Lucy

Lucy tapped the handle of the pump with her fingertips, pulling them back with exaggerated speed.

Her skin, moist from washing the morning dishes, froze to the cold metal, but over such a small area she felt only the lightest pull, like touching drying paint. At nine, Lucy knew enough not to just go and grab great hunks of metal on a cold morning. She pulled the more or less dry dishrag from her back pocket, wrapped it around the handle and began pumping.

Water gurgled into her bucket almost at once. She'd drawn water just a while ago, so it hadn't had time to sink back down the pipe. She had to admit it was easier getting water with the manual pump than with the old electric one her grandpa kept trying to rig. One time he found some solar cells, another time a windmill, but he could never get water to come out, at least not reliably.

Lucy was always ready to help him with his schemes.

When he hooked up a dynamo to a bike, she pedaled furiously, but at best produced a trickle. At last, grandpa had to admit that he lost too much energy turning it from mechanical to electrical and back to mechanical.

The manual pump was more elegant.

Lucy filled her second bucket and lugged them, one in each hand, the hundred feet back to the side porch door. In a few weeks a couple feet of snow will make the walk much harder, and she'll have to decide whether it's more trouble to shovel the path or trudge over it.

She put one bucket down to open the door and then passed both inside to the kitchen before following and closing the door. The kitchen was bright with slanted southern light falling on the worn hardwood floor that they found, having taken up the linoleum that was curling in from the edges. The formica counters were still in good shape. Over the years, layers of sheetrock, paneling and linoleum had sedimented over the surfaces of the old farmhouse, but now these layers were wearing away, exposing the original home. As she straightened again balanced by her buckets, she saw that grandpa had made it downstairs and was watching her come in from his customary chair by the window.

"There's my girl," he said, eyes framed in fondness for Lucy: "She's certainly a harder worker than you ever were at her age." This was directed at Lucy's mom, who paused momentarily as she was placing eggs on the plate that held grandpa's late breakfast.

She handed him the plate, refusing to be baited. He had always teased, so his teasing was more a part of her than anything she merely had grown used to. "You sat on the couch watching TV and bickering with your sisters your entire childhood." Lucy placed the buckets on the counter near the stove.

Well water was for cooking. The cleaning water they got from the rain tub.

"Back in the day, Lucy, you know what we did?"

Lucy's mom paused briefly to compose an expression of perfect non-amusement in preparation for whatever dumbass thing her father was about to say.

"We used to get the purest, sweetest water and put it in a big white bowl." He spoke in wide cadences, as if he were telling a fairy tale to a toddler. "And then, do you know what we did?"

Lucy turned to grandpa, not quite sure where he was going.

"We pooped in it! We pooped in it and we peed in it!" He clapped his hands, delighted with himself for being shocking and immature. Lucy's mom turned her deadpan to her father, a look that asked if it was even necessary to roll her eyes at him, a look she’d given him since before she was Lucy's age.

Dad said the world didn't end one day; but the old ways of doing things just receded, a wave falling back into the ocean. Lucy understood what he meant though she'd never seen the ocean and expected she never would. Even now there were places where people drove cars and few in planes and kept electric lights on all the time, but nobody could afford that in Vermont.

Vermont had been off the grid for so long that only adults over 40 really remembered the time before when there'd been TV and supermarkets.

The first years had been the hardest, as people had to relearn the skills of self-sufficiency that had nearly been lost over generations, but there'd been no chaos or mass die-offs. In Vermont, people organized seemingly spontaneously, as small populations with rich interconnections can do. As the realization set in that the services that for a long time had been getting more and more expensive and less and less reliable were finally and completely gone, that there was no more gas, no more heating oil, and so, no more of anything else you could buy, people found the skills they needed in their hobbies. Gardeners scaled up their gardens to small farms, Blacksmiths and glass blowers that had served the tourist trade in years past took on apprentices to meet the demand. Families consolidated their generations under one roof and turned grassy lawns into plots of potatoes and onions. The state government existed now only to guard the state forests and allocate precious wood for heat.

There certainly had been plenty of schemes aimed at maintaining some piece of the old lifestyle. Grandpa had been part of a project to cut off all the lines to the old grid so they could light their town from the small hydroelectric dam on their small river. After months of tinkering without success, the project was slowly abandoned as people came to their senses and dropped out, though grandpa was one of the last holdouts. They couldn't afford to use their remaining sources of power for conveniences. They converted the hydroelectric plant into a mill for grain.

