The Last Pilgrims by Michael Bunker Read Free Book Online Page B

no… it’s alright. I’ll cook it up anyway.”
    Everyone was always happy with roast pork on
the plate. Ruth liked it slightly charred and glazed with honey,
served with onions and basil from the garden, accompanied by
pickled beans from the root cellar, and nopal cactus juice
sweetened with honey. No one ever complained if supper was a little
bit late when they knew that a pig was on the menu.
    Ruth went into the stone springhouse to sit
down for a moment, relishing the cool air inside. The springhouse
actually wasn’t built on a spring, as most springhouses were. It
was built mostly below ground, about 20 feet from the large
icehouse. The stone walls of the structure were nearly two feet
thick. The ice-melt from the icehouse flowed down an underground
pipe through the thick wall and into the springhouse. Stone gutters
had been built around the inside walls of the icehouse, and the icy
water filled the eight-inch deep troughs. When the dripping water
had risen enough that it crested the dam on the trough in the south
wall, it flowed down into a deep cistern where it could be pumped
up via a hand-pump when it was needed. The icy cold water was the
perfect place to store perishables, such as cheese, butter,
leftover food etc., and the trough was nearly always full of jars
and crocks of goodies, along with sealed jars of beer.
    Ruth would hang meat from hooks in the
ceiling rafters of the springhouse where it would stay cool until
Wally could come, usually in the early morning, and cook it for
breakfast, or process it for longer-term storage.
    After she had cooled herself down a bit,
Ruth hung the skinned and gutted coon carcass from a hook. She then
walked down the stone pathway past the woodshop to the tannery
where she gave the coonskin to Ana, who dropped it into a bucket of
cool water she had recently pumped up from the springhouse cistern.
From her bag, she took out the brains of the hog that she had
wrapped in grass after gutting the beast, knowing that Ana would
find them useful in her tanning process. Tanning was still somewhat
of a mystery to Ruth.
    Ana was a widow, about 45 years old,
dark-haired and beautiful. She was the official tanner of the Wall
ranch. Tanning was a full time job on the ranch and Ana was known
throughout the Vallensian territories as one of the best tanners
around. Ana’s skins, at least all those that were not used right
there on the ranch, were bundled and taken to Bethany where they
would be traded for salt and any other necessities that could not
be produced on the ranch. Ana, like all of the other workers on the
ranch, was well taken care of. Ruth’s father treated them all as if
they were part of the family.
    Ana had come to live and work on the Wall’s
ranch many years before Ruth was born, and she told fantastic and
often frightening tales of life before the crash. Ruth sometimes
got into trouble with her father for repeating Ana’s tales. Father
said that Ana would have been a great fiction writer, and sometimes
even he would sit and listen, fascinated by the stories Ana could
tell. But, on those rare occasions when he would fall under Ana’s
spell, like clockwork, after about 20 minutes of listening, he
would shake his head and gruffly order everyone back to work.
“Distractions!” he would say.
    Ruth didn’t have time for tales today. She
thanked Ana and headed back to the house to clean up. Father would
be home soon, and she wanted to talk to him about her day. She
could not wait to tell him about her pig, and the perfect kill-shot
that had even impressed Timothy the ghostman. She also wanted to
sit at her father’s feet and hear him talk about whatever news he
had from Bethany.
    In the olden days, Father told her, people
would sit around a glowing box and be entertained by strangers who
hated them and wanted to brainwash them and do them harm. That
didn’t make any sense to Ruth. What nonsense! People must have been
silly back then, or really stupid. How could watching