Chapter 5 #2
She pressed it with two fingers and Tyler came up out of the water with a shout.
"How long?"
"Three weeks," Christina said.
"Four," Tyler said, through his teeth.
"Pack strap?"
"Yeah. He's been carrying everything since August. The strap sits right there and it's got a buckle on it."
"Has it been wet?"
"It's been wet since the middle of September. Everything's been wet since the middle of September."
Kindra crouched so she could see it level.
"That's pressure and damp," she said. "The strap rubbed the skin raw and the damp kept it from ever closing and now it's gone down instead of across. That's an abscess with a top on it and it's got a pocket underneath."
Tyler said, "It's fine."
"It is not remotely fine, and you know it isn't, which is why you wouldn't let her look."
He didn't answer.
"Hot compress four times a day," Kindra said. "As hot as he can stand, ten minutes at a go, and after every one you wash around it with this soap and you dry it and you leave it open to the air. And the pack strap does not touch that man again until it closes."
"Will it close?"
"If it drains, it'll close. If it doesn't drain in four days, then somebody's going to have to open it, and that's a conversation for Thursday."
Christina's hands had gone still on his shoulders.
"Thank you," she said.
"Wash his feet," Kindra said. "Feet are the other thing. Between every toe, and then dry them, and then look at every crack."
Outside, in the drizzle, under the eave, Tom had five children and a woodpile.
"Everybody grab an armload," he said. "This goes on the north rick. Butt ends out, bark side up on the top course."
"Why?" Mate said.
"Because bark sheds water and butt ends dry faster, and if you stack it the other way you spend February burning wet wood and crying about it."
"That's stupid."
Tom turned around.
"Which part."
"The whole thing. It's raining. Why are we stacking wood in the rain." Mate Clubman had his hands in his armpits. "It's just going to get wet anyway."
"It's going to get wet on the outside and dry on the inside, and the inside is where the fire lives."
Tom picked up four rounds and set them on the rick himself.
"And stacking it with the bark up means the water runs off instead of sitting in the checks. And doing it now instead of tomorrow means if somebody comes tonight, the wood's against the house where it can't be burned without burning the house."
"Somebody's coming tonight?"
"Somebody's always maybe coming."
Quentin picked up two pieces, looked at them, and put them down again.
"My dad says this is all going to be over by spring," he said.
"Does he."
"He says the government's going to come."
Tom kept stacking.
"What do you think?" he said.
Quentin considered it.
"I think my dad's full of shit," he said.
Oliver made a noise. McKenzie went completely still.
"Hey," Tom said.
"What? He is."
"That's not the part I'm objecting to."
"What, shit?" Mate said, from the other end of the rick. "Everybody says shit."
"Nobody says it here."
"Why?"
"Because I've got a six year old, and because words are a tool and you don't leave tools lying in the wet."
Tom set down his armload and faced them both.
"Here's the rule, and it's the only one I'm going to give you tonight. In my yard, in my house, around my kids, you don't swear. Not the big ones, not the little ones. That's it."
"That's dumb," Mate said.
"Might be."
"You can't just make a rule."
"I made it about eleven seconds ago and it's holding up fine."
Quentin was watching him with his head slightly tilted, the same way he had looked at the hedge line.
"What happens if we do?" he said.
There it was.
"Then you find out," Tom said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you get for free."
Quentin smiled.
Then he said, clearly, not loudly, looking Tom directly in the eye, "Fuck you."
Sofie's head came up.
Tom crossed the four feet between them and took Quentin Clubman by the ear.
Not hard. Not the way his own grandfather had done it in 1989. A thumb and two fingers, folded over the top of the ear, and he turned and walked, and the boy came with him because the alternative was the ear staying behind.
"Ow. Ow, ow, ow."
"Mm hm."
"Get off me!"
"Walking."
He took him in the door and the cabin was full of steam and Christina Clubman had a cloth in her hand and Tyler was sitting in the tub with his back to the room.
"Quentin!" Christina said.
That was all.
That was the entire thing she did.
Tom stood there holding a boy by the ear and he watched a mother say her son's name in the voice a person uses for a dropped cup and then turn back to the washcloth, and he understood, all at once and completely, exactly why eleven year old twins had gotten this way.
"Ma'am," Tom said.
"He's tired. We've all been walking."
"He told me to do something to myself in front of my six year old."
"He's eleven."