Lucy felt lucky to live in Vermont. Though she sometimes dreamed of walking the streets of the still-lit city of New York, she couldn't imagine trying to get there. Between them lay the lawless and largely dark net of roads through the old suburbs and minor cities. Where once malls and giant stores lined the streets, only two businesses thrived, beer outlets and storefront churches. The government dropped aid from the air, wiping its hands of the riots that ensued. A few drivers of armored trucks plied the route between New York and Vermont, bringing spare parts and tools that they traded for cheese and produce. They avoided the interstate highways and whole cities like Springfeld, where gangs threw barricades across the road, charging tolls that varied based on that day's level of desperation.

Grandpa sprang from his chair. Old as he was, he could still move quickly, but he was bent, having worn out all the ways a man can hold himself upright or even near upright. Apparently, he'd worn out all the customary ways of walking as well, instead lifting and twisting at the hip to move one stiff bow leg in front of the other. He came up behind Lucy working at the counter and was placing his hand on her shoulder when she turned suddenly, leaving him grasping at air. She took him in in a single glance and decided he was up to something.

"Lucy, I was hoping you could help me with a project in the barn," he announced rather loudly and then paused to give her mom a chance to consider and possibly object. If her mom had too much work to get done, she couldn't spare Lucy to go hang out with grandpa for the morning, handing him tools as he tinkered and muttered to himself. Lucy and grandpa looked to her mother expectantly. She stopped wiping the counter to regard the pair of them, for a long moment giving no indication of her decision, teasing her father in retaliation for his earlier antics. Lucy's cheeks rounded and lifted into a smile. If her mother was going to say no, she would have said so already.

Grandpa had not yet caught on when mom smiled and said, "go on."

Grandpa walked to the door and pulled his tan duck cloth coat from a peg beside the door. "Cmon." he said though Lucy was just behind him with her coat on and he was still threading his arm down the tunnel of his coat sleeve. She looked at him without lifting her head, her eyebrows coming together to question.

"Is this going to be worth it?" He knew she was just sassing him. He knew how much she loved fixing things with him or clearing brush or searching in the woods for mushrooms. He was even pretty sure that she liked to hear his old stories, though she wasn't so interested in the time before. She could imagine driving in a car, but she wasn't sure why it would be better to read words on a screen instead of from a book. She preferred stories about the many mistakes made and occasional eurekas as he and others built the world they now lived in.

He led her down the gravel path to the small door on the side of the barn. Lucy followed him inside. To her surprise, he strode past the work benches that held his half-finished projects. He continued across the main barn floor, scattering the chickens, and went straight out the back door. He turned left and made his way walking close to the outside wall. Lucy caught up to him as he stopped to peer at the house from around the corner of the barn. Seeing no activity in the windows, he loped over the twenty yards that were visible from the house to a small hillock with green metal bulkhead doors in the side. As he opened the door with one hand, he gestured to Lucy to follow with the other.

By the time she reached the door, he'd already gone down the earthen steps and was lighting the stub of a candle he'd retrieved from a long shelf. The shelves were bowed under the weight of pumpkins and cabbages, and the bins below them were filled with apples and potatoes. Grandpa walked with the candle to the back of the root cellar and placed it on the far shelf. He knelt beside a bin and began pulling potatoes out and placing them on the floor. Lucy saw that the layer of potatoes was actually quite shallow, resting on a board that served as a false bottom. When it was cleared, grandpa wedged a finger in notches made on either side of the board and lifted it out. Beneath lay four mason jars full of a clear yellow can liquid and a large tangle ball of wires studded with plastic crystals. Lucy recognized the Christmas lights.

Every year for as long as anyone could remember, grandpa had lined the front porch and second floor windows with strings of electric lights. On Christmas Eve he'd haul out the old generator and from somewhere he'd produce a half gallon or so of gasoline. For a few hours, the lights would glow. Neighbors came by to see the lights, though some thought it in bad taste to hoard gasoline for such a frivolous purpose. Lucy had always loved the lights, and even on the coldest Christmas Eve nights, she'd stay out looking at them, freezing to the bone until her mom called her inside.

Lucy was thrilled and honored that grandpa was letting her in on one of his secrets, but she felt a loss too, as she knew she'd never see them again with the same childish wonder. Rolled up and without power, they were just a green and white lump of plastic.

"Here, take these," grandpa pulled out a couple of smaller balls and handed them to her. He gathered the larger ball in his arms and headed up the stairs. He turned to close the door, crouching and looking up at the house. He made a run for it back to the barn, this time with Lucy at his side. He went in the back door and carried his bundle across to his shop, setting it down on a bench hastily cleared by a sweep of his arm. "I can get the gas later, but I've got to untangle the lights first and make sure they work."

