Z for Zachariah

Chapter Two

May 23rd

I am writing this in the morning, about ten-thirty, while I rest after some things I had to do that I hated to do. But if I had waited until he came over the ridge, and then over Burden Hill where I could see him—where my valley begins—it would have been too late.

These are the things I had to do.

Let the chickens out of the chicken yard. I chased them out. They are all free now. I can catch them again later, or most of them, if it isn’t too long.

Let the two cows and the calf, the young bull calf, out through the pasture gate. I had to chase them, too. They will be all right for a while. There is still good grass in the far fields down the road, water in the pond, and the calf will keep the fresh cow milked. They are Guernseys. Generally I have had good luck with the animals, and taken good care of them. The chickens have kept on laying, and there are two more now than there were at the beginning. Only the dog, David’s dog, Faro, ran off. He just wasn’t there one morning, and he never came back. I suppose he went out of the valley, looking for David, and died.

Dig up the vegetable garden, everything that was coming up, flatten it, and cover it with dead leaves. It does not show at all. I hated that the worst, because everything was growing so well. But I have enough tinned and dried stuff to live on; and if he had seen the garden, all in rows and weeded, he would have known someone was here.

I am sitting at the entrance to the cave. From here I can see most of the valley, my own house and barn, the roof of the store, the little steeple on the old church (some of the boards are off the side—can I fix them? I don’t know), and part of the brook that runs by about fifty feet away. And I can see the road where it comes over Burden Hill, and almost to where it disappears again through the pass—about four miles altogether. But I do not think he will see the cave, since it is halfway up the hillside behind the house, and the trees hide the opening, which is small. Joseph and David and I did not find it for years, and we played near it every day, or nearly.

He will find the house of course, the store and the church, but he must have found a lot of those on his way. By luck I have not dusted the house recently. This morning I looked at it carefully, and I do not think there are any signs that I have been in it recently. I took the flowers off the altar in the church. I brought the two lamps up here, and a supply of oil.

Now I will wait. I said it was about ten-thirty, but I’m not really sure of the time. My wrist watch runs all right, but I have nothing to set it by except the sun. I’m not really even sure of the date. I have a calendar, but it is hard—really hard—to keep track even so. At first I would cross off each day with a pencil. Then, later in the day, I would see the calendar and start thinking: did I check today or didn’t I? The more I thought the more I couldn’t remember. I’m pretty sure I missed some days, and other times I may have crossed off two. Now I have a better system; I have an alarm clock I set; I keep it right on the calendar, and when it goes off I check the day. I do this only in the morning; in the evening I wind and re-set the clock.

I think I know how to check the date anyway. I have a Farmer’s Almanack that tells the longest day of the year, June 22nd. So in a few weeks I will try timing the sunrise and sunset each day. Whichever day is longest, I will know it is June 22nd.

It isn’t really important, I suppose. Except that my birthday comes on June 15th and I would like to know when it’s my birthday and to keep track of how old I am. I will be sixteen on my next one, about four weeks from now.

I could write a lot about things like that—things I had to figure out when I first realized that I was alone and going to be alone, maybe for the rest of my life. The luckiest thing was that the store was there, and that it was a big store, a general store, well stocked because of the Amish trade. Another lucky thing was that the war ended in the spring (it began in the spring, too, of course—it only lasted for a week), so that I had all summer to understand how things were, to get over being afraid, and to think about how I was going to live through the winter.

Heat, for instance. The house had an oil furnace and a gas stove. When the telephone went off, so did the electricity, and the furnace wouldn’t run without electricity. The gas stove would work, but it used bottled gas; I knew that the tanks (there are two) would run out eventually, and when they did, the gas truck would not come to replace them. But the house has two fireplaces, one in the living room, one in the dining room, and there was about a cord of wood in the woodshed, already cut. Still, I knew that wouldn’t be enough, so that was how I spent quite a few mornings in the spring, summer and autumn—cutting wood with a bucksaw (I got a new one from the store, one of the tubular kind) and hauling it in the old hand truck that was stored in the barn. By closing off the rest of the house I kept those two rooms warm enough—really warm, except for a couple of very cold days. Then I just wore some extra sweaters. By being careful with the gas I made it last most of the winter; then I cooked on the fireplace, which is a lot of trouble because it gets the pans so dirty. There is an old wood-coal stove in the barn that my mother used to use before we got gas. This summer I’m going to try—that is, I was going to try—to haul it to the house. It’s heavier than I can lift, but I think I can take it apart. I’ve already put oil on all the bolts to loosen them.

I started this in the morning, while I was resting. Then I did some more work, ate some lunch, and now it is afternoon.

The smoke has come again. It is definitely on this side of Claypole Ridge. As nearly as I can guess, about half way between the ridge and Burden Hill. That means he (they? she?) has seen the valley and is on his way to it.

I feel as if it is the beginning of the end. I must make up my mind what to do.

