Renewal 3 - Your Basic Swiss Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

the back, crawling towards out camp. It was driven by a hefty old man, wearing overalls and a tall green baseball cap. Dad waved at the man, and we relaxed, thinking it must be the landowner Dad had met. The tractor squealed to a stop on old brakes, and the man shut the diesel engine down.
    We saw Mom walk over to shake hands with the old man, who stepped stiffly down from the tractor and pulled out a wooden walking cane from somewhere next to the seat. We couldn’t hear the words, but we knew they were talking. Dad picked up an empty water bottle and showed it to the man. The man gestured and smiled back at Dad. He hoisted himself back up on the tractor and started the engine. Our parents were waving and smiling as the tractor chugged away.
    Dad waved us over, and we helped the little boys down from the tree, which offended them, of course. We walked back the campsite, and started asking questions, tripping verbally all over each other.
    Dad held up his hands to get us to shut up. “That was Mr. Carroll. He’s a friend. He’s going to get something. He’ll be back in a little while.”
    Someone came to our camp, and wasn’t trying to kill us for our stuff. That was a first. It’s hard to express how much time, how much human experience was stuffed into those several days since we had left the interstate. Already, each minute of the day had expanded into more thought, more texture, and more freaking work than I thought possible. The endless busyness of modern life, with its TV and phones, and video games, and school, and soccer practice, had been yanked away to reveal long moments filled with an unexpected gift of silence.
    Of course, even the best silence can be filled with the chattering of siblings. Lucy, in particular, was speculating out loud about how much we could expect from the Carrolls. Maybe she was expecting to ride home on an old diesel tractor, or to borrow a much missed hair dryer for Mrs. Carrolls no doubt huge collection of appropriate pretty-products for teenage girls.
    My Dad let her go for a minute or two before he appeared to have some kind of daughter-at-the-mall flashback and threw a figurative bucket of cold water on my sister. “Lucy, Mrs. Carroll may have the best blow dryer on the planet, but I can guarantee you that without electricity, it won’t do anyone any good, not for a very long time, so cool your jets girl. We’re here because they are kindly allowing us to be here, and we should be thankful for that, because very soon, this entire country is going to be crawling with poor folks with no place to live, no place to go, and no food to eat. We’re not going to ask the Carrolls for anything that we don’t absolutely need. Understand?” Dad was clearly serious without leaving any room for coddling. “Every one of you is going to absolutely polite, respectful, and friendly to Mr. and Mrs. Carroll, and if they ask for any help from any of us, we’ll give it – cheerfully.”
    We were all nodding our heads, wearing slightly abashed expressions. Especially Lucy, who didn’t understand why she was being singled out. To drive his point home, Dad sent us all back to work. “Now, I need you all to go look around the edges of the woods for rocks about this big,” he said, holding his hands about eight inches apart. “Bring them back here. Now go. Get busy.”
    We headed out to look. We didn’t know it at the time, but Dad understood that most of the old farmers would take any rocks they turned up while plowing the fields, and set them along the edges of the field as a matter of course. Kirk and I headed over to the place where we had chopped our first trees down, remembering a jumble of rocks we had seen there. Lucy followed along quietly, having no idea where to look for herself. Tommy and Jimmy naturally fell in line behind the rest of us.
    We hit the motherlode of weathered red and gray stones, and spent a good hour walking back and forth with the heaviest rocks we could reasonably