Z for Zachariah

Chapter Nine

June 3rd (continued)

The next morning, amazingly enough, I got the tractor running. That was a direct result of The Farm Mechanic.

When I had finished cooking breakfast I found Mr Loomis on his bed, up on his elbow, reading one of the volumes, and he showed it to me. It was a set of diagram-drawings of the inside mechanism of a petrol pump—approximately identical to the ones at Mr Klein’s store. When I thought about it, that was not surprising; a great many farms, especially big ones, have their own petrol pumps; I remembered that three or four of the Amish farms did, for example. So it was natural that farmers would need to know how to repair them.

“Look at this,” Mr Loomis said, pointing to one of the drawings. It showed a small electric motor connected by a belt to a larger wheel. “That wheel runs the actual pump,” he said, “and look at this.” In the diagram an arrow pointed to a small circular hole near the rim of the larger wheel. At the non-pointed end of the arrow was the number “7” with a circle around it.

“Now look at number seven in the table.” Below the drawing there were printed instructions, and instruction number seven said: “Attach handle ’H’ here for manual operation in case of power failure or in areas where electricity is unavailable. Remove V belt.”

“What’s ’handle H’?” I said.

He showed me another drawing across the page. “Handle H” turned out to be a knob, rather like a doorknob, with a pin on the end to fit into “Hole 7” in the wheel. It seemed simple enough. That would convert the wheel into a sort of crank.

I said: “And if I turn it, petrol will come out?”

“Say a prayer first. Petrol should come out. Be sure to take off the belt.”

“How?”

“Pry it off with a screwdriver.”

“I could just cut it.”

“No.” He sounded most emphatic. “V belts are useful, and we have nowhere to buy any more.”

I went to the store and examined (for the first time!) the petrol pumps that stood in front of it, ordinary red-and-white things I had walked past a thousand times, one Super, one Regular. The front, I now saw, was made like a door, with hinges on one side but screwed shut. I got a screwdriver from the store and took out the screw; I pried a bit and the door came open rather squeakily. Inside all was as the diagram showed—the motor, the belt, the wheel, some pipes leading down. And there, clipped to the door in a spring-clamp, was “Handle H”.

I tried to pry the belt loose from the wheels, but it was made of heavy, stiff rubber, very tight. Finally I had to take out some screws and remove the wheel from the motor. I took off the belt, replaced the wheel and hung the belt on it. It would be there when we needed it.

Quite excited, I took Handle H from its clamp and inserted it into the slot on the big wheel (about fourteen inches in diameter). I unhooked the hose from the petrol pump, and holding the nozzle in one hand and the knob in the other, I was ready to turn it. Which way? An arrow on the wheel pointed counter-clockwise. I turned and in ten seconds liquid was splashing on the gravel at my feet. The smell could not be mistaken—it was petrol.

I stopped pumping and got a five gallon container from the store and filled it. With the can bumping my leg every step, I carried it to the barn and rilled the tractor’s petrol tank. I checked the oil—it was all right. There was a self starter but the battery was dead, of course. That had happened many times before, however, and I knew how to start it with the crank. First I primed the carburettor as my father had showed me (we all used to drive the tractor, starting at about age eight); then, saying the prayer I had forgotten to say at the petrol pump, I cranked hard. The motor started immediately, with a loud sputtering roar, and I felt like patting it on the hood. In fact, I did. The noise seemed incredibly loud. You forget how noisy machines are after a year.

That was partly because it was still in the barn. I climbed up to the seat, put it in reverse, and backed it out. It was a bit less deafening; now the noise filled the whole valley. Though I was sure Mr Loomis had heard it, I wanted him to see it, too, so I drove the tractor to the house and parked it outside his window. I almost laughed, remembering how I had hated to drive it several years ago; the girls who lived in Ogdentown didn’t drive tractors. Now I could rejoice over the time and labour it would save us, and I hurried into the house to share the triumph.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed and was surprisingly matter-of-fact.

“You found Handle H,” he said.

