Chapter 5
They stood at the fence for eleven minutes while Tom asked questions and Tyler Clubman answered them badly.
Not lying. Tom was fairly sure of that by the fourth answer. Just badly, the way a man answers when he has not slept properly in four months and has stopped being able to organize anything in his head.
"How long on the trail?"
"Nine days. Ten. Christina, was it nine?"
"Eleven," Christina said.
"Eleven days."
"What have you been eating?"
"Rose hips," Christina said. "And we had a marmot on the sixth day. And there was a cabin on Sunday with about two pounds of flour in a coffee can that the mice hadn't got all of."
"You've got a rifle."
"It's a thirty aught six," Tyler said. "And I've got three rounds and I've had three rounds since the end of July, and I have not seen an elk since the end of July either, because I don't know how to find them."
That was the first thing he said that Tom entirely believed.
"Where'd you learn to say hello the house?"
Tyler blinked.
"A man told us," he said. "Back in June. He said if you ever come up on a place with smoke, you stand off and you call out, and you don't ever just walk up."
"Old man? Gray beard, big?"
"Two pistols," Christina said.
Tom looked at Kindra across the yard.
Kindra lowered the Beretta an inch.
"You can come in as far as the chopping block," Tom said. "Rifle goes on the block. You get water and you get a meal, and then we talk about what happens after that, and that's all I'm promising."
"Thank you." Tyler's voice went wet and he hated himself for it out loud. "Sorry. Sorry. Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. Rifle."
Tyler laid it on the block, and his hands were shaking so badly he nearly dropped it.
Tom picked it up and cleared it. Three rounds, exactly as stated, and a bore that had not been cleaned since summer and had rust coming in like frost on a window.
"You've got maybe one shot before this thing does something ugly," he said.
"I know."
"No, I mean it does something ugly to your face."
"I know," Tyler said, "and I have known it for two months and there's nothing I can do about it, so I stopped thinking about it."
Tom set the rifle down.
That was the second thing he entirely believed.
The Clubmans ate at the table because Kindra would not have it any other way, and Tom watched four people eat fish stew in a manner that told him more than any answer had.
Christina fed the boys first. Both bowls before her own, and she did it without appearing to think about it, which meant she had been doing it for months.
Tyler ate like a man who had forgotten he was allowed to.
And the twins ate like wolves and talked the entire time with their mouths full.
"This is the best thing I have ever eaten in my entire life," Mate announced.
"It's fish," Oliver said.
"It's the best goddamn fish anybody ever cooked."
"Mate," Christina said.
"Sorry. It's the best fish."
Quentin had not said much. He had eaten two bowls and then he had turned sideways on the bench and looked at the racks of drying meat hung under the eave outside the window, and he had counted them, and Tom had watched him count them.
"You've got like sixty pounds out there," Quentin said.
"Eat your food," Tyler said.
"I'm just saying."
"Eat your food."
Afterward Christina stood up to help clear and got close to Tom for the first time, reaching past him for a bowl, and she stopped.
"You smell good," she said.
Tom laughed, startled.
"Ma'am."
"No, I'm sorry, that's an insane thing to say to a stranger." She had gone red to the ears. "It's just that I have not smelled a clean person since May. My whole world has smelled like wet wool and woodsmoke and us for five months and you smell like, I don't know what that is. Pine?"
"Spruce," Kindra said from the stove.
"Spruce."
"Spruce tips and bear fat. It's soap."
Christina Clubman put the bowl down.
"You have soap," she said.
"I make soap."
"You make soap."
"About four pounds a batch." Kindra dried her hands. "You want to see?"
She brought the box down off the shelf and knocked out the slab, amber and faintly translucent at the edge, and Christina held it in both hands like a woman holding a baby bird.
"How," she said.
Kindra told her, and she told her properly, because Kindra never explained anything halfway.
"Two ingredients. Lye and fat, and that's the whole of it. Everything else is the fussing."
"Where does lye come from?"
"Ashes." Kindra pulled the barrel lid off and showed her.
"But only hardwood ash. Cottonwood, apple, alder if you're desperate. Not pine, not fir, not lodgepole. Softwood ash is weak and resinous and it'll never throw a lye that works, and half the people who try this once and fail, fail right there."
"We've been burning fir for four months."
"Then start a second bucket. Anything hardwood you burn, that ash goes in the barrel separate."
"Then what?"
"Then you build the barrel right, and that's the part people skip."
