Chapter 4 #2
"It isn't bad. Felling's the easy part." Tom held up his hand and counted. "Fell it. Limb it. Buck it into sixteen inch rounds. Haul it four hundred yards. Split it. Stack it. Fifteen trees is about sixty hours of work with two good saws and two hatchets."
"We have one saw," McKenzie said.
"We have one saw and no hatchets, because they took both."
The table went quiet.
"How long with one saw and an axe," Kindra said.
"A hundred hours. Maybe a hundred and twenty."
"That's ten days."
"That's ten days of every single person in this house working from light to dark, and not doing anything else, and not hunting, and not smoking meat, and not standing watch." Tom looked around the table. "And I don't believe we've got ten days."
"Then we don't get five cords," Oliver said.
"No."
"So how much do we get?"
"As much as we get," Tom said. "We start at first light and we work like we've got ten days and we accept whatever we have when we stop."
That was the shape of the next four days, and they were the hardest four days the family had ever put in.
Tom fell the trees. The two man crosscut was gone with the shed, so it was the bow saw and the axe, and the axe had to be sharpened twice a day on the flat stone with water.
McKenzie limbed. She was small and quick and she went up the trunk from the butt end swinging a hatchet they no longer had, which meant she used a heavy knife and a wooden baton and she did it by driving the blade under each branch collar and rolling her wrist.
Oliver bucked with the bow saw, and his hands blistered on the second day and tore open on the third, and Kindra wrapped them in cloth soaked in yarrow water and he went back out.
Kindra split.
She was better at it than Tom, which had been a sore point in 2016 and was simply a fact by 2019. She had a way of reading the round before she swung, finding the check in the end grain and setting the wedge in it.
Sofie carried. Two pieces at a time, four hundred yards, back and forth, all day long, and by the end of the second day she could do it without being told where to stack.
They did not build a new shed. There was no time.
They stacked in four ricks along the north wall of the cabin, tight against the logs under the eave overhang, covered with elk hides and bark slabs and weighted with rock.
It was worse than the shed in every way. It would take weather and it would breed carpenter ants against the wall in spring.
It also could not be burned from thirty feet away without burning the house, which meant a man with a can of diesel had to come stand where Tom could see him.
On the evening of the fourth day Tom stood back and measured it with his eye and his arm.
"Two and a quarter," he said.
"That's all?"
"Two and a quarter cords."
Kindra wiped her face with her sleeve and left a streak of pitch across her cheekbone.
"That's a month and a half," she said.
"That's a month and a half if we burn the way we burned last year. It's three months if we burn once a day and wear everything we own and sleep four in a bed."
"Then that's what we do."
"That's what we do."
On the fifth morning it rained, hard and cold, the kind of October rain in Montana that is snow four hundred feet higher, and Tom made a call and called a rest day.
Nobody argued. Nobody could have worked.
Oliver slept until noon, which he had not done since March. McKenzie sat by the stove and re-sorted the brass. Sofie lay against Shyla, who was walking on all four legs now, stiff and slow, with the fur growing back in gray over the three furrows.
And Kindra, at two in the afternoon, said, "Tom. Come here."
She had the big galvanized wash tub in the middle of the floor and two pots on the stove.
"What's this?"
"This is me deciding that we are not going to be animals about it," she said. "You have been in the same clothes for five days and there is pitch in your beard and you smell like a burn pile."
"There's a lot to do."
"It's raining and there is exactly nothing to do." She pointed at the tub. "In."
"Kindra."
"The kids are up in the loft, the door's barred, Kenz has the window watch and she's been told not to come down for an hour." Kindra crossed her arms. "Also I made soap and I need somebody to test it, and you are the only adult available."
Tom stopped.
"You made soap."
"I made soap."
"Out of what?"
"Sit down and I'll tell you, because I am extremely proud of it and nobody has asked."
He sat.
"Three weeks ago I started the ash barrel," she said. "You saw me doing it and you assumed I was clearing the stove."
"I did assume that."
"I was clearing the stove into a barrel. But only hardwood ash. Not lodgepole, not fir. Softwood ash is weak, it's got too much resin in it and it won't throw a lye that'll hold an egg."
"Where'd you get hardwood?"
"Cottonwood down by the river, and the old apple stump from behind the Keegan place that you brought up in August and I never used for anything."
She was moving as she talked, laying out cloths.
