Jerome got a job at a Big O tire shop, just as he had in New Orleans, but with a higher salary and the promise of bonuses. Jerome had also been promised inflation indexing for his pay. Sheila took a job in data entry for the local phone company’s billing department, much like the one that she had held before for a power utility in Louisiana. It was boring, repetitive work, but it helped pay their bills, and she was able to work six hours per day, five days a week, which allowed her to pick her son up after school each day. Even working only thirty hours per week, the job offered full health and dental benefits. And this was a plus, since her husband’s job didn’t provide a dental plan.
Jerome had thought Radcliff was a good place to work because the Army payroll meant that a steady stream of cash customers came into town every week, mainly on the weekends. All the local stores did well. The soldiers mainly spent their money at the grocery stores, Wal-Mart, and the many bars and tattoo parlors. But the town had a slightly unsavory air to it, and that bothered Sheila. Most of all, she missed her large Creole family. Sheila had such fair skin that she could pass for white, but her husband had much darker skin.
Their house was nice, as rentals go, and had a big yard, but there was noisy traffic, since it was close to the Dixie Highway. The city park and the Big O tire store were both within walking distance. At least the backyard was fairly quiet, since it had an alleyway behind it, and it had a fence, so it was a safe place for Tyree to play. Their neighbors were a mix of whites, blacks, and Mexican-Americans. Most of the houses in the neighborhood, including theirs, had been built in the 1920s. The owner-occupied homes had been well maintained, but most of the rentals had shabby yards. Their next-door neighbor was Mrs. Hernandez, a divorced woman who worked as a shipping clerk at the U.S. Cavalry Store. It seemed that half the town currently worked for the Cav store or had worked there in the past. The company had started out in the early 1980s as a military uniform store that made machine-stitched uniform name tapes and sold tanker boots to soldiers from Fort Knox. It eventually grew into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, mainly selling by mail order.
When the inflation started, Grandmere Emily advised Sheila to buy up vegetable seeds. Jerome said he thought it was evidence of senility, but Sheila went along with the plan, since her grandmother was very wise and had lived through the Great Depression. So they spent three Saturdays in September driving to nearly every seed store in Hardin, Meade, and Breckinridge counties, buying up their late-summer seed closeouts. Also on Emily’s advice, they bought dozens of pairs of gardening gloves in various sizes.
Without telling her husband, Sheila also spent some of her lunch hours at work mail-ordering seeds via the Internet. These were mostly the open-pollinated “heirloom” varieties that Emily had suggested were best because they bred true, as opposed to hybrid seeds. Sheila followed that advice and concentrated on the non-hybrid varieties. She bought nearly all vegetable and herb seeds. The only flower seeds that she bought were nasturtiums, which could be eaten as salad greens, and marigolds, which Emily said could be planted around the perimeter of a garden as a barrier to protect it from rabbits, moles, and even slugs.
As the dozens of seed mail orders arrived, Sheila had her grandmother hide them in her bedroom closet. Jerome had only begrudgingly gone along with the seed-buying plan, knowing that the money all came from Emily’s retirement nest egg. But Sheila saw no need to tell Jerome about the mail orders of the heirloom seeds. If he found out about her “petit secret” with her mother, she knew that he’d go ballistic. But since Sheila handled paying all the family’s bills, Jerome never caught on. Eventually, there were boxes containing thousands of seed packets stacked up in the back of Emily’s walk-in closet.
Even with all of the economic chaos, the mail was still coming through, and the seed companies-mostly family-owned businesses-were good to their word: nearly all of the orders eventually arrived. While all of their neighbors were desperately scrambling to buy canned food, Sheila Randall was quietly buying enough vegetable seeds to plant hundreds of gardens.
Seeing what was happening, many small-business owners wisely went “on vacation” or “closed for inventory.” This started with the local coin shop. Then the local jewelry store and the Cav store closed. The privately owned gas stations followed suit, but many people suspected that they had quit business while they still had fuel in their tanks. The big chain stations and truck stops soon had supply difficulties. Every time that word circulated that a tank truck delivery had been made, that station was swarmed with customers, who would line up their cars for blocks.
Short of gas cans, people resorted to filling unsafe containers such as two-liter bottles, ancient milk cans, and water barrels with gasoline and diesel fuel. This wasn’t allowed at the gas stations, but that didn’t stop customers from filling their fuel tanks at the station and then driving home to siphon the gas into small containers at home. It seemed that the main occupation of many people was either standing in line in front of the bank or sitting in their cars in long queues at gas stations.
Jerome spent many evenings after work driving up to thirty miles to buy staple foods. His dwindling supply of cash was spent primarily on canned foods, pasta, pasta sauce, and breakfast cereal.
Jerome’s other contribution to the family’s preparedness effort was to withdraw their savings from the bank to buy a shotgun from one of his coworkers. The only gun that he could find was a 20-gauge “Youth” version of the Remington Model 870, with a special short stock designed for small shooters. The gun was obviously well used and had a scratched stock, a dented barrel rib, and a few rust spots from previous improper storage, but it was serviceable. It cost Jerome $1,400 in the rapidly inflating dollars. As a teenager he had hunted ducks with his father’s 12-gauge Model 870, so he was quite familiar with the gun’s operation. With much searching and what he considered a huge outlay of cash, he was also eventually able to buy forty-five boxes of 20-gauge shotgun shells-an odd assortment of mostly birdshot of various sizes, #0 buckshot, and a few slugs. Some of the birdshot shells were so old that they had paper hulls, and Jerome wondered if they would still fire.
On their third weekend seed-buying trip, Jerome took his family to the Hoosier National Forest, just across the river, in Indiana, to try out the shotgun. He explained and demonstrated how to load and fire the gun, and the operating of its safety button: “This gun had a duck-hunting plug in it, so the magazine would only hold two shells. But I took that out, so now it holds five shells, plus one in the chamber. Now, let me show you something my daddy taught me. Right after you shoot one shell, after you pump the action, without taking the gun off your shoulder, you right quick shove another shell into the magazine from your bandoleer. You need to learn how to do that just by touch. That way you always keep the gun’s magazine full. And then if you ever have to shoot multiple, uhhh, ducks, then you can keep pumping from a full magazine. Okay?”
“Okay, shoot one, load one, unless it’s an emergency,” Sheila echoed.
“That’s right, ma chere.”
They shot only the oldest shells, aiming at empty soda pop cans set up twenty feet away. This gave an impressive display of the gun’s power, thoroughly shredding the cans with birdshot. Since he had only two pairs of earmuffs, one of them had to plug their ears with their fingertips. While the gun was small for Jerome, the stock was just the right length for Sheila, who was five feet two inches and weighed just 110 pounds. Sheila soon got used to shooting the gun, obviously enjoying it. Even Emily fired a few shells, and Tyree fired three shells while sitting between his father’s knees. He was thrilled. As they walked back to his car, toting the shotgun and a paper bag full of ventilated aluminum cans, Jerome said, “Well, now we’re all ready for World War Three.”