Oleg jerked around suddenly, ending his stoic frozen pose once and for all. He faced Abel, a drop of moisture hanging on the end of his nose.
“Look,” he spit his words, “the humble potato and the hay field make it possible for us to do everything else. Nothing yields tonnage like potatoes. If we have potatoes at the heart of our diet, then we just need to add some dairy protein and greens to round it out. We could live a long life on such fare. Now add a little fish protein, a little chevon and lamb, and the greenhouse fruits, and we just might live like kings. Little kings, maybe, but kings nonetheless.”
“You think we’ll have enough calories to see us through?”
“No, Abel, I don’t. We’ve got to go see Penny; she’s been tinkering with our calorie needs. It doesn’t look promising.”
The men left the runny potato barrens to rendezvous with Penny Markham at the CC kitchen. Abel paced along in silence, his mood black. The farm manager tried to lift his spirits. There was one consolation in the evolving struggle against the hardships Yellowstone had wrought, Oleg told the community founder as they trudged from the fields. Providence had been good to Independency, he suggested. If the colony had received the burden of ash that lay on Ortonville and Sweetly just to the south, nothing could be done to free the soils of their burden. There wasn’t enough labor, fuel, tractors or earth-moving equipment on the Great Plains to clear three, four, five feet and more of ash from even a few square miles of land. Even if it could be done, there would be no place to put the mountains of volcanic waste.
“The Plains are finished,” Knudsen remarked. “We can free up an acre here and there,” he’d told Abel, “but there’s no hope for a million square miles of breadbasket.”
Penny stood before a laptop computer on the counter in the community kitchen. She glanced up as Abel and Oleg arrived, the men dripping moisture on every surface.
“Will you take a minute from your work, Penny?” asked Abel.
“I don’t need much coaxing to give this up, Abel.”
“Oleg says you’ve been running numbers, charting calorie needs. What do you have?”
Penny wiped her hands on her apron, scowling all the while. “Well, I’ve been running minimum calorie requirements for our adult folks, normal levels for the children. I increased yields from the greenhouses but greatly decreased yields from the fields. I ruled out getting in a crop of corn altogether because of the conditions, but plugged in a potato crop into two-thirds of the greenhouse space. I ran the figures every which way. I have to tell you, Abel, without corn or some other grains there’s no way we can sustain 110 people.”
“What’s the shortfall, do you think?”
“The best estimate, we’re ten to twelve percent deficient. More likely we’re fifteen to as much as twenty percent off. We won’t harvest enough calories for ourselves and the animals if the fields don’t yield. If we see to it the children have enough to eat, the adults will slowly waste away.”
Abel stood in trance, contemplating Penny’s grim assessment. He lowered his head and squeegeed water from his face.
“If we can work out an arrangement with the coop in Sweetly,” the woman offered, “we might be able to….”
Abel held up a hand and shook his head no. “There isn’t going to be a pound available from the coop. The National Guard is moving into towns along the border country to pull the grain out of the storage silos and ship it east. They’re coming to Sweetly, as I understand it. They’re on their way as we speak.”
“Can’t be,” scoffed Oleg in disbelief. “When did you hear that?”
“I talked with Jim Bottomly.”
Penny pulled her lower lip down. “Who?”
“The man who manages the Sweetly coop.”
“What did he have to say?”
“He explained there’s a federal emergency policy in place. Washington has ordered up the Guard, here and all over the Plains. They’re clearing railroad tracks up from Watertown whenever they can keep machinery running.”
Penny shook her head. “How long until the forces get here?”
“Soon, if the weather runs wet. If the dust returns, it might take them a month, maybe more. Who knows? There’s no way to know with any certainty.”
“If the National Guard carts away the grain, famine is going to descend on the valley. We’ll have to think about abandoning this community,” Penny warned.
“No! There will be no pulling out.” Abel scowled and shook his head from side to side. “Look, we grow plenty of food. If we give this up, who in the world is going to feed us, the federal government? Not likely.”
Penny’s eyes flared wide with anxiety and flitted from face to face. “We will not produce enough food, Abel. We need a complex carbohydrate, something that yields plenty of calories. We have got to get our hands on some coop grain. There is no alternative.”
Penny glared at Abel. He turned away and cast his gaze out a window across the common to the soaking fields.
“Don’t you turn your back on me, Abel Whittemore,” Penny snipped tersely. “I’m talking to you.”
Abel spun around abruptly and faced the undisputed lord of the CC kitchen. “You are absolutely right, Penny. Right now, those coop silos down in Sweetly are, what, maybe half full of corn and soy? Go back to your numbers. Tell me how many tons of grain we would need for a year to make up for the calorie shortfall, worst case. Then project forward several years.”
“Years?”
“Three, four years, at the very least. Our troubles won’t end next year. Yellowstone made certain of that.”
Penny blinked, blindsided by that revelation.
“What are you figuring, Abel?” asked Oleg.
“We need a fallback position,” said Abel emphatically. “Salvation rests across Big Stone Lake. There’s a mountain of food in Sweetly. We’ve got to get at it. We’ve got to get at it before the Guard can move it out.”
Oleg raised a red flag. “Wait, wait, wait! The farmers in the valley aren’t going to take kindly to us waltzing in there asking for handouts.”
“He’s right. People have got to be terrified down there,” said Penny. “If they think their lifeline is going to be cut to some decree, they’re not going to greet us with open arms.”
Abel scoffed and set about pacing the room, thumping the floor, a quirk of personality that Oleg and Penny were long accustomed to. “Look, we built this town in a decade. We faced obstacles, big ones; we overcame them. We’ll do the same now, somehow. We could offer the citizens of Sweetly something in exchange—something that’s in short supply right now—our market crops and dairy surplus for their corn. We could do that.”
“Ya, we could,” Oleg concurred. “That would be just the thing.”
“We’ve got the best shot there is to make it right here,” Abel declared. “I’m throwing my shoulder against the grindstone. When the food reserves are exhausted in the good ol’ USA, things aren’t going to be very pretty. I don’t want to be walking the mean streets out there when the Chicken McNuggets run out.”
Chapter Seventy-Two
The taste of disgust, bile bitter, fouled Winnie’s tongue. She sat numb in her Jeep in her own driveway, having spent the day examining computer files at a clandestine packaging operation set up in an abandoned manufacturing plant. Inside the crumbling brick building were manual gravity-feed dispensers, set up on long tables. Stacked along the walls were fifty-pound bags of horse feed grain. Plastic bags were fitted over the dispenser nozzles and a few pounds of feed metered out to fill the bags. Pull the lever. Fill the bag. Each fetched five dollars from anyone anxious to horde foodstuffs of any kind against an uncertain future. Business had been brisk.