Not a Drop to Drink

Four

It was a bittersweet victory, Lynn had to admit by her sixth trip out to the garden and back down to the root cellar. She raised the woolen blanket they kept dropped over the entrance to their pantry, sidestepping past the huge plastic drum that held the purified water supply. Even though her arms were shaking, she was careful not to drop the buckets loaded with potatoes for fear of bruising them. They went into a pile beside the crooked shelves made out of stacked cement blocks and mismatched lengths of wood. Canning was a hot job whether done indoors or out, but Lynn didn’t complain since Mother had taken the water-gathering duties for the day in return. She dragged the cast-iron pot up the basement stairs with the last of her energy and started a fire with one of the matches taken from the dead man. The tomatoes came to a red boil as Lynn started a second, smaller fire to sterilize the glass jars.

Work calmed her fears as usual. The feeling of doing something always overcame the fear of nothing. There would be vegetables for the winter, and if Mother let her have her way, plenty of wood as well. The purified water still had to be moved down to the basement tank, but they weren’t lacking. Soon the days would be short, and the breezes would bite.

Lynn had never minded the cold. Winter meant diving back into the much-coveted books that lay untouched on the shelf the rest of the year. Mother had used the encyclopedias to teach her something of the world beyond their small borders, but Lynn had no interest in what surrounded them. Not after seeing the globe.

Mother had rummaged in the attic for it when she was making an argument for heading south, hoping that an illustration might sway her. The vast expanse of blue that covered it had fascinated Lynn, and she’d asked Mother wondering why they didn’t seek out this unending expanse of water called “ocean.” Mother had knelt down to her height and held her face in her hands.

“I know it’s hard to understand, but that water would make you sick.”

Lynn remembered arguing, her childish hope refusing to admit that so much blue could be a bad thing.

“There’s a famous line from a poem about the ocean,” Mother had finally said to end the discussion. “‘Water water every where, but not a drop to drink.’”

Lynn had broken the globe afterward, smashing its false promises to bits on the chopping block with her hatchet. The tears that had fallen while she worked were as salty as the ocean, but she had sucked them greedily off her lips.

The canning was done by the evening, and Mother had emerged from converting the outbuilding into a smokehouse to help her carry the hot glass jars down into the pantry. They had fresh corn over the fire and the kernels burst juicily in Lynn’s mouth as she crunched down on them, relishing even the feel of the bits that stuck in her teeth.

That night, Lynn tried on the steel-toed boots. They fit well, and she giggled when Mother dropped the biggest encyclopedia (M) on her foot to illustrate what a good choice it had been to go ahead and take them. She tried not to let on how bothered she was at feeling the outlines of the dead boy’s feet inside the boots.

“You chop your hand off and the shock’ll kill you before you can make it back to the house.”

“I know, Mother.”

“If that chain saw gets away from you, it’ll take your leg down to the bone.”

“Yes, Mother.” Lynn hefted the ax into the back of the truck.

Mother glanced nervously at the steering wheel as Lynn climbed into the cab. “Stay in sight of the house.”

“I will.”

“I’ll keep my eye on you as much as possible,” Mother said, slinging her rifle over her shoulder. “But I can’t be always watching.”

That finally caught Lynn’s attention. “Smoke to the south?”

“Again, yes,” Mother answered, shifting her eyes in that direction as she spoke, nervously scanning the skyline for any hint of other people. “This morning, while you slept.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Don’t know. You have a handgun, too?”

Lynn nodded.

“Just remember to squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it. And go to the west, not south. Stay—”

“Stay in sight, right. I know. Mother, it’ll be okay.”

“Right.” Mother gave Lynn a long look before she stepped away from the truck. “Okay then. Go.”

Mother had taught Lynn how to drive as soon as her feet could reach the pedals, but it had been years since she’d been behind a wheel. Gravel sprayed when she tapped on the gas, and Lynn tried to reassure Mother with a smile and a wave as she pulled away. Even from the road she could see the concern stamped on her features, but there was no help for it. They needed heat. They needed wood.

Lynn surveyed the countryside as she drove, making sure to keep the house in sight of the rearview mirror while dodging the huge potholes that pockmarked the road. She spotted two or three downed trees that looked as if they’d fallen years ago. A strong wind a week earlier had knocked most of the grass down so that Lynn could see woods in the back acres of the fields, untilled even during Mother’s time.

The ride back to the woods was bumpy, the shocks in the truck having given out long ago. Lynn smacked her head on the ceiling of the cab, but it was exhilarating. The smell of the crushed grass under her tires, the two tracks following her in the rearview mirror, even the panicked grasshoppers that accidentally jumped through the window were a cause for amusement, a break from the norm.

She parked parallel with the woods, putting the truck bed near a huge, cracked trunk of a maple. Lynn got out of the cab and looked toward home, barely visible on the horizon. She waved, not knowing if Mother was watching her at that moment or not, but it felt better to pretend she was. She grabbed the ax and headed toward the tree.

She recognized the warning shot for what it was the second it sliced through the mud at her feet. Lynn instantly froze and put her arms into the air as far as the weight of the ax allowed. The crack of the shot faded away into the distance, but no one called out to her. Slowly she lowered her arms and studied the woods. The shooter was undercover there, and she was in no position to return fire. There was a handgun tucked into her belt, but her hands were full and she was in the open.