Kindra turned it and pointed. "False bottom. Clean river gravel four inches, then a layer of straw or dry grass over the gravel to keep the ash from packing down into it, then the ash. Fourteen, sixteen inches of it, packed but not stomped.
And a hole in the side just above the gravel with a little wooden spout in it."
"And you pour water in."
"Rain water. Not spring, not creek." Kindra held up a finger. "Minerals in ground water fight the lye. Rain water is soft and it'll pull twice as much. Save it off the roof."
"How much?"
"Slow. A cup at a time, over a plate laid on top of the ash so it doesn't dig a channel straight through. If it channels, you get brown water and nothing else. Half a day for a run."
"And how do you know it's ready?"
Kindra grinned.
"Egg," she said. "Chicken egg, raw, whole. Float it in what comes out. If it sinks, your lye's weak and you pour it back through the ash again and start over. If it floats up high like a cork, it's too hot and it'll burn you.
What you want is an egg riding with a circle of shell showing about the size of a quarter."
"That's it?"
"That's it, and it's the only measurement in the whole process and it's better than any measurement I ever had in a kitchen."
"And the fat?"
"Bear's best. Deer tallow works, it just makes a harder, meaner soap. Bacon fat's no good, too much salt."
Kindra pulled the crock down. "But whatever you use, it has to be rendered clean. Double rendered. You boil it in water, let it set up cold, lift the fat cake off the top and throw away everything underneath, and then you do it again.
Any meat left in that fat and your soap goes rancid inside two months."
"And then?"
"And then you boil them together. Two parts lye water to one part fat, roughly, and you boil it hard and you stir it for six hours and it is the single dullest work on God's earth."
"Six hours."
"Six hours, and you know it's done when you drag the spoon through and it leaves a track that stays open for a second. Then you pour it in a wooden box lined with cloth and leave it two weeks and cut it into bars."
Christina Clubman stood there holding the slab.
Then she said, "Can I bathe my husband?"
Everyone stopped.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry, that came out of me like a sneeze."
"No," Kindra said. "No, that's the most reasonable thing anybody's said today."
"He's got a place on his back."
"What kind of place?"
"It's red and it's got a hard edge and it's been there three weeks and it's bigger than it was." Christina's voice was very level all of a sudden, the way a voice gets when a person has been carrying something alone. "He won't let me look at it. He says it's nothing."
Kindra put the lid on the barrel.
"Tom," she said. "Take the kids outside."
"Happily."
"Take all of them."
"I said happily."
They filled the tub with four pots and the kettle and a bucket of river water that had run the filter, and Christina tested it with her wrist twice.
Tyler Clubman stood in the middle of the floor with his arms at his sides.
"I don't need this," he said.
"Tyler."
"There's work. I should be doing something. They fed us, I should be splitting something."
"It's dark, and it's raining, and the man's got nothing for you to split." Christina pointed at the tub. "Get in."
"Christina."
"Get in the water, Tyler."
He stood there a second longer.
Then he stripped naked, fast and businesslike, the way a man does when he has decided not to feel anything about it, and he stepped into the tub and sat down hard and put both hands over his face.
"Oh God," he said.
"I know."
"It's hot."
"I know."
He sat there in six inches of hot water with his knees up and he did not move for a long moment, and his shoulders started to shake, and his wife put her hand flat on the top of his head and held it there and said nothing at all.
Kindra stayed by the stove with her back half turned, which was as much privacy as a one room cabin could offer, and she talked, because talking was better than the silence.
"Hair first," she said. "Always hair first. Everything you scrub off his head runs down onto the rest of him, so if you do it last you're just relocating the dirt."
Christina worked the soap into a lather in her hands and then into his scalp.
The water going off him ran gray, then brown.
"Don't be shy with it. That's four months up there."
"It's coming out in clumps."
"That's not the soap, that's what was holding it together." Kindra rinsed a bowl. "Rinse him with the dipper and go again. Twice on the hair, always."
She did it twice.
"Now face and neck and behind the ears. Behind the ears is where it goes wrong on men, it's warm and it never sees daylight."
"He's got scaling back here."
"That's what I mean."
Christina worked down. Neck, shoulders, back.
And then she stopped.
"Kindra," she said.
"Is it the place?"
"Yes."
Kindra dried her hands and came over.
It was low on the left side of his back, just above the belt line, and it was the size of a playing card. Red going to purple at the center. A hard rolled edge. And the skin at the middle of it had that dull dead shine that skin gets when it has already given up.