Renewal 4 - Down on the River by Jf Perkins Read Free Book Online Page B

guess if the lightning gets bad, it could be.”
    “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t storm.”
    “There’s worse things than storms. Save your hope for them.”
     

 
     
    Chapter 4 - 7
    Dad recovered quickly, but I think it took a long time to shake off the guilt. I think he believed he should have done something to keep Francine alive, but eventually Mom convinced him that it was not his responsibility. At any rate, that’s the good thing about the end of the world. It keeps throwing new stuff at you to keep you from thinking about the old stuff.
    Dad always had recovery option number two. When in doubt, keep busy. He kept us shooting a few rounds a day until he was sure that we were competent with the guns. Then he stopped the regular training to save ammunition and made us pick up all our spent ammo casings on the off chance that we could reload them in the future. More to the point, he had sent Kirk over to invite the Carroll’s to our camp, on their land, for the 4th of July. In order to prepare for the occasion, Dad decided that we needed a picnic table. Of course, that meant more chopping, more cutting, and a new brand of wooden torture. In order to make the table and its benches flat, we learned to split logs into rough planks, and employed a variety of tools to smooth out the broad sides. The end result was the purest definition of rough-hewn, but compared to sitting on round logs, it worked pretty well. Unfortunately, it was all for nothing.
    When George and Martha Carroll came chugging into our campsite, they brought gifts. The most obvious of which was the picnic table strapped to his tractor’s mower deck. Kirk and I smacked our own foreheads, and Dad went from the most dumbfounded expression to maniacal laughter. Dad stepped up to help Mrs. Carroll down from her perch on her husband’s right leg. George unsheathed his cane and hopped to the ground.
    “Thought you might need a table,” George said, “But I should’ve known better.”
    Dad shrugged and smiled while everyone greeted each other.
    “You and your boys do good work, David. That must have taken an hour or two,” George said, running his hand over the rough planks of our latest project. He turned to Kirk and me. “Show me your hands, boys.”
    We held our blistered palms up for his inspection.
    “Yeah, that’s what I thought. I’ll try to to let you know ahead of time, next time,” he said with a smile. George walked back over to the tractor and plucked a cooler off of the mower deck. “Martha, will you do the honors?”
    Martha paused in her rapid conversation with Mom. She opened the big Coleman cooler and lifted out a plastic jug. “Grownups only,” she said, handing a full gallon of George’s finest moonshine to David. “But, I didn’t forget you young’uns either.” She hoisted two round green watermelons out of the cooler and set them on the table. “First of the season,” she said with a proud smile. “And, last but certainly not least...” Martha lifted a huge foil covered platter onto the table and pulled the foil to reveal a mound of pink hamburger patties, ready to cook.
    We all groaned in spontaneous pleasure. We had been living on canned spaghetti for long enough that fresh food of any kind was literally mouthwatering. George snagged a burlap sack off the tractor and threw that on the table as well. It was about twenty ears of fresh corn. What had started as a special day in name only had turned into the best day in at least month. Mom, Martha, and Lucy went to work, taking ownership of their cooking and running us males away, when all we wanted to do was hover around the food.
    It struck me again that the world had changed. Only weeks before, Mom would have resented the fact that she was expected to cook, and Lucy would not have even considered cooking. She would have starved first. Now, they both took it as their most serious duty. Was it important for what it was, or were they just afraid that if they