Chapter 5 #4
"We're going over the saddle."
"Tyler, listen to him."
"I have been listening to him for fourteen hours!"
It came out of him in a roar and it cracked at the top.
"That is all I have done since we got here! I have listened to him explain wood and water and fish and soap and my own son, and every single word of it has been true, and I cannot do it, Christina. I cannot stand in a yard for five months being the stupidest man in it."
Nobody said anything.
"That's what it is," Kindra said quietly. "Isn't it."
"Yes."
"That's the whole thing."
"Yes."
"Tyler, we'll all be stupid at something. I've never trapped. Tom can't sew a seam that holds."
"You don't understand." He was shaking. "I got us out of Missoula. I did that. I got us up the Blackfoot and I held that place for four months and everything I did was wrong, and I only found out it was wrong when men walked in and took it, and we ran,
and I have walked eleven days knowing that every single thing I decided was the wrong thing."
He wiped his face with his wrist. "If I stay here, my sons watch him be right for five months. Every day. And at the end of it I'm nobody to them."
Tom looked at the table for a long moment.
"That's honest," he said. "And I'd rather you said it than not."
"So we're going."
"You're going to get them killed."
"Maybe."
"Tyler."
"Maybe!" He stood up. "But it'll be me doing it."
They went at ten in the morning.
Kindra packed them. She did it herself and nobody helped and nobody argued about the amounts.
Four pounds of dried fish. A pound and a half of jerky, which was eleven percent of everything the family had. The last two cups of flour. Half a pound of salt out of two pounds eleven ounces.
A fire kit, flint and char cloth and a hank of dry tinder in a birch bark tube.
Two elk hides.
A bar of soap, wrapped in cloth, and a sheet of birch bark with the whole process scratched into it with a nail. Hardwood ash only. Rain water. Egg floats a quarter.
And she made Tyler take his shirt off on the porch one more time and she put a hot compress on him for ten minutes and packed the wound open with yarrow and gave Christina the rest of the yarrow bundle.
"Four times a day," she said. "Hot as he can stand it. And that strap does not touch him. Christina, you carry the pack."
"I'll carry it."
"He'll fight you about it."
"He'll lose," Christina said.
Tom drew them the route on birch bark. Up the draw, over the saddle, north side of Bear Gulch and not the south side because the south side cliffs out at the top, down the far side to the Tolliver flats.
"Two days," he said. "Camp at the spring on the north slope, there's a flat spot with a rock overhang. Don't camp on the saddle. Wind'll kill you up there."
"Thank you," Tyler said.
"One more thing." Tom handed him three rounds of .30-06, cleaned and oiled, and a rag with a string through it. "Your bore's got rust in it. Run this through wet four times before you ever fire that rifle or it'll let go in your face. I'd give you a better gun if I had one and I don't."
Tyler looked at the rag.
"You should have," he said.
"Should have what?"
"Hit me. Yesterday. You had it and you didn't take it."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because your boys were in the doorway," Tom said.
Tyler Clubman stood there a second.
Then he put his hand out and Tom took it.
The twins went last.
Mate said, "Thanks for the fish," and meant it, and then spoiled it slightly by adding, "It was really damn good," and then flinched and said, "Sorry. Sorry."
"That's all right."
Quentin stopped in front of Tom.
He looked up at him with that tilted head.
"You were wrong about one thing," he said.
"What's that?"
"You said nobody's watching."
Then he walked off after his family, and Tom Thorn stood in his own dooryard with no idea at all what to do with that.
They watched the four of them go up the draw until the timber took them.
Sofie waved. Nobody waved back, because nobody looked around.
"Well," Kindra said.
"Yeah."
"Say it."
"I don't know how to say it."
"Try."
Tom sat down on the chopping block.
"I feel like I just killed four people very politely," he said.
"You didn't put them out. They left."
"I gave them a reason to leave."
"You gave them a rule," Kindra said. "That's different, and you know it's different, and you're going to spend three weeks pretending you don't."
She sat down beside him on the block, hip to hip.
"Can we talk about the boys," she said.
"Yeah."
"Because that was not normal."
"No."
"Tom, I have been around eleven year olds. Those two weren't wild."
Kindra was frowning at the treeline. "Wild kids are loud and stupid. Those two were watching. Every minute. Quentin counted the racks through the window in about four seconds and got it close to right, and then he looked down the hedge and found Oliver's second line,
which you and I built in the dark."
"I saw that."
"And he was the one who spotted the post."
Tom rubbed his beard.
"They've been scouting for months," he said. "Not for anybody. For themselves. That's what four months of losing does to a kid that age. He stops being a child and starts being an assessor."
"And the cussing?"
"That's the other half of the same thing."
Tom shook his head. "They've learned that words are the only thing they've got that lands. They've got no strength, no gun, no food, no say in anything. So they say a word and a room changes shape and for two seconds somebody's looking at them. That's power and it's the only power they've ever had."
"So it's fear."
"It's always fear at eleven."
Kindra was quiet.
"You know what scared me?" she said. "It wasn't the words."
"I know."
"It was Christina saying his name and going back to the washcloth."
"I know."
"That's a woman who stopped a year ago. That's what surrender looks like on a mother." Kindra pulled her coat tighter. "And I understood it completely, Tom, and that's what scared me. Because I could feel where that is. It's about four bad months from here."
Tom put his arm around her.
"It's not four months from here."
"How do you know?"
"Because you built a soap barrel in the middle of it," he said. "People who are surrendering don't start six hour projects."
She laughed, once, into his shoulder.
They sat there a while.
"I meant what I said in there," Tom said. "About not tolerating it. And I want to say the rest of it to you, because I didn't get to it in front of them."
"Say it."
"It was never about the word."
"I know."
"Sofie's six. In four years she won't remember there was ever a grocery store."
Tom looked out at the meadow. "Everything she thinks a person is, she's going to get from the eleven people she ever meets. That's it. That's the whole sample size. Eleven people, and we don't get to choose who they are, and half of them are going to be starving."
"So we choose what she sees us do about it."
"That's all there is left to choose."
Kindra nodded slowly.
"Then we should go do the thing we've been avoiding," she said.
"What's that?"
"You've been sitting on this block for eleven minutes and there's a cook pot on our table that came out of a cache in the rimrock."
She stood and pulled him up by the wrist.
"He didn't give that back to be generous. He gave it back to say something. And we've been too busy with four other people's problems to read it."
Tom went in and picked up the pot.
He turned it over in the light from the window.
And on the underside, in the soot, somebody had scratched with a nail, in the same square capitals as the note:
FRIDAY
Below it, smaller:
brING IT OUT TO THE FENCE OR WE COME IN AND GET IT
Tom set it down very carefully.
"What day is it?" he said.
Kindra had gone white.
"Thursday," she said.