Drop City

splitting wood (Steve as a down payment on the dinner he knew to expect), drinking beer out of Mason jars and keeping an eye on the weather. It looked like rain--or sleet--and if the wind settled there would be frost for sure. Sess had his woodpiles heaped up at the four corners of the garden, ready to generate some heat through the night, because like every tiller of the earth he wanted to extend the growing season as long as possible, and you never knew, you could have a killing frost tonight and then a week or two of Indian summer to follow. He'd grown some champion tomatoes in the greenhouse, Early Girls and Beefsteaks both, and the cherries had run riot till he had to lift a panel off and let them creep out into the world. They'd had butternut squash till it was coming out their ears, and there was plenty more of it ballooning on the vine, and pumpkins too. She'd been canning day and night, stewing beans and tomatoes and zucchini in the big pot on the stove, peas, broccoli, anything that came up out of the ground in the crazy abundance of light. Her herb garden was a jungle in itself, and the root cellar was stacked high with carrots, onions, potatoes, turnips.
    She'd just put the bread in the oven when there was a tap at the door and Iron Steve shifted into the room. He was bent nearly double to avoid cracking his head on the doorframe, which he'd already managed to do twice in the course of the afternoon and too many times to count in the past. Pamela didn't know how tall he was exactly--six-six, six-seven--but he towered over everybody in Boynton like an old-growth tree, and with his long-billed cap cocked at an angle on his head he grazed the ceiling of the cabin and had to work his way through a gauntlet of lanterns, kettles, tools, spatulas and fry pans hanging from the rafters just to get to the table to sit down. Pamela had no problem with that. She liked him. He might have been tight-lipped and more than his share of odd, not yet thirty and already a proto-coot, drunk more often than he was sober, but for all the raw-boned mass of him and the hard Slavic architecture of his face, he was gentle and good at heart. Before he'd got his hat and gloves off she handed him a cup of coffee, a can of evaporated milk and the sugar bowl.
    “Bakin', huh?” he said, blowing steam off the cup.
    “That's right,” she said. “What else is a young housewife to do-especially on a day like this. Think it'll snow?”
    “Uh-uh.”
    “Frost?”
    “Oh, yeah. No doubt.”
    There was a pause. She laid a few more sticks on the fire--the trick was to keep a consistent temperature for the hour or so till the bread was done. “Those hippies ever get anything out of their garden?”
    “Not much. Rabbits got most of it.”
    “Plus they started late.”
    Steve just nodded. He drank off an inch of coffee, poured half the sugar jar into the cup and then filled it back up with evaporated milk.
    “They know enough to light smudge fires tonight?” She couldn't help worrying for them--for Star, especially, and Merry, she liked Merry too and wanted to see her make it through all this without suffering, or suffering more than she could bear. It was amazing--they were all so naive, so starry-eyed and simplistic, filled right up to the eyeballs with crack-brained notions about everything from the origins of the universe to the brotherhood of man and how to live the vegetarian ideal. They were like children, utterly confident and utterly ignorant--even Norm Sender, and he must have been forty years on this planet. They should have known better. All of them.
    “I already told them, but they're mostly just sitting around the stove in that big clubhouse they built, you know, playing cards and board games and that sort of thing.”
    “What about Verbie, you tell her?” She poured herself a cup of coffee and eased in at the table across from him, the space so tight their elbows clashed every time they lifted the cups to their mouths. “If anybody'll get it done, she will. She's a pretty dynamic girl.”
    Steve ducked his head and looked away. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I told her.”
    Another pause. A gust ran across the roof like a jet plane coming in for a landing. She glanced up at the window and saw the first white driven flakes in horizontal motion. “How's that coming,” she said, “you and her?”
    He caught her eye for an instant, then glanced up at the window. “Guess I was wrong,” he said. “But it won't amount to