Chapter Six
Early Days

Malcolm Reed

Our early days at Grandmother's house are busy, but not exhaustingly so. She's provided Liz with several changes of clothes, dresses, skirts, blouses and one or two pairs of trousers that must have once belonged to Grandmother or some other woman who used to live in the house. I've been given free access to her late husband's wardrobe (the contents of the chest under the bed), but she warns me, she has been widowed for decades, so I'd best check everything for dry rot before I put it on. She also pulls a few hats and some sunglasses out of a box in the attic. In addition to the light trousers and tunics I quickly come to favour, I always wear a light poncho to cover the shape of my body and Liz always has a simple shawl around her shoulders for the same purpose. In this way, we are both able to work outdoors whenever necessary without fear of being recognized by any of the surveillance satellites passing overhead.

Every day, we both help Grandmother tend to the house, the garden and her animals – two old cows, Bessie and Bossy, and a nanny goat, Nan, who find enough to eat in the arroyo where Grandmother harvests her dates and wander home every evening when she rings their dinner bell; a pair of sturdy little burros, Pious and Patience, whose only functions seem to be pulling the cart she uses on her weekly forays into the village and wandering the hills to the east in between times, searching for browse with the old swayback mare, Cora, who 'has earned her retirement,' Grandmother insists, and is good for nothing but nuzzling about your pockets looking for carrots, apples, and the occasional sugar cube. This is my first indication that Grandmother might not be quite as indigent as she appears – sugar is not cheap, sugar cubes are taxed at the luxury rate instead of as a staple and she is feeding them to an expensive-to-feed horse that no longer serves any practical purpose while using natural sweeteners made from local wild edibles for herself. On the one hand, I want to roll my eyes at her indulgence of a useless dumb beast; on the other hand, I sheepishly have to admit privately to myself that I'm not so sure I wouldn't do the same for Beans, but then Beans does at least perform the service of catching mice.

There's also a sizeable flock of chickens (more than two dozen, I think, though they're hard to count because many of them look alike and they're never still for long) who roam freely about the place pecking at bugs and mice and small lizards and whose names I don't bother to learn because one of them becomes Sunday dinner on our third day here and I realize quickly that I would rather not know them personally if they're destined to end up on my plate; two cockerels, Dingle and Dangle, who are both diligent and determined in protecting their harem and offspring from Beans; and Oddball, a fat white goose who, as a gosling, was washed downstream in the arroyo during a flash flood, adopted by one of the hens, and now thinks she's a chicken who's learned how to swim (Grandmother built her a pond out of a four meter diameter round stock tank and populated it with appropriate water plants from who knows where, though apparently during the rainy season she rides on the cows' backs out to the arroyo to swim in the creek when the water is running slow). Apart from the chicks, which appear in twos and threes with reliable regularity just in time to replace those harvested for dinner, all of the animals are like Grandmother: steady and unchanging, of indeterminate age, and well-adapted to the desert life.

With the help of Dingle and Dangle and Grandmother's deftly wielded broom, Beans learns quickly enough which small animals and what areas of the little homestead are off limits. I fully intend to keep her in the house for the first week, but that plan quickly goes out the window (with the cat, quite literally) a few hours after breakfast our first day here. Initially, she doesn't wander far, and her inquisitive mewing at my heels as Liz and I follow Grandmother on the Grand Tour to meet the animals reassures me that she won't get lost. Within just a couple of days, though, she's wandering far and wide, and apparently has had a friendly chat with Oddball about the cows as one evening she comes riding home from the arroyo on Bossy's back. She mostly fends for herself, but every evening, Grandmother prepares her a little saucer with cat-sized portions of appropriate foods from our supper – a bit of chicken or fish or a boiled egg, a few leaves of spinach, a broccoli floret, or a dab of pureed pumpkin, a small cube of cheese or half a pat of butter – "in case she caught a skinny mouse today."

A week later, Beans lets us all know she is perfectly at home by leaping into my lap as we sit down to breakfast and depositing a half-dead mouse on my empty plate.

As the tiny creature scrabbles about, its back clearly broken since its hind legs aren't functioning and it's urinating and defecating uncontrollably on my plate, Liz gasps and clutches at her imaginary pearls. Grandmother gives a loud cackle of witchy delight, which is a relief considering we are guests in her home, but perhaps not as surprising as one might have expected. Beans sits on my knee and tips her head straight back to look at me upside down, clearly expecting praise, and I think back to the literature Trip provided me on how to care for my first pet.

