It also lets me know some things. He is sure to be carrying some fairly heavy supplies and equipment. He leaves those at the crossroads while he makes side trips, so he can go faster. It also means he probably hasn’t seen anyone else along the way, wherever he came from, or he wouldn’t leave his stuff. Or else he has somebody with him. Of course he could be just resting. He might have a car, but I doubt that. My father said that cars would stay radioactive for a long time—because they’re made of heavy metal, I suppose. My father knew quite a lot about things like that. He wasn’t a scientist, but he read all the scientific articles in the newspapers and magazines. I suppose that’s why he got so worried after the war ended when all the telephones went off.
The day after they took the trip to Ogdentown they went again. This time they went with two cars, our truck and Mr Klein’s, the man who owned the store. They thought that was better, in case one broke down; Mr Klein and his wife went, too, and finally Mother decided to go, I think she was afraid of being separated from my father; she was more worried than ever after she heard what happened in Ogdentown. Joseph was to stay at home with me.
This time they were going south, first through the gap to where the Amish lived to see how they had come through the bombing. (Not that they had been bombed—the nearest bombs had been a long way off; Father thought a hundred miles or more; we could hardly hear the rumble, though we felt the earth shake.) The Amish farms were just south of our valley. They were friends of ours and especially of Mr Klein’s, being the main customers at his store. Since they had no cars but only horses and wagons they did not often drive all the way to Ogdentown.
Then, after they saw the Amish they were going to circle west and join the highway to Dean Town, passing through Baylor on the way. Dean Town is a real city—twenty thousand people, much bigger than Ogdentown. It was to Dean Town I was supposed to go to the Teachers’ College. I am hoping to be an English teacher.
They started out early in the morning, Mr Klein leading the way in his panel truck. My father put his hand on my head when they left, the way he used to when I was six years old. David said nothing. They had been gone about an hour when I discovered that Joseph was nowhere to be found, and I figured out where he was: hidden in the back of Mr Klein’s truck. I should have thought of that. We were both afraid of being left behind, but my father said we should stay, to look after the animals and to be here in case somebody came, or in case they got the telephones going again and ours should ring. Well, it never rang, and nobody came.
My family never came back, and neither did Mr and Mrs Klein. I know now there weren’t any Amish, nor anybody in Dean Town. They were all dead too.
Since then I have climbed the hills on all sides of this valley, and when I got to the top I have climbed a tree. When I look beyond I see that all the trees are dead, and there is never a sign of anything moving. I don’t go out there.
Chapter Two
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