A strange thing. Whoever it is, he is certainly moving slowly. If he came over the ridge, as he had to do, he must have seen the valley and the green trees, because the ridge is higher than Burden Hill. You can see it from there, I know—the far end of it at least—because I’ve done it so many times myself in the old days. So you’d think he would be in a hurry. If he walked towards Dean Town, or the other way, east on number nine, he would see only the deadness, as I have seen it, everything grey and brown and all the trees like stalks. He has probably seen nothing else all the way, wherever he came from. And between the ridge and Burden Hill he is still in it. The distance is only about eight miles—yet he seems to have stopped halfway and camped.

Tomorrow morning I may go up near the top of Burden Hill, climb a tree and watch. I won’t go on the road. There is a path that goes in the same direction but is in the woods higher up the hillside. In fact the wood has quite a lot of paths. I know them all. If I go I will take one of my guns, the light one, the .22 rifle. I am a good shot with mat, better than Joseph or David, though I have only practised on tins and bottles. The big one, Father’s deer rifle, has too much kick. I have shot with it, but I tend to wince when I pull the trigger, and that throws my aim off. I don’t expect to use the gun anyway, really, I don’t like guns, I just think I ought to have it with me. After all, I don’t know what to expect.

Tonight before I go, if I go, I have to get some more water into the cave, and to cook some stuff. I won’t be able to build a fire after he reaches the valley. By day he would see the smoke, at night he would see the flames because it has to be outside. We built a fire in the cave once, and had to run outside because the smoke got so thick. Tonight I will cook some chicken, boil some eggs (hard), make some cornmeal bread, so I won’t have to eat just tinned things, at least for a while.

I could get water by sneaking to the brook at night. But I think it is safer to store some. I have six big bottles—cider jugs—with tops.

That was another thing I had to decide about when the electricity went off: water. There was—there is—a drilled well near the house, about sixty feet deep, with an electric pump. We had an electric hot water heater, a shower, bath, all that, but of course they all stopped working. So I had to carry water. You can’t lower a bucket into a drilled well; the hole is too small, so that left me a choice of two brooks. The one that flows past the cave, the one I can see from here, goes on down towards the house but then turns left into the pasture, where it widens into a good pond—a small lake, really, clear and quite deep, with bream and bass in it. The other, named Burden Creek (after my family, like the hill—the Burdens were the first to settle in this valley), is bigger and wider, also nearer to the house. It flows more or less parallel to the road, and out of the valley through the gap at the south. It is really a small river, and quite beautiful, or used to be.

Since it was nearer, I thought I would carry water to the house from that—two buckets at a time as needed. Then, just in time, I noticed something. It had fish in it, too, though not as big or as many as the pond. But the first time I went to get water I saw a dead fish floating past. I found a dead turtle on the bank. This stream flows into the valley out of a sort of cleft in the rock ridge to the left of Burden Hill—the water comes from outside, and it was poisoned. I looked a long time (I kept back from it, though) and I saw that there was nothing left alive in it at all, not even a frog or a water-bug.

I was scared. I ran (with the buckets) all the way to the pond, up to the far end where the small stream flows in. I was never so glad to see a bunch of minnows in my life! They scooted away, just as they always had. The water was all right, and still is. It rises from a spring up the hill, inside the valley, and it must come from deep underground. I catch fish in the pond all the time, and eat them; they are one of my best food supplies except in the middle of winter, when they stop biting.

I think I will definitely go in the morning, as soon as it is light. Now that I have decided, I am beginning to worry about something that I know is really foolish: how I look. How I’m dressed. I thought about it this morning when I was at the house, and I looked in the mirror, which I don’t often do anymore. I have on blue jeans, but they are men’s blue jeans (there are cartons of them at the store, but no girls’) so they don’t fit too well, but are rather baggy. And a man’s work shirt, cotton flannel, and boys’ tennis shoes. Not exactly elegant, and my hair isn’t exactly stylish—I just cut it off square around my neck. For a while I used to curl it every night—the way I did for school—but that took time, and finally I realized that no one would see it besides me. So it is straight but clean and has turned much lighter because I am outdoors so much. I think I am not as skinny as I used to be but it is hard to tell in these clothes.

But what I wonder—should I wear a dress? Suppose it is a real rescue party, an official group of some kind? Perhaps I could sneak back and change. I do have one pair of real slacks left. The others wore out. But I haven’t had on a dress since the war. Anyway, I can’t climb a tree very well in a skirt. But I think I will compromise and wear the good slacks.

May 24th

It is a man, one man alone.

This morning I went as I planned. I put on my good slacks, took the .22 and hung the binoculars around my neck. I climbed a tree and saw him coming up the road. I could not really see what he looks like, because he is dressed, entirely covered, in a sort of greenish plastic-looking suit. It even covers his head, and there is a glass mask for his eyes—like the wet suits skin divers wear in cold water, only looser and bulkier. Like skin-divers, too, he has an air-tank on his back. But I could tell it was a man, even though I could not see his face, by his size and the way he moves.

The reason he is coming so slowly is that he is pulling a wagon, a thing about the size of a big trunk mounted on two bicycle wheels. It is covered with the same green plastic as his suit. It is heavy, and he was having a hard time pulling it up Burden Hill. He stopped to rest every few minutes. He still has about a mile to go to reach the top.

I have to decide what to do.