CHAPTER 67, April, 2016
Two more brand new calves were up and nursing when Ed walked over to his farm to feed in the evening and check on the cows. The rest of the cows all looked to be ready to drop a calf any day, so he made sure the feeding area was clean, they had fresh bedding, and he gave the cows some extra ground feed. Ed was up to 15 brood cows now that all looked healthy and content. Last year's crop of calves were growing fast and eating enough that he began to hope for new pasture grass soon.
The Fescue had greened up as soon as the snow was gone, but the clover he had seeded with it was just starting to show enough green to be seen across the field behind the barn. He stayed long enough to see them all go to the pond to drink, then come back to the barn to get out of the misty rain. The cows with new calves were halfway to the barn when three coyotes came galloping out of the trees, then 2 more, encircling the cows with calves and half a dozen others. Ed ran for the barn driveway where he had left his old Springfield rifle.
He laid the rifle stock against the corner of the barn for a rest and sighted on one that was farther out from the herd. When the rifle boomed, the coyote dropped in a pile and the others took flight for the trees, headed north toward the old Duncan place. Ed swung the rifle at the departing coyotes and squeezed the trigger again. As that one fell, he moved on to the one closest to the tree line and hit it, but it struggled to it's feet and trotted on 3 legs out of sight. By the time he cycled the bolt again, they had all disappeared.
He looked at the cows that had circled the baby calves in a protective huddle, shaking their heads aggressively. They might have fought off the attack by themselves, he thought, but he'd thin out the coyotes every chance he got. He looked around and picked up his empty brass and pocketted it for reloading later. As he reloaded his rifle Ed heard another shot from the Duncan farm, then a second one. It sounded like the neighbor had got in some licks, too. Bob Clemmons kept a watchful eye on Ronnie's herd of hogs, and he hated coyotes as much as anyone. Mike had reloaded some shotgun shells for Bob with home made buckshot cushioned with sawdust, a very lethal load at up to 50 to 75 yards.
Ed slung his rifle over his back and walked out in the mist to gather up the dead coyotes. He dragged them to the driveway one at a time and left them in a pile. Ed started his walk back home. He would drive the truck back later to pick up the coyotes. The meat would be run through his cranked meat grinder then spread out to dry slowly in his home made dehydrator over the wood stove. He had more than enough to feed his chickens for now, so he'd probably trade it off to Ronnie to use in hog feed. The bones would be dried on the hen house roof and later ground in his hammermill to put on his garden. The pelts would be dried on stretchers and given to the tanner toward Ed's next leather purchase. All of the proceeds didn't amount to a lot, but it would pay for his rifle shells and some besides.
The neighborhood came to full alert when they heard the shooting. Ed knew this and stopped at Gerald's house to tell him what happened, then at his son's house on the way out with the truck to pick up the coyotes. Mike said he'd help him skin them out. Ed loaded the coyotes then drove over to Ronnie's place where he met Matthew at the driveway carrying a rifle and explained. The young man thanked him and walked back to the house.
Since he was close, Ed drove across the road to tell Bob what he shot at and to see if Bob had any luck. He had. There were 3 dead coyotes in his barn driveway, the first hung up and being skinned.
"How'd you get 3 with 2 shots?" Ed asked.
"You got one and he just made it over here to die. You take him. The hide belongs to you," Bob said.
"No, the two I've got is all I can handle tonight. You're welcome to the hide. Just wanted to let you know it wasn't outlaws I was shooting at."
Bob grinned and said, "They're outlaws as far as I'm concerned. They can make a mess out of a herd of hogs."
"Well," Ed said as he got back in his truck, "That's 5 of 'em we don't have to worry about now. See you later. It's getting dark and we both have work to do."
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Neal Davis didn't have the security problem that Wes and Larry did, since the back of his farm had steeper and higher banks above the creek, and he had always pretty much kept to himself, so they didn't have a lot of company. It would be a while before the ground dried enough for him to begin putting in crops, so he spent some time opening boxcars and containers. He was tickled pink with the next car he opened, it being a shipment to some big feed store, he supposed. There were pallets of the brown salt blocks he fed his cattle (he had run out of those), some blocks of molasses and magnesium to prevent grass tetany, and the rest of the car was filled with bags of dried pork meat scrap, which he knew as "tankage" from many years ago when he started farming. It was a protein supplement that was richer than soybean meal, and it would keep practically forever in the plastic lined bags. Neal wasn't young, but he was still fit. Even so, it took him a couple days to carry enough of the 50 pound bags up the steep bank to haul to the old grain bin he used to store such things. It was hard work, but it was all sorely needed things to feed his stock.
That had kept him occupied, but he was getting more curious all the time about the rest of the cars and opened a couple more containers on the next flatcar. He wasn't much of a fisherman, but he knew he had a fortune in fishing equipment when he got a look at the load addressed to Bass Pro in Clarksville. The shipping papers inside listed hundreds of fishing items, and almost as many clothing items. The prize, though, was cartons of archery equipment--compound bows, graphite arrows, hunting broadheads, and pages of accessories, all of it made in China and shipping direct to Bass Pro.
