“Why, of all people, would you give a damn about it, or about me, for that matter?”
Abel rolled his lower lip out and back. “Too much death, Harland. Too much! We need to get on with the business of living, every one of us. If you don’t get on that boat, we won’t be back until the ice goes out next spring. You won’t survive here alone.”
“I can fend for myself.”
Abel shifted on his boot heels, back and forth. “Look, Harland, you’re a man of the earth. You’re about growing things, about raising living things up from nothing, not withering in the face of hardship. You told me your father sat you on his lap on his John Deere when you were barely old enough to walk. He taught you what it took to wrest food from the land, from the elements. I don’t imagine he taught you how to give up.”
Harland narrowed his gaze to pinholes, his lips pursed.
“Make the journey with us, farmer. You can go to work with us first thing tomorrow morning. You can get your hands dirty in the good earth once again. That’s what you do. That’s what you have always done. There is no way you are going to give that up.”
The bony figure shrugged his shoulders but committed to not a thing.
Abel blew out a cyclone of frustration, rotated 180 degrees on his heels, and paced to the shoreline, leaving Harland locked down in his boot prints. Max helped the town founder aboard the lake steamer.
“Will you come aboard, Harland?” offered Abel aloud.
Harland tilted his head back to better view the fat smoke plumes trailing from the grain silos, the white acrid clouds as thick as the night the towers erupted in flames.
Max tugged on the whistle cord to let out a banshee wail of live steam. The powered scream rolled away mile after mile down the thirty miles of open lake water.
The farmer cast a look over his right shoulder at the little vessel and the human cargo aboard, a dozen pairs of eyes burrowing into his hide. A hand went up to scratch the white bristle on his topknot.
“Abel?” Harland croaked.
“Talk to me, farmer.”
Harland brought his hand down from his scalp and rubbed his fingers across his heart. He did not make eye contact with Abel for twenty long seconds.
“I’ll be along.”
Epilogue
At first light on the morning of the vernal equinox, human figures streamed from Independency village’s many modest homes through white hard March cold. Each shuffled briskly along shoveled paths up the hill to the greenhouse complex, its powerplant stack trailing a thin streamer of condensation and sawdust smoke.
Throughout the entire month a seamless quilt of moisture-poor snow clouds lay draped over the bluffs. Water vapor was locked away in floating needle crystals, drifting aimlessly. Dry snows atop the frozen earth served as an effective foil to incessant clouds of fine volcanic dust that, until freeze up, wafted across the mid-continent on the ever-present winds off the western prairie.
The sun was but a memory. The frigid monotony of the weather strangled the spirit of colonists and retarded the growth of the greenhouse plants in the unheated high tunnels. The heated greenhouses, though, their banks of lighting glowing day and much of the night, were a riot of foliage and a temperate oasis for the winter weary.
Citizens climbed the elevation, making for one of the heated structures, Strawberry Cathedral. A group of four carried a flat object the size of a small table, to be wrestled through the small east door of the hothouse. Down the four interior steps they shuttled, descending below grade level, and there they clustered in the narrow workspace at the east end of the building or fanned out among the many hundreds of strawberry towers sprouting from the floor.
Most coming along in the dusky dawn observed that the sky seemed open and bright. The persistent cloud blanket had thinned out during the night. The dawn seemed promising, as did the annual equinox service.
Abel and Bobcat waited beneath the glass vault as every man, woman and child in the little town made their way down the steps into the greenery. They stood before a plank table covered with a sheet. The humid air smelled earthy, of the odor of compost and growing things. The temperature hovered just above seventy degrees. Penny and Winnie lifted the sheet over the table and busied themselves arranging whatever treasures lay beneath.
Harland and the tiny band of Sweetly émigrés stood in a little cluster to one side. Abel was pleased that they had healed well at Independency from their serious bout with pellagra. It had taken months for the shock of the loss of their loved ones, their little farm community, and their former life to dissipate, but the South Dakotans seemed noticeably more at ease in their new surroundings. Some were making real strides to attempt to integrate into the life of the village on the bluffs.
As the last citizens spread out in the greenhouse, Abel signaled to Oleg to throw the breakers and cut power to the grow-lights. The interior of the greenhouse plunged down to a dusky green. Abel turned to his longtime friend and nodded. Bobcat, donning his ministerial persona, led the community in an invocation.
“Hear us, Lord, we the few. Through your infinite mercy, you have seen fit to spare us the horrors of the Yellowstone cataclysm. ‘Why us?’ we ask. What have we done to deserve such a blessing, when all the peoples of the earth are diminished and many are failing to thrive?
“We are not nobler than others, more pure, more deserving. We must seem a motley band before your eyes. We do not even know how to address you as one or pray to you in unison. We are hardly devout. Yet you have set us aside to preserve our lives so that we may continue to do good work on this earth.
“We are humble in your presence this equinox morning, more so than at any time in the past. We rejoice in the increasing daylight, in the promise of warmer temperatures to come, in the miracle of growing things, and in the miracle of our very lives.”
Suddenly, a gleam—ruler straight rays of red sunlight pierced the glass and scattered into the foliage and faces. On the horizon, the ruby rim of the new day’s sun swelled on the eastern horizon. The citizens found their voices. A joyous cheer went up from every throat and filled the huge glass enclosure. The spontaneous outburst rent a toothy smile across Abel’s face.
“A miracle, indeed,” he murmured quietly.
Warm red gold washed through the greenhouse, casting the people in bronze and the plants in tones of freshly oxidized copper and chartreuse. Trapped beneath the glass, the warming rays of the sun quickly nudged the temperature up and freed random water molecules to further dampen the air.
The colony’s minister, marveling at the gilded light, raised his hands to heaven and called out, “Who wrote this script?” Laughter echoed through the building.
“I would like to conclude our little prayer by saying simply this: Thank you, Lord, for giving us a tiny corner of an immense universe, a tiny corner of a vast solar system, and a tiny corner of a blue planet to carry on. We will not fail you, as you have not failed us. Amen.”
“Amen,” from scores of throats.
Abel stepped forward and thanked Bobcat for his words. As Bobcat before him, he lifted his hands to the heavens, and there rose a clamor from the far end of the greenhouse. It was the drum and fife band, the little ragtag ensemble that had once called everyone to dinner on the first day of the Total Life Skills seminars. Lost in the strawberry foliage, the assembled could hear the band approach, drumming and piping and stomping the soft earth beneath. Suddenly, four mimes burst from the foliage, raced to the table, and stood at the four corners of it, stone still. The band emerged, banged its feet as one, and stopped.
At that, the mimes reached down to the cloth covering the table, and in unison, they lifted it away. Beneath lay a modest feast, with stakes of corn bread, crocks of New England-style baked beans, pans of potato pancakes, pots of herb tea, pitchers of goat milk and a wheel of cheese. At the center was a four-foot-long sheet cake, slathered with white icing and sporting filigrees of sliced strawberries and a garnish of strawberry leaves and flowers. Scrawled across the center of the cake were two words formed by the strawberry slices: ‘Wonderful Life’.