The greenhouse Darla designed would be about ten feet high at the north side and have a sloping, south-facing roof, so the wall on the south side would need to be only two feet high—barely tall enough to crawl into that section to tend our crops.
We built the greenhouse around the tank contraption Darla had been working on. She’d connected more than a dozen heating elements from electric water heaters inside the tank. The idea was that when the wind blew, the electricity from the wind turbine would heat the water. When it wasn’t windy, the water in the tank would serve as a heat reservoir, keeping our greenhouse warm until the next windy day. I mean, it was more complicated than that— Uncle Paul and Darla argued over circuit breakers, transformers, and resistance values in ohms—but that was the basic idea.
We had lost all our plastic in the fire, so the greenhouse roof had to be glass. Even with all the panes we’d salvaged from the old farmhouse, we didn’t have enough. So we started trekking to the nearest abandoned farmhouse to loot its windows. They turned out to be modern, double-paned glass—much better than the glass in Uncle Paul’s house, Darla said, but the glass was coated with some kind of UV inhibitor—great if you don’t want your curtains to fade, but not so good in a greenhouse that’s too cold to start with. So we spent hundreds of hours laboriously scraping the glass clean with razor blades.
We tore the farmhouse’s roof apart, salvaging the rafters to build the walls of our greenhouse. The amount of labor everything took was staggering. To get a nail, for example, you had to start by making a hammer. We had plenty of hammerheads, but all the shafts had burned with our barn. So you had to cut a shaft with a hatchet, clean out the remains of the old shaft from the hammerhead, fit the new one to the socket, jam it in there, then hammer wedges of wood into the socket from the other side to tighten up the fit.
Then, of course, you still had to pull the nail out of a rafter, set it on a flat rock, and beat it more or less straight so it could be reused. Now repeat that part of the process eighty-two bazillion times, and you have an idea of what many of my days were like.
By the time the greenhouse was finished, we were pretty much out of food. And we hadn’t even planted anything yet. Darla and Uncle Paul started working on connecting the heating system to the wind turbine, which involved figuring out how to refit a complex, formerly computer-controlled system for manual control. Even turning the turbine to shut it off in a wind too forceful for its design was complicated. To work on the turbine, they had to climb a ladder attached to the wall inside the tower. The base of the tower was pretty roomy, about twelve feet wide, but it narrowed at the top almost three hundred feet up. So working in there made me feel both acrophobic and claustrophobic. Since I was no help at all working on the turbine, I took everyone else out into the fields to dig for corn.
We started by clearing the snow from an area about ten feet square. Sounds easy, right? Not so much. The snow was more than four feet deep and heavy with ice. To clear a ten-by-ten area, we had to dig up and remove more than four hundred cubic feet of snow—that’s more than two full dump truck loads, Darla told me later.
The ash layer under the snow was surprisingly uneven—several feet thick at one side of our excavation, almost nonexistent at the other. Which was strange—in most places around Warren, the ash layer was a consistent thickness of only two or three inches.
As we dug into the ash, we figured out why. Someone had already harvested this field. The cornstalks were there, flattened by the weight of the ash and snow, but the ears were all gone. We moved across the road and tried again.
This time Max and I dug a small test hole only about two feet square. When we found ears of corn at the bottom, everyone joined in, widening the hole. By the end of the day, I felt more hopeful about our chances. We had more than twenty grocery sacks stuffed with corn ears.
There was more good news back at the greenhouse. As we approached, we could see the huge arms of the windmill turning slowly in the breeze. That meant heat!
I was a little disappointed when I got inside the greenhouse. It didn’t seem any warmer in there than it had that morning. I dropped the bags of corn I was carrying, peeled off my left glove, and held my hand against the metal wall of the tank. It was stone cold.
Darla flung her arms around me from behind. I knew it was her instantly—although I couldn’t have said exactly how.
“We got it working!” her voice practically frothed with excitement.
“It’s cold.”
“That tank holds almost four thousand gallons of water. It’s going to take days to come up to temperature.”
“Oh.” I’d been expecting instant heat.
“That means it will hold heat for days, so even when the wind isn’t blowing, we’ll stay toasty.”
“Cool. Want to shuck some corn?” I asked.
“I love it when you talk dirty,” Darla whispered in my ear, pulling me into an even tighter hug.
“Shucking corn? I don’t get how that’s dirty,” I said.
“Would you rather have me explain it now or show you later?” I couldn’t see Darla’s face, but her evil grin was easy enough to imagine.
“This is the Show-Me State, right?”
“That’s Missouri, silly.”
“Let’s move there.”
Darla released me from the backward hug, and we sat on the cold dirt in the greenhouse. I dumped a bag of corn out between us.
The first ear I shucked looked strange. Instead of light yellow kernels, they were grayish black. I rubbed at the ear. Some of the black stuff came off, as if it were dirt or dust or something, although it was too dark for dirt—pure black without a trace of brown.
“What’s this?” I asked Darla, holding the ear out between us.
She looked up from the ear she was shucking and let out a string of curses that I was fairly certain included an anatomically detailed description of what she’d called “shucking corn” a few minutes before.
“What’s wrong?”
“Smell it,” she said.
“Smell what?”
“The Iowa State Fair queen’s powdered ass. The ear of corn, of course.”
“Geez. Sorry.” I raised the ear cautiously to my nose. It smelled terrible—like old, wet cardboard.
“It’s some kind of mold. Normally you’d send it out and have it tested for mycotoxins. The corn was wet when the ash buried it. That’s why you harvest it dry, or dry it before you store it, so it can’t mold. I was hoping freezing would do the trick, and I guess it helped for a while.”
“Can we still eat it?”
“If it’s a type of mold that’s toxic, then no. You can’t even feed it to pigs or goats.”
I grabbed another ear and started peeling back its wilted brown sheath. It was moldy too. We sampled ears out of every bag we’d harvested. They were all moldy, although some of them only had a light dusting of mold, while others were almost uniformly black with it.
I held out one of the least moldy ears. “You sure we can’t eat this? What happens if we do?”
“I don’t know,” Darla said.
“I’m going to try it—”
“That’s not—”
“I’ll cut a handful of kernels off this ear and boil them ’til they’re mush. If I don’t get sick, we’ll try a little more.” Darla was scowling at me. “It’s not safe.”
“We need the food.”
I left the greenhouse to hunt up a pot and start a cooking fire.
About a half hour later, I was crouched over a pan of boiling water and corn when Ed sidled up to me.
“Let me eat that,” Ed said.
“Did Darla put you up to this?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he replied, “but I wouldn’t have agreed to do it if she wasn’t right.”