Little House on the Wasteland

Twenty-Eight: A Visit from the Black Snake

Midsummer came and went. Still it did not rain. The creek beside the shanty was now no more than a damp streak darkening the bottom of a dry gully. Crescent Pond was a sliver of its former self. The billabong had retreated from the wattle trees that surrounded it, leaving cracked earth behind.

The wattle leaves were brown. The wastegrass was brown. It seemed to Laura as if the whole world was brown.

The soy field was withering beneath the heat. Already, many of the stalks had shriveled and collapsed, never to rise back up. The other crops were faring hardly better. The carrots they had harvested had come out of the ground short and stubby, and just a single pepper had ripened on the parched little vines that sagged against the wattle stakes Pa had pounded into the soil to prop them up.

Only the hemp field seemed to be flourishing. Back behind the shanty, a grove of plants had sprung up, taller and taller with every week. Laura and Mary could hide and seek among the foliage or pretend that they were back in the Big Woods, hidden beneath its dense canopy.

One day, when the grove had grown nearly as tall as the shanty roof, it came time to harvest the hemp. Pa went through with his sickle and chopped the plants down, stalks and all. When all those tall hemp stalks lay in piles on their sides, Laura helped Ma and Pa hunt through them and pluck out all the seeds. They came away with baskets full of hemp seeds, which Ma would use to make oil and milk and flour.

Only Pa's three pipeleaf plants remained standing where they were. Earlier that summer, Pa had uprooted them and moved them off by themselves. All three were female, Laura knew, for only female hemp flowered and only if the plants were not too close to the male plants.

When all the seeds had been collected, the plants were left in the field to ret. At night, Pa would sprinkle water over the cut stalks to make the retting go more quickly. After a week, all the hemp leaves had decayed, and the bark had turned from green to a dark gray like new-forged iron. Now the fibers would be soft enough to separate from the stalk.

Pa constructed a hemp break, which was a tool made up of several thick wooden boards. One board would swing downward on a hinge, and the hemp stalks would be pounded and crushed between the boards. Another board was lined with iron nails, their sharp ends all sticking up like a row of teeth. This was called a hackle. After the hemp stalks had been crushed, they were run through the hackle, and their silky hairs would begin to unravel.

The previous summer, when Ma and Pa had processed their last hemp harvest in the Big Woods, Laura had only watched. Now, she was old enough to help. She helped beat the stalks over the hackle and helped unwind the strands and peel them away from the woody core. Then, as the hemp fiber began to accumulate in a corner of the shanty in tangled piles, she helped make rope.

Laura liked rope-making the best. She and Mary worked together. First, they drove a stake into the ground. Then Mary looped a bundle of hemp fibers around the stake and stretched them out as far as they would go. She twisted and twisted that hemp until it started to kink and coil. Meanwhile, Laura did the same thing with a second bundle of hemp. When both lengths of hemp were twisted up, they would twist them both together. Then they tied knots on both ends to make the strands stay put, and that was the rope.

They were making rope out in front of the shanty one morning when Laura looked up and saw something that made her drop her half of the rope mid-twist. The coiled hemp fiber sprang away from her hands and burst apart into dozens of individual hairs. Mary turned to her. Beneath the darkness of her bonnet, there was a look of scolding on her face. But then she saw the alarm in Laura's eyes and followed her gaze.

There, out beyond the brown grass, moving across the otherwise empty plains of the Wastes, there were people. Not one or two or even ten people. There were thirty or forty of them or even more. Laura tried to count all the distant figures and gave up. And amongst the procession there were bisox as well. The animals all had large bundles tied across their hairy backs. Sticking out from both ends of these bundles, Laura could make out the shape of long tent poles.