The other container didn't excite him much, although he knew it was worth a lot. It was a shipment of parts from Rednekk Trailer Supply to some trailer manufacturer in Kentucky. The shipping papers said it had hitches, stub axles, rims with tires, and springs. He figured somebody would want to make something out of all that, but he left it where it was for now, picked up his big pipe wrench and crowbar and went on to the next one, a boxcar.
He read the shipping papers twice and part of it again, before he began to believe it. The car had the yellow placard that said, HAZARDOUS MATERIAL, and sure enough, inside were boxes printed with "A. Uberti" and addressed from Accokeek, Maryland to a distributor. There was a separate shipping document from Remington Arms, a re-shipment from the Uberti comany to their distributor. It listed numerous calibers of ammunition he only vaguely remembered, like .44-40, .45 Long Colt, and .45-70. From what he could see reading the papers, this company must be a maker of old style guns, because it listed things like Trapdoor rifles and Colt single action revolvers. He used his belt knife to cut open a carton and found it full of 1873 Carbines, replicas of Winchester's fine lever action rifle chambered for .45 Colt.
Neal wasn't a "gun nut" as he called the people who bought one gun after another just to have them, but he knew what he had in that one car was worth as much or more than his farm. He struggled to get past that carton to the one just behind the car side by the door. it required that he cut away and half emptied the carton of rifles to get to the pallet labeled Remington Arms Company. It was full of boxes of ammunition. Neal put all the rifles back in the carton except the one he'd laid aside and took out several boxes of ammunition, then closed the car door. Having that many guns sitting there made him nervous. He'd heard on TV what some people had done to rob gun stores when the trouble all began. He decided that he'd seen enough for today and went to the house, after figuring out how to load and work the simple lever action rifle.
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Olivia Davis was getting more curious about what they might have sitting in those rail cars, so she encouraged Neal to open the rest of them. There was only one more boxcar. The rest were flatcars with 2 containers on each one. He had noticed some leakage from the boxcar so he opened it next. When he released the plug-seal door, a brown sludge came dripping out. The stench made him nearly lose his breakfast. It was filled with canned food that had apparently frozen and burst open the cans, then rotted.
He closed that one as fast as he could and went to the barn for a bucket and a shovel. The bucket he used to dip water from the creek and slosh the brown ooze off the car and the wash down the tracks and ties below. Neal shoveled some dirt over the mess on the ground and that helped some, but the stench was still bad. It looked like rain, so maybe the smell would diminish soon.
Knowing better than to disappoint his wife, he went back to work opening containers. The first one wasn't going to be of much use, being full of washing machines from The GE plant in Louisville. The problem was, very few people could afford much electricity now, let alone a new washer. The other container on that car had a shipping label addressed to Big Lots on the boxes inside. He cut open an unmarked box and found plastic bags of inflatable Halloween decorations--tombstones, ghouls, ghosts, a ten foot inflatable spider, and witches with brooms that looked like they crashed into something. This wasn't going well at all today, he thought, but dutifully moved to the next flatcar.
Neal's next discovery helped make up for his earlier bad luck when be found a shipment from Marion Kay Spice Company. The boxes were smaller than he had been finding, and marked Cayenne Pepper, Vanilla Extract, Cinnamon, Black Pepper, Cloves, and Bay Leaves that he could see from the door opening. A carton of each went to his wagon on the hill above. He dug deeper and found granulated garlic, mustard seed, allspice, celery seed, coriander, and several kinds of extracts like lemon, almond, and butter flavor. There was more further back in the container, but he called that good for now and went on to the other container on that car.
Proctor and Gamble was the name on the shipper he found, but the aroma told him it was cleaning products. All he could see were cartons of Tide and Dawn detergents, but the papers said there were Ivory soap and Mr. Clean products as well. Neal took a carton of both detergents to the wagon. Olivia would like those, and they had lye soap they had made, so he left the rest for now, but got out his pocket notepad and wrote down what he'd found so far. It was close to lunch time, or at least he was hungry, so he went to the house with his small load and the news of what he'd learned. He had five more cars with 2 containers each to look into later. It was time he got the garden plowed up and planted some things, so this was going to have to wait a while. Food came first in his mind.
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Struggling internet providers tried to provide service, but after some of their electronics failed the only service for most places was dependent on telephone lines, and there was little or no maintenance on those lines now. The tower that gave Ed Wilson internet service was still working, so when it came back on the last time, he and Mike dutifully paid the fee when they were in town once a month. Todd Reynolds also had service, and gladly paid for it so Alicia could access the State Education site for teaching and testing materials. Todd watched the financial reports sometimes, mostly to get the current prices on oil and watching currency exchange rates. The various statistics put out by the government were always out of date and suspect anyway. There was still a BBC News site, but it was as sanitized as the rest of the so-called news. They still monitored the shortwave radio for real news.
The last he had heard, the US dollar was staying pretty stable, but inching down relative to the Chinese Renmimbi, as China recovered faster from the world currency reset. Japan's Yen had been toast since the reset, and the shortwave news from China, always a critic of the Japanese, said that millions of Japanese were starving due to their inability to afford imported foodstuffs. There was no news of significance from the Mideast, beyond the normal butt-kicking going on between Israel and their neighbors. Russia had made an offer to sell more natural gas to Europe, but their stranglehold on Europe's energy supplies had cratered the economy so badly that there was almost no economic activity outside Germany. The Mediterranean countries had devolved to something like feudalism, from what little news was known about them.