"Er, I know I shouldn't reprimand her for this," I tell Grandmother as Liz is clearly still in no condition for conversation, "but nothing I read really told me what I should do. She's the only pet I've ever had. What do you think I should do?"

"Cat thinks she's teachin' you how to hunt, Grandson," she explains. "Otherwise, it'd be all the way dead. If I was you, I'd take it quietly outside, break its neck to put it out of its misery, put it down somewhere just to the side of the door, thank her for it and tell her she's a good cat. Leave it there two or three days, and every time she's around when you pass by it, bend over, point to it and tell her she's a good cat. That way she'll know her gifts are appreciated and learn where to leave them for you to find.

"Meantime, Granddaughter can put your plate in the sink, pour some boilin' water from the kettle over it and get you a clean one." As I rise to follow her advice, Grandmother cuts Liz a mildly reproachful look and adds, "No need to get the vapours, girl. Cat's a cat; she's just doin' what a cat does. Dishes wash, and she'll learn better soon enough."

"Y-you mean you're not angry?" Liz asks rather tentatively.

"What would be the point in that?" Grandmother asks. "She don't know better and you two can't control what she does. First, you teach her, then she'll know."

Once we've dealt with the mouse according to Grandmother's instructions (fortunately the damage to the wretched little beast's nervous system prevented it biting me while I handled it), Beans precedes me back to the table. Her confident, sinuous walk and her raised tail, curled like a fluffy question mark, assure me that she feels her present was appropriately admired and sufficiently appreciated. When she hops up onto my seat and peers across the table as if expecting to be served like the rest of us with sausage gravy over those savoury scone-like things Americans call biscuits, Grandmother reaches over and scratches her ears.

"Good girl," she says warmly. Then pointing her finger in the cat's face, adds sternly. "Now, no more mice at the table, Miss Beans!"

As I draw close, she gently nudges Beans off the chair so I can sit again and we can begin our meal.

=/\=

Every day, after the animals are tended, breakfast is eaten, the garden is weeded and watered as necessary, and the other morning chores such as making beds and washing up are completed, there is a project. We spend a full five days taking inventory, which is how Liz and I both learn for certain that Grandmother may have chosen a Spartan life, but she is hardly impoverished.

There is a cave in the rocky outcrop that forms the back wall of the house. It stays relatively cool all day, and the interior has been worked to smooth the walls and make them square, plumb and flush so that they can be lined with shelves. In a row up the middle are crates, boxes, bins, two industrial-sized chest freezers and a spare fridge, which, like the lights that illuminate the cave and the fridge in the house, run off solar panels sitting outside. Every jar, pot, bag, crate and vessel, every bundle of herbs, packet of powders and box of vegetables, every jug of homemade spirits or wine, every bottle of juice and vinegar, every package of meat, poultry, fish, fruit or veg in the freezers is counted, and where there are multiples, they are sorted by date. Then the empty boxes, crates and containers are counted, and the bales of hay and sacks of grain in the loft over the stable, and the bales of wool and bundles of rags, and the hand-braided rag rugs, hand-woven blankets, and hand-knitted hats, scarves, mittens and gloves, jumpers, shawls and coverlets in the rafters of the house.

It seems Grandmother is a one-woman cottage industry of handicrafts and artisanal foodstuffs. The wool is part of her share of the shearing of a flock to the north that she helped her nephew buy years ago. She's a mostly silent partner who trusts her nephew to get the best price for the raw wool, and banks her share of the proceeds, but she takes a few bales in trade every year, dyes it with natural pigments, and spins it into yarn which she works into traditional and contemporary textiles and garments for sale at the village store. The rags she collects from her neighbours or in her travels, sometimes picking them from the trash, sometimes buying or bartering for them; these are braided into rugs or sewn into quilts and coverlets or dolls for children. The food items she hunts, fishes, shoots, traps, forages, grows and preserves herself. The hay and grain she buys outright to be sure she always has sufficient feed for her animals. She says she also used to make milk and cheese for personal use and sale, but when she started going to the distribution gatherings over a decade ago, she had to give it up. Running a dairy, even on a small scale, requires hours of daily dedication to milking morning and night (not to mention cheese-making and butter churning in between the milkings), especially in the desert where you have to move your herds from one arroyo to another every other day.

