Big Stone Lake fast became a highway for villagers on the bluffs. With roads choked by ash and blowing dust, and gasoline an impossibly scarce and precious commodity, the lake provided freedom of movement. The town’s half dozen canoes and several kayaks were put into regular service.
Abel and Bobcat paddled toward the dark form of Sweetly Primary School, its rear brick walls illuminated by a crackling bonfire. Through the smoke, figures drifted, carrying materials from the school and anything that would burn from buildings nearby. Sweetly citizens had piled flammables high on the fire, creating a searing orange conflagration and oily smoke. Abel approached one of the citizens ferrying tinder and asked if the man knew the whereabouts of Jim Bottomly, the coop manager. The stranger simply pointed toward the school.
A small brick and mortar structure, the school building shouldered a wound in its roof above its multi-purpose room. The weight of wet ash had bent steel girders and brought down splintered span timbers on citizens huddled there, using the building for emergency shelter.
The sour stench of unwashed human bodies invaded the nostrils of the men from Independency village as the doors of Sweetly Primary School parted. Accustomed to the pissy odor of farm animal excrement and the acrid bite of agricultural chemicals wafting from South Dakota farm fields, Abel tried waving away the smell as he and Bobcat entered the school building, but the odor would not dissipate.
The central hallway down the middle of the small building stretched dark, illuminated only by sun filtering through the doorway. The corridor lay littered with bedding, clothing, utensils of every kind,, and knots of listless people. The sound of repeated coughing filled the space.
Electrical power and natural gas supplies had failed long ago. Food supplies dwindled down to bulk corn and soy salvaged from the grain coop towers. Shivering in frigid homes, families abandoned their dwellings and migrated to the school to seek shelter and the warmth of many bodies. Volunteer firemen pulled several corn pellet stoves out of homes and set them up wired to a small gasoline-powered generator, one stove in each of two classrooms to provide pockets of warmth in the little school building. They muscled drums of water from the lake for drinking, for washcloth bathing and for flushing toilets. Farmwomen, laboring outdoors, cooked corn meal and soy mush and hard, dry corncakes over wood fire coals glowing inside of gutted gas barbeque grills.
The efforts weren’t enough to keep people in place. Scores of citizens had left the area, fleeing the ash by traveling south on foot or, if they were lucky enough to still have some gasoline in a farm bulk tank, by mammoth field tractor down the buried rail lines.
Few acknowledged the arrival of the newcomers. Midwesterners were famous for neighborly greetings and welcoming travelers warmly. But the few townsfolk sprawled at Abel’s feet averted their eyes and shrank away as he and Bobcat picked their way through the hall and entered one of the classrooms, stacked tight with double-deck bunks all occupied with people. Bobcat thought the space resembled a barracks. Abel understood in an instant the classroom was a ward for the sick.
At the west corner of the room, Abel recognized a portly man heaped on a bunk in nightwear, pulling at the air with his mouth as a fish does when caught on a filament line and hauled out of the water. Jim Bottomly’s lips and fingers were blue from lack of oxygen, even though he was wheezing, panting heavily. The man’s left forearm was exposed to the air. The skin blushed dark red. Abel noticed the rash also encircled Bottomly’s neck and flared up on the top of the manager’s feet but not the souls. Like his fingers, Bottomly’s toes exhibited the blue hue of cyanosis.
Abel took a seat on the bed beside the ward patient and flagged a greeting with a wave of the hand.
“Well, Mr. Whittemore,” Bottomly gasped.
“How are you feeling, Jim?”
“I’m not much use to anyone right now.”
Abel placed his fingers to Bottomly’s forehead. The skin was hot to the touch. The man shook with a shivering spasm.
“How long have you been ill, Jim?”
Bottomly’s eyes widened to circles as if in fright. “Four, five days.”
“You’re running a frightful fever.”
“Much like everyone else. It’s swept through the town pretty hard.”
“What is it, what’s the contagion?”
“No idea. It’s pretty bad, though, like a bad flu. It’s taken down elderly folks, kids, a few adults.”
“You’ve lost townspeople?”
“We have, and folks are frightened to death of it. Some say it’s the plague; it’s typhus; it’s whatever. Lots left town because of it. It’s too much for them, that and the ash, conditions and all.”
Bottomly’s revelations unnerved Bobcat. He shook Abel’s shoulder. “We should be going, Abel.”
“Give me a minute, Bobcat.”
Abel turned his attention back to the man lying prone on the bunk before him.
“Jim, we think we can help people here in Sweetly.”
“Help us? Now how are you going to that? We’re a pretty miserable lot right now.”
“We need a supply of grain, Jim. Everyone in Sweetly needs that grain, too, of course, but we want to offer citizens fresh food in exchange for grain: vegetables, fruit, dairy products. What does that sound like to you, Jim—foodstuffs for grain.”
“Don’t matter what I think. We’re not going to have an ounce of grain to give you even if we wanted to.”
“Why’s that?”
“National emergency, boys. Washington is intent on moving the grain, move it by train if the Guard can get here.”
Abel shook his head in understanding. The rumor was true, then. “So the government is mobilizing now?”
“Yes sir, the Guard’s been put to work. Uncle Sam wants the rails dug out of the ash everywhere.”
“How long before they start work here on the lines?”
“No idea. Sooner than later is my guess. Harland wants to stop them.”
“Who?”
“Harland Sven.”
Abel’s eyebrows arched upward. “He does?”
“Says he’ll stop them with bullets. All he’s going to do is get himself killed.”
“Where is Harland?”
“Home tending to his bride. She’s sick something awful, as I understand it.”
“Well, we’ll have to go see him and….”
“Hell, he won’t have anything to do with you.”
“We’ve got an idea that should secure the grain, Jim. Maybe we can convince him to help us carry it out.”
“Don’t you be betting on that, Mr. Whittemore.”
Chapter Eighty
Seated at the stern of a canoe, Abel guided the craft toward the western shore of Big Stone Lake, aiming for a landing where a swarm of tractor tracks reached the water’s edge. Local citizens, many without power to run pumps or fuel to fire emergency generators, had no choice but to come down to the lake frequently to obtain a ration of water for their families.
After pulling hard on their oars to cut through cold lake chop, Abel and Bobcat nosed their canoe into the western shore five miles north of Sweetly. Abel jumped from the little vessel and disappeared up a rough lane on foot. Bobcat would wait for his companion’s return.
Walking for fifteen minutes in deep tractor ruts stabbed down into loose volcanic ash as deep as his hip sockets, Abel approached the marooned residence of Harland and Eda Sven. The dull volcanic crud was much deeper in Sweetly than at Independency village. The ash blanket from the Yellowstone eruption had swept lightly across the community on Prospect Bluffs but had descended with a vengeance on communities toward the southern narrows of the thirty-mile lake.