The UK had begun to dig out from their economic rubble, using their highly regulated agriculture to the utmost for producing all the food the country needed. That was almost possible now that their population had dwindled to only 15% of what it had been, and with some revival in the North Sea oil field, the UK balance of payments began to look better. Their cities had been ravaged with riots and disease to the point that labor was again moving to the cities for employment, leaving the rural parts begging for farm labor.
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Matthew had tested in the high 90 percentile ranks when he took his high school graduation exams online and received his diploma. Thankfully, their printer still worked so Alicia could get him a copy of it. His graduation was recorded at the County Courthouse, according to the State, so it was a matter of public record. This practice had been started when there were no funds for public schools, and all students were required to be home schooled. The old Federal Laws pertaining to education were ignored as being impossible to comply with them.
Matthew decided he wasn't finished with education, however. He asked Todd to teach him some higher mathematics and science classes, so he was still a regular at Alicia's school sessions. That suited Emily very well. She had convinced her Mom for Matthew to teach her more of what he knew about herbs and how they grew. She had an idea to cultivate all of them she could for sale. It had the fringe benefit of spending a lot of time with Matthew in the woods, too.
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CHAPTER 68 May, 2016
Crops were being planted after an early Spring warm up that let farmers begin plowing early. Larry and Wes were somewhat ahead of the game because they had been plowing off and on all winter with the oxen, whenever the ground was not frozen and dry enough. A single bottom plow was slow, but 4 oxen could pull it most of the day in the easy ground that had been worked for years.
An acre a day is not that much, but by working many days in the winter, Wes and Larry had plowed the 40 acres they planned to put in corn and soybeans this year. This month, they had gone over all of it with a disk and had it ready to plant. Not trusting their young oxen to be precise enough for planting, they resorted to Larry's tractor, but that was light work and took little fuel. They had their crops in early, and had spent very little to do it. Cultivating could be done with the oxen, too, when that time came.
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The stamping plant got word to Ed Wilson that they had a contract to make several parts and would probably be working through the summer. The next time he was in town, Ed went to the plant and told them he was no longer interested in working there. The Plant Manager was not happy about that and told him it was the best place to work in the county. Ed told him no, it was not, and he was not interested, thank you, since they couldn't pay him the pension he had been promised for prior service, he doubted if they could be relied on to pay him for work now. The Manager had no idea where to find knowledgeable help. He asked his General Foreman who he could get to help start this production run and he had no ideas either, so he got appointed to do it himself. It was a slow startup with a lot of expensive mistakes.
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Gloria decided that she could open boxcars and containers as well as the men could. She was dying to know what was in the rest of the train and determined to find out. She wanted some fabric anyway, so her first stop was the JoAnn Fabrics shipment. She and Alicia consulted the list and drove the pickup truck into the edge of the woods and out of sight of the road. Once they had the car door open, they began to methodically remove cartons of fabric until they could get deeper inside the load. The cartons were smaller in the west end of the car. Further digging got them deep enough to hand out boxes from the dark interior.
It took a couple hours of work to get the assortment of cartons outside for inspection, and more work to open each one. This shipment seemd to be intended to open a complete new store, based on teh variety of things. There were cartons with entire displays of thread, scissors, needles, bobbins, zippers and buttons. They found whole pallets of new patterns, some dress forms, sewing machines that they laughed about because they were electric until Ashley saw "Janome 712T" on a box and knew what it was. An Amish friend of her Mom's had one of those mounted on an old Singer Treadle base.
"That one is going home with " Ashley said.
"What's so great about that one?"
"It's a treadle powered machine! You don't need electricity for it," Ashley told her.
"They still make those?"
"Yep. The Amish buy a lot of them because the antiques are getting harder to keep running. I guess they sell them in other countries where they don't have electricity, too. They don't come with a treadle, so you just use it to replace the head on an old treadle machine like Mom's. Her's is skipping stitches and is pretty worn out, so this will be great. It's a modern machine, too, that will do a lot of things, like buttonholes."
They had quite a load to carry to the truck before they finished in that one car, but Gloria wasn't finished. On they went to car #22. It took both women on the crowbar to get the door to move.
"What the heck is that stuff?"
Ashley said, "Welding rods, that's what. Lincoln makes everything for welding. Let's see what else is in there."
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The town had a newspaper again, of a sort. It was one sheet, printed both sides and folded in quarters, with a few commercial ads and lots of small classified ads. Someone had taken the old high school print shop equipment from storage and had cut newsprint sheets from the ends of rolls at the old newspaper plant. The new paper was printed by letterpress, set with moveable type just like Gutenberg had done it. The first issue was printed on Friday and taken to the market day meeting at Brent Collins' farm to distribute at a quarter per copy. The type was small to get more on the single sheet, but the front page carried a big headline, "BANK PRESIDENT ARRESTED" , followed by "Embezzlement Charges Filed". The run of 500 copies sold out in nothing flat.
Tara asked Ronnie, "Did you read about the bank guy?"
"Read what?"
"The newspaper. It says that the guy we bought the farm from was embezzling money and now the State Police have arrested him. They say he sold the bank's foreclosed properties and kept the money. At least the money is missing from the bank's accounts."
"I thought that guy was shady as the devil. Maybe I should have bought another farm, too.
