Read The Slow Road Online

Authors: Jerry D. Young

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic, #Two Hours or More (65-100 Pages)

The Slow Road (4 page)

BOOK: The Slow Road
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That changed before Christmas. Southeast Missouri suffered the worst blizzard and ice storm on record just before Christmas. The area shut down for four days. Jasper’s truck was one of the few vehicles capable of traveling through the mix of snow and ice. He chained up all four wheels before the storm hit and with the Minister riding shotgun, delivered food and water to trapped parishioners of their church. They wrapped several of them in blankets and took them back to the church for the duration.

Jasper had shut off the water to the trailer and drained the lines to keep them from freezing underneath. He then took Millie in to the church to help out, as well as be safe and warm. He wasn’t too worried about the trailer. Their underground propane tank was half full and the furnace in the trailer didn’t require electricity to operate. He turned down the thermostat to its lowest setting to keep things in the trailer from freezing, and still not use up too much propane.

Jasper didn’t limit his help to his own church members. The county Sheriff’s deputies asked his help to get to some outlaying citizens of the county to again deliver food and water, and to bring people in to shelters that didn’t have heat for whatever reason.

When the worst of the situation was over Jasper was able to make quite a bit of extra cash using the truck with the snowplow he’d built for it. He bought a commercial dispenser for the bed of the truck to spread ice control material on parking lots after he’d scraped them with the blade. Even with the cost of the spreader he came out well ahead.

He was still going after most of the city and county vehicles shut down for lack of fuel. Between the loss of power and lack of deliveries to those stations with generators, there was simply no fuel to be had until the main roads cleared and the trucks could run again. Jasper’s one hundred gallon plus capacity kept him going.

They shivered for a while, until the temperate rose after Jasper turned the thermostat back up when he took Millie back home. They looked the place over and there were no signs of any damage from the wind and cold.

Jasper and Millie had a quiet Christmas at home, exchanging only small gifts. They were trying to avoid the commercialism of Christmas and get back more to the religious holiday it was supposed to be. They did gladly accept the Christmas bonus the company gave all the employees, including the watchmen.

The New Year holiday came and went. With it came a small increase in salary for both Jasper and Millie. Millie was getting a few cents more an hour for her alternate Saturdays, and Sara offered her Wednesdays as well. She gladly took it. They were doing okay, but every penny helped. There was no way to substitute anything for the concrete that was going to be needed for the shelter and Jasper hadn’t found a way to trade for it. They would have to pay for it out of pocket and it wasn’t going to be cheap.

Besides getting the garden in that spring, Jasper began on the shelter. He used the rototiller to loosen the soil he’d so carefully tamped down the previous summer and dug the footing by hand. Jasper had hoped to get rebar from the building he’d salvaged, but that had not worked at all. But the steel shop in town needed some extra help for a month that spring and Jasper took rebar in pay.

When he had the footings dug and the reinforcement in place for the monolithic floor and footing pour, Jasper and Millie tightened their belts and Jasper called the concrete company. It took all the spare cash they had at the moment to get the concrete required for the footings and floor of the shelter. But finally the concrete was in and curing. Jasper kept a close eye on it and kept the fabric spread over the fresh pour damp as instructed by the concrete workers for the time needed for the concrete to cure.

They did without most of the simple pleasures they permitted themselves that cost money that summer. By early fall the concrete was ready for Jasper to start laying the blocks for the two parallel walls that enclosed the shelter. After each lift had time to cure, Jasper shoveled in the dirt, sand, and gravel mixture he’d been accumulating and tamped it down after wetting it.

It went slowly, and Jasper had to stop during the winter. It was another bad one and they had to scrimp again to buy propane, though there was nothing like the blizzard and ice storm of the winter before. There was more snow than usual, though it had come intermittently and hadn’t caused much problem. But the snow melt had the ground saturated when the spring rains started.

Once again Jasper put in more than his share of time helping out church members and the county deputies take care of people that couldn’t take care of themselves during the floods. They weren’t bad and didn’t affect Millie and Jasper’s place at all, but Jasper had to rest up for two weeks, doing only the watchman job and taking care of the garden. He finally was able to start working on the shelter again. It still went slowly, but it went steadily.

The thick, earth filled walls were at the correct height, which was a couple of layers of block higher than the original design. The shelter was small and Jasper wanted it as high inside as he could reasonably make it to cut down on the claustrophobic feel. That was also the reason he painted it white inside when it was finished.

He had to rent the high lift, long reach forklift again to set the structural steel in place that would support the earth covered concrete roof of the shelter. That done, they had to wait to come up with the money for the concrete for the roof. But they had plenty to keep them busy.

Millie helped Jasper place and lightly tamp brick floors for the greenhouse they were going to build against the south facing side of the shelter. Jasper had picked up two medium sized polymer stock watering tanks from TSC and buried them down with the top edges just above the floor level, back against the wall of the shelter.

When the floor was in place, Jasper began building a wooden framework with the salvaged lumber. As the structure took shape, the salvaged metal framed glazed windows were installed.

The windows were in pretty good shape considering their age and going through the recovery process. Jasper had to replace a few broken panes of glass and re-glaze a few more as he installed them.

The garden was producing well, as were the two strawberry towers. There was still no fruit on the trees, but they were healthy and doing well. The next year would tell the tale for them and the grapes. The nut trees still had a few years to go, except for the original paper shell pecan that was at one edge of the front yard. It produced a few nuts every year, but not as many as it should. Jasper was studying up on why.

Though there was no roof on the shelter yet, just the decking to support the concrete when it was poured, Millie began stacking the cases of glass jar canned foods she was producing on shelves that Jasper had built for her with some of the salvaged lumber. They kept another of the old salvaged tarps over the shelves in case of rain leaking through the forms of the roof.

