It was the necessary new construction, as much as replacement, which had caused the shortage to last so long.
The Conner house needed paint. Every house did, these days. But paint was short, also, though not rationed. They hadn’t bothered yet to try to get the house back exactly on its foundations. Men had come, that first winter, with powerful jacks and pushed the frame building as near to its proper position as they could. Joe Dennison had helped with his bulldozer. And Ed Pratt had followed with bricks and cement, bringing out “temporary” foundations to support overhanging sills and to close in the basement. A power pole, sawed on a diagonal at the top, leaned across the drive from a concrete base on the ground to the eaves, a brace against winter wind.
Have to paint that pole, Ted thought; wouldn’t want it to rot. He moved again, drowning out the cicadas in the trees with a not dissimilar sound.
His father had boarded up all the windows that first winter, when there was no window glass and when he had been in the hospital. At the Country Club, that was—with many other people. He was among the lucky. Plenty of them hadn’t left that place alive. They’d died of about everything you could think of, injuries and burns, shock and even of radiation, like that Catholic priest and the Baptist minister. So many people…!
For a moment, the fear of those days returned to him. No one had been sure of anything.
Everything was short—food, blankets, bandages, medicine. Nobody knew whether the war was over or not; they knew only that the Soviet planes didn’t come back. Mobs were ravaging the countryside; for weeks it seemed the armed forces couldn’t stop them, couldn’t restore order, couldn’t prevent the looting and the murdering and everything else. Everybody was scared, scared the bombers might return, scared the mobs might come back to the cities or to what was left of cities.
That time passed.
Peace came. Then, for more weeks, the burying. It was still going on when he could sit up in bed and look out the window. They made a new cemetery of the Green Prairie Country Club golf course, the last nine holes. Digging and blasting all through February and March, burying people, or whatever they found that had been a person. Later that spring, in common with other bombed cities, they designed their Cenotaph and it stood now above the graves-a monument to the ninety-some thousand known dead of Green Prairie. There was one in River City, also-for a hundred and twenty thousand. At what had been the ball park.
Ted mowed down the edge of the sidewalk.
It must have been—when?—around June, around this time, two years back, that they’d stopped all the mobs. What a job! Still a job! Some of the towns and villages that city dwellers had overrun were almost as bad off, afterward, as the bombed areas. Nobody knew, exactly, how many people had been killed by the crazed fugitives or how many people had been killed in self-defense and killed by the soldiers and the police. The total was thought to be more than a million.