Tara asked, "Won't the court ask questions about us buying it? Are we in trouble?"
"No, we're not in trouble. We have a deed to the farm and that's it. What that guy did with the money has nothing to do with us. He's the one with a problem," Ronnie told her.
But the next day 2 State Police officers came knocking on their door asking for Ronnie. Tara called him from the barn. Tara was worried sick, but the officer only wanted to confirm what they had paid for the farm and a witnessed statement to that effect. The State had the deed as proof the bank had sold the property, but there was no paper trail for the amount since it had been a cash deal. Ronnie filled in the amount in the prepared statement, his name and signed it. One officer signed it as a witness and the other one pocketed the paper.
"That's not much to pay for a farm," one officer said.
"It's not much of a farm, or, it wasn't until after we got it," Ronnie told him. "It's in a lot better shape now, but it was grown up in brush when we got it and the buildings were in bad shape."
The other officer said, "He's right. I made an arrest at that place some years ago and it needed work back then. Not that it matters. You paid for it and the deed was duly recorded. You folks don't have to worry about this at all. Oh, one more thing. We found the remains of a truck in a hollow along the highway close to here. It had some bullet holes in it, and some parts were taken from it. Do you folks know anything about that?"
Ronnie and Tara looked at each other and both said no they didn't know it was there.
The officer looked seriously at them and said, "I doubted if you did. We ran the VIN number and it was stolen years ago. Hunters probably shot it up. Thanks for your time and help on the bank matter. We'll be going now."
Tara breathed a sigh of relief when they got in their car and left. Ronnie remembered that Mike Wilson had been careful when he installed that truck rear axle for Charlie's windmill and made sure the end with the VIN number on it was in the concrete. It looked like that old situation was peacefully at rest now.
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Larry said, "We gotta keep the electric bill paid now, with all those welding rods you found."
Wes said, "Yes, and it will be easier to pay since we can work in the shop."
Ashley said, "I knew you needed them, so that's all we brought up here, but there's a lot more stuff in there. I saw boxes of helmets and lens filters, some grinding and sanding discs, MIG wire, all sorts of welding stuff. You two should go through that one. We just brought the 6010, 7014 and 7018 rods you use a lot, but there are several other kinds."
"We need to get back on Neal's planter job. He needs it bad. But we'll go take a look as soon as we can," Wes said.
Ashley said, "We've got the early garden put in, so there's nothing pressing today. We're going back and work until milking time."
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"Wes ain't gonna believe this," Gloria said. "He's been whining about needing steel for ages."
"He'll be in shock, but he'll get over it," Ashley told her. "I have to make some notes. I wish we had something to measure with. Oh! Yeah, my notepad says it is 3 1/2" x 5". That will work. Let's see here, that has to be 2" wide, and that is 4" wide," She said as she made marks on her pad, creating a crude ruler. "Okay. I have marks at every inch up to 4" now. I'll tear this sheet out and you take notes for me."
Gloria took the pad and pencil while Ashley climbed up on the ends of the bundles of steel in this container, calling down measurements. The bundles were fairly large so there weren't that many different sizes. Most of it was flat bars of several thicknesses and widths, with several bundles of steel angle in sizes from 1 1/2" wide to 4" wide. They closed up the container and moved on to the other on on the car. There was nothing but black pipe in it, 1", 1 1/2", 2" and 3" diameters. They made notes and moved on.
The next 2 containers also had steel in them, a variety of shafting quality cold rolled rounds in one, and sheets of plate in the other one, from 1/8" up to a few 1/2" thick, all from a Canadian Steel mill headed to a distributor in Louisville.
"Who the heck is Browning? Is that a gun company?"
Ashley looked inside the container and said, "Not this load. They make gears and pulleys and stuff."
"It's headed to Industrial Motion Sales Company in Louisville," Ashley read off the shipper.
They dug open some cartons and found no end of chain sprockets, pulleys, roller chain, and bearings in profusion. All types and sizes, of those. The stuff was too heavy to move, but they read the shipping list and saw that buried in there somewhere were hundreds of Vee-belts, too.
Ashley said, "Our boys are going to be in seventh heaven with all this stuff. And they are going to work us like slaves getting it up to the shop. Let's take them as many different samples as we can, because they are going to need this when machinery starts breaking down this year."
The women worked until late in the afternoon digging through the container, taking off just the top layer of cartons so Gloria, being the skinny one, could crawl in deeper for more. She began to get a little claustrophobic when she got stuck once, and wouldn't go back without making more room for her. The Spring sunshine was heating up the inside of the container, too. She came out sweaty and dirty, and not at all happy about getting stuck, but she had brought out cartons of tapered roller bearings.
"The boys can dig for their own buried treasure. That's enough for me today," Gloria said.
"Let's open the other container on this car. That will finish 26 cars, and we'll have an even dozen to go," Ashley said.
"Whatever. You get to break the lock this time," Gloria said.
It came open with moderate difficulty this time. The contents were crated in wood and cardboard to protect stainless steel sinks, tables, and carts that they could see, from Aero Manufacturing to a restaurant supplier. They didn't try to move any of the heavy crates, but peered in as deep as they could. There were boxed cartons in the far end they couldn't figure out. The women decided that was enough for the day, and headed for the house with their load on the truck.
