Darla's Story Read Online Free PDF

of
baling twine to make sure we wouldn’t get lost in the dense
ashfall.
    The ash was thick over the pump cover—three
or four inches. It was heavy, far heavier than wet snow, and it
stuck to my hands, turning them a ghostly shade of light gray.
    We got the useless electric pump out of the
well, and I cut the water supply tubing and electrical wire with a
hacksaw. Mom and I trooped to the barn, carrying the pump and the
tubing we’d pulled out of the well.
    The dollhouse was still on my workbench. It
looked alien somehow in the ashen haze of the flashlight’s beam.
Too pristine to be part of my world now. Mom and I moved the
dollhouse to the barn’s storage room to make room to work on the
pump. Our ash-stained clothes left long smears of gray on the
dollhouse’s white paint.
    I replaced the electric pump with my inertial
pump, paying special attention to the joint where my pump connected
to the tubing. I didn’t have any fittings the right size, so I used
a lot of epoxy and duct tape. It would hold, I thought. It had to
hold—I couldn’t bear the thought of losing my pump.
    Mom helped me haul the contraption back out
to the well. She held a flashlight for me while I threaded my pump
down the shaft and duct-taped a pole onto the tubing where it
emerged from the well, to make it easier to pump. Then I took hold
of one end of the bamboo pole and started pumping.
    Nothing happened at first, of course. I
pumped for one minute . . . two . . . nothing. It seemed like it
was getting heavier—harder to pull up after each downstroke—but I
was getting tired. And then, finally—water! It splashed out the end
of the tube Mom held, glistening in the light of the flashlight,
soaking her left pant leg.
    Mom laughed, her voice a distillation of pure
relief and joy. “You’re a wonder, Darla.”
    “It’s a really simple machine, Mom.” I turned
my head to hide the grin spreading across my face before I realized
Mom couldn’t see it through my breathing rag, anyway.
    “We’d be mighty thirsty before I figured out
how to build that ‘simple machine.’” She had redirected the tubing
into a bucket, but we’d barely wet the bottom of it before we
noticed that way too much ash was falling in, fouling our
water.
    So I spent the next hour making a bucket
cover with a hole just the right size for the pump tube. We worked
well past midnight, according to Mom’s watch. It was impossible to
tell by the sky—noon was just as dark as midnight. We filled almost
every waterproof container we owned. If my pump failed at some
point, I wanted to have enough water on hand to last until I could
fix it or build another.
***
    When I woke in my bed the next morning,
Monday, I wasn’t sure what was going on. For a moment, I forgot
about the eruption, despite the grit clinging to my skin and the
omnipresent sulfur stench. I was seized by a ridiculous panic—I
hadn’t done my homework. Then I came fully awake and realized it
didn’t matter. I didn’t need to worry about school; I needed to
focus on surviving.
    So that’s the way I spent the next few days.
I got up early every morning, fed and watered my rabbits, worked on
mechanical projects all day and most of the night, then collapsed
into bed.
    After the water pump, I pulled the toilet out
of the downstairs bath and built a squat tube—a piece of pipe and
funnel—so we wouldn’t have to trek out into the ash to pee.
    I started worrying about the roof, so I
attached a series of poles to an old garden rake, lengthening the
handle, and used that to pull ash off the barn and house roofs. I’d
noticed how heavy the ash and rain were, and we had more than six
inches on the ground now. Both the barn and house were old, sturdy
buildings constructed of heavy timber, but if you put enough weight
on anything, eventually it’ll collapse.
    As I raised the rake for the first time, I
bumped the gutter. It ripped free with a screech, narrowly missing
me. As the gutter crashed to the ground, big