Read Renewal 2 - Echoes of the Breakdown for Free Online Page B

do from that point on, Mom took it as reality, not some wild theory of my father’s, and she performed every last necessity as if her family’s life depended on it. That was good, because all too often, it did.”
     
    Chapter 2 – 5
    Arturo and Dad did the weapon collection and corpse dragging, taking the bodies off in the same direction as the first two, and kicked dirt onto the drying blood in the camp before they called us back from behind the log where we were hiding. We came back to find our mother sitting almost as catatonic as Francine, who still hadn’t moved an inch. I never forgot that she pointed out the men, but I doubt if anyone else even knew. Lucy went to Mom, and sat down next to her. I talked to keep Tommy and Jimmy distracted from the mood of the place. I don’t know what they saw, but they seemed unaffected after they got over the shock of all the guns going off.
    “We made a lot of noise, so everybody keep a sharp eye out, ok?” Arturo said.
    Dad was staring into the distance for long seconds, but managed to shake himself out of it. He quietly passed around paper more bowls and plastic spoons. He walked around with the huge pan, and spooned chili into our bowls. I sat in a little triangle with the boys, and showed them how to crush saltines into the chili. We ate hungrily, while the rest of the party didn’t eat much at all.
    Finally, Dad picked up his bowl. “Let’s not waste good food, people,” he said, and started mechanically shoveling chili into his mouth. One by one, everyone else followed his example. All except Francine, who ignored her chili until it grew cold beside her.
    After lunch, a little bit of life began to stir in our group again. Dad and Arturo made a quick plan to try for more supplies from the school, and rumbled off in the station wagon. He had left us with a small ax, and told Kirk and me to cut down some of the little saplings on the edge of our woods. He had shown us the type of trees to cut, and warned us not to cut anything else. Kirk had the ax of course, being the oldest, and headed over to the trees Dad had indicated. We were in boy heaven. Like all young boys, axes presented a terrible temptation to us. We had never really used one, since cutting down anything in our yard back home would have meant a fate worse than death, and we knew that instinctively. Here, we had a whole grove of potential ax targets and a license to kill trees. Awesome, at least until we learned the next stage that any boy with an ax learns. Cutting down trees is hard work!
    We chopped and chopped on the first tree, taking turns as our flabby suburban arms grew tired. The tree was only about three inches in diameter, but it could have been the size of a house for all the progress we were making. Kirk went at it with a vengeance, chopping straight into the side of the tree with all his might. I was more deliberate, taking swings and trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. My pace made Kirk impatient, and he began to give me a hard time about doing half the work he was doing. He didn’t complain too much, though, because it took me longer to wear my arm out, and he got more rest. Eventually, out of pure frustration, I took a wild swing, coming down on the tree at angle, and the ax sank in almost an inch. We looked at each other with the same basic thought. Eureka !
    From that marvelous breakthrough, akin to the discovery of fire as far as we were concerned, it only took us a few minutes to work out a technique that involved chopping at alternate angles, cutting a deeper v-shaped notch until the ax broke through to the other side. With our new skills in play, the small trees came down at respectable rate, and we had twenty or thirty of them stacked up when we heard the station wagon rumbling and slithering back through the tall grass. We grabbed the ax and ran the seventy yards back to meet them at our camp.
    Arturo and Dad got out of the car with smiles on their faces. Apparently