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Two more brand new calves were up and nursing when Ed walked over to his farm to feed in the evening and check on the cows. The rest of the cows all looked to be ready to drop a calf any day, so he made sure the feeding area was clean, they had fresh bedding, and he gave the cows some extra ground feed. Ed was up to 15 brood cows now that all looked healthy and content. Last year's crop of calves were growing fast and eating enough that he began to hope for new pasture grass soon.
The Fescue had greened up as soon as the snow was gone, but the clover he had seeded with it was just starting to show enough green to be seen across the field behind the barn. He stayed long enough to see them all go to the pond to drink, then come back to the barn to get out of the misty rain. The cows with new calves were halfway to the barn when three coyotes came galloping out of the trees, then 2 more, encircling the cows with calves and half a dozen others. Ed ran for the barn driveway where he had left his old Springfield rifle.
He laid the rifle stock against the corner of the barn for a rest and sighted on one that was farther out from the herd. When the rifle boomed, the coyote dropped in a pile and the others took flight for the trees, headed north toward the old Duncan place. Ed swung the rifle at the departing coyotes and squeezed the trigger again. As that one fell, he moved on to the one closest to the tree line and hit it, but it struggled to it's feet and trotted on 3 legs out of sight. By the time he cycled the bolt again, they had all disappeared.
He looked at the cows that had circled the baby calves in a protective huddle, shaking their heads aggressively. They might have fought off the attack by themselves, he thought, but he'd thin out the coyotes every chance he got. He looked around and picked up his empty brass and pocketted it for reloading later. As he reloaded his rifle Ed heard another shot from the Duncan farm, then a second one. It sounded like the neighbor had got in some licks, too. Bob Clemmons kept a watchful eye on Ronnie's herd of hogs, and he hated coyotes as much as anyone. Mike had reloaded some shotgun shells for Bob with home made buckshot cushioned with sawdust, a very lethal load at up to 50 to 75 yards.
Ed slung his rifle over his back and walked out in the mist to gather up the dead coyotes. He dragged them to the driveway one at a time and left them in a pile. Ed started his walk back home. He would drive the truck back later to pick up the coyotes. The meat would be run through his cranked meat grinder then spread out to dry slowly in his home made dehydrator over the wood stove. He had more than enough to feed his chickens for now, so he'd probably trade it off to Ronnie to use in hog feed. The bones would be dried on the hen house roof and later ground in his hammermill to put on his garden. The pelts would be dried on stretchers and given to the tanner toward Ed's next leather purchase. All of the proceeds didn't amount to a lot, but it would pay for his rifle shells and some besides.
The neighborhood came to full alert when they heard the shooting. Ed knew this and stopped at Gerald's house to tell him what happened, then at his son's house on the way out with the truck to pick up the coyotes. Mike said he'd help him skin them out. Ed loaded the coyotes then drove over to Ronnie's place where he met Matthew at the driveway carrying a rifle and explained. The young man thanked him and walked back to the house.
Since he was close, Ed drove across the road to tell Bob what he shot at and to see if Bob had any luck. He had. There were 3 dead coyotes in his barn driveway, the first hung up and being skinned.
"How'd you get 3 with 2 shots?" Ed asked.
"You got one and he just made it over here to die. You take him. The hide belongs to you," Bob said.
"No, the two I've got is all I can handle tonight. You're welcome to the hide. Just wanted to let you know it wasn't outlaws I was shooting at."
Bob grinned and said, "They're outlaws as far as I'm concerned. They can make a mess out of a herd of hogs."
"Well," Ed said as he got back in his truck, "That's 5 of 'em we don't have to worry about now. See you later. It's getting dark and we both have work to do."
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Neal Davis didn't have the security problem that Wes and Larry did, since the back of his farm had steeper and higher banks above the creek, and he had always pretty much kept to himself, so they didn't have a lot of company. It would be a while before the ground dried enough for him to begin putting in crops, so he spent some time opening boxcars and containers. He was tickled pink with the next car he opened, it being a shipment to some big feed store, he supposed. There were pallets of the brown salt blocks he fed his cattle (he had run out of those), some blocks of molasses and magnesium to prevent grass tetany, and the rest of the car was filled with bags of dried pork meat scrap, which he knew as "tankage" from many years ago when he started farming. It was a protein supplement that was richer than soybean meal, and it would keep practically forever in the plastic lined bags. Neal wasn't young, but he was still fit. Even so, it took him a couple days to carry enough of the 50 pound bags up the steep bank to haul to the old grain bin he used to store such things. It was hard work, but it was all sorely needed things to feed his stock.
That had kept him occupied, but he was getting more curious all the time about the rest of the cars and opened a couple more containers on the next flatcar. He wasn't much of a fisherman, but he knew he had a fortune in fishing equipment when he got a look at the load addressed to Bass Pro in Clarksville. The shipping papers inside listed hundreds of fishing items, and almost as many clothing items. The prize, though, was cartons of archery equipment--compound bows, graphite arrows, hunting broadheads, and pages of accessories, all of it made in China and shipping direct to Bass Pro.
The other container didn't excite him much, although he knew it was worth a lot. It was a shipment of parts from Rednekk Trailer Supply to some trailer manufacturer in Kentucky. The shipping papers said it had hitches, stub axles, rims with tires, and springs. He figured somebody would want to make something out of all that, but he left it where it was for now, picked up his big pipe wrench and crowbar and went on to the next one, a boxcar.
