Oddlands Magazine: The Cabbages of the Moon by Sonja Cassella
Lightning strikes, actually and metaphorically. This was eight years after gasoline rationing officially stopped, replaced by a ban on consumer sale. An early twilight had crept over our adobe in southwest Colorado, and a storm blew in over Mt. Hooker. At first I didn’t worry. We’d seen plenty of weather. But then a bolt came down from the sky, struck the wind farm. A small explosion and the lights in the house snapped off. For a second it was dark. Then with a hum and buzz, everything resumed.
This could not be good. I checked the battery charge and the main reserves. Both were almost completely full. But the gauge for incoming current from the wind farm was showing “zero.” And that would be a problem. How long could I keep the cabbage project controls static — with no wind energy?
My husband Rand had been gone to do his much-delayed National Service tour, which he signed up for right before I found out I was pregnant again. He might have applied for another deferment, but at the time he left, Papa, his dad, was alive and living in the little house down the hill. Had I complained Rand would have reminded me that Annika, the Zuni midwife, would attend the birth whether he was here or not. To be a ranch wife, you need to have a certain hardness.
We were a team. His family had owned the land. It was I who loved it. I cared for sick stock, watched over ewes during lambing, studied the color of Mt. Hooker - how the light played on the slopes, which predicted the condition of the forage, the number of birds nesting and what kinds. Rand was an engineer. He built things. He told me before we were married that when you’re a rancher, you have to be an optimist.
He couldn’t have known that while he was gone Papa would take with pneumonia and die.
Now, he was in the Ivory Coast, setting up irrigation and water purification systems, and I hadn’t heard from him in a week. I checked on Sasha, on his back in the bassinet, breathing peacefully. I sat at the computer, our only link - through satellite - with our fellow humans, and brought up the notelink for National Power. We lived off the grid; no cell stations in these mountains.
The old yellow truck that had been Papa’s was in the woodshed, rusting out. We should have used up the gasoline in the underground tank years ago. But ranch people save things. Sheet metal, wood, National service tours.
I made a request for repair services, claiming it was needed for the house’s solar cells, clicked it off, and walked to the living room. In the morning, they would send someone and when whoever he was got here I would try to explain that he had to fix the wind farm instead. Which was not his job.
I went to my Navajo loom, set up against a wall in the small living room, the cold terra-cotta floor insulated by rugs. This blanket I worked on now would be the finest of them all. I picked up a clew of lambswool from the basket, began to work up the image of Grandfather Coyote. If all went well, this blanket would be on our bed when Rand got home. What if that day never arrived? I would finish all the same. There was no other way.
In the morning, a dispatch arrived. National would send a repairman up from Shiprock; he’d be here around noon. Outside, the wind turbines spun; but no electricity registered.
The solar would cut in soon. Still, the wind farm needed to be on-line in less than 36 hours, or the greenhouse would lose its solar lamps and its UV generators, and though the cabbages would probably be unaffected, NASA experiment standards would be compromised.
I took Sasha in his front pack and Jenny on foot, went to turn out the sheep. Nip and Tear, our American Dakotas, danced through the door. The Dakota was a new breed of dog, started by mountain ranchers who needed a heavier, more cold-hardy animal - they said. I think they just wanted to show off. Selective breeding of anything - animals, plants, everything except humans - is all the rage. Anyway, Nip and Tear were good workers. Animals or people, I most valued utility, beauty, and freedom.
My daughter wore tiny fur boots Papa had made. He would do that. Hunt, fish, tan hides, sew moccasins. Rand could shoot and hunt but said it wasn’t worth it; he’d rather have protein powder stew than have to clean a duck or squirrel. “Take ‘em out,” I called, and the dogs bunched the flock and drove it through the gate. I watched, holding the gatepost. “Bye bye, Sheepies!” called Jennifer. “Have a good eat!” We went to check the lunar greenhouse unit.
When Rand and I applied for the assignment we’d put in both of our bios, a botanist and an electrical engineer. Rand’s part was to set up the mechanical structure and then fix any of it that broke. He’d built the wind farm to power this project.
