there to help stand guard. If we all work together maybe we can get those Unger women under some kind of control–or kill them."

He spoke for the first time. "The
Fanchers
–niggers, aren't they?"

I looked at him in shock. Even before the blowup, that sort of talk had been dying away among all except a few diehards. Now that there were so few of us, color didn't enter into our calculations.

Zack's voice was hard as he said, "They're good, stout, clever people. Good at fighting off
Ungers
. Good at surviving. Good with their hands and their heads. If they'll come, we're going to move them into the house nearest us. That way we can be of some help to each other without having to fight through
Ungers
to get back and forth."

Londown
grunted, his gray eyes as expressionless as such eyes can be. Then he said, "Don't fancy
gettin
' cozy with no niggers. Might not mind you all, but not them. We've done all right, just
keepin
' to ourselves, anyway."

Zack was a bit flushed, but his voice was calm. "If that's the way you want it, okay, but some morning if you wake up with your roof on fire from one of those she-devils' torches, just let off some shots. We'll probably come and bail you out. Black ones and all."

He touched his heels into
Coalie's
hanks, and as I turned
Friz
to follow him, I was watching
Londown's
face. It had the turtle-
ish
expression of one who knows his kind is extinct but absolutely refuses to admit it to himself. Times had changed out of all recognition. Unless Curt
Londown
managed to change a bit to suit, I suspected that he might well go down, taking his family with him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

With so many hands at work, it didn't really take long to get the
Fanchers
settled into their new home. Though the
Jessups
had offered to move them all into their capacious stone fortress, Bill and Annie had decided that so many children injected into an all-adult household might make problems for everyone. I felt certain that Carrie had breathed a silent sigh of relief, though her invitation had been
hearfelt
She was not young, and I could tell, in my short visits with her, that noise tore up her nerves.

She and Horace supplied many items that were needed. They had spent their lives wandering, but when they finally sent down roots they collected things at an amazing rate. The blowup had found them equipped with a little bit of almost everything.

The storage shed at
Fanchers
' had survived the fire, and there Bill had stashed the "finds" he had made at
Sim
Jackman's
. A bowlegged wood
cookstove
was the most valuable of these, but blacksmithing tools, chisels, punches, bits, leather-working tools, and many more items came out of that storeroom, and we rejoiced to see them.

Once we had the house earth-banked and the roof sheathed with tin we scrounged from several old hay sheds, they insisted that we return to our own burgeoning crops and let them cope. This we did, after helping them drive their cattle down the road and into the new pastures. We rather regretted cutting the fences so thoroughly before we were through mending them.

By now we were well into May, and we turned the children out with buckets, baskets, boxes, and hats to pick dewberries by the bushel. With our plentiful supply of honey (which also helped in making our alcohol) we jellied and preserved and "jammed" until all four households bulged with sweet stuff. And no sooner had the berries slacked off than the plums, both wild and tame, came on.

By June we had exhausted the bulk of the garden stuff, drying much of it, though we had rigged
Savoniuses
for the other families and scrounged freezers for them, too. Still we felt that it was better to start in the way we must go. Freezers, we knew, once worn out could not be replaced.

The first really hot days found us with a brief breathing spell while we waited for the hay to reach its full growth. For the first time in months we took thought to the children's education.

Annie, we found, was far ahead of us.

"The way I see it," she said in her carefully precise English, "is this. The things schools taught before are mostly useless now. Who needs to know bookkeeping – or will for generations? Nobody has use for civics, for instance. Civics is as dead as the dodo. What our young ones need is to read, to write a clean hand, to be able to use math, geometry, and logic. Most of the rest they'll get by reading. In your books you have something on everything I ever heard of, and they can get their history and geography and philosophy from reading them.

"Among us we can find somebody who knows quite a bit about a lot of things. The children will learn from us while they help us do what we know how to. But for learning to read, write, and do simple math, they can teach each other much better than we can. Mine have been doing that since the blowup. Those who can read teach those who can't. As the five-year-old learns, she teaches the three-year-old. My two-year-old can read simple things like Hop on Pop, right now."

"But will they?" Mom Allie asked, interestedly. "How do you make '
em
accept the responsibility?"

"By not letting them know it's a responsibility," Annie replied. "They do it for fun. Getting down the books is the biggest thrill they can think of, and if they're bad they don't get to study. Kids like to learn. It's only schools and sorry teachers that have made them think it's miserable hard work."

I nodded with agreement. "Remember last winter, Mom Allie? Jim and
Sukie
started out hating the thought of having to do schoolwork. But with no TV, no school itself, no outside people or ideas, before Christmas they were diving into it every evening, without being told. I hadn't really thought about it, what with everything, but it's been working right here. Do you know that Candy can say her ABCs? And count? And recognize both letters and numbers?
I'Il
bet you anything that the other under-fives are learning, too."

And they were. When we checked (very cautiously), we found that
Suzi
was taking home armloads of books from the cabin every day or two. Jim, when asked very offhandedly, said, "We have a ball Mom. The little ones want to know everything and why it's so, and it keeps
Sukie
and me busy reading up, every night, so we can answer their questions."

"Do you think they might like to learn something new–say Spanish?" I asked innocently. "I found my old records from the course I took, and we could rig a phonograph over there, if you wanted."

"That'd be neat!' he breathed. "We could play with it every night."

So our educational processes went on with even more verve than our agricultural ones, though many evenings all the young ones were too tuckered to do anything but lie in the fragrant summer grass and play word games or practice their Spanish. Even Lisa, whose life had not included even the concept of schooling, took to the books and the new ideas with relish. By midsummer, we were astounded at the amount we all had learned, for we soon found that an hour spent batting words and facts and strange philosophies around the bunch of us not only rested our bodies but kept our minds from going stale.

The first of the hay was cut and stacked, according to Lucas's remembered formula. The stacks stood along the edges of the hayfields like African huts, and each
forkfull
had been laid neatly arranged around the central poles so that the rains of the winter wouldn't run into the stack. New hay was beginning to get deep in the fields when we began picking the corn that had dried on the stalks. We filled every bin and crib and shed that could be made weatherproof and (we hoped) rodent-tight. This would be the basis for our alcohol for the next year, and the protein-rich residue would feed all our cattle.

We had washed up, one scorching July evening, and were waiting for Nellie,
Suzi
, and Lisa to finish getting supper on the table when a familiar yet alien sound reached us. Zack stood up in one motion and reached for his rifle. I followed suit, as did the rest of our crew. Skinny and Josh melted into the shrubbery, and the children scooted for their burrow. Mom Allie and Lantana made for the cabin and took up their posts.

So it was that when a four-wheel-drive pickup jounced into view, only Zack and I stood waiting for it to come to a stop. We didn't exactly hold our rifles on it as the driver got out, but it wouldn't have taken a second to have him in our sights.

He was a surprise. In his neat highway patrol uniform, he might have stepped, entire, out of the lost past. However, he had his handgun out, and his expression was not really reassuring. He waved the thing at us, motioning us back.

Obligingly, we stepped one pace backward.

"Harley Schmidt," he grunted.

"
Gesundheit
, "I replied, gravely, and Zack snorted with laughter.

"This is no game, ma'am," he said sternly, waving the pistol again. "I'm the only government this whole area has left, from Dallas to the Coast. It's my job to see everybody knows the rules and lives by '
em
. I've got the Texas Criminal Code in the truck, plenty of copies for everybody. Anybody doesn't take '
em
serious,
I'Il
have to take '
em
in.