Ashfall

I found a ball of string in one of the kitchen drawers, but Darla said it wasn’t heavy enough. She wanted something tougher to fix my ski poles, so we explored the barn.

A snowdrift had covered the long side of the barn, reaching upward almost to the eaves, which made it something like fifteen feet deep. We skied around, looking for a way in.

There were no doors on the right side or back of the barn. When we got to the left side, we found a big square hatch set on the inside of the jamb so it would open inward. Darla said it was for unloading manure, but I didn’t know how she could tell. There was no sign or smell of manure there.

I tried the hatch; it was locked. But it had a little wiggle to it on the right side, like it was loose. I took off my skis and kicked the door with a simple front kick. I got my hips behind the kick, thrusting forward for extra power, like I would for a board break in taekwondo. The door rattled, but the latch didn’t break. I tried again. On the third try it finally gave, and the door flew open with a bang.

I stepped into the barn. The door had been secured from the inside with a simple hook and eye. My kick had ripped the hook out of the doorframe.

“Damn,” Darla said appreciatively, looking at the splintered spot in the wood.

I shrugged. We broke boards all the time at the dojang. It was no big deal.

In the barn’s loft, we found fifty or sixty bales of hay—the small, rectangular kind.

“Perfect,” Darla declared.

“We need hay?”

“No, silly, the baling twine—I can make ski pole baskets with that.”

So I cut twine off the hay bales while Darla searched for some wood. We carried everything back to the living room and built up the fire.

Darla whittled a shallow groove into both my poles about five inches from the bottoms, using my mother’s mini-chef’s knife. She cleaned off the bark from two sticks and cut them about eight inches long. Then she lashed the sticks to one of the poles in an X shape, wrapping twine in the groove so the sticks couldn’t slide up or down.

I handed her stuff and cut twine for her. She talked while she worked. “This reminds me of working with my dad. He used to let me do everything—well, everything I was strong enough for. He’d hand me tools and tell me what to do with them. I’d usually screw it up, at least the first time, but he’d just tell me what I was doing wrong and let me try again.”

“What’d you guys work on?”

“All kinds of stuff. We built a hydraulic tree-digger when I was ten or eleven. Big thing with four blades on it that you could hook up to the tractor and use to move live trees around. That’s when he taught me how to weld.”

“You learned to weld when you were ten?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I don’t think I was allowed to touch the stove when I was ten, let alone use a welder.”

“Yeah, well. With your amazing mechanical aptitude, I wouldn’t have let you touch a stove, either.”

I might have taken offense, but she was smiling at me in a way that made it impossible to be mad. “Why’d you want to learn all that stuff?”

“I du

“It must have been hard when he died.” The moment I said it I realized how stupid it sounded. Duh. But Darla didn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah. I tried to keep the farm going. At first the neighbors came by all the time to help. But that didn’t last long.”

“The farm? I thought you only had the rabbits.”

“You didn’t think all that corn we were digging up planted itself, did you?”

“You did all that?”

“Yeah. Got crappy grades at school. Kept falling asleep in class. Almost had to repeat sophomore year.” Darla frowned. “It got better junior year. Mom and I sold off the cows and leased out some of our land, so it wasn’t as hard to keep up.”

“Junior year . . . how old are you?”

“I’ll be eighteen in February. You?”

“Um, I du

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“What’s the date today?”

Darla thought for a few seconds. “It’s the fourth of October.”

“I guess I’m sixteen then. My birthday was two days ago.”

“Wow, missed your own birthday.”

I shrugged. “So . . . I’ve fallen for an older woman? You going to take me to prom?”

“Yeah, right. Even if there was a prom, I probably wouldn’t be going. Probably be too busy.”

“So much for the benefits of dating an older woman.”

“Happy birthday.” She leaned over and kissed me, a quick peck on the lips. I hoped we’d keep kissing, but Darla returned to working on my ski poles. She tied a series of strings co

When Darla finished she said, “Ta-da! New ski poles. For your birthday. Not much of a present, I know, but it’s all I’ve got.”

“When you followed me out of Worthington, that was my real birthday present.”

* * *

The poles worked great. The combination of crossbars and string grabbed in the snow, so my poles only sank a few inches. It didn’t do anything for my skis, of course. They still had an a

Early that afternoon we came to an intersection. A wide road crossed our path. A sign poked about a foot above the snow. Darla knocked the ice off it: U.S. 151.

That startled me a little. The snow on 151 was completely undisturbed—no one had used it since the blizzard had ended. Shouldn’t a major highway have had some kind of traffic? People walking along it, at least? Was everyone dead? The east-west road we’d been on for a while, Simon Road, had been deserted as well, but it was a minor county lane, probably not even paved.

“Highway 151 goes to Dubuque,” Darla said. “We should head north.”

“I du

“The only bridges across the Mississippi within thirty miles of here are in Dubuque.”

“Crap. Okay.” We turned north.

* * *

Two hours later, we still hadn’t seen signs of anyone on the road. We passed two farmsteads that had tracks in their yards, and two more that appeared to be deserted, but it was too early to stop for the night.

Every now and then we passed a big rectangular shape covered in snow. I asked Darla what she thought they were.

“Abandoned cars,” she replied. “Buried in ash and snow.” That made sense—why hadn’t I thought of that?

We hurled ourselves up a ridge, duck walking. At the top, a glorious downhill slope stretched out below us. Darla gri

About halfway down, Darla stood up on her skis and quit pushing with her poles. I started to yell, to ask what was wrong, but she held up a hand, motioning for quiet. That didn’t make sense until I caught a glimpse of what lay ahead of her.

Someone was coming up the road toward us.

Chapter 37

Neither of us was much of an expert in cross-country skiing. I didn’t think I could stop myself on the downhill slope without falling over. Anyway, Darla was in the lead and had a better view of the approaching people, so I left it up to her. She kept going, and I followed.