“Are you hungry?” Britney said.
“Yes, I am.”
“Mr. Schmidt came by with a stewing hen. It’s in the Dutch oven out there.”
“How did he know you were here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that was kind of him,” I said. “I suppose you two have already eaten.”
“Well, yes.”
“Maybe I’ll have a look, then.”
“There’s some beer too.”
I went out to the summer kitchen and lit a candle. The beer was in a plastic gallon jug. We reused them endlessly. It was a pale ale, very hoppy and strong. I felt the glow in my stomach immediately. The Dutch oven still retained some warmth. I lifted the heavy cast-iron lid. Britney had deboned the meat. Plenty was left and it was swimming in a cream-thickened sauce with new onions and peas along with some cornmeal dumplings flecked with thyme. I spooned out a bowlful and brought it back inside the house along with a tumbler of beer.
“I hope you didn’t wait up for me,” I said.
“I feel safer if you’re here.”
“You could lock the door.”
“But then you’d have to wake me up to get in,” she said.
“Is the beer from Mr. Schmidt too?”
“Yes.”
“This is delicious,” I said, holding up my bowl. “You’re a very good cook.”
“Thank you.”
“Mr. Toad got arrested and they put him in the jail,” Sarah said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’ll get out before long.”
“Did you have a motorcar in the old days?”
“I certainly did. We just called them cars, though.”
“Do you think we’ll ever have them again?”
I chewed for a minute and glugged down some beer.
“No, I don’t think we’ll have them again, Sarah,” I said.
“Ever?”
“Probably not.”
“Oh…” She seemed hugely disappointed.
“Do you know what happened to them?”
“Not really,” Sarah said.
“Well, I’ll try to explain. Here’s what happened. Cars had engines, and the engines needed a certain kind of magic liquid to run on, and—”
“What’s an engine?”
“It’s a machine that makes things go. You put the magic liquid in it and then the engine can do work. It can turn wheels and make the car go.”
“What’s the magic liquid?”
“It’s called fuel.”
“What’s fuel?”
“It’s like… Do you see this chicken stew that I’m eating?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this is fuel for my body. It gives me energy, makes me strong, powers my muscles and my brain, makes it possible for me to do things like saw wood and carry stuff from one place to another.”
“Do you have an engine?”
“My whole body is a kind of engine. A living engine. And yours is too. We all need food and water to run our bodies. That’s what food is for.”
“It tastes good,” Sarah said. “That’s why I like food.”
“That’s true. It can taste very good if there is a good cook around.”
“My favorite food is pudding. What’s yours?”
“Right now, this is my favorite food.”
“Did the motorcars run out of food?”
“The cars needed a very special kind of food to run in their engines. It was called gasoline. It was made of oil, which came out of the ground. We had a lot of oil in the old days, but then we used so much that we had a problem getting it. We had to get more and more of the stuff from faraway places across the ocean. And that led to a lot of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“People in other countries like China and Japan and Germany needed oil too, and there wasn’t enough to go around, so they fought over what was left. And soon, the fighting caused more problems with money and getting all the other things we needed to live, like steel and rubber. And there were such big problems with money that a lot of people couldn’t buy cars, and even if they could, the gasoline was very expensive, or else sometimes you couldn’t get it at all, even if you had enough money—”
“How come?”
“Because we couldn’t get the oil to make the gasoline from those faraway lands anymore. So people had to stop using the cars.”
“What happened to all the cars?”
“They were made from steel and people needed the steel for other things, so over the years they took the cars away and melted them down.”
Sarah started rubbing her eyes.
“It’s time for you to go to sleep,” Britney said.
“But what about Rat, and Mole, and Mr. Toad?”
“They’ll be here tomorrow,” Britney said.
“What if people come and take all the books away and melt them like they did to the motorcars.”
“Books don’t melt,” Britney said.
Fifty-two
I was reading in bed by candlelight later that night when I heard a light rapping on the door.
“Yes…”
Britney came in. She was barefoot and wearing an old green chenille bathrobe that had belonged to Sandy. She sat in a chair to my left that was the place I customarily tossed my clothes if they weren’t too dirty to put on again the next day.
“What are you reading?”
“Albert Speer’s memoirs.”
“Who was he?”
“Hitler’s pet architect.”
“Hitler had an architect as a pet?”
I explained the Hitler-Speer thing to her as concisely as possible. The truth was my pulse had quickened just having her in my room, and though it was another warm evening, I began to shiver slightly.
“You’re good at history,” she said.
“I’m fascinated by it.”
“How so?”
“Where we are now in relation to where we once were. It’s quite
a strange story.”
“Oh. I don’t miss the old days so much anymore.”
“In the old days I used to fly across the country three, four times a month. Imagine that. Clear across North America and back. Boston to San Francisco, Boston to Las Vegas. Over and over.”
“What was it like, being in an airplane?”
“Didn’t you ever fly?”
“No.”
“Really? Well, I was a nervous flyer at first. Being packed into an aluminum tube with a hundred other people. And the climb was so steep. It took ten minutes or so to get up to cruising altitude where the air is thinner and there was less drag on the body of the aircraft. Finally, they’d level off around forty thousand feet, about eight miles high.”
“It makes me queasy just to hear you say that.”
“I got to enjoy it. My company paid for business class seats. They gave you free drinks and nice things to eat and they played movies that were still showing in the cinemas. You forgot you were sitting in a metal tube eight miles up in the sky.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever fly in an airplane.”
“I think you’re probably right about that.”
“When I was a little girl, I rode the train a couple of times from Albany to New York City,” she said. “You’d think they could get trains running again, at least. You don’t need oil to run a train. Even I know that.”
“Yeah, you’d think,” I said. “Except I’m not sure there’s any `they’ left out there to get them running. And I wonder where you’d go if `they’ did.”
I told Britney about my side trip to the state capitol when we were in Albany, the lieutenant governor pretending to be still part of something that had obviously dissolved all around him.
“I wonder what New York City’s like now,” she said.