After The Fall Comes Winter

There isn’t much to talk about around here in Maple Corners anymore, what with all the kids gone and everything. In the old days we used to watch television, go to the mall, argue about politics and taxes and social reform - all that sort of thing. But after the war there just didn’t seem to be any point. I mean, how can any of that stuff matter when you’re busy most of the time scrounging out a living and trying not to think about what happened to the rest of the world.

I guess other survivors, if there were any and if they knew about us, would say we lucked out. We never felt a shock wave or saw a fireball, and the lethal dust clouds that killed other people in other towns were pretty far from us. If we hadn’t all seen it on CNN, I guess there’d be some who’d never believe it, like old Jake Downey, who never believed we walked on the moon, either. He maintained until his dying day that it was some hoax dreamed up by the government to divert attention from whatever underhanded thing they were up to at that time. He never explained that part too well.

‘Course, it doesn’t matter much now. Jake’s dead, been dead a long time, dead before the war. There are those who would say that was lucky for him, never to see what happened when some overpaid bureaucrat on one side or the other, or maybe some terrorist, who knows now, pushed the button that sent the silver missiles flying.

They say it was over in a couple of hours. I don’t remember much of that time. I musta been fifteen years old, and I cut class from high school that day. I remember my mom crying and daddy never came home, but I don’t remember much else about when it happened. One day I was a kid and the next I guess I was all grown up and looking for some way to feed myself and my mom. Mom never spoke another word, she just looked out of the window like she was expecting something to happen. But nothing ever did after that.

I walked up and down Main Street, looking for other people. One by one they all came out. The televisions didn’t work anymore, of course. Nothing worked anymore, except a few old cars and some farm machinery. The sky was dark all the time, someone said it was from the fires of Hell that burned the rest of the world. We never saw no fires. We found out where the edge of town was after a few weeks of trial and error. The edge of town was how far you could go before the radiation levels were high enough to kill you after repeated dosages.

So we divvied up the non-perishable foods from the Market Basket and did the same with the drugs from Slocombe’s Pharmacy, and everyone went politely back home, except old Mrs. Wasco who stayed at the Sleepytime Motel because she had been in town shopping and her house was outside the edge now.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out we were probably never gonna see anyone from the outside in our lifetimes. Maple Corners never did have much of a population, less than two thousand people counting those who were too close to the edge and didn’t make it. The population shrank to about fifteen hundred that first year and pretty much stabilized there.

I was sixteen when I started to look for a suitable wife that second year. Linda Rae O’Malley and I got on pretty well, and made it official with Reverend Jensen. Not too long after that, we had a little one, but like most of the little ones born during those next couple of years, it couldn’t live. We grieved and Linda Rae didn’t want to try again, not for a long time. Most of the girls felt that way, and there was a whole corner of the little cemetery where nearly every one of them put a small bundle in the ground. We guessed it was the radiation, but we didn’t really know.

We didn’t know too much. Maple Corners never had no university or anything, and the biggest employer around was the textile mill over in Cramden, outside the edge now. So we had to make do with what we had. We did have a county extension library, but it was pretty small. Still, I think nearly everyone in town read everything in that little place over the course of the next few years. We learned a lot about the past, and never thought about the future.

Everybody had a little garden of their own and Deke Wilson’s apple orchard became a community enterprise, despite the gray skies. We all took a turn working it and when the apples came, we all got some. By the time the cases of canned peas and carrots ran low we were all canning and drying our own foods. We never ate meats, though. We took care of the few surviving animals, more as company than anything else. All the chickens died the first year, so even if we’d wanted to, we couldn’t have eaten them or had eggs or anything. It’s funny, at first I missed all those different foods we used to have. But you get used to anything, I guess.

I was twenty-five when Linda Rae and me put my mother in the little cemetery. I talked to her then about us tryin’ to have another baby, and she agreed that maybe things were safer. A couple of little kids had been born the previous year and they both survived. And one of the girls from the old Dairy Queen, Marsha something, was visibly pregnant.