She was near enough to the fallen tree now to see fresh cuts in the trunk and bright piles of fresh sawdust strewn around. Lynn turned back toward the truck and walked slowly, very aware of what her back would look like in the crosshairs of a rifle. Whoever it was, they didn’t mean her harm. The courtesy of a warning shot was more than most people extended these days, and the fact that she’d left the field with her truck said a lot.

The thought of returning to Mother with nothing after having to beg to be allowed to leave in the first place made Lynn’s cheeks burn brightly as she drove home. She slammed her palm against the steering wheel, borrowing the new phrase she’d learned from Mother the night the men from the south had come.

“Son of a bitch!”

Mother seemed more amused than anything, once she saw that Lynn was perfectly fine, minus a bruised ego. Lynn stamped across the floor of the basement, her fuming anger more than sufficient to heat the room.

“At least it was someone nice enough to fire a warning shot,” Mother said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lynn snapped. “That’s the farthest out you’re going to let me go. I won’t be able to see the house much past that and I didn’t see anything else that was down and big enough to be worth cutting.”

Lynn went to the pantry for an apple, her anger not enough to quell her appetite. “You hungry?”

“Oh, pretty much always,” Mother said, and Lynn grabbed her an apple as well. When she handed it to her, Mother grabbed her wrist.

“What’s that?” She pointed to a cut across the palm of Lynn’s hand, bruised and red from a slight infection.

“Nothing,” Lynn said. “I got scraped the other day moving wood over for the canning fire and forgot to clean it out right away.”

“Always clean,” Mother said stiffly. “Always. You know what to look for?”

“Red streaks for blood poisoning, going up toward my elbow.”

“And gangrene?”

Lynn snorted. “I’m sure if I develop gangrene you would notice the smell pretty quick.”

“I won’t always be here to double-check you,” Mother said.

“Don’t say things like that.” To even hint at a future time when Mother wouldn’t be around sent her heart soaring into her throat, a worried pulse of adrenaline shooting through her veins.

“How do you know what gangrene smells like anyway?” Mother changed the subject.

Lynn pulled the stem from her apple before answering. “Because of Stebbs,” she said quietly. “Because of his leg.”

Mother looked down quickly and cleared her throat. “I didn’t know you remembered that.”

“Kind of tough to forget.”

When Mother didn’t offer anything else to the conversation, Lynn barreled on. “How old was I? I’m guessing seven?”

“Six,” she was corrected. “You were six.” But nothing further.

It seemed young, Lynn thought, to have been sent to get the tomatoes from the garden alone. But at the time the coyotes had not been so numerous or so desperate as they were now.

The smell was distinctive. Even in her youth she had known that what she smelled meant danger. She had stopped, sniffing the air like an unsure fawn in the spring. The hand had come as a shock, starkly white against the new green grass of the tromped path. White and flecked with freckles, something she’d looked at curiously for a moment; neither she nor Mother—the only people in the world, for all she knew—had them.

“Hey there, little one.” His voice had been thin and weak. But still it set her back and she’d tripped in alarm, landing on her bottom. “It’s all right,” he said. “I need help. Get Lauren.”

The last word had meant nothing to her, a foreign mixture of two syllables she’d never heard before.

“Your mother,” he added patiently. “Get your mother.”

That word she knew, and she had bolted home, a panicked message on her lips that Mother had deciphered after a few moments. Lynn remembered the shock that had passed over Mother’s face; it was the first time she’d ever seen that Mother could feel fear. And then she had turned and run, leaving Lynn to follow as best she could. The strange man was propped on his good leg and leaning against Mother by the time she caught up. The sight of a metal trap, its jaws embedded firmly into swollen, stinking flesh just above the man’s ankle, had brought Lynn to a screaming halt.

The two adults had shuffled awkwardly back to the house, Lynn carrying both their weapons and following behind. The man’s foot had banged against the cinder-block wall of the cellar as they clumsily helped him down the stairs, and he’d howled so loudly that Lynn had run back to the landing, peering down into the basement as Mother eased him onto her own cot and looked critically at his ruined foot.

Mother had ordered Lynn back downstairs, and she had been put to work ripping a rag into shreds for binding, boiling water, and then to the upstairs kitchen for their sharpest knife. After that, she’d been banished to the upstairs bedrooms, somewhere she’d hardly ever been before. A thick coat of dust covered the room that Mother called “Lynn’s room,” even though she’d spent most of her life on the roof or in the basement, where the only windows were inches above ground level and easy to defend. She’d sat on the dusty frame of her unused bed and tried not to listen to the screams coming up through the vents.

The memory still had the power to chill her. The stranger had passed out under Mother’s ministrations, and a shaken, pale version of her mother had come upstairs and sat next to her on the bed for a few moments before speaking.

“That man is named Stebbs, and he’ll have to stay with us for a little while until he gets better,” she had said calmly.

It was the first and only time Lynn could remember speaking to anyone other than Mother. She had very little memory of him, only that she’d had a fascination with his stubble that seemed to amuse him, once he was healthy enough to be amused by anything. And then he was gone, someone she would only see for years afterward through the lenses of binoculars or the crosshairs of a scope.