Chapter 5 #3
Tom stood in the rain and looked at a man he had known for five hours.
And he was opening his mouth to answer when Quentin Clubman, who had drifted twelve feet down the yard during the fight and was standing at the end of the north rick looking off toward the river, said, in a completely different voice than any he had used all night:
"Hey. Hey, mister."
"What."
"There's a guy standing in your bushes."
Tom was flat behind the rick before the boy finished the sentence.
"Down," he said. "Everybody down. In the house or on the ground, pick one, now."
Kindra had the door and she pulled Christina through it by the arm and went low past the window with the Beretta up.
McKenzie took Sofie off her feet, actually off her feet, and was gone around the corner of the cabin with Oliver behind her.
Quentin Clubman stood exactly where he was.
"Get down," Tom said.
"He's just standing there."
"Get down or I will put you down."
Quentin got down.
Tom came up over the rick with the .22 and looked where the boy had been looking.
The hedge line ran a hundred and eighty feet along the river side, black and tangled in the last of the light, and forty yards down it, at the upstream end where the gravel bar narrowed to nine feet, there was a shape.
It was not moving.
It was man-height and man-width and it had the wrong outline for a stump and Tom had walked that hedge eleven times in four days and there had been no stump there.
He watched it for ninety seconds.
It did not move at all.
"Kenz," he called, low. "Tell me what you see from the corner."
Her voice came back from the far side of the cabin, thin and steady.
"Something at the upstream end. It's got a light spot at the top."
"Is the light spot a face?"
A pause.
"No," McKenzie said. "It's too high and it's too round."
Tom's stomach turned over.
He went down the yard along the inside of the hedge, using the thorn as cover, taking eleven minutes to cover forty yards, and he came at it from behind and above.
It was a fence post.
Somebody had driven a four foot cedar post into the gravel at the upstream mouth of the bar, and on top of the post they had set a cook pot.
Kindra's cook pot. The one from the cache.
Inside it, laid in neatly, was a tangle of braided dogbane cord with mud dried on it, and eleven tin cans on wire, and a wooden clapper made of two flat pieces of dry birch.
Every one of Oliver's noisemakers.
All of them, pulled from a hundred and eighty feet of riverbank, in the dark, at some point in the last few days, and stacked in a pot on a post like eggs in a basket.
Tom stood there in the rain for a long time.
Then he picked up the pot and carried it back up the yard, and when he came into the light from the doorway everybody saw what he was carrying and nobody said a word.
Oliver's face did something Tom would have given a great deal not to see.
"They're not broken," Tom said immediately. "Look. Not one of them is broken. Not a cord cut, not a can dented. He pulled every one of them without setting a single one off and he put them in a pot."
"Why?" Oliver said.
"Because breaking them says I beat your traps." Tom set the pot on the table. "Stacking them neat says I could have walked in here any night for a week and you'd never have known."
"Then why didn't he?"
"I don't know."
"Yes you do," Kindra said quietly.
Tom looked at her.
"Because he's not ready," she said. "Because the wood's not out yet and we're not hungry enough, and he's still filing us down."
"Yeah."
"How long's it been there?"
"The mud on the cord's dry. Two days, maybe three."
Tom pulled a chair out and sat down heavily.
"Which means it's been standing at the end of that bar since before the last snow, forty yards from this door, and I walked the weir past it twice a day and never once looked up the bar because I was looking at the water."
"That's not on you."
"It's entirely on me."
Nobody argued, because everybody was thinking about the same four hours.
Then Tyler Clubman, in the corner, in a dry shirt with mud still in his hair, said, "So there's men."
"There's men."
"Then we can't go downriver."
"No," Tom said. "You can't go downriver."
The argument started at six the next morning and it was worse than the fight, because nobody could end it by putting anybody in the dirt.
Tom laid it out at the table with the ash and the hearth stone.
"The Keegan place is off," he said. "I'm not sending you eleven miles down a river with a post on it. So here's what's actually available."
He drew.
"East, over the saddle, up Bear Gulch and over the spine. That's two days of climbing with two eleven year olds and a man with an open sore on his back. On the far side there's the Tolliver ranch in the flats. Three houses, a barn, a hand pump well."
"Is it empty?"
"I don't know. I haven't been over there since August of last year."
"That's it?" Tyler said. "That's the plan? Two days over a mountain to a place you haven't seen in a year?"
