Renewal 5 - an Untimely Fall Read Online Free PDF Page B

the pickup and keep Bill safe like I told you before, ok?”
    “Well, hell. It can’t be any harder than a tugboat.”
     
    Chapter 5 – 5
    July 2012 was everything you’d expect from a Tennessee summer. Hot and humid, and yet dry of rain, sunshine only broken by the heat-built afternoon thunderstorms, which made life in a tree a bit more exciting than you might expect. Arturo was up and walking around, or hobbling at least, on a cane that George Carroll had given him. When Arturo tried to thank him, George waved it off. “ That’s a young man’s cane. Far too sporty for a codger like me.”
    Dad’s initial burst of construction had slowed to a virtual halt, thanks largely to the intense summer heat, and the fact that he was running out of ideas for our camp on George’s back forty. It was almost idyllic, thinking back, like an extended trip to a state park, minus the showers and flush toilets. Each week, we would head north to Brewer’s Creek for bathing and just cooling off. We went in shifts, because we had learned that our camp must be watched at all times, as demonstrated by the occasional small bands of opportunist rednecks, who felt that the easiest way to make a living was by finding what they needed, and stealing it from whoever had it.
    Thanks to Arturo’s continuous training dialog, we were all becoming practiced little soldiers. Even Lucy was a decent shot, and a good tactician, once she got past her concept that no one was really worried about how cute she looked when food was the real issue. It no longer worked for her to flirt her way to an agreement, and it took her some time to realize that life was all business for the time being. When that understanding dawned on her, she went through another phase, called the telling-everyone-what-to-do period. That was even less effective than her old methods. Eventually we all learned about each other, our strengths and weaknesses, and how that applied to whatever we were doing. In one quick summer, we went from a typical modern family with multiple and varied lives, to a well-oiled machine for survival.
    All well and good, until the stack of canned, boxed, and packaged food in our storage pit began to run low. By July, it was diminishing at a disturbing rate. Dad was the hunter. While Arturo spoke in military terms, Dad spoke of weapons as tools of the harvest. We learned to hunt and fish, even with the cheap tackle from Wal-Mart, and to gather a few edible plants and berries. We were also the recipients of the Carroll’s generosity, which was large at first, but tapered off as they discovered that their own supply of food was much less than endless. Add it all up, and as well as we worked together, it was not going to be enough.
    Then August arrived, and the broken nature of the world began to manifest. August in Tennessee is usually even hotter than July, but in a year marked by thousands of global nuclear strikes, the millions of tons of atmospheric dust kicked up by the blasts effectively dimmed the sun. At least that’s how Dad explained it. August announced its arrival with cold rain, gusty winds, and the kinds of temperatures we would usually expect around Halloween.
    It became very clear that living in a treehouse was turning into the worst place we could be. In the heat, it provided shade and light breezes that never made it to the ground. In the cold, a treehouse just gives the wind more ways to steal heat from the body, and for Arturo’s family, space blankets made a poor substitute for real insulation in a sleeping bag. Our sleeping bags were of the department store variety, and not even remotely adequate to the kind of cold that was bearing down on us. As a result, we all spent many nights huddling for warmth, and freezing anyway. Even after the hard work that had gone into our lovely treehouse, it was time to move.
    Even in this hardship, we were lucky. The Carrolls had once offered us the use of their barn for the winter, but the timing was