It would be rude to ask, but I have to admit I'm burning with curiosity to know what she does with the proceeds from her various lines of business. Considering the quantities of, really, just about everything our inventory reveals, I have to think she's turning a tidy profit.

After the inventory, we spend a day loading Grandmother's cart and another preparing a second load. She's going to take her wares into the village store where some of it will be sold to her friends and neighbours and some will be sold on to distributors who will then sell it on to other stores in other places for other consumers.

Liz will go with her, to check the news and get the lay of the land. I've been growing my beard out – it's shocking how much grey there is in it! – but it will be another month or so until I have sufficient coverage to truly mask my identity. But a floppy hat and large sunglasses along with a pretty green and white gingham frock that might once have been Grandmother's fifteen or twenty kilos ago and a lovely hand-tatted lace shawl are an adequate disguise for Liz. Even with her face plastered all over the news, she's not as familiar as me; it's still a risk, but not a very big one as long as she doesn't engage with any strangers.

Meanwhile, I plan to do a little stock-taking myself.

=/\=

After waving Liz and Grandmother goodbye in the early light of dawn, I go back into the house and find a pencil and a pad of paper in the sewing table. Grandmother said Beans would need a cat flap, and while she's been coming and going through the windows during the day, I am sure it'll eventually come in useful at night or when the wet season comes (if we stay here that long), especially once I've installed the shutters Liz suggested. Beans never did use the litter box, so that was dumped and cleaned out soon after our arrival. I've found her preferred toileting area a few dozen meters from the house, and I make a point of checking it at least every other day as a way to monitor her health and make sure she hasn't picked up any intestinal parasites.

When the harvest we've been preparing for arrives, I'll be happy to learn and do whatever Grandmother needs from me; but she'll also have Liz available to help with processing the various local foods she gathers from the desert, and I have other skills that she won't need to teach me. Looking around inside the house, I can see light passing through chinks in the roof and the three wooden walls, so those will need patching. If I could acquire sufficient quantities of the right materials, I could probably install a proper ceiling, too, and insulate it by laying fibreglass or styrene on top of the ceiling between the rafters. Then the few boards which currently lie on top of the rafters and a few more could become the floor of a permanent attic, which I could possibly insulate further by attaching rails to the outside of the roof, laying more fibreglass or styrene between them, and building a second, shingled or metal roof over the existing one. Of course, a proper attic demands a set of pull-down stairs for Grandmother to get up there.

The hard-packed earthen floor is nearly as smooth and easily swept as marble right now, but I can't help wondering what it's like in the wet season. I don't know how I'd go about getting tile, but boards might be easier to acquire. There's probably a tumbledown, abandoned shack somewhere around here, or even a proper ghost town with lumber to salvage. I might even be able to obtain my theoretical insulation and shingles there. Or perhaps Grandmother can suggest a way I can obtain some sort of goods from the desert to barter in exchange for the resources I need.

The oil lamps seem an unnecessary risk when it would be easy to wire the little house and run it off a few solar panels. Clearly, Grandmother is already comfortable with that level of technology as evidenced by her refrigerators and freezers. With the bidet sprayer in the outhouse and a pump just a few feet away for the stock, I have to wonder why she doesn't have proper plumbing in her house. She uses a basin to wash dishes in the dry sink and has a bucket under the drain in case something spills, but ultimately, she carries her wastewater out to a pit behind a small hummock of earth behind the stable where she also disposes of dirty straw, animal waste, refuse from the garden and kitchen garbage.

Stepping outside again, I realize the front of the house faces south. An awning to shade the wall would certainly keep the interior cooler in the afternoon. There's a barbecue pit on the east side of the house, presumably so it can get the afternoon shade, and it has a few loose blocks. Perhaps after I get all the necessary work done, I could pour a cement patio, build an awning to provide additional shade, and add a table and some chairs so Grandmother will be able to dine al fresco on fine evenings. Of course, if she knows anything about it and would be willing to supervise the labour, I'd be quite keen to try my hand at building her a brand-new adobe house. Whatever the case, one thing is sure. Grandmother is getting older and she deserves to live in a snug, secure home that stays dry in the rainy season.

The stable is in much the same state of disrepair as the house, and Grandmother has already been fretting about getting a tarp to cover her hay and grain when the rainy season comes. The little corral leans drunkenly this way and that, so she's even resorted in two places to tying the rails in place because they're no longer able to reach the slots where they're meant to be inserted into the tilting fence posts. There's a wobbly support post inside the stable and the stall doors all sag so badly on their hinges that they've scraped quarter-circle wedges in the floor.