Grandpa stood by the bench and started teasing out the first strand of lights. Lucy put one of her balls on the floor and sat out a stool to get to work on the other. She started at the end of a string where there was a weird little knob with two metal tines protruding from it. She looked at the little white lights and thought it funny that the people who made them wanted them to resemble tiny flames. She concentrated on her work. When she freed her first strand and looked up for a place to put it, she saw that grandpa had already laid two strands side by side along the length of the floor. She placed hers beside the other two, careful to put the knob thing at the same end grandpa had, and go back to work.

Soon they had all twelve or so untangled in lines on the floor.

"Now let's see if they all work," announced grandpa. He turned to rummage through stuff piled on a bench in the corner of the room.

"We have to save the gas for Christmas Eve, but we can test the lights with this," pulling out a smallish box with metal handles on either side, a hand-cranked generator. He clamped the box onto a sawhorse and placed them at the head of the first strand of lights. He put the knob tines into holes at the top of the box and waved to Lucy. "Come over here and light this thing up."

Lucy walked to her grandpa and lifted a leg to stand astride the sawhorse. She took a handle in each hand and began to turn the crank. At first, nothing happened, but then she saw a faint glow along the line that steadied and grew brighter as she cranked faster. Grandpa stood back to admire the lights. Lucy was hypnotized. In the way they dimmed or brightened with the slightest variation in her speed, she saw how her life was drawn into the lights. She cranked faster.

"Whoa young lady. Don't wear yourself out. We've got other strings to test."

She let go of the handles and the dynamo quickly slowed to a stop.

Grandpa pulled the knob out of the dynamo and inserted the knob from the second string. "Okay, let'er rip," he said.

This time nothing happened. Lucy cranked faster and faster, trying to break through what she imagined was a clog in the electricity. "Alright, hold up. Let's put this one aside for right now and move on to the next one."

He attached the third strand, but again, no matter how fast Lucy cranked, the lights refused to glow.

"Dammit," cursed grandpa, "Okay, let's try something different. Keep it going a little slower, this might take a while."

As Lucy continued to crank, grandpa took a light from the first strand and replaced the light nearest the end on the dark strand attached to the dynamo. Nothing happened, so he put the original one back in and replaced the second light.

"It's gotta be one of these," he said, "and if I can find the one that's bad, the whole string will light up" Taking each light in turn, he made his way down the string. Each time the string failed to glow, he muttered to himself more loudly until he reached the end of the line. When he put the bulb he knew to be good in the last socket and still there was no light, he glanced up at Lucy, puzzled, as if to check that she was still turning the crank.

Lucy looked up at grandpa, expecting him to announce a new angle, a new way to tackle the problem. Instead, she saw that his face was twisted in pain as she’d seen before when he slammed his finger with a hammer or dropped a box on his foot. But it wasn't the pain on his face that alarmed her. It was the fear. She could tell he wasn't sure what was happening.

Grandpa looked at the milky plastic bulb but saw no light but the dull refraction from the window.

He felt the pain rise in his chest. It did not subside or even plateau. The pain kept growing until it was unmistakable. This wasn't a muscle spasm or sudden heartburn which many times in the past had caused him to briefly contemplate what it would be like to die of a heart attack. This time it was the real thing, and he felt his equilibrium abandon him as he clutched at his chest.

The room wavered and wobbled, so he lowered himself to lie face up on the floor.

Looking up at the rafters of the barn, grandpa concentrated on the weight of fire that spread from his chest through to the tips of his fingers and toes. Slowly the pain became fascinating, as if it were removed from him, an object of study. Lucy's face appeared above him, frantic for some direction from him, some idea of what to do.

She looked over toward the door, and he knew she intended to go for help, and he knew he had to stop her because it was too late anyhow. He grabbed at her arms and caught the sleeves of her coat. He pulled her down closer to him. He was afraid she'd misunderstand, that he would frighten her, but she seemed to realize he was almost gone. As much as she longed to run for help, knowing that it would be so much easier to return to find him already dead, or at least that it would be somebody else, her mom, that would watch him die, she couldn't leave him alone.

She let out a breath onto his face and held his pained eyes.

Grandpa relaxed as it was clear she wouldn't leave him. He counted the stars in the constellation of freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. He counted the thick long lashes that no secret stash of mascara could improve. He counted the spokes of blue around the dark hubs of her eyes.