He read the shipping papers twice and part of it again, before he began to believe it. The car had the yellow placard that said, HAZARDOUS MATERIAL, and sure enough, inside were boxes printed with "A. Uberti" and addressed from Accokeek, Maryland to a distributor. There was a separate shipping document from Remington Arms, a re-shipment from the Uberti comany to their distributor. It listed numerous calibers of ammunition he only vaguely remembered, like .44-40, .45 Long Colt, and .45-70. From what he could see reading the papers, this company must be a maker of old style guns, because it listed things like Trapdoor rifles and Colt single action revolvers. He used his belt knife to cut open a carton and found it full of 1873 Carbines, replicas of Winchester's fine lever action rifle chambered for .45 Colt.
Neal wasn't a "gun nut" as he called the people who bought one gun after another just to have them, but he knew what he had in that one car was worth as much or more than his farm. He struggled to get past that carton to the one just behind the car side by the door. it required that he cut away and half emptied the carton of rifles to get to the pallet labeled Remington Arms Company. It was full of boxes of ammunition. Neal put all the rifles back in the carton except the one he'd laid aside and took out several boxes of ammunition, then closed the car door. Having that many guns sitting there made him nervous. He'd heard on TV what some people had done to rob gun stores when the trouble all began. He decided that he'd seen enough for today and went to the house, after figuring out how to load and work the simple lever action rifle.
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Olivia Davis was getting more curious about what they might have sitting in those rail cars, so she encouraged Neal to open the rest of them. There was only one more boxcar. The rest were flatcars with 2 containers on each one. He had noticed some leakage from the boxcar so he opened it next. When he released the plug-seal door, a brown sludge came dripping out. The stench made him nearly lose his breakfast. It was filled with canned food that had apparently frozen and burst open the cans, then rotted.
He closed that one as fast as he could and went to the barn for a bucket and a shovel. The bucket he used to dip water from the creek and slosh the brown ooze off the car and the wash down the tracks and ties below. Neal shoveled some dirt over the mess on the ground and that helped some, but the stench was still bad. It looked like rain, so maybe the smell would diminish soon.
Knowing better than to disappoint his wife, he went back to work opening containers. The first one wasn't going to be of much use, being full of washing machines from The GE plant in Louisville. The problem was, very few people could afford much electricity now, let alone a new washer. The other container on that car had a shipping label addressed to Big Lots on the boxes inside. He cut open an unmarked box and found plastic bags of inflatable Halloween decorations--tombstones, ghouls, ghosts, a ten foot inflatable spider, and witches with brooms that looked like they crashed into something. This wasn't going well at all today, he thought, but dutifully moved to the next flatcar.
Neal's next discovery helped make up for his earlier bad luck when be found a shipment from Marion Kay Spice Company. The boxes were smaller than he had been finding, and marked Cayenne Pepper, Vanilla Extract, Cinnamon, Black Pepper, Cloves, and Bay Leaves that he could see from the door opening. A carton of each went to his wagon on the hill above. He dug deeper and found granulated garlic, mustard seed, allspice, celery seed, coriander, and several kinds of extracts like lemon, almond, and butter flavor. There was more further back in the container, but he called that good for now and went on to the other container on that car.
Proctor and Gamble was the name on the shipper he found, but the aroma told him it was cleaning products. All he could see were cartons of Tide and Dawn detergents, but the papers said there were Ivory soap and Mr. Clean products as well. Neal took a carton of both detergents to the wagon. Olivia would like those, and they had lye soap they had made, so he left the rest for now, but got out his pocket notepad and wrote down what he'd found so far. It was close to lunch time, or at least he was hungry, so he went to the house with his small load and the news of what he'd learned. He had five more cars with 2 containers each to look into later. It was time he got the garden plowed up and planted some things, so this was going to have to wait a while. Food came first in his mind.
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Struggling internet providers tried to provide service, but after some of their electronics failed the only service for most places was dependent on telephone lines, and there was little or no maintenance on those lines now. The tower that gave Ed Wilson internet service was still working, so when it came back on the last time, he and Mike dutifully paid the fee when they were in town once a month. Todd Reynolds also had service, and gladly paid for it so Alicia could access the State Education site for teaching and testing materials. Todd watched the financial reports sometimes, mostly to get the current prices on oil and watching currency exchange rates. The various statistics put out by the government were always out of date and suspect anyway. There was still a BBC News site, but it was as sanitized as the rest of the so-called news. They still monitored the shortwave radio for real news.
The last he had heard, the US dollar was staying pretty stable, but inching down relative to the Chinese Renmimbi, as China recovered faster from the world currency reset. Japan's Yen had been toast since the reset, and the shortwave news from China, always a critic of the Japanese, said that millions of Japanese were starving due to their inability to afford imported foodstuffs. There was no news of significance from the Mideast, beyond the normal butt-kicking going on between Israel and their neighbors. Russia had made an offer to sell more natural gas to Europe, but their stranglehold on Europe's energy supplies had cratered the economy so badly that there was almost no economic activity outside Germany. The Mediterranean countries had devolved to something like feudalism, from what little news was known about them.