At night, the hens, cockerels, chicks and Oddball all crowd into an empty stall with no proper roosts or nesting boxes. I don't know when or where I might have learned that this was not an appropriate situation for the birds (perhaps Aunt Sherry, who was fond of all animals), but something should be done about it. Behind the stable between the building and the hill which blocks the sight and smell of the waste pit, there is what used to be a proper henhouse, so it's really just a matter of fixing it up, and maybe expanding it. Like the house, the stable could easily be wired for electric light, ending the dangerous need for oil lamps among all the dry hay and unpredictable animals during the evening chores.

Two other structures well east of the house are initially something of a mystery to me. They are identical in size and shape, three meters square and low enough that I can reach up and touch the inside of the roof without having to stand on my toes. One is very solidly built, almost airtight except for a small gap at the peak of the roof on each end, and with evidence that it has been carefully maintained and regularly repaired. The fire pit in the bottom and the strong smoky smell I first noticed as I approached tell me this must be a smokehouse. The other shed seems to be missing every other board in its walls (though the roof still seems to be free of leaks as far as I can tell by standing inside and looking for daylight shining in through any holes) and is lined on the inside with a wire screen. If I had to guess, I'd say this building was used to dry herbs. Both structures have dozens of poles running from wall to wall with the lowest ones starting about thirty centimetres off the ground and the top ones being as high as I can comfortably reach.

From the noises they're making, the motors and compressors on the refrigerators and freezers could use some preventive maintenance, and I spotted at least one frayed electrical cord with a dangerously exposed wire during our inventory. Even the little outhouse whistles with the wind at night, and the water tank that allows gravity to supply the bidet can only be filled halfway because there's a hole rusted in it on the side.

Liz and Grandmother have left me some lunch in the fridge – a sandwich of some kind of wild game and the cheese that reminds me of cheddar with greens and mustard on a hearty bread, a few dates, and some kind of pickled mix of desert veg that I find surprisingly refreshing, perhaps because it's replacing the electrolytes I've lost through perspiration. I take my time and savour the meal, frankly surprised by the appetite I've managed to work up just walking around and looking at the place. Then I wash and dry my plate and put it away before getting myself a glass of water and going back to sit at the table.

I have a list of repairs and improvements I'd like to make that's four pages long. Some are urgent, some are important, some are both and some are merely cosmetic or convenient. With structural integrity and security being my necessary first priorities, shutters for the windows and fixing the wobbly support in the stable quickly jump to the top of the list. Unfortunately, I have neither hinges for the shutters nor cement to set the post, so I start a list of supplies I'm going to need. I learned some respectable carpentry skills helping Dad with Mom's DIY projects around the house on holidays from school when I was a boy, but I've never had to order the materials before. I know I'll need lots of nails and screws in various sizes for different projects, but I've no idea of the specific names of any of them and while I could calculate the exact number I expect to use, that seems a dreadful waste of time. The more I think about it, the more confident I am that Grandmother will be able to help me with that, and if she can't, I'm sure the shopkeeper in town will be able to help her.

Once I've prioritised my tasks and generated a complete list of materials, I head back out to the stable. There are eight stalls, but only five of them are used to house animals. Cora and the cows each have their own stall. The burros, Pious and Patience, share a stall with Nan, and the birds crowd themselves into the fifth one every evening. The other three stalls are being used for storage. One of them's been converted into a very tidily organized tool crib, one holds scrap metal, lumber, wire and other materials, and the third is filled with sacks of feed and supplies for the animals. I'm sure in there I can find a suitable hammer and saw, a bit of wood, and enough nails to produce a satisfactory cat flap.

Under other circumstances, it certainly wouldn't be my first choice for a project to complete. It has nothing to do with security or structural integrity, and it's neither important or urgent to me, though for Beans I am sure it will be necessary as soon as I get the shutters installed; and who knows, by the time I scare up the materials I need for the cat flap, I could just stumble across the hinges I need for the shutters.

Once the cat flap is done – and the shutters, if I can find the hinges – I'll start clearing out the old chicken coop. I don't want to begin repairs on it right away because I want to consult with Grandmother in case she would like to make any changes. That should keep me busy until Liz and Grandmother return, which Grandmother said would be shortly before sunset, and I'm sure Liz will have news from town. So, we'll all have something to talk about over dinner tonight.

If you have been enjoying this story, please consider leaving a review.