The next two weeks passed in much the same way: work, work, and more work. I was anxious to get moving, to continue my quest to find my family. But I was still weak-it wouldn’t do me any good to start out again before I’d completely recovered. I knew I’d regret leaving Darla, but my family mattered more than some girl I’d just met and barely knew. And anyway, she seemed anxious for me to leave, too.
At least the work varied a little. Some things had to be done every day, like pumping water. We filled three five-gallon buckets each morning: one for the rabbits, one for the kitchen, and one for the bathroom. Darla told me the pump for the well had quit when the electricity went out, before the ashfall had even reached their farm. She’d rigged up a bamboo pole that protruded from the pump hole. I had to grab the pole and push it up and down fast to get water to flow out of a PVC pipe.
Wood had to be hauled to the living room fireplace every day as well, from a huge rick behind the house. We spent one day cutting more with a bow saw and ax. Well, mostly Darla cut and hauled the wood while I stacked it-my side was still too weak to do much of the heavy work. There was plenty of timber nearby: immediately around the house a bunch of trees grew, and there were more along a creek in the valley. Darla checked each tree before we cut it, bending a few twigs. If they were green and springy, we left the tree alone. But most of the trees were dead.
We spent the lion’s share of our time digging corn. We worked our way along the ridge where the ash was thinnest, pulling bag after bag of corn down the hill. Even then the work wasn’t done. The corn had to be shucked, scraped off the cob, and ground to meal. Darla had built a bicycle-powered grinder that I’d seen in action when I first arrived at the farm. Now I ground corn, endlessly it seemed, either pumping away on the bicycle or pouring the corn into the mill. I was starting to feel stronger, but Darla could drive the grinder at least twice as long as I could.
On my twelfth day on the farm, Darla cut the stitches out of my side. Droplets of blood welled up here and there when she pulled the threads from my flesh. Overall, the wound didn’t look too bad. But it was going to leave a heck of a scar.
The rabbits got sicker. We killed and skinned eight more-the ones Darla thought were so sick they wouldn’t survive much longer. That was too much meat to eat right away, so I helped Darla build a smokehouse. Helping Darla meant holding tools for her, scavenging nails, and cutting boards where she told me to, not to mention enduring abuse when I didn’t know which tool she meant or couldn’t cut a board straight enough to suit her razor-sharp eye.
We ripped up a chunk of the floor in the hayloft to get boards for the smokehouse. Darla said it didn’t matter since there wouldn’t be any more hay for years. It took the better part of a day for us to knock together a ramshackle structure about the size of a short outhouse, which seemed like a long time until I considered that we’d had to salvage all the materials and do the work without power tools. From then on, we had two fires to tend: one in the living room that we relied on for heat and a smaller one in the smokehouse.
We hung the rabbit meat on crossbars at the top of the structure where the smoke would pool. While we were building the first fire at the base of the smokehouse, I asked Darla, “So how long do we have to keep this fire going?”
“I don’t know exactly. Never done this before.”
“Like, a few hours?”
“No, days at least, a week maybe? I’ll probably leave the meat out here until we eat it-it’s cold enough that it shouldn’t spoil, even without the smoke.”
“How’d you know how to build this thing if you’ve never smoked meat before?”
“I saw a smokehouse once. Guy was using it to cure hams. And how hard can it be? Fire in the bottom, meat up top where all the smoke collects.”
“I guess.”
“I don’t know how it’s going to work for rabbit. Not much fat on them. Probably going to be pretty dry and tough when we get done smoking them.”
“Better than nothing.”
“Yep, it’ll beat not eating.”
Since I’d spent two days on the way here not eating, I had to agree with her. Almost anything beats starvation.