A Black Boy Bought the Mill Beside the Dump for $12 — One Month Later, Farmers Waited at His Gate
Chapter 5
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On the 22nd day, the forecast changed. A freezing rain system was moving up out of Kansas, and the weather service was talking about half an inch of ice—maybe more—across northern Missouri early next week.Whitmore got buried. Nora drove past the next morning and counted nine trucks in the yard, with contract accounts loading first and small customers pushed back again. Her extra batch had been bumped to the following week. She called Darius that night: "Any chance you can do one more before this hits?"He told her to come by Friday.Then he got ready the way he always did before a big storm: he filled the tractor with diesel and checked the oil; he tightened the belt and hung a spare one on the wall; he set a fire extinguisher by the door, swept every bit of dust off the floor, and backed the tractor into position outside the side door with a tarp over the seat; lantern, headlamps, extra batteries; then he filled every water tank on the place to the brim.Nora watched him do it when she came for her batch. "You're prepping like you know something.""My line always goes down first," he said.She snorted. "Well, Caroline's telling everybody not to worry. Says Whitmore's got a backup generator."Hank was there that afternoon, listening to the bearings. He heard that and frowned. "Generator? What does it run?"Darius didn't know.Hank pulled his cap down. "Having lights in a building doesn't mean every motor in it'll turn."The rain started at dusk on the 28th day. By 9:00, it was freezing on everything it touched. Darius walked the hog pens with a headlamp and listened to the trees around the farmhouse start to crack.A little before midnight, a transformer blew somewhere down the road with a flat bang and a blue flash against the clouds. The house went dark. So did every yard light he could see.Morning showed him the damage: two trees lay across the gravel road, and every power line in sight sagged under a sleeve of ice. Neighbors came out with chainsaws, and by late morning, the local roads were passable. The battery radio said the interstate was closed, and freight was stalled on both sides of the state line.Darius counted what he had ground for his own hogs: two days, maybe three.Nora's truck came up the drive at 10:00 in the morning, sliding a little, with three barrels of corn in the bed. She'd driven past Whitmore on the way."Lights are on. Generator's running the office and a couple of the small augers. The big mill's not turning." Caroline had electricians out there, she said, but the word in the yard was that the main motor needed more than the generator could give it. Nothing was getting ground until the three-phase came back.It wasn't just Whitmore. A couple of the small farms around Nora had their own electric grinders, and those were dead, too. Nobody's animals were going to starve by suppertime, but anyone raising hogs or hens on a thin supply of ground feed was starting to do the math: they had corn in their bins; they just couldn't use it.