Little House on the Wasteland

Four: Restrant

Night after night, they camped among the trees. Pa would pull the handcar off the road, into the cover of the woods. Once they found a nice flat place away from the road, Laura and Mary would sweep the ground clear of rocks and nettles. Then Ma would hang up the big tarp that she had stitched from hides and scraps of old lectricmade fabrics. Finally, snug and dry beneath their little lean-to, they would unfurl their bedrolls and settle in.

Most nights, unless it was snowing heavily, Pa would backtrack a ways to muddle their tracks.

Meanwhile, Ma would begin preparing supper. If Pa said it was safe, they could have a cookfire. Ma might boil a bit of saltmeat with carrots and pickled kale and perhaps a few herbs or moss that she had spied along the road. Sometimes, Ma would bake a big round wheel of soybread in her skillet, and Laura would have warm yellow bread to dip into her stew.

On some nights, after supper, Mary and Laura could stay up and watch the fire dwindle into embers. This was Laura's favorite time. If he wasn't too tired, Pa would tell them stories or bring out his two-string and sing them some of the old traditionals Uncle Freddie had taught him as a boy.

It was not easy, sleeping outdoors on the ground night after night. The woods were cold, even beneath Laura's layers of furs and blankets. The ground was hard and uneven, even lying atop her bedroll. But Laura knew she must not complain. She knew that she must be brave and strong on their long journey to the Wastes.

Late one day, they came to the ruins of a Merican town. They had seen the ruins from afar. The town lay at the bottom of a valley, along the shores of a tiny lake. From the mountain pass where the Old Thirty-Nine Road emerged from the wooded slopes above and began to twist its way downwards, Pa had pointed out the gray shapes of old creetrock buildings. They paused there for a time while Pa consulted his map. The place had no name, at least not one that anyone had bothered to record.

Pa studied the valley below. No traces of smoke rose from the ruins. Nothing stirred. No sounds of human activity were heard. Pa was certain that the town was long abandoned.

The Old Thirty-Nine Road wound down into the valley, taking Laura and her family right towards the abandoned town. Snow was falling gently but steadily by the time they reached the ruins and Pa said they might as well stop for the day and see if they couldn't find some shelter indoors for a change. He turned the handcar. They left the old number road and made their way cautiously down a side trail that seemed to lead deeper into the old Merican settlement.

According to Pa, that trail had probably been a road once, back when people lived in those parts, covered in creetrock just like the old number roads. The town's main street perhaps.

Laura looked up and down the trail, skeptical. If there had once been a creetrock road here, the Big Woods had done a fine job of covering it up. Along the Old Thirty-Nine Road, shrubs often sprouted from the cracks and nibbled away at its edges, but the road never disappeared entirely. That was because the old number roads have deep creetrock foundations that make it hard for plants to take root, Pa had explained. Besides, trade convoys still used those roads sometimes, trampling saplings beneath boots and carwheels and helping to keep the woods at bay.

This lonely, forgotten side road was something different. Here, the boundary between road and woods wasn't always clear. As they walked further, though, Laura began to see what Pa meant. Ahead of her, she could make out a long straight swath where the ground was flat and the trees were shorter and not gathered so closely together.

On either side, Laura began to notice square columns of brick and stone. They were evenly spaced, standing in neat rows. They began to pass one after another, and Laura soon realized that they were chimneys. The houses that once surrounded them had fallen away, their wooden boards and shingles absorbed into the nest of forest foliage from which the lonely pillars rose.