Renewal 6 - Cold (8 page)

“A few, Boss. Don’t know how much use they’ll be, though. Might be better if we just pretend they don’t exist.”

“I know what you’re saying, Seth, but when this thing is over, assuming we come out on top, we’ll have to deal with them anyway. It might work better if Tullahoma owes us a favor.”

“Gotcha, Boss,” Seth replied, nodding.

“Ok, men. I’m really starting to miss that dang old room of mine. How about lending me a hand up the stairs?”

Chapter 6 – 15

By the end of September, Kirk and I finished digging out the stalls. What had started as hard, backbreaking work slowly turned into pure tedium. Our young hands were tough as oak, covered in calluses, and attached to a set of wiry muscles that could dig all day. In a way, we were disappointed by the conclusion of the task, as if we had created some kind of momentum for shoveling the earth. In the long process, we had transformed the massive hay bale walls into an airtight shell around the barn. When we ran out of barn bales to pack with dirt, we moved over to the Carroll’s house and repeated the procedure. We discovered that if we took a bucket of water along, we could pack the mud into any shape we needed, and it would freeze in place almost immediately. The only trick was working fast enough to keep the water in the bucket from freezing solid.

Other than a light dusting of snow on the 23rd, the main problem was the simple buildup of a frosty crust. Those of us working outside had developed the habit of carrying a hammer to knock frozen objects loose, which worked fine unless the object in question shattered like glass.

Arturo probably made the single biggest contribution to our well-being. Once the outhouse was enclosed in a sandwich of sheet metal, wood framing, and square hay bales chinked with mud, a scavenged wood stove was installed in the six-foot space behind the original outhouse. A big black piece of PVC pipe vented the waste pit through all the layers to the outside, and stainless flue pipe vented the stove. The outer door was a foot thick, filled with sheet foam insulation, and edged in as much foam and rubber gaskets as we could find. All in all, the outhouse became a relatively pleasant place to take care of business. Even with all of that, Arturo made it infinitely better.

He was happy to have a job that didn’t rely too heavily on his aching leg. He took a pile of old bricks, and some bags of mortar they had pulled from the supply yard, and enclosed the woodstove in a massive brick labyrinth. From the outside, it looked kind of like one of those barbecues that people had once built in their backyards. It was a rectangle that rose in stages to the top, where the flue escaped. The lowest platform was like a hearth, and covered the entire floor behind the old outhouse. The second layer contained the stove, and rose up to a shelf about eighteen inches wide. The third layer was the top of the construction, and eventually gave way to a brick chimney that enclosed the flue pipe to the roof.

He called it a masonry heater. On the inside, it was far more complex. Through a painstaking process of sketches and trials, he laid the bricks in series of channels to cause as much brick as possible to contact the escaping heat. This efficiently warmed the entire brick mass, which radiated the heat into the entire building. When he was done, the outhouse was our version of a luxury spa, warm, comfortable, and efficient with firewood.

We worked as a team to laboriously drag an old cast iron tub from the old homestead, up the hill, and into the improved outhouse shed. The tub barely fit through the door on its side. It was a wrestling match. We tipped it up on end to get around the original outhouse and set it on the hearth layer of the masonry heater. We had to push it right to the end of the hearth to keep it from blocking the door of the stove, but the fact that it did indeed fit was another vast improvement. Dad rigged a drain under the wall with some PVC and ran the pipe far enough that the water would flow downhill, in theory. In reality, we were tasked with shoveling dirty ice away from the outflow every time the tub was drained. From then on, the tub was kept full, along with a row of buckets on the second ledge, so that warm water was always available. It’s hard to explain how much that meant to us during that winter, but it’s safe to say that Arturo was our hero once again.

Dad pronounced our stall excavations perfect, except for one thing. He had us cut tunnels between the pits in each stall. Kirk and I were so immune to digging by that point, we didn’t even grumble. Compared to the pits themselves, the short tunnels were nothing. In fact, they were more like thick doorways than tunnels. Again, we had no idea what we were doing, but we had learned that Dad always had a plan, and we paid close attention when he showed us how to use plywood and two-by-fours to shore up the doorways.

