Children of a New Earth (3 page)

After combat practice was over, Luke rushed toward the low metal building that served as the ranch’s garage. He was worried. Amy had never come back to class. That was not terribly unusual, not nearly as unusual as her dismissal had been. Coupled with the rumors of a ranch-wide meeting, however, he was sure something was up.

The entire yard surrounding the garage was littered with junk. Car parts and other less identifiable bits of metal sprouted weeds, and clumps of weeds sprouted bits of metal. Paint peeled from the metal siding of the garage in huge flakes. The whole building was slowly sagging to one side.

Neither the paint nor the sagging was particularly unusual. Most of buildings around the ranch were showing their age in this way. The ranch was at war, against nature and other less visible enemies. Paint and maintenance were not priorities.

The mess was another matter altogether. Most of the houses were fronted with orderly garden rows, reflecting both the lack of space in the valley and living proof that one of the enemies, at least, was being beaten.

The garage and its occupants had always been another matter. Luke had heard some of the older members’ murmurs, and had heard the boys repeat it often enough. The ranch had made a deal with the devil, in the name of Marlin Beland. Sure, he too had a small personal garden in front of his house. The house the ranch members had built for him, that is. It was tended by his daughter Elisabeth, when it was tended at all.

Meanwhile Marlin and his oldest daughter Amy lived a life unlike any other at the ranch. They didn’t work on the communal farm, help with the hunts, or care for the sheep. They ate the food the ranch provided; wore the clothes others wove and sewed for them. The ranch supported them.
 

Or so they all say when things are going well
, Luke thought. He’d spent enough time in Marlin’s company to see the other side. While the men grumbled that Marlin had not helped with the harvest, he was busy pressing the meager soybean crop for oil—oil for cooking and more importantly for biodiesel. He and Amy maintained the tractor and repaired the tools. While the women complained that they got no help with the canning, he was the one who fixed the seals on the pressure cookers. He maintained the solar array and the freezer, and manned the smithy. Amy worked almost as hard, helping her dad in the shop, helping Jaime Hall with the ceramic kiln, and a dozen other chores to boot.

And when questioned about the mess in front of his garage, ’Marlin would just say that he’d get to it. It had been thirty years now, and he was no closer to getting to it. Most had giving up trying, but that didn’t keep them from grumbling.

The loud clanging of metal on metal broke his reverie. Amy came bursting out of the side door of the garage, her face red. She stomped off toward her home, taking no notice of Luke. He had to rush to catch up to her.

“Amy?” he said hopefully. 

“That bastard!” she fumed. “‘
This is important business, little lady
,’” she mimicked.

Luke didn’t need to ask who she was mad at. “He’s our leader,” Luke offered. “Don’t you think you should show some respect?”

“No,” she retorted. “I will when he does. Dismissing me? I have helped maintain that system for the last five years. I know it as well as Dad. Hell, I was the one who jury-rigged the charge controller after the last one burned out. Why won’t he talk to me about anything?”

Luke’s first impulse was to say, “Surely your dad will tell you what he says anyway, so why does it matter?” but the impulse was stopped as what he had heard sunk in. “The charge controller?” he said. “Is something wrong with the solar array?”

Amy nodded. “Damn thing’s fried. Direct lightning hit last night.”

“Is it fixable?” Luke asked. “I mean, what will we do if it’s not?”

“It’s not,” Amy replied. “And I would probably know what we’ll do if that bastard Amos hadn’t told me off. ‘
Men’s business
,’ my ass. He knows Dad will tell me later anyway. They’re all like that. They bring all their problems to Dad. They refuse to talk to me. They know damn well that once they are gone, Dad will turn to me. What choice does he have? They expect so much from him. But will even one of them openly admit that I can do the work? No!”

Luke let her vent. He knew it’d be useless to try to get any more out of her until she had calmed down. Just like it was useless for her to expect any of the men at the ranch to accept a woman as a mechanic.

“Do you know about a meeting tonight?” Luke asked as Amy wound down.