The UK had begun to dig out from their economic rubble, using their highly regulated agriculture to the utmost for producing all the food the country needed. That was almost possible now that their population had dwindled to only 15% of what it had been, and with some revival in the North Sea oil field, the UK balance of payments began to look better. Their cities had been ravaged with riots and disease to the point that labor was again moving to the cities for employment, leaving the rural parts begging for farm labor.
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Matthew had tested in the high 90 percentile ranks when he took his high school graduation exams online and received his diploma. Thankfully, their printer still worked so Alicia could get him a copy of it. His graduation was recorded at the County Courthouse, according to the State, so it was a matter of public record. This practice had been started when there were no funds for public schools, and all students were required to be home schooled. The old Federal Laws pertaining to education were ignored as being impossible to comply with them.
Matthew decided he wasn't finished with education, however. He asked Todd to teach him some higher mathematics and science classes, so he was still a regular at Alicia's school sessions. That suited Emily very well. She had convinced her Mom for Matthew to teach her more of what he knew about herbs and how they grew. She had an idea to cultivate all of them she could for sale. It had the fringe benefit of spending a lot of time with Matthew in the woods, too.
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CHAPTER 68 May, 2016
Crops were being planted after an early Spring warm up that let farmers begin plowing early. Larry and Wes were somewhat ahead of the game because they had been plowing off and on all winter with the oxen, whenever the ground was not frozen and dry enough. A single bottom plow was slow, but 4 oxen could pull it most of the day in the easy ground that had been worked for years.
An acre a day is not that much, but by working many days in the winter, Wes and Larry had plowed the 40 acres they planned to put in corn and soybeans this year. This month, they had gone over all of it with a disk and had it ready to plant. Not trusting their young oxen to be precise enough for planting, they resorted to Larry's tractor, but that was light work and took little fuel. They had their crops in early, and had spent very little to do it. Cultivating could be done with the oxen, too, when that time came.
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The stamping plant got word to Ed Wilson that they had a contract to make several parts and would probably be working through the summer. The next time he was in town, Ed went to the plant and told them he was no longer interested in working there. The Plant Manager was not happy about that and told him it was the best place to work in the county. Ed told him no, it was not, and he was not interested, thank you, since they couldn't pay him the pension he had been promised for prior service, he doubted if they could be relied on to pay him for work now. The Manager had no idea where to find knowledgeable help. He asked his General Foreman who he could get to help start this production run and he had no ideas either, so he got appointed to do it himself. It was a slow startup with a lot of expensive mistakes.
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Gloria decided that she could open boxcars and containers as well as the men could. She was dying to know what was in the rest of the train and determined to find out. She wanted some fabric anyway, so her first stop was the JoAnn Fabrics shipment. She and Alicia consulted the list and drove the pickup truck into the edge of the woods and out of sight of the road. Once they had the car door open, they began to methodically remove cartons of fabric until they could get deeper inside the load. The cartons were smaller in the west end of the car. Further digging got them deep enough to hand out boxes from the dark interior.
It took a couple hours of work to get the assortment of cartons outside for inspection, and more work to open each one. This shipment seemd to be intended to open a complete new store, based on teh variety of things. There were cartons with entire displays of thread, scissors, needles, bobbins, zippers and buttons. They found whole pallets of new patterns, some dress forms, sewing machines that they laughed about because they were electric until Ashley saw "Janome 712T" on a box and knew what it was. An Amish friend of her Mom's had one of those mounted on an old Singer Treadle base.
"That one is going home with " Ashley said.
"What's so great about that one?"
"It's a treadle powered machine! You don't need electricity for it," Ashley told her.
"They still make those?"
"Yep. The Amish buy a lot of them because the antiques are getting harder to keep running. I guess they sell them in other countries where they don't have electricity, too. They don't come with a treadle, so you just use it to replace the head on an old treadle machine like Mom's. Her's is skipping stitches and is pretty worn out, so this will be great. It's a modern machine, too, that will do a lot of things, like buttonholes."
They had quite a load to carry to the truck before they finished in that one car, but Gloria wasn't finished. On they went to car #22. It took both women on the crowbar to get the door to move.
"What the heck is that stuff?"
Ashley said, "Welding rods, that's what. Lincoln makes everything for welding. Let's see what else is in there."
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The town had a newspaper again, of a sort. It was one sheet, printed both sides and folded in quarters, with a few commercial ads and lots of small classified ads. Someone had taken the old high school print shop equipment from storage and had cut newsprint sheets from the ends of rolls at the old newspaper plant. The new paper was printed by letterpress, set with moveable type just like Gutenberg had done it. The first issue was printed on Friday and taken to the market day meeting at Brent Collins' farm to distribute at a quarter per copy. The type was small to get more on the single sheet, but the front page carried a big headline, "BANK PRESIDENT ARRESTED" , followed by "Embezzlement Charges Filed". The run of 500 copies sold out in nothing flat.
Tara asked Ronnie, "Did you read about the bank guy?"
"Read what?"
"The newspaper. It says that the guy we bought the farm from was embezzling money and now the State Police have arrested him. They say he sold the bank's foreclosed properties and kept the money. At least the money is missing from the bank's accounts."
"I thought that guy was shady as the devil. Maybe I should have bought another farm, too.