With the doorways complete, Mom joined the pit team. She directed the careful transfer of our food supplies into the front stall. She handed the containers down, and Kirk and I stacked them where she wanted. Once the food was stacked in the pit, it looked like we had enough food for an army, but even then, I knew it was an illusion.

Arturo built a smaller masonry heater in the well pump house, but it lacked the mass and multiple channels of his first masterpiece. He planned it to get the most out of every last brick, and declared himself thankful that it was warm enough inside the little house for the mortar to cure. When that was done, we had another warm shelf for water buckets. The heat was more direct, able to cook certain foods if we wanted, but not nearly as even or enduring. We would need to manage the pump fire more closely than the outhouse. Between the two stoves we had scavenged, the two from the old homestead and the one in the Carroll’s house, we were maintaining five fires at all times. Mom preferred to keep the cooking stove hot. It was much easier and more efficient than starting a new fire several times per day. Dad watched the wood supply, and decided that five fires were too many.

George stopped by for his daily visit, one bitter afternoon right at the end of September. Martha had taken to huddling by the wood stove in the living room of her home. If we didn’t go to the house, we never saw her. She said she couldn’t tolerate that kind of cold at her age.

“Hey, folks. How goes life in the barn?” George asked some version of the same question every day.

“Not too bad, George. How’s life in the house?” Dad’s reply never changed much either.

“Well, to be honest, not too good. It’s okay by the stove, but the rest of the house is well below freezing. Martha’s having a tough time of it.”

“Yeah, George. I can tell by the melt pattern on the roof that you are losing a ton of heat straight up,” Dad said.

“It is an old house. Never had much in the way of insulation. I think some of it is just old newspaper.”

“Well, George, I was going to talk about that same problem, from the other end.”

“What do you mean?” George asked, a little defensively.

“The hard fact is that we’re using too much wood. We can still go out and get more, but that’s going to become impossible soon. Of everything we are heating, the barn is the least efficient right now. We’re sending heat into space, but we’ve been working to fix that. Second least efficient is your house. With no real insulation, there’s no way to hold in the heat. A month from now, you and Martha may be lying on top of that stove to stay warm.” Dad accompanied his lecture with lots of hand gestures.

“So what can we do?” George asked.

“We can work hard to tighten up your house, but to be honest, making the barn efficient will be faster and easier. This may be a tough call for you, but I think you and Martha should move out here with us. That’ll be one less big stove to feed, more bodies to share warmth, and a basic consolidation of resources and effort. In the spring, you can just move back in.”

“You think it’s going to get colder,” George said.

“I think it’s going to get extremely cold,” Dad replied with a hard expression. “I’ve been tracking the temperature on your big thermometer since we moved in from the woods. If the general trend continues, we’re looking at North Pole conditions - fifty, maybe seventy below. If it gets that cold, a trip to the outhouse will be life threatening. I’m sorry, but there’s no way you will survive in the house. Even if we do everything right, it’ll be dangerous enough out here, with everyone living and working together.”

George looked up into the shadows of the barn, then back to Dad. “Ok, David. I’ll talk to Martha.”

Chapter 6 – 16

My birthday was on December 2nd. Mom was doing her best to get a decent cake out of the wood-fired oven, and it wasn’t going well. Powdered eggs do not apparently lend themselves to a moist and delicious cake. The makeshift ingredients combined with the uneven temperatures in the oven began to drive my mom into a frustrated whirl of aggressive motion. This state was further exacerbated by the crowded conditions.

The snows had finally come in mid-October. At first, it brought the same thrill that kids always get when snow falls, but it quickly became apparent that there was no playing in the snow. Then it kept snowing until everything outside became a vague white lump with never ending dark clouds. Anyone looking from a distance would have seen a blurry, dead land, only broken by three faint streams of wood smoke. More often than not, even the smoke was lost to the blizzard conditions. Dad had strung a triangle of rope from the barn to the outhouse to the well and back to the barn. There was a time almost every day when the rope was all that kept us from being lost in the unceasing storm.