“It’s not going to fall apart, sweetie,” Rand had told me. But he didn’t count on the power source getting struck by lightning.
The cabbages were genetically engineered for the moon colony. Power was no longer the insurmountable issue for the lunanauts; food was. Plants for the moon colony had to adapt to high light intensity and background radiation and grow fast — the target was to convert water and light to cellulose at twice the rate of earth agriculture.
The cabbage was a natural choice. The entire plant is consumed; it grows faster than carrots, has considerable health benefits, is compact and needs no staking or other special care.
Our cabbages were grown in conditions designed to mimic those of the moon greenhouses. Each planting of seeds I tracked was genetically unique. Today, our 250-odd cabbages looked remarkably round, green, and healthy. I picked up number 126 as typical to do a daily specimen study.
I used a butcher knife to slice off the roots at the soil line, then took the cabbages’ circumference, weighed it and cut it in half, counted the leaves, measuring the diameter. I’d misplaced the scalpel they told me to use for this. It was surely somewhere close by. No matter. I entered the results on an electric tablet mounted to the specimen table, and put the dissected cabbage in a basket to feed to the sheep.
At three weeks of age, this lot of seeds was doing better than the previous. But I hated the clinical quality. It had been Rand’s idea. Like it or not, we needed this project. Our sheep and handmade blankets couldn’t sustain us. But with NASA - their deep pockets, their cabbages of the moon, the situation changed.
Everyone in this world needs a patron. If I couldn’t get the wind farm running again, we’d lose ours.
At noon, I saw a Ducati electric three-wheeler, driving up the hill. It pulled a tiny trailer, reached the gate, stopped. I picked Sasha up and walked out to meet the repairman, arrived at the post and rail fence as he was pulling off his helmet and replacing it with a worn red baseball cap.
His eyes from the very first second focused on me as if the ranch, Hoover Peak, and the two children - were in a separate frame.
“Power trouble?” He asked.
“Struck by lightning,” I responded.
Jennifer had pulled her moccasins on and run to join me. “Are you Edward Freeling?” she asked, referring to her favorite pretty-boy actor. There was a resemblance, in the blue eyes starred by lashes.
“No,” he replied, looking down absently. He wore a leather jacket and jeans and work boots that looked new, as if he had just started the job. When he glanced at Jenny he looked so optimistic and so incredibly young, though what would he be - 22 - 23 - a decade younger than me. He stepped off the bike, pushed it forward onto the kickstand, made sure it was balanced on the uneven driveway, then turned and smiled. “National Electric Service. John Hopper.”
When I showed him the wind farm, he frowned.
“This is not National Electric property,” he said.
“My husband is an electrical engineer. He built it. But he’s on a two year term of national service.”
He scratched his chin. “That wasn’t very good planning, was it?”
“No.”
When we reached the wind farm’s main control center - a small metal room half dug into the side of the hill - he pulled a diagnostic meter from his pocket and plugged it into the CPU. Punched with the stylus. Frowned. “The bolt fried one of the main cables,” he told me. “It might take a little time to isolate. How’re you fixed for power?”
“The greenhouse will be off line by tomorrow afternoon if I can’t get this running.”
He looked at me then, a strange look, like he was running up a sum of long figures in his head.
“Give me a minute,” he said, opening up the control center door in and going in, preceded by the beam of a flashlight.
When he came back, his mind was made up. “It’ll take the rest of the day and tomorrow. I’ll have to call National and tell them it’s not their deal. But they’ll give me a couple of days to report to the next job. In the meantime I can do this. Five hundred dollars and you put me up here overnight.”
I was worried about him staying. Could I trust myself? But still. “We have a guest room,” I replied.
John Hopper followed me when I went to bring in the sheep. Nip and Tear were working the flock, darting and spinning, their black bodies coming up and around, threatening a shoulder here, a hock there, and the sheep were coming in. I whistled, called “get on by now” they drove the sheep to the gate, and I raised the lever and let them into the high fenced fold.
“How’s it going?” I asked John.
“Should be done in the morning,” he answered. “You have wolves here?” I heard a brush of leather against leather as he raised his arm and adjusted his cap. No doubt he was noticing the tight construction of the pen.