Tara asked, "Won't the court ask questions about us buying it? Are we in trouble?"
"No, we're not in trouble. We have a deed to the farm and that's it. What that guy did with the money has nothing to do with us. He's the one with a problem," Ronnie told her.
But the next day 2 State Police officers came knocking on their door asking for Ronnie. Tara called him from the barn. Tara was worried sick, but the officer only wanted to confirm what they had paid for the farm and a witnessed statement to that effect. The State had the deed as proof the bank had sold the property, but there was no paper trail for the amount since it had been a cash deal. Ronnie filled in the amount in the prepared statement, his name and signed it. One officer signed it as a witness and the other one pocketed the paper.
"That's not much to pay for a farm," one officer said.
"It's not much of a farm, or, it wasn't until after we got it," Ronnie told him. "It's in a lot better shape now, but it was grown up in brush when we got it and the buildings were in bad shape."
The other officer said, "He's right. I made an arrest at that place some years ago and it needed work back then. Not that it matters. You paid for it and the deed was duly recorded. You folks don't have to worry about this at all. Oh, one more thing. We found the remains of a truck in a hollow along the highway close to here. It had some bullet holes in it, and some parts were taken from it. Do you folks know anything about that?"
Ronnie and Tara looked at each other and both said no they didn't know it was there.
The officer looked seriously at them and said, "I doubted if you did. We ran the VIN number and it was stolen years ago. Hunters probably shot it up. Thanks for your time and help on the bank matter. We'll be going now."
Tara breathed a sigh of relief when they got in their car and left. Ronnie remembered that Mike Wilson had been careful when he installed that truck rear axle for Charlie's windmill and made sure the end with the VIN number on it was in the concrete. It looked like that old situation was peacefully at rest now.
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Larry said, "We gotta keep the electric bill paid now, with all those welding rods you found."
Wes said, "Yes, and it will be easier to pay since we can work in the shop."
Ashley said, "I knew you needed them, so that's all we brought up here, but there's a lot more stuff in there. I saw boxes of helmets and lens filters, some grinding and sanding discs, MIG wire, all sorts of welding stuff. You two should go through that one. We just brought the 6010, 7014 and 7018 rods you use a lot, but there are several other kinds."
"We need to get back on Neal's planter job. He needs it bad. But we'll go take a look as soon as we can," Wes said.
Ashley said, "We've got the early garden put in, so there's nothing pressing today. We're going back and work until milking time."
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"Wes ain't gonna believe this," Gloria said. "He's been whining about needing steel for ages."
"He'll be in shock, but he'll get over it," Ashley told her. "I have to make some notes. I wish we had something to measure with. Oh! Yeah, my notepad says it is 3 1/2" x 5". That will work. Let's see here, that has to be 2" wide, and that is 4" wide," She said as she made marks on her pad, creating a crude ruler. "Okay. I have marks at every inch up to 4" now. I'll tear this sheet out and you take notes for me."
Gloria took the pad and pencil while Ashley climbed up on the ends of the bundles of steel in this container, calling down measurements. The bundles were fairly large so there weren't that many different sizes. Most of it was flat bars of several thicknesses and widths, with several bundles of steel angle in sizes from 1 1/2" wide to 4" wide. They closed up the container and moved on to the other on on the car. There was nothing but black pipe in it, 1", 1 1/2", 2" and 3" diameters. They made notes and moved on.
The next 2 containers also had steel in them, a variety of shafting quality cold rolled rounds in one, and sheets of plate in the other one, from 1/8" up to a few 1/2" thick, all from a Canadian Steel mill headed to a distributor in Louisville.
"Who the heck is Browning? Is that a gun company?"
Ashley looked inside the container and said, "Not this load. They make gears and pulleys and stuff."
"It's headed to Industrial Motion Sales Company in Louisville," Ashley read off the shipper.
They dug open some cartons and found no end of chain sprockets, pulleys, roller chain, and bearings in profusion. All types and sizes, of those. The stuff was too heavy to move, but they read the shipping list and saw that buried in there somewhere were hundreds of Vee-belts, too.
Ashley said, "Our boys are going to be in seventh heaven with all this stuff. And they are going to work us like slaves getting it up to the shop. Let's take them as many different samples as we can, because they are going to need this when machinery starts breaking down this year."
The women worked until late in the afternoon digging through the container, taking off just the top layer of cartons so Gloria, being the skinny one, could crawl in deeper for more. She began to get a little claustrophobic when she got stuck once, and wouldn't go back without making more room for her. The Spring sunshine was heating up the inside of the container, too. She came out sweaty and dirty, and not at all happy about getting stuck, but she had brought out cartons of tapered roller bearings.
"The boys can dig for their own buried treasure. That's enough for me today," Gloria said.
"Let's open the other container on this car. That will finish 26 cars, and we'll have an even dozen to go," Ashley said.
"Whatever. You get to break the lock this time," Gloria said.
It came open with moderate difficulty this time. The contents were crated in wood and cardboard to protect stainless steel sinks, tables, and carts that they could see, from Aero Manufacturing to a restaurant supplier. They didn't try to move any of the heavy crates, but peered in as deep as they could. There were boxed cartons in the far end they couldn't figure out. The women decided that was enough for the day, and headed for the house with their load on the truck.
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