The good news with the snow was that every time the snowfall grew heavy, the outside temperature climbed. It was all relative of course, but it was bizarre to learn to feel the difference between twenty-five below and fifty below just by the icy bite on my four square inches of exposed skin. We all learned to hold our bladders until there was another reason to go outside. We fell into a slogging routine of tending fires, huddling for warmth, and passing the time. Days lasted forever.

The larger spaces in the barn had been abandoned. By the first week in October, we had built flat roofs over the stalls, moved the two stoves into stall three, which became our tiny common area and kitchen, and constructed a two-stage entry vestibule for the same stall. We had pulled the square bales from the outer walls of the barn and buried our horse-stall living space underneath them. The end result was a rabbit-warren of a home that kept us well above freezing, but packed eleven people into three barn stalls. It was bound to cause problems.

For one thing, Juannie was as intolerant as always. She seemed to treat the situation as a prank that we were playing on her. She clearly thought we wanted her to suffer, and that we spent our time thinking up ways to make her miserable. She split her time between crowding the woodstoves in the barn and sitting for hours in the outhouse shed. She was the number one user of the bathtub, even though we had set and agreed to a regular schedule for bathing. We all had the responsibility for refilling the tub after we used it. If we didn’t want to brave the cold running back and forth with buckets, we could always take option two, and simply skip a bath. Juannie left the tub empty every time. The only exception to the rule was for Tommy and Jimmy. Mom and Juannie were supposed to take turns handling the boys’ bathroom activities, but true to form, Juannie rarely took her turn.

So it was on my birthday - another day in which Juannie had failed to lift a finger to contribute, and my mom had stepped over her twenty times in her frustrating attempt to bake my cake – when Mom finally snapped.

She stood over Juannie’s legs as she looked in at a cake that was one third black, and two thirds raw. She made a weird growling sound as she slammed the oven shut. She looked down at Juannie’s indifferent expression, and said in a very calm voice. “Juanita, if you do not get out of my sight in the next three seconds, I am going to kill you here and now.”

Dad rose from his standard sitting spot in the corner, but Mom halted him with a sharp “stop” gesture thrown to her side. Juannie took Mom’s statement with the exact same concern as she took the end of the world. That is, she ignored it.

After exactly three seconds, Mom lunged and wrapped her hands around Juannie’s neck. From four feet away, I could not process what I was seeing. That was my mom, choking the life out of someone. Arturo got to his feet but made no move to intervene. He and Dad looked at each other and made the tacit agreement that the women would just have to work it out. Kirk made a move to jump in, but Dad held him back. George and Martha had retreated into their tent in stall four and showed no sign that they knew what was happening. Lucy looked on with an expression I had never seen before and then quickly herded the boys over to stall two, out of sight of the fracas.

All of the reactions occurred in a few seconds. By the time I refocused on the actual fight, Juannie was clearly struggling for air, and Mom was showing no signs of letting up. She kept squeezing until Juannie’s hands waved erratically at her face. I was projecting how to deal with a Mom-murderer in my head, because it looked for all the world like Juannie’s time was up. Juannie’s eyes were fluttering and starting to roll up when my dad snapped, “Beth! Enough!” The sound was pure command, military, and startlingly loud in the pit.

He got through. Mom released Juannie’s neck with one hand, stopped squeezing with the other. I could actually see the white fading from her knuckles in the slow-motion moment. Mom waited for Juannie’s eyes to clear while still pinning her to the ground with her hand. When it was clear that Juannie was back in the picture, Mom slowly drew back her free hand, and delivered a snapping punch straight to Juannie’s nose. The blood exploded out of her nostrils and across her chest.

Mom stood up and backed away. “Juannie, you are completely useless, you spoiled bitch. I’ve been covering your ass since the day you showed up, and it stops, now! Get busy, or get lost.” Mom took another step back and wiped her sleeve across her mouth, dragging the spittle from her lips.