She nodded. They had reached her house, and she flopped onto a crude wooden bench by the front door. “Sure, that’s what Amos is seeing my dad about now. Trying to figure what they are going to tell people tonight.”

“There’s no hope of fixing it?” Luke asked.

“The panels themselves still produce a bit of electricity, but all the batteries are gone. The freezer took some damage as well. There’s nothing we can do. We might be able to rig something up to draw water during the day at least, but that’s about it.” 

Larry Gatlin strummed a poorly tuned guitar while his wife sang a coarse rendition of Bobby McGee.

“Freedom ranch, just another place with nothing left to use . . .” Luke quipped as they went by.

Amy snorted but didn’t comment. Luke was always coming up with shit like that. He had stayed up at her place since that afternoon, talking to her to calm her down, helping her sister harvest spring greens from the family garden for supper, and then staying to discuss things with Marlin when he came home.

Amy shivered as a cold breeze played on her shoulders. Around her, other women were pulling their shawls close around themselves.
I should have brought my coat
, she thought to herself. The days were warm, but it still got cold at night.

Directly ahead of them was a faded, gray, two-story farmhouse. It was a mottled, uneven gray, the color you get when the last remains of a dozen paints are mixed together. It too was falling off in chunks. This building served the ranch as its only communal space. It served as a church, an armory, a school, a dance hall, and tonight, a meeting hall.

Light streamed out of the lower-story windows. The buzz of conversation flowed out of the open doors. Amy paused and pulled back; she was in no hurry to join the growing throng.

Instead, she turned back and looked at the ranch. The rest of the ranch was unlike the two large buildings at the center, the communal space and the garage. The houses of the ranch were mostly underground. They were built into the side of the valley in a wide half circle. Posts of rough-hewn pine logs were set into the slope with earth berm roofs laid over that. All that showed was the occasional window.

Only years of familiarity allowed Amy to pick out those windows tonight.
Flickering tallow lamps should show right about there,
she thought,
where James Derry would normally be reading Bible passages to the kids before bed. And just over there should be the dull glow of Jaime Hall’s wood stove. When was the last time the whole ranch showed up for a meeting?

Amy shuddered and turned away. She was filled with a sudden foreboding. She had an image in her mind of all the windows empty and dark. She shook her head to clear it.

“You okay?” Luke asked.

She looked up at the community building without answering. She hadn’t realized that he had stayed outside with her. “Do they even use the second story anymore?” she wondered aloud, looking up at the empty windows.

“Sure, but not much,” Luke answered. “The library is up there.”

“So you use it, anyway.”

He blushed but didn’t answer. After a few minutes, he said, “The meeting should be getting started anytime now. We’d better go in.”

As they entered the building, Amy could tell by his reaction that Luke had never seen a meeting this well attended. He always attended any public function and took great pains to be involved.

He had managed to drag Amy to one of the other meetings. The six or seven attendees had gathered around one long table. That table had been all that had prevented a fistfight between Amy and Theresa Deaton. Luke had never tried to get her to come to another meeting.

Now, however, the table had been shoved into one corner and chairs of every description lined the main room. The community building didn’t have enough chairs to sit everyone, so kitchen chairs and rough-hewn patio chairs had been borrowed from a number of families.

Most of the women had either knitting needles or crochet hooks out and were crafting multi-colored afghans from the last remnants of yarn. All were experienced, chatting while their hands worked. In another month, there would not be so much as a skein of yarn left anywhere in the ranch.

In one corner, there was the rhythmic sound of Larry and James Gatlin running the blades of their shears over a whetstone. In just a few days, they would begin shearing the sheep. The women would trade their knitting needles in for carding and spinning supplies, and the cycle would begin again.

A few of the men wore faded and patched overalls like Amy and her father, while a few had on worn fatigues. Mostly, however, homespun wool and coarse woven flax had replaced these as the standard dress for the men of Freedom Ranch. The men wore pants and shirts of oak brown, and the women long dresses in green or yellow. All three colors represented readily available dye materials.

A few of the men still had short military haircuts, but most had gone the route of crude shoulder-length haircuts and thick beards.