Jasper had made sure to get his hunting license and migratory waterfowl tags again and went hunting with Alvin several times that year. Millie found the help she needed on line to learn how to can meats. Most of what Jasper brought in went into pint jars that were added to the vegetables in the shelter.

The green house was finished by winter time, but Millie and Jasper didn’t try to start a winter garden that year. Jasper still needed to make the growing tables and install a wood burning heater.

They got a break that winter. As usual every few winters there was an exceptionally mild one. They still had plenty of masonry blocks and bricks, and Millie and Jasper decided to expand their outdoor garden beyond the confines of the garden plot. Jasper built raised growing beds using some of the block and bricks, incorporating gravity feed deep soil irrigation pipes in the beds using the pipe that he hadn’t sold to finance the labor on the salvage job.

With the new raised beds and the greenhouse, the regular garden could be used for space intensive plants like corn and potatoes, both of which the two of them loved and wanted. They were able to increase the useable space by planting the various melons they liked at the back of the garden, along the fence, and train the vines up the fence on rails that Jasper had attached for that purpose. Jasper used some of that year’s load of manure from Alvin to sweeten the raised beds for the following year.

Some of the blocks were used to make a four bay mulching assembly, making it easy to turn the mulch when needed. It would eventually be used on the raised beds and in the greenhouse, with the yearly manure delivery going to the regular garden.

Christmas that year found the family a soon to be real family. Millie was two months pregnant. They’d always planned on children, and tried, but had never been blessed until that fall. Both were ecstatic, despite the realization that a baby meant a lot more expenses in their lives. They adjusted their plans accordingly.

The only major expense they allowed themselves, besides preparations for the baby, was the concrete for the roof of the shelter. It was poured the first good day that spring and allowed to cure properly before Jasper rented the high lift, long reach forklift to lift the large box he built and filled with earth up and down so he could spread the fill material on the roof, inside the outer, extended block wall of the shelter.

Jasper had laid down drain lines around the perimeter of the roof and covered the entire roof with plastic sheet before he filled the area in. One of the changes he’d made to the shelter design had been to build stairs up one side of it so they could use the dirt covered roof of the shelter for additional garden space. That would come later.

For the moment, Jasper replaced the sod he’d cut before starting the process and stored, keeping it damp year round. It hadn’t fared well, and it took the entire amount to piece out the roof of the shelter with good sod.

The next low cost project Jasper started was to lay down another brick floor on the raised section of the property next to shelter on the side facing the garden. Using a combination of block, brick, lumber and salvaged sheet metal he’d made a deal for the previous summer, Jasper built a new yard shed over that winter between Christmas and spring, when he wasn’t otherwise engaged. The material from the old shed was incorporated into the new, the contents of the small building stored in the shelter temporarily.

He built a less elaborate shed on the north side of the shelter and began stacking the firewood he got every year helping Alvin in it on the brick floor. The final additions to the outside of the shelter were worm beds with rabbit hutches built over them, under the stairs that went up to the roof of the shelter. The area could be fully enclosed if the temperature got too cold for the rabbits and heated with a tiny sheepherders stove that Jasper built out of scrap steel.

Millie lost the baby in the second trimester and she and Jasper mourned the loss, and then carefully packed away all the baby things they’d already accumulated and put them in the shelter. Millie had been advised not to let herself get pregnant for at least two years.

Perhaps because of the loss of the baby, Millie eagerly took on the responsibility of the rabbits they had been planning on raising for their own use and to supplement their income. Jasper managed the fish in the two stock tanks in the greenhouse, using the worms to feed them. The worms fed on the droppings from the rabbits. The rabbits lived on items from the garden most of the year, with rabbit food fed to them when fresh food wasn’t available.

Just as she’d not been able to take game when she went along on a couple of Jasper’s hunting trips, Millie couldn’t bring herself to butcher the rabbits. She was okay handling the carcasses after Jasper had butchered and cleaned them. Some she canned and some she sold, just as she did the fish that Jasper’s fish tanks started producing.

After checking the town statutes, Jasper found out that chickens could be raised legally in the area of town they were in. A bit reluctantly, out of anticipation of the neighbor’s possible squawks because of the squawks of the chickens, Jasper built a moveable chicken pen and henhouse. The chickens got some of the worms, too.

But the birds weren’t too noisy, and the thick hedges dampened the sound to each side and the solid alley fence dampened the noise to their across-the-alley neighbors. The neighbors didn’t seem to mind as long as they were able to buy the fresh eggs and chickens the Willingham’s were now producing, along with the generous gifts of fresh vegetables during the height of the garden harvest.

Just as scheduled, the fruit trees began to bear that summer. It hurt Jasper initially to thin down the fruit as it began to show, but the experts on the internet were adamant that the process was critical for good yields and the good health of the trees. All the thinned fruit went right into the compost bins.

That fall Jasper came home to find Millie nearly at the point of collapse from having been in the kitchen nearly constantly for several days, canning produce. He vowed to prevent that from happening again and immediately began to construct an outdoor kitchen for use during the canning season.

There were still plenty of bricks and blocks from the building salvage project and feeling guilty about Millie’s condition, Jasper built something more elaborate than he might have otherwise. He did acquire more fill dirt and built up the area to the same height as the shelter mound. Though he ran a gas line from the propane tank to the outdoor kitchen and installed a couple of propane side burners, the main cooking apparatus was the wood stove with oven that Jasper built from plans he found on the internet. He had to buy the firebrick for the stove, but decided it was well worth the money to make it easier on Millie.

BOOK: The Slow Road
2.91Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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