"I built a barrel with a false bottom. Layer of clean river gravel, layer of straw over the gravel, then about fourteen inches of ash packed in, and I drilled a hole in the side just above the gravel and ran a little wooden spout out of it."
"And then water."
"Then rain water, and it has to be rain water. Spring water's got minerals in it that'll fight you." She checked the pot. "You pour it on slow, a cup at a time, over a plate set on top of the ash so it doesn't channel. Takes half a day. What comes out the spout is lye."
"How do you know when it's strong enough?"
"That's the good part." She grinned at him over her shoulder.
"You float a chicken egg in it. If it sinks, it's weak and you run it through the ash again. If it floats high like a cork, it's too strong and it'll take the hide off you. What you want is an egg floating with a circle of shell showing about the size of a quarter."
"And you got that?"
"Fourth run. The first three were water with a bad attitude."
"And the fat?"
"Bear," Kindra said. "The one you took in September. I rendered four pounds of it clean, double rendered, boiled it in water and let it set and skimmed the good fat off the top and threw away the sludge underneath, twice, because if there's any meat left in it the soap goes rancid by Christmas."
"Then you boil them together."
"Then you boil them together, and you boil them for six hours, and you stir the whole time, and that is the single most boring thing I have ever done in my life." She lifted a wooden box off the shelf and turned it over and knocked a slab out onto the table. "And that's what you get."
It was pale amber and slightly translucent at the edges, and when she cut a piece off with the bread knife it cut clean.
Tom picked it up and smelled it.
"There's something in it."
"Spruce tip and a little rendered pitch. For the smell, and because pitch is good for skin."
"Kindra, this is real soap."
"It is real soap. It's the first real soap in this house since June." She set it in the dish beside the tub. "And I have no idea if it's too strong, because I have not put it on a person yet. It might take a layer off."
Tom looked at the slab, and then at the tub, and then at his wife.
"I'll be your guinea pig," he said.
"That's what I was hoping you'd say."
The water was hot. That was the first thing, and it nearly undid him.
Not warm. Hot, poured from both pots and topped from the kettle, six inches deep in the galvanized tub, and Tom stood in it and felt eleven days of cold come up out of his bones and leave through the top of his head.
"Oh," he said.
"Right?"
"Kindra."
"Don't talk. Sit down on the stool."
He sat, knees up, and she started with his hair.
She worked the soap into a lather in her hands first and then into his scalp, and the pitch and the sawdust and five days of woodsmoke came out of it in a gray stream, and she poured a dipper of clean water over his head and he put his face in his hands.
"Does it burn?"
"No."
"Tell me the truth, because I'll change the recipe."
"It doesn't burn. It squeaks." He rubbed a lock of it between his fingers. "It squeaks like real soap does."
"That's the lye ratio," she said, and she sounded so pleased with herself that he laughed out loud for the first time in a week.
She did his beard next, and then his shoulders, and then his back, and she took her time about it because there was pitch worked in at the shoulder blades where he had carried rounds on his back for four days.
Then she pushed him upright and went down his arms, and she found every blister and every torn nail and every place the rose thorns had gone in, and she cleaned each of them out without being gentle about it because gentle is how a hand goes septic.
"You've got nine of these in the left palm alone."
"I know."
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"Because there was wood to cut."
"Tom Thorn." She dug a thorn out with the point of her sewing needle. "You are forty two years old and you have the medical judgment of a border collie."
"Ow."
"Good."
She worked down his legs.
She ran the soap along his calves, thumbs into the muscle on either side of the shin bone, and Tom made a sound he was not proud of, because his calves had been cramping every night for four nights and he had not told anybody about that either.
"There it is," she said.
"That's bad."
"That's not bad, that's rock hard. You've been climbing that gulch on nothing but salt and elk for two weeks." She dug in with both thumbs. "This is going to hurt and then it's going to stop."
It hurt. Then it stopped.
She did his thighs the same way, long strokes up the quadriceps, working the soap in and the knots out, and he leaned forward with his forearms on his knees and let his head hang and for eleven minutes he was not afraid of anything at all.
"Stand up," she said.
"Why?"
"Because I can't do the rest of you sitting down."
He stood.
She rinsed him with the dipper and lathered again and went up the backs of his legs, and then she squeezed both cheeks of his glutes, and he smiled.
"Hey."
"I'm testing the soap."