"He's eleven and he's going to be thirty one." Tom let go of the ear. "I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm telling you what's happening. He's on water for three days."
Christina blinked. "What does that mean?"
"It means he hauls for the settling barrel. Sixteen buckets a day from the river, which is what Oliver has been doing since Monday, and he does it alongside him, and when he's done he helps Sofie time the boil. Three days."
"That's a punishment?"
"That's the arrangement. You want to call it a punishment, call it that. I call it the price of the stew."
"He's a child."
"So is the boy he'll be hauling with."
Water came over the side of the tub.
Tyler Clubman stood up out of it, dripping, and Christina got a towel around his waist and he took it from her and held it closed with one fist.
"You don't touch my son," he said.
"I took him by the ear."
"You put your hands on my son."
"I did. And I'll tell you exactly why, and then you and I are going to be fine." Tom kept his voice flat and low. "Because he said that thing to me in front of my daughter, and I'd rather deal with it in four seconds now than spend three days listening to it get worse."
"You could have come and got me."
"You were in a bathtub."
Tyler came across the floor fast.
He had eleven days of trail and four months of failing his family and an abscess in his back the size of a playing card, and none of it was Tom's, and all of it arrived at once.
"You think I don't know what you're doing." His finger came up an inch from Tom's chest. "You feed us one meal and then you start giving orders. Three days. Three days of hauling and then what, a week, a month, and then we work for you and we sleep in the shed."
"There's no shed. They burned it."
"You know what I mean."
"I don't think you do."
"Get out of my way."
"You're in my house."
Tyler shoved him.
It was not a good shove. It was a wet man in a towel with one fist occupied, throwing his shoulder forward, and Tom took two steps back through the door into the drizzle and the dirt of the yard because going backward through a door is better than going down inside a room full of children.
Tyler came out after him.
"Dad!" Mate shouted.
Christina was in the doorway with both hands over her mouth.
"Tyler," Kindra said, from behind her, and her voice had a sound in it that Tom had heard exactly twice in eleven years. "Tyler, stop."
He did not stop.
He swung, wide and looping and telegraphed from the hip, and Tom leaned back and let it go by his chin and felt the wind of it.
"Don't," Tom said.
He swung again.
This one was closer and Tom took it on the shoulder and it hurt more than he expected, because Tyler Clubman had been a tall man once and there was still framing under the wreckage.
Tom stepped in.
He did not punch him. That was the thing he was proudest of afterward, on the nights when he was proud of anything.
He got inside the arc, put his shoulder into the man's chest and his right arm behind his left knee, and lifted and turned and put him down in the wet dirt the way you put down a fence post.
They went down together. The towel came off somewhere between standing and landing and was simply gone, and then there was a naked man on his back in the mud in a Montana dooryard in the rain with Tom Thorn's forearm across his collarbone.
Tyler bucked once. Twice.
"Stop," Tom said.
He got a hand up into Tom's beard and pulled and Tom let him, and rode it out, and did not hit him.
"Stop."
"Get off."
"Stop moving and I will."
Tyler Clubman went limp all at once and the fight came out of him like water out of a split bag, and he lay there in the mud with the rain on his face and his chest heaving and he made a sound that was not crying and was not anything else.
Tom got off him.
He picked the towel out of the dirt, shook it once, and handed it down.
Nobody in the doorway moved.
Tyler got the towel around himself and got to his hands and knees and stayed there a second before he stood up, and there was mud down the whole left side of him and in his hair and in the open sore on his back.
Tom stood four feet away with his hands loose.
"That's going to need washing again," he said. "That place on your back's got dirt in it now, and that's my fault as much as yours, and your wife's going to have to do it hot."
Tyler said nothing.
"Get inside. Get warm. Eat what's left in the pot." Tom wiped the rain off his face. "And in the morning you're leaving."
Christina made a small sound.
"You can have four days of dried fish and a pound of jerky and the flour we've got left," Tom said. "You can have a fire kit and you can have one of my hides, and I'll draw you a route downriver to the Keegan place, which is empty and has a stove and a roof and nobody's been in it since March."
"Tom," Kindra said.
"That's eleven miles and it's downhill the whole way."
"Tom."
"I'm not putting them out with nothing. I'm putting them out."
"You can't." Tyler's voice was raw. "You can't do that. There are men on that river."
"I know there are men on that river."
"Then you know what that is. That's not putting us out, that's."
He stopped.
"Say it," Tom said.
"That's killing us slow," Tyler said.