One Second After

“I think we have to take that,” Charlie said. “It’s different from what’s in people’s basements.”

John sighed and realized he had to agree even though it wasn’t much different from his commissar imagery of a few moments ago.

Sixty cattle, two or three a day turned into soup, stew, could stretch things. But far more pragmatic, how to keep control, to prevent someone else from rustling them, from raiding the farm one night, killing the owners, and then just slaughtering what they could drag away quickly, leaving the rest to rot?

Again a film image, from Dances with Wolves, the Indians finding the hundreds of buffalo slaughtered by white hunters who just took their hides and tongues, leaving the rest to rot. It could be the same here, and yet again it caught him how movies had so defined so much of the country’s image of self and now the screens were blank. A movie about us fifty years from now, if there are movies, what will it show?

“Charlie, we have to make a deal with the few farmers in this valley. We just can’t go marching up there, take their cattle, and ride off. A deal. We protect their food, they get more than a fair cut because they are sharing with the rest of the community. In exchange we protect them, their herd and crops. And Charlie, we have to keep some stock alive.”

“What do you mean?”

“For next year. A couple of males, enough females. We might be looking at next year and we’re still in the same boat. We got to keep breeding stock alive even if it means we go hungry now. In the old days, eating your breeding stock was the final act of desperation.”

“John,” Kate said. “I don’t need to hear this now. Are you saying this will still be going on a year from now?”

“Maybe. And if we don’t plan now, there won’t be a next year for any of us.”

“Ok, John,” Charlie said. “We’ll go up the North Fork later today and start talking.”

“And suppose someone up there, shotgun in hand, tells us to go to hell and get off his land?” Kate asked. “You said I grew up here. I did and I know some of these folks. They’re good people, but they don’t hold much truck with someone telling them what to do.”

“Then maybe you should be the one to go talk with them,” John said quietly.

“Me?”

“Exactly. Everyone in town knows you, Kate, even more than they know Charlie or Tom here. You going first would be nonthreatening.”

“Because I’m mayor or because I’m a woman?” she asked sharply.

“Frankly, Kate, it’s both. Tom shows up, gun on his hip, it’s commissar time. You show up, sit down with the family, have a chat, I think you can help folks with these small farms to see reason. They have to strike a deal because if they stay on their own, sooner or later someone will go for them and take what they have. We promise to post twenty-four-hour guards on their places, we offer protection, they trade some food back to the commu-nity.

“Sounds a bit like where you come from originally up in New Jersey,” Charlie said with a trace of a smile. “Protection racket.”

John tried to smile in spite of his light-headedness.

“Like it or not, that’s the way it is now. I’m dead set against people’s homes being cleaned out, but I think we can agree that farms have to be protected but something given back in return to help the entire coramu-nity.

She nodded in agreement. “Ok, I’ll go.” Charlie looked down at his notepad. “Transportation. Anything new?”

“We got three more cars running,” Tom said. “Actually I should say that Jim Bartlett down in that Volkswagen junkyard of his did. Beetles, another van.”

“He’s become a regular friend of yours,” Kate said, and there was, at least for a moment, a touch of a smile.

“Yeah, damn old hippie. Though I’m not buying his line that we should be using pot for medicine.”

“I might agree with him now,” Kellor said.

“It’s breaking the law,” Tom replied sharply.

“The cars, Tom,” Kate interjected. “Let’s stick with that.”

“All right, other garages say they can get ten or fifteen more old junkers up and going, including an old tractor trailer down at Younger’s.”

“We’ll have forty or fifty within the week,” the policeman from Swan-nanoa said quietly.

No one spoke, looking at him.

“You folks up here in Black Mountain always kind of looked down on us in Swannanoa. Maybe because we was poorer, but that poorness makes us worth more now.”