Darla's Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

glops of wet ash
splurted out, splattering me. More fell off the roof, and I cursed
out loud. The wet ash reminded me of the time a pigeon pooped on me
in Dubuque. But for a pigeon to make droppings like these, it’d
have to be elephant-sized. I ducked my head and stumbled farther
back, waiting for the bombardment to end. When it did, I dragged my
long-handled rake out of the muck and returned to clearing our
roof.
    By Thursday, it was a little brighter. At
least we could tell the difference between night and day and didn’t
have to carry flashlights and candles everywhere during the
daytime. Which was good—all our batteries were dead, and we were
running low on candles. We’d run the batteries out both in the
flashlight and listening to the radio, trying to find a station.
Either no radio stations were broadcasting, our radio was broken,
or the ashfall was messing up the signal somehow. We had two sets
of rechargeable batteries, but without power, they were useless.
Maybe I could figure out a way to recharge them by hand—I filed
that thought away for later.
    I decided to use the daylight to work on my
tractor. We were running out of food, both for humans and rabbits,
but I’d planted over 190 acres of corn in the spring. The ears were
mature, but the kernels were way too moist—if we had harvested this
early, we would’ve had a horrendous drying charge at the co-op. But
wet or not, the corn was perfectly edible, despite being buried
under almost a foot of ash. Digging it up by hand would be an
exhausting nightmare. I wished I had a bulldozer blade for the
tractor. Instead, I used an old piece of angle-iron to fashion a
long blade that I could drag behind the tractor on two chains. With
one chain longer than the other, the ash would get scraped off to
one side.
    As I worked, I sent a silent thank-you to my
dad, wherever he was, for buying an oxy-acetylene welding rig
instead of the electric kind. An electric rig would’ve been as
useful as a boat anchor, but the oxy-acetylene setup worked fine
without electricity. I would feel so much better—so much safer—if
he were here with me. Still, he’d left me the knowledge and tools I
needed now, so maybe he was with me in a way.
    Then it was time to consider the tractor
itself. Its air filter was good, designed for dusty jobs like
plowing, but no way would it hold up in this God-awful ashfall. I
took the air filter out of our pickup, fashioned a cloth cover for
it, and attached it over the tractor’s air intake. It was a bit of
a spit-wad setup, but it worked okay. The tractor ran way too
lean—starving for oxygen due to the doubled filter—but it ran.
    I grabbed an armload of old feed sacks,
hopped onto the tractor, and drove it right up to the house, the
blade scraping through the ash behind me.
    “You continue to amaze me, Darla.” Mom said
when she saw the tractor running.
    “I know—”
    “And you’re humble, too.” Mom’s smile morphed
to a scowl.
    “Let’s go get some corn.”
    “We should check on the Haymakers, see if
they came through the eruption okay.”
    “We’ve got maybe a day’s worth of rabbit
pellets left, and what, two or three days of food for ourselves?
And only that much if we both eat your cream of wheat.” You have to
be half dead of starvation to eat cream of wheat. Unless you’re my
mother. Who’s weird.
    “The Haymakers might have even less. And that
fire we saw was over by their place.”
    “We don’t have enough gas to go driving all
over the place.”
    “We’re not driving all over the place. Just a
couple miles to check on the Haymakers.”
    I sighed and went to unhook the blade from
the back of the tractor. Arguing with Mom when she got all
neighborly was hopeless. My tractor was an old model, a
single-seater, so Mom and I had to squeeze in together, with me
sitting at the front of the seat between her legs. Normally this
would’ve been unbearably hot, but with the rain, ash, and dim
light, we kind of needed to