“And the petrol came out on the first turn,” I said. “I think that tank must be full.”

“If it is, we have three thousand gallons. At least that’s what The Farm Mechanic says—for a standard underground tank.”

And in my excitement I had not even tried the other pump. There might be six thousand!

I took the tractor back down to the barn and hitched on the plough. I had already decided what I was going to do. As you head back from the house to the barn, the pasture, the far field, the pond and the brook all lie on your right. To the left there are a few fruit trees and then, further left, another small field of about an acre and a half. This was a field my father used for a few years to grow melons, pumpkins, squash, things like that—to sell in Ogdentown. However, he gave that up, as he said, because it did not make enough money to be worth the time it took. That was about five years ago; since then he had merely kept the field mowed but not planted it.

I had decided, if I got the tractor running, to plough that field and plant it with sweetcorn, with maybe a few rows of soy beans and pea beans. These were all staples which would take up too much room for the small vegetable garden near the house. Sweetcorn could be eaten by us, by the chickens, and, if there was any left over, by the cows—husks and all.

The truth was, now that the tractor was running I could face a fact that I had previously tried to keep out of my mind, it being too depressing to dwell on: The store was an illusion.

It seemed, especially at first, like an endless supply of almost everything I needed. But in fact I knew it was not. In it there were sacks of flour, meal, corn, sugar, salt, and cases of tinned food. But most of these things, except perhaps the salt and sugar, would not keep forever, even though I did not use them up. They were already a year old; in five years or so, I estimated, most would be spoiled (though some of the tinned stuff might keep longer; I’m not sure).

There were also in the store seeds of all kinds: corn, wheat, oats, barley and most kinds of vegetables and fruit—almost everything that will grow here. Also flowers, which I had not even had time to think about. But again, although most of the seeds would germinate after one year, after two years the percentage would decline, and after three or four they would not do well at all.

So before Mr Loomis came I had already been wrestling with the idea that I would just have to tackle that acre and a half with the shovel. It would have been extremely hard, since it is all covered with a five-year turf. So it is not surprising I was really excited about the tractor, and eager to get started ploughing.

I had decided to plant sweetcorn as my grain rather than wheat, oats or barley. I would have liked to grow wheat for the flour to bake with, but I had no way of processing those grains—no thresher, no mill. But there was, in the barn, an old hand-cranked machine called a sheller for making corn meal and hominy. And, of course, we could eat corn “as is”; the same was true of the beans.

The sun came out—finally—as I started ploughing, and was pleasant and warm on my back. Faro had followed me to the field, looking astonishingly healthy; even his hair was growing back. He raced in circles around the tractor, a habit he had picked up years ago when my father would plough or mow and sometimes flush quail or partridge hidden in the field. There were none of those now, but Faro seemed happy anyway, and so was I. I felt like singing, but that is hopeless in a tractor; you can’t hear yourself. So instead, as I sometimes do, I began remembering a poem. I am very fond of poetry, and this one, one of my favourites, was a sonnet. It began:

Oh earth, unhappy planet born to die,

Might I your scribe or your confessor be…

I had thought of that poem many times since the war, and of myself, by default, as “scribe and confessor”. But now I was neither of those. I was the one, or one of the two, who might keep it from dying, for a while at least. When I thought of that, and how my idea of my own future had been changed in the past week, I could not stop smiling.

Then, as I ploughed, I thought I heard, over the noise of the tractor, a high squawking sound overhead. I stopped, turned the engine down to idle, and looked up. There were crows, sharp and black against the sky, wheeling in a circle over the field. I counted eleven of them, and I realized they had remembered the sound of ploughing; they knew there would be seeds to follow. My father used to call them pests, but I was glad to see them. They were probably the only wild birds left anywhere.

I had half the field ploughed by lunchtime. I finished it in the afternoon, and planned to harrow it in the morning, and then seed it. But as it turned out, I had to change my plans.

That night Mr Loomis’s fever went up to one hundred and four degrees.