Ring of Fire(30)

By the time Gwaihir was born, Tom was no longer just the guru of drug-assisted meditation and provider of the sacred sacraments. Necessity and the fact that he was the only one with any medical training had made him the de facto doctor for the group, as well as midwife. More of a root-doctor than a sawbones, though he'd set broken bones in plenty, so long as the injury was pretty straightforward.





But with all of the old ladies gone, the rest of the guys lost interest in keeping things together. One by one, they drifted off, too, leaving Tom alone with three kids to raise. The three mothers never did come back even to check on their boys; he never knew why.





On the other hand—without a bunch of dopers lounging around, he had a lot fewer mouths to feed, and by then he wasn't bad at subsistence farming. The vegetable garden, the chickens, and the yearly pigs took care of most of their food needs. Wind-generators, one of the last things the commune had built together, brought much-needed electricity, and once Tom himself had gotten the greenhouse built, he was able to grow veggies all year long without having to fight bugs. He'd had a surprisingly green thumb, all things considered.





And of course—though by the time he and the kids were living here alone it was to bring in much needed money for the kids' needs, rather than to supply the group with smoking materials—that wasn't all he grew in there. A trusted friend had made a little pilgrimage to Holland once the greenhouse was operational, bringing back precious seeds, and Tom had been breeding the best of the best back every year. By the time it was just the four of them, he had some finest-kind weed flourishing amongst the zucchini.





"Want to see the greenhouse?" he asked, more out of politeness than anything else. Somewhat to his surprise, they did.





He was irrationally proud of the place, which had started life as the windows from every building that was about to be wrecked that he could scrounge, with a frame of similarly salvaged timber. That was before old barn-wood became such a hot item with decorators, and every time a tilting barn came down, he'd been there with the communal pickup and flatbed. Most of the farmers had been glad to let him haul it off.





"Damn," Nichols said, looking at the place from the inside for the first time. "How the hell did you manage to keep this under wraps?"





Made of barn-boards up to waist-high, with a relatively low eight-foot ceiling, he'd put windows with screens at the bottom where he could open them in hot weather, and solid windows for the roof. Now he'd segregated the pot plants at the rear, with the veggies and herbs up front—though in the days when the law might come a-calling, he'd mingled pot and beans, using the vines of the latter to screen the former.





He shrugged. "Stayed under the radar," he said. "Didn't get greedy. We didn't need a lot of cash to get along, so I didn't deal in more than that."





The boys had kept their dear little mouths shut, when he explained the economics of the situation in terms of toys, treats, and new clothing. An additional bribe—the promise of never telling anyone what their real names were, and signing them into the Grantville school system as "Frank," "Ronald," and "Gerry," made sure they wouldn't tell, wouldn't bring samples out to their friends, and wouldn't allow the friends in the greenhouse, ever. After all, as Tom knew only too well, peer-pressure among the male of the species is a dreadful thing, and a name can become a deadly weapon. "Gwaihir" was too funny for words, "Elrond" had any number of nasty permutations, and as for "Faramir"—well. Any idiot could quickly figure out just what sort of nickname would come out of "Faramir" in the mouths of a pack of boys.





No, Tom never grew too much and never sold it in or near Grantville. One of the former members of Lothlorien came and collected the crop four times a year, paying in cash, taking it—well, Tom didn't know where he took it, but it definitely went far, far away. It wasn't a lot of cash, but it was enough to keep them in shoes and T-shirts, Tonka trucks and the occasional Twinkie.





So yes, he managed to stay far below the radar, so far as the law was concerned. From time to time, he ventured out into legitimate mercantile ventures, but aside from the sale of eggs, they never amounted to much, and some were outright disasters.





Then came the Ring of Fire, and everything changed.





At first, he and the boys had just been concerned about surviving the experience. But—that was months ago. Survival was no longer the issue—thriving was.





It had not escaped him that suddenly he was the only person in all of the New United States that was producing a pain-killer instead of consuming it. He'd never given up on the ethics that had brought him out here in the first place, and as soon as things settled down some, he brought himself and a sample of his crop straight to James Nichols, figuring that an ex-'Nam vet out of the 'hood was going to be a tad bit more open-minded about what had been going on in the greenhouse than the Law, and might be willing to intervene on his part.