"That's one option. Here's the other." Tom set the pencil down. "You stay."
Kindra's head came up.
"You stay through winter," Tom said. "You work. Everybody works, ten hours a day, every day, and I mean the boys too. You eat what we eat and it won't be enough for anybody and we'll all be lighter in March than we are now. And you take orders, from me and from my wife, both,
and you take them the first time."
Christina said, "Yes."
"Christina."
"Yes. God, yes, yes."
"No," Tyler said.
The room stopped.
"Tyler."
"No." He had both hands flat on the table. "I heard what he said. Take orders from me and from my wife. That's not staying. That's being owned."
"It's being organized," Kindra said.
"It's the same thing when you're the one taking the orders."
"It isn't remotely the same thing and you know it."
"What I know," Tyler said, "is that yesterday a man put his hands on my son and then put me on my back in the mud with my wife watching, and now he's offering to let me live in his yard."
"Yesterday," Tom said, "your son told me to go do something to myself in front of my six year old, and you were in a bathtub, and your wife said his name and went back to the washcloth."
"Don't you talk about her."
"I'm talking about him."
"He's eleven!"
"Everybody keeps saying that like it's an argument."
Tom leaned forward. "My son's ten and a half. He hauls sixteen buckets a day. He lost four weeks of splitting in one morning and stood there and watched it burn with his mother's hand over his mouth and he did not make a sound because he knew making a sound would get his sister killed."
"That's not my fault."
"No. But this is." Tom pointed at the twins. "Look at them. Not at me. At them."
Mate and Quentin were on the bench by the stove, and they were watching the whole thing with the identical bright interested expression of two boys who had seen a great many arguments and had learned, correctly, that none of them ever ended in anything.
"That's what I'm not going to have," Tom said.
"Have."
"In my house. Around my kids."
"Say what you mean."
"All right," Tom said, and he stood up.
He was not loud. That was the thing Kindra would remember about it, and Oliver, and McKenzie, and even Sofie, who was six and who would remember it wrong in the details and exactly right in the shape of it for the rest of her life.
"My children are going to live in a world I can't see," Tom said.
"That's the truth of it and I've had six months to get used to it and I haven't. There's no school. There's no doctor. There's no policeman, no judge, no jail, no priest, no neighbor who'll call somebody if things get bad in here. All of that is gone and it is not coming back inside of thirty years.
"
Nobody moved.
"So what's left?" he said. "What's actually holding a person together out here when nobody's watching and there's no punishment for anything?"
"Nothing," Quentin said.
"That's the right answer and it's why I'm saying this to you." Tom turned to him. "Nothing's holding you together. Except what's inside you. That's it. That's the entire supply, and it doesn't restock, and every single day you spend acting like nothing matters, you spend some of it."
"Words don't matter."
"Words are the cheapest thing on this mountain and that's exactly why they matter. Watch."
Tom held up a hand. "Right now, today, it costs you nothing to be decent. Nothing. It's free. And you won't do it. So what happens in February when being decent costs you something? When there's four days of food and six people? What are you going to do then,
if you can't even hold your mouth shut when it's free?"
Quentin didn't answer.
"You know what I think happens?" Tom said.
"I think a boy who says whatever he wants at eleven because nothing happens becomes a man who does whatever he wants at nineteen because nothing happens. And then somebody like Wallace Wingman finds him and tells him he's finally in a place where nothing happens, and gives him a coat and a hatchet."
Christina made a sound.
"I met the man who taught you to say hello the house," Tom said. "Chip Charter. He walked into this yard eleven days ago and he was a foul old bastard about my wife within ninety seconds and I nearly shot him for it."
"What happened to him?" Mate said.
"He got caught in a gulch a mile and a quarter from here and five men killed him with a hatchet, and he took a rope in the ankles running uphill, away from this house, on purpose, breaking branches the whole way so they'd follow him instead of coming down here."
Tom's voice did not change. "He bought us a day. Nobody made him. There was no law, there was no God standing over him with a clipboard, there was nobody watching who could ever have told anybody. He just had it in him."
He sat back down.
"That's all I want," he said. "Not manners. I don't care about manners. I want to know that the people in this house have got something in them, because that's the only thing in the entire world that still works."
The silence went on for a while.
Then Tyler Clubman said, "We're leaving."
"Tyler," Christina said.