The women wore their hair long. They kept it out of their way in long braids, as Amy herself did, or up in buns. The fashion of Freedom Ranch could be described in one word: practical.

Amy sank down into an Adirondack chair next to her father, who was perched nervously on a tall stool. Luke, finding most of the seats taken already, sat on the arm of Amy’s chair as Amos banged his gavel and yelled, “Order! Order!”

Amos, Minister Posch, and Isaiah Hall all sat together behind a card table. Minister Posch rose as everyone grew quiet. They all rose as he intoned a short prayer. Then everyone recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

Afterward, everyone sat again. Amy glanced nervously at Luke. He was watching Amos intently.

“No point beating around the bush, people,” Amos said. “I called this meeting to let everyone know some bad news. There’s no way to sugarcoat it, so I’ll just tell you. Last night’s storm got the solar array and the freezer. Both are beyond repair.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then the whole room broke out in a dozen separate conversations. Amy heard her father’s name mentioned several times. Her head darted around trying to catch what they were saying about him. But there were too many separate conversations coming from too many directions. Nothing made any sense.

Her face burned crimson. She could guess well enough. Twenty some years of loyal service, and they would be grumbling, “Why can’t he fix it?” Twenty years of doing his best, and they would merely wonder why he wasn’t doing better this time.

Amos’s gavel banged for silence. “Listen up everyone. I know what a lot of you are thinking. Marlin’s gotten us out of a lot of bad spots before. He’s done his best, better than we could have hoped for.” Amy felt a flush of gratitude for Amos’s support. “We’ve already burned out one unit of batteries. This was our backup. There is nothing he can do. Marlin, do you have anything to add?”

Marlin shuffled to his feet. He stared pointedly at them. He was painfully self-conscious under everyone’s gaze. “Some of the panels are still producing a charge. We got no battery, but we can run the well pump during the day and fill one of the cisterns. That gets us water, at least.”

“Can we run the freezer during the day?” Larry asked from the back. “It should stay cold enough at night, I would think.”

“And risk half-frozen meat?” someone asked.

“No, the freezer unit took part of the strike. Even if I could repair it,” Marlin answered, “where on earth would we find Freon these days?”

Marlin’s pronouncement was taken as the final word. No one even asked what Freon was. Again a dozen conversations started up, and again Amos banged his gavel.

“All right, let’s not lose our heads. It makes life a little harder, but we’re used to that by now, hey?” he chided them. “Here is what we are going to do. Every family gets a share of the remaining meat. There’s not much left anyway, and we could all use a spring feast. Whatever you can’t use up, can. This summer we clean out the old smoke house and can more food. We get by.”

“No, we can’t,” a woman moaned toward the back.

“We did it once,” Amos growled. “We’ll do it again.”

“No,” the voice pleaded, firmer now.

Amy craned her head to see. She was shocked to discover that it was Rebecca Hopes talking.
That’s the last person I would have expected to lose it
, she thought.

Rebecca was one of the hardest working women at the ranch. She had organized the harvest for many years now and had a reputation for being able to make even the most recalcitrant of the boys pull their share, at least for a day or two.

She rose as she spoke. “I am sorry, sir, but we can’t. Theresa told me earlier about what happened, and I have been thinking about it ever since. We did manage for a while, but that was years ago.

“The canning jars we have are reusable, but the gaskets wear out eventually. Some jars get broken, people drop them or whatever; it’s inevitable.” There was a note of hysteria in her voice. “We haven’t got even half what we had at the beginning. And that was barely enough.”

“Smoking more meat?” Isaiah Hall asked.

“We stopped doing that years ago, for a reason,” she answered sharply. “It needs salt. We can’t get salt to preserve things anymore.”

“So what do you suggest?” someone asked.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she replied wringing her hands.

“Leave it to the men, missy,” Liam O’Malley called. “We’ll hunt all winter, put fresh meat on your table every day.”

Isaiah Hall scowled and glanced across the room at his daughter-in-law Jaime. A momentary silence fell. “Hunting in the dead of winter on the mountain is too dangerous,” Isaiah said coldly.