So Joey was born and he looked okay. He seemed normal and healthy and we couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Old Doc Maguire had died, but his daughter sorta took up where he left off and tried to make a go of healing. She helped deliver the boy and did some examinations and tests and things. She thought he looked okay, too, so we took him on home and raised him up. Linda Rae never did have another baby, though we tried. We decided that maybe one was all we were allotted in this world, so we did the best by him that we could.

There was something different about Joey, though, just like there was something different about all the kids born after the war. They looked like us, except for all of ‘em being so tall and skinny, and they talked like us, but there was more going on in their heads than we could even guess.

The kids who survived had all been born about ten years after the war. I guess by then we had either absorbed all the radiation we were going to, or maybe we adapted to it somehow. Anyway, after about ten years women conceived and children were born. We were thankful and didn’t question the process too much.

Another ten years went by. We had a plague one year, where about sixty people died from a respiratory infection, and then a year when the meager sunlight just wasn’t enough to grow much food and we found ourselves down to the last bits of food before the winter was over. Wanda Gordon killed and ate one of the animals, a small one. It was revolting, but she probably would have lived. I don’t know. By then our ways were pretty much set, and as we didn’t kill or eat animals, Wanda had to be driven out beyond the edge.

I watched her cross the roadway and walk, backpack weighing her down, into the distance. I wondered if the edge had receded somehow, if maybe it was safe out there further beyond the boundary than it used to be. But there was no way of knowing. And anyway, it was forbidden for anyone to go out there.

Joey and the other kids were smart, much smarter than any of their parents, and that certainly included me and Linda Rae. They developed their own way of talkin’, a sort of short hand, only out loud.

After what happened to Wanda, they fixed up a way to catch the few bits of sunlight we had and store them in lights for the times when the plants needed more sun than the battered old world could provide. We moved the gardens into the big warehouse that used to be the feed lot storage barn and fixed up the lights. We were able to grow something all year long this way, and no one would ever have to do anything bad again to eat.

Then one day Joey just upped and announced that he and the other young people were going away.

His mother and I were upset - well, everyone in town was upset - but there was no talkin’ any of them out of it and one evening they all just went to the edge, down by the road where Wanda Gordon had disappeared all them years ago, and they waited.

We waited with them, but when they crossed over the edge, we stayed behind.

We watched when the big ship that made all the noise landed and our kids got on. We watched as it lifted up into the dim sky and went clean out of sight.

No one had any more babies after that.

Sometimes I sit here on the porch in the evening and wonder why we even bother here. But where else would we go? Every year there are fewer and fewer of us. Last year old Miss Maguire, the doctor’s daughter, just walked out to the edge and kept on going. Takin’ the Big Walk, that’s what we call it. I think about doing that sometimes. Linda Rae took to her bed a few months ago, hasn’t moved since, just stares at the wall, the way my mother just stared out the window.

Wherever the kids went, I guess I kept hopin’ they’d come back for us someday. But they didn’t. At least maybe they had some kind of life out there. Maybe they found another place, sunny and beautiful, with plants and flowers and animals and stuff. I remember the sun, so bright and hot it would make you sweat.

I heard old Carl Jensen say he was gonna take the Big Walk when his missus passes on. I guess if Linda Rae don’t get any better, I might join him. Wouldn’t it be funny if everything was fine everywhere else and only Maple Corners got forgotten? If our kids were really out there in the new world, the world of sun and cities, the world we lost so long ago? Yeah, it’d be real funny, huh?

Copyright 1998 Kate Thornton

Kate Thornton lives in Pasadena, California and has written several novels and short stories in both mystery and science fiction genres. Recent publications include "The Chinese Tinker Belle", "Just Like in the Movies" and "On The Other Hand." When not writing, she works for a government contractor and teaches in the Army.

You can e-mail Kate kittyf@hotmail.com