“Of course.”
“You come, tell me if you hear a wolf.”
What was this? A great pickup line of rural repairmen? Let me know if you ever see a wolf! Oh, did he think I was so foolish? I should lock John in his room tonight, I thought, as he turned and walked away, because he was probably just like any unmarried guy.
In the evening, he came into the living room and sat in Rand’s chair, and watched me weave. “What you keeping all those cabbages for?” he asked.
“NASA.”
“You ever think about outer space?”
“No.”
“Hacum?”
I shrugged.
“‘Cause you don’t like long business trips? But your husband, he does, doesn’t he?”
“No escape from National service.”
“I’m not going. I claimed financial hardship in family, E-42. Or how about genetically unique individual, E-39? Child of a servant on the people? (That meant a member of Congress) I-264.”
“You sure know the numbers.” I wove the brown thread in and out.
“It’s like a game I play, me and my buds.”
“Rand wants to hold public office someday.” Knotting the thread at the end of the row.
“Does he call you to ask how things are going?” He sipped his beer.
In that instant I hated John Hopper. “He’s in Africa.”
“Africa?” He laughed. “You know what the stories about camp followers of a delegation of the NSC in Africa are like? Guys go crazy out there, you can’t think straight in the jungle– ”
I picked up Sasha, carried him off to bed although it was really too early.
John Hopper, I decided, would be one of those people, who wanted to leave Earth and go somewhere else, and continue the dream of the Enlightenment, that someday we would live as if we were greater than the simple humans from which we had descended. There are some people who wish they could be reassembled with unbreakable mechanical parts, things that were not vulnerable to disease and decay, like mortal bodies and fleshy hearts are. Perhaps he was just young. But a handsome man with no conscience is a dangerous thing to have around the house.
I’d heat him up one of the frozen hamburger dinners I made in advance for when you need adult food but you don’t want to get the pots and pans dirty. I could have offered him something decent. I could have defrosted one of the 30 pounds of steaks still remaining from last year’s steer. But I didn’t. Not for some shirt-tail National electric repairman.
Who came to do my husband’s job.
* * *
I went to bed at ten o’clock, and the sheets felt cold. I’d heard that somewhere in the world there was a tool, a pot of coals on a long handle which one could run around bed sheets to take the damp off. I didn’t have anything like that but that mutt - or not mutt- Tear was nosing around so I opened up the bed and let him jump in. Five minutes later, the chill was gone. And I fell asleep and dreamed that I’d let John Hopper into the bed instead of the dog, and in my dream there was a knock on the door and Rand came walking in and he looked at me and I couldn’t see his face but I thought, “well, this is it, he’s going to kill me and I’m going to the bad-spirit country and I’ll be stuck down there with John Hopper and in addition to being alternately frozen and scalded we’ll have nothing to talk about.”
I woke up and my arms were around Tear’s neck and I pulled some black fur from my mouth and experienced that post-nightmare sinking-back-into-reality feeling and the slow but steady relief of realizing that it was all a dream. And then I heard a howl. When I went to the window, I saw something I’d never seen before: a white wolf emerged from the woods east of the house and sat 50 feet from my bedroom window on an up-thrust of bedrock. It howled, not at the moon, but at my window.
“How can you sleep through this?” I asked Tear aloud. He was snoring. If he had a dream it would be a smug dream in which he told the wolf, you ought to look and see what side the bread is buttered on. How do wolves stay wild? For changes always come, but how they come, and whether we preserve the old ways or annihilate them, that is my question. The wolf was thin, rugged, looking into my window and telling me that if the sheep were not locked up he would take one. It was his right, the right of the wild. Survival was not a matter of purity, and he was not civilized, he did not think it wrong to steal.
I had locked the sheep up securely. Before he left, Rand nailed wire mesh over the two weak spots in the fold. The white wolf, with flaring ruff and paws huge like snow boots, gazed at my bedroom and howled again and his face seemed almost furious. I went to the cradle, touched Sasha’s back, then went into the hall, around the corner, and checked on Jenny. She lay well covered under a quilt, a single braid and the side of her face exposed, and Nip was on the bed with her. I went to check the bolt on the front door, and someone was in the room. It was John, sitting in the big chair again.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Watching the wolf.”
