imagine. You’ll have all winter long someplace where you’ve nothing to do but knit, so you might as well start learning now. You’ll need socks, sweaters, everything else. Look here!”
From the same box she produced a pair of socks knitted of bright red yarn. They looked enormous, and Jeebee estimated that they would come well up to his knee, if not over it. The feet were very large and the legs were wide. He felt slightly embarrassed, since clearly she had guessed at his feet and leg sizes and had got them wrong.
“I don’t think you understand,” she said, looking at his face. “When winter comes, you’re going to need to wear layers of all kinds of clothes, including three or four pairs of socks. This is the pair that goes outside everything else, that’s why I made them so big. I made it exactly according to the diagram and directions on page forty-nine. The first thing you do is try to make another pair of socks just like it; and you can look at this pair to see how close you’re coming. Do you understand that?”
“Oh, I see!” said Jeebee. “I… thank you. I never thought of anything like this. I’ll do just what you say. I’ll learn how to knit.”
“You’ll make a lot of mistakes while you’re learning, and there’s going to be no one around to help. It’ll be you and the book,” said Merry. “But if you keep on trying, you’ll get to where you can make socks, sweaters—all sorts of things. Mittens too. Don’t forget mittens!”
She passed him the pamphlet and dug back into the box, coming up with another paper-bound volume. She shoved it into his hands.
“This,” she said. “This will give you instructions on how to skin animals, how to tan the hide, and how to use it making clothing and shoes. Study that, too!”
“I will,” he said. The gear that was to go on the back of Sally, the packhorse, was piled on the green plastic groundsheet that could have its edges tied together to protect its contents from rain. He stooped to put what she had just given him into one of the loading bags that had room to take it.
Pushing it into one of the bags, he stopped, staring at what was laid out on the groundsheet before him.
“Now,” said Merry’s voice crisply, “let’s see you load Sally and see if you do it right.”
He straightened up and looked at her.
“I wasn’t supposed to get all this stuff,” he said, waving a hand at the items on the groundsheet. “Paul said—”
“He changed his mind,” Merry said, still crisply. She looked straight at him. He stared back, his mind fumbling for words he wanted to say to her and finding none.
“Paul only promised… ” he began at last, unsurely.
“It’s that gold of yours,” she said, still looking him in the eye as if daring him to argue. “He’d been valuing it at the minimum he could get for it. Instead, he decided to value it for the maximum. There can be a big difference; particularly if he can sell those coins in one of the southern cities that didn’t burn itself to the ground, or have everyone in it shoot each other trying to stay alive after the power, water, and food stopped coming in.”
“He didn’t say anything about changing his mind to me.” Even to Jeebee’s ears, his own words sounded weak and unconvincing. It was hardly Paul’s way to announce his reasons for anything he did, even for a change as enormous as this.
He looked again at what lay on the groundsheet. Besides the flour, ammunition, blankets, clothes, and other things of relatively small value that Paul had promised him, there were both a double-bladed and a single-bladed ax, a small wall-supported tent with a frame of aluminum poles, and a large number of other kinds of gear that were—from the viewpoint of Jeebee’s survival—unexpected luxuries.
He raised his eyes again to Merry.
“You had something to do with this,” he said.
“What makes you think so?”
“I just know you did,” he told her. “Paul wouldn’t do it on his own and Nick couldn’t make Paul change his mind, even if Nick wanted to. It had to be you.”
For the first time, her direct glance yielded a little. There was no real change in her expression, but having said what he had and seeing her standing there, for the moment silent, he was suddenly sure of what he had merely suspected before saying it.
“What did you give—what did you promise to get me all this?” Jeebee demanded. “I’m not going to take —”
“Nothing!” she said, almost violently. “I didn’t give up or promise anything. Dad understands me. I told him you had to have these things if you were going to have any chance of staying alive until we come back next year.”
“And he went along with you—just like that?”
“All right!” she said. “I told him I’d give you my own things if he wouldn’t, and he said in that case he didn’t have a choice, because he’d just have to replace them so I’d still have them. Yes, I know it was a hard thing to do to him. He loves me, Jeebee. All this—”
She waved her hand at the wagon.
“—all this, he did for me. I didn’t give him any choice in this case, no. But I’d do what I did again in a minute. I tell you, I want you to stay alive.”
They stood staring into each other’s eyes for a long, painful minute. Then Jeebee stooped to the pile on the groundsheet and began the process of loading the packhorse. Merry had always taken charge of packing the horses when the two of them had gone after the seed. Even when she had allowed Jeebee to help, it had been strictly under her supervision.
Merry had explained that not only was each horse best off loaded with the optimum amount the animal could carry, some carried their loads best when those loads were arranged in a way that suited the particular horse. Jeebee had followed orders, listened, and to his surprise, ended up knowing more than he had ever suspected there was to know about loading a packhorse.
In this case, he could take it for granted that Merry had not supplied him with too heavy a load for Sally to carry comfortably, and he remembered that Sally had a ticklish spot high on her left side, which was best off without having anything pressing directly on it.
As he worked, he waited to hear Merry correcting him in what he was doing. But she said nothing. When at last he had put everything on the horse’s back, covered the load completely with the groundsheet, and secured it all with rope in a diamond hitch, he heard something that was almost a small sigh behind him.
He turned and stood facing Merry once more.
“It’s all right,” Merry said, after a moment. “You’ll do all right. Just remember, she can carry perhaps another fifty pounds comfortably for a full day, at a walking pace—but no more, for day-in, day-out travel.”
They were once more looking unhappily into each other’s eyes.
“You don’t have to go,” Merry said, finally. The words came almost as if forced from her.
“Yes,” Jeebee said with a tight throat, “you know I do. And there’s no hope at all… ”
His voice ran out.
“I can’t leave Dad,” she said. “You know that. But you’d be as safe with us as with anybody else.”
“It’s not just safety,” he said. “It’s a place where I can work I need.” [*original book says this, page 204]
“What work?”
“Maybe someday figuring out how all this happened to us. How maybe it could be kept from ever happening again.”
She shook her head slowly.
“Why you?” she asked. “And what difference does it make now?”
“It makes a difference because a civilized world’s going to grow back together again,” he said. “You know that. Paul knows it. He even plans on it—for your future. You know that, too. As for why it has to be me who finds it, maybe it doesn’t, but I don’t know of anyone else who’s trying, with what I know.”
He had never told her as much of his personal history as he would have liked, and the meanings of it to him—even though they had talked at length on the seed-farm trip. She had not, perhaps, asked the right questions to get him going, and he was not yet beyond the reticence that had simply been his habit for a lifetime. So now,