“He’s not as tough as he looks.”
He shrugged. “Who is?”
“For my money - Coyote. The Indians call him Grandfather and the Trickster. He’s not so strong, but he’s smart, and in the end, smart gets what you’re after.”
“You ever get lonely way out here alone?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
“What’s it to you?”
A moonbeam caught his face as he smiled in the half-light. “I’m a great time, you know.” He told me this with serene conviction. “I’ve been with a lot of women, actually. But I think you’re the loneliest woman I ever saw.”
Shot straight through the heart! How could this stranger guess my most guarded secret? “What do you know?”
He shrugged. “Your husband has forgotten you. He’s trying to do too much, rancher, husband, father, government stooge.”
Now I turned. “If he’s negligent, that’s my problem.” I heard a small whimper from my room, and got up.
“Oh, you’re going to try that ‘I’m a mother’ thing on me?”
“I’m not trying it, I am. If anything that’s how I got so lonely.” I went and got Sasha. The baby stretched out his body and then settled into my arms. I came back to the living room and sat down on the couch. Surely John would see that he needed to leave so I could let Sasha nurse.
The wolf was still standing on the rock but no longer howling.
I was never going to find out if John Hopper was any good or not and that was just the way it was because the world is a world of scarcity and hardship and people who do stupid things get hurt. As I settled into the couch, the wolf moved off at a trot, back into the woods, and John turned to go back to the guest room. My stomach felt empty and cold as the wolf disappeared into the trees.
In the morning, snow had fallen and the ground was white. I did my routine as if nothing had ever been said, finished the daily work in the greenhouse, and found the dissection scalpel under a cardboard mat, so I put the kitchen knife in the basket with the dissected cabbage halves and laid them by the door of the greenhouse. John was working with clips and wrenches when I came up the road.
“How’s it going?” I asked, nonchalant.
“Like a dream,” watching me with those otherworldly eyes. I wanted to cast myself under the umbrella of his protection. But no.
“How long till it’s done?” I continued.
“It’s done now.” He put away his tools. “All I need is your say-so and I’ll go ahead and reload the codes. Your power will be down 2-3 hours until the system reboots.”
“Emergency will stay on?” I was thinking of the tracking monitors on the cabbages. He nodded, so I said okay.
He pushed a button and turned away, walked to the entryway to the greenhouse. “Got me some time to kill. Oh, look,” He picked up the knife, threw a half cabbage in the air, and speared it as if came back down. “What a guy!” he exclaimed, displaying to me the impaled half cabbage.
“Stop!” I said, but he was laughing so hard, I don’t think he heard me because he threw the second half cabbage and as he tried to spear it, he slipped on the snow and he, the cabbages, and the blade went down in a heap.
I ran over, laid Sasha behind me on the ground, safe in his snowsuit. At first, the wound in the crook of John’s arm looked small. But the blood wouldn’t stop.
“Is it a vein?”he asked, confused.
“Artery,” I said. Bright red blood covered the snow around where he sat, spurted with the rhythm of his heartbeat. My mother said blood was a biohazard before they came out with four-way vaccine. Today, all I had to worry about was stopping the bleeding. I removed my long nylon sock and tied it around his arm for a tourniquet. The blood barely slowed; I needed a stick. I found one, it was lousy, rough and shaped like a bow, but with no time to be picky, I stuck it in the loop, twisted it two revolutions, and John winced. I looked around, trying to think. The blood was still leaking out of the wound. I twisted the stick again. John’s face was white but the leaking was no longer obvious. “Hold this,” I said.
“How much blood do I got,” he asked, his voice shaky.
“Not enough to keep this up forever,” Standard procedure: I could click off a post for an emergency team. Even so, it might take them too long. But the power was down. I glanced around and my eyes fell on the open tool shed and the yellow hood of the F150. Rand had already laid out the plan for this day. Before he left, he told me “If anything happens and you need to get out.” And demonstrated the old gas pump, twenty hand cranks a gallon, and the truck: break, gas, gears, lights.
“Hold that tight,” I told John, and he reached around and grabbed the stick.
“What’cha gonna do?” John asked.
“Get the truck.” I picked up the now-crying Sasha and stood.
The windows, covered with dust, seemed prehistoric. So much metal in this machine - so heavy. The thing sank when I sat down. I sat Sasha beside me on the bench seat. Jennifer came running. “Get your coat and a blanket,” I told her. “We have to drive to the hospital in Shiprock.” I looked down at the tasseled, homemade boots on her feet. “And change your shoes.”
Ranch girl, oldest child, she didn’t question, she ran.
It was as if Rand was with me, now, the words he’d told me a year ago repeated in my head as clearly as if they were on tape. “It’s easier than riding a bike. Remember, the roads are ruined, so go slow.”
Now Jenny came running, last summer’s canvas tennis shoes on. I opened the door and she climbed into the shelf behind the seat designed, I suppose, for animals and small children. “Hold your brother.” I told her, handed him back.
What if we crashed? Still, we couldn’t just sit there and let John Hopper bleed. I did the last thing that Rand had showed me … I moved the lever beside the steering wheel to “D” and took my foot off the brake and pulled the truck around to the front of the greenhouse.
John was still strong enough to climb in when we started, and he sat, very still, holding the blood-covered stick and staring silently out the window. The road was cracked and weeds grew all over it.
Silence for a while. Then he spoke: “Last night, you -” he paused. “You sure were cold-hearted.”
“I bet my husband would disagree.”
“If he ever comes back.”
Men get hurt and then get nasty, I reflected. No blame. “What did your mother call you?” I asked.
He looked at me uncomprehendingly, almost angrily, as if I had asked for an intimacy I didn’t deserve. “Jay,” he said. “She was … ah, my mother. Oh well.” His voice drifted off and he looked out the window again.
We’d been driving an hour and town was in sight when he passed out and his hand fell from the tourniquet.
I hit the break, expecting to see spurting red again. But when the machine stopped, I turned and a small hand was there. Jenny. “I’ve been holding it for a while, Mama. He wasn’t strong enough by himself.” I looked behind her; Sasha was safely sleeping, his waist in a belt. “I tied Sasha in.”
“Good girl,” I replied. We pressed on.
The weeds got lower and disappeared. Shiprock. The size of a city, the architecture of a Navajo pueblo. People stared. I opened the truck door. “Injured man, where’s the hospital?” The crowd parted, someone pointed me where to turn, one young man in a bright red shirt ran beside the truck until I reached a low building covered with solar tile and a nurse came out and then another and an orderly with a wheelchair and they took John Hopper.
A young Navajo woman came up as I sat gasping in the driver’s seat; she smiled. Plenty on Big Rez no longer spoke English. I was technically in a foreign country. She asked “You live close?” I noticed her intricate silver necklace, a thunderbird.
“Under Mt. Hooker,” I replied.
“Tribal police say, you need leave before they write down truck numbers, ask where you keeping gasoline.” Pause. “They no want to know.” She nodded, patted my sleeve as if she knew what I’d been through. “The hurt one … he man of you house?”
“No. He was working for us.”
“He very … pretty.” She paused again. “I go make sure they take good care.” She ran off.
I drove back slower than I had come. The truck chugged up the hill and I found I had time to muse. Getting back to normal was all I cared about.
We arrived at the ranch and the blades of the wind mills were spinning fast; and I could hear the generator humming. I picked up Sasha, who’d slept through it all, and walked toward the house. Jenny jumped out, too, and it was just as I expected - her clothes, including her canvas shoes, were stained with blood. She walked, skipping from stone to stone along the side of the path, singing an old folk song:
“Yippie tie yi yo get along little doggies,
It’s your misfortune ain’t none of my own.”
For some reason the words stung. “Put your clothes in the washer,” I told her. “Run the water cold.”
At the front door, I saw the handmade moccasins, and knew that for better or worse, when his tour was over, Rand would come home to claim all that was his.
