Chapter 6 #3
It took four hours and every hand in the family.
From it you could see the whole meadow, the entire river approach, the yard, the cabin roof, and three hundred yards of the draw below.
From the yard you could not see it at all, because Tom had spent forty minutes walking back and forth below it while McKenzie waved a white rag from behind the wall, and every time he could see the rag they took the wall down a course and started again.
"That's the answer," he said, when it was done. "That's the answer to everything. We don't hold the house. We hold this."
"What if they burn the cabin?" Oliver said.
"Then we watch them burn it and we count them while they do it."
"That's it?"
"That's it, and I need you to understand why." Tom crouched by his son. "Right now they think we'll fight for that cabin, because everybody fights for a cabin. Everybody they have ever robbed has stood in a doorway. And so they've planned for people in a doorway."
"And we won't be there."
"And we won't be there. And there is nothing in the world harder than fighting somebody who won't stand where you expect."
They got two hours of sleep in shifts and at nine in the morning they took their places, and then they waited.
Kindra and Tom in the yard, in the open, at the fence. That was the bait and both of them knew it.
The three children and the dog in the stand, two hundred yards up the draw, with the .22 and McKenzie in charge and orders that Tom made her repeat back three times.
"We do not come down."
"You do not come down."
"Not for anything. Not if you yell. Not if Mom yells."
"That's right."
"And if they go up the draw after us, we go over the saddle and east and we keep going and we don't stop for two days."
"Kenz."
"I know it. I know all of it."
Nine o'clock came and went.
Ten.
Eleven.
At half past eleven Kindra said, "This is the worst part."
"It's always the worst part."
"No, I mean I have been standing in this yard for two and a half hours with my heart going like a bird and nothing has happened, and I have used up everything I had."
"I know."
"I was braver at nine."
"Everybody's braver at nine."
Noon came.
At half past twelve Kindra went in and made tea and brought two cups out and they stood at the fence and drank it, and the absurdity of it got to both of them at the same time.
"We're having tea," Kindra said.
"We're having tea."
"While we wait to be robbed."
"It's what's available."
At one in the afternoon Sofie came down the draw at a dead run with McKenzie forty yards behind her yelling in a whisper, and Kindra put her cup on a post and went to meet them.
"What."
"I had to go," Sofie said.
"You had to."
"I had to go and Kenzie said not the draw because it's where we hide and you don't do that where you hide."
Kindra closed her eyes.
"She's right," she said. "Go behind the chicken run. Fast."
"I'm going."
Sofie went.
McKenzie arrived, furious, out of breath.
"She just went. She just got up and went."
"She's six."
"We had a rule."
"Kenz." Kindra took her by both shoulders. "You had a rule for men coming up a trail. You did not have a rule for a six year old who needed to go, because nobody ever has that rule, and you handled it correctly and you followed her, which is the right call."
"I left the boys up there."
"For ninety seconds. Go back up."
Sofie came back at a trot, pleased with herself.
"Better?"
"Much."
"Go on up."
Two o'clock.
The waiting did a thing to all of them that Tom had not anticipated and would remember for years, which was that it made them silly.
By half past two the terror had burned all the way down to its socket and what was left underneath was a kind of ragged, punch drunk lightness, and the family started talking the way they used to at the dinner table in a world with electricity.
Oliver came down the draw at three because his legs had gone dead and Tom said fine, twenty minutes, stay by the woodpile.
Sofie came down because Oliver did. Then Shyla. Then McKenzie, on the grounds that if everybody else was going to break the plan she was not sitting alone behind a rock wall.
So at three in the afternoon on the day Wallace Wingman was supposed to come and take everything, the entire Thorn family was sitting on the ricks in the thin October sun eating cold fish out of a pot and being ridiculous.
"If I could have one thing," Oliver said. "One thing from before. Not food."
"Not food," McKenzie said.
"Not food."
"A hot shower," Kindra said instantly.
"That's basically food."
"That is nothing like food."
"I'd take a car ride," McKenzie said. "Not going anywhere. Just sitting in the back seat at night with the heater on and the windows fogged."
Tom looked at his daughter.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that's a good one."
"Mine's the refrigerator light," Kindra said.
"What?"
"The little light. You open the door at eleven at night and there's that light and there's cold air and you're not even hungry, you just stand there." She was smiling at nothing. "I'd stand in front of an open refrigerator for an hour."
"Bug, what about you?"
Sofie thought hard.
"Ice cream," she said.
"That's food."
"You said one thing."
"He said not food," Oliver said.
"Then a bath with bubbles."
"That's reasonable," Kindra said.
And then, sitting on the woodpile in front of her entire family, Kindra Thorn farted.
It was a short, high, entirely unmistakable sound and it went across the yard in the cold air like a note off a penny whistle.
There was a half second of absolute silence.
"That was a squeaker," Kindra said.
McKenzie made a noise like a kettle.
"Mom."
"What? It was. That's what those are called."
"Mom, you're."
And then the smell arrived.
It came across the ricks in a slow wave, and it was not a small thing, and it was not a funny thing, and it had in it three weeks of dried elk and fish frames and boiled river water and beans in sand.
Oliver went off the woodpile sideways into the dirt.
"Mom!" he shouted. "That was a bad one!"
"Oh no," Kindra said, waving her hand in front of her face. "Oh, no, that's."
"That is a war crime."
"Oliver."
"That's what it is! That's a weapon!"
Sofie had both hands over her face and was screaming with laughter. Shyla got up, shook, and moved eleven feet upwind and lay back down with an expression of profound personal disappointment.
"The dog left," McKenzie wheezed. "The dog left, Mom."
"The dog has been eating fish heads for a month, the dog has no standing."
Tom was laughing so hard he had to put both hands on his knees.
It was not that funny. He knew even while it was happening that it was not that funny, that it was six hours of adrenaline coming out the only door it could find, that his family was standing in a yard laughing at a fart because the alternative was six hours of looking down a river trail.
He did not care.
He laughed until his stomach hurt and his eyes ran, and he looked up through the water at his wife, thirty two years old, hair full of rock dust, waving her hand in front of her face and going red, and at his son rolling in the dirt, and at his daughters holding each other up.
"I love this family," he said, out loud, to nobody.
"You can't say that right now," Kindra said. "Not right now."
"I'm saying it right now."
"Tom, I just."
"I know what you just did. I love this family."
She started laughing again and could not stop.
Four o'clock.
Five.
The light started to go and the cold came down off the high country, and one by one the laughter drained out of the yard and the day turned back into what it actually was.
At half past five Tom walked down to the fence and stood looking at the river trail, and Kindra came and stood beside him.
"He's not coming," she said.
"No."
"That's worse."
"That's much worse."
They put the children in the stand at six with the hides and the pot and a fire kit they were not to use, and Tom and Kindra took the yard, and the night went by in two hour shifts.
Nothing came.
At three in the morning Tom sat on the chopping block with the .22 across his knees and did the thinking he had been putting off all day.
Friday had been a date. Wingman did not miss dates. Everything about that man was schedule and efficiency and the precise application of the minimum force.
So either something had stopped him.
Or Friday had never been the point.
He turned the second thought over and did not like it.
What does a note on a pot actually cost a man? One night of walking. What does it buy him?
It buys him a family standing in a dooryard for eleven hours with their stomachs in knots, not working. Not cutting wood. Not running the weir. Not drying meat.
It buys him a day.
"He's doing it again," Tom said, out loud.
Kindra came out of the dark behind him. "Doing what?"
"Spending nothing to take everything." He stood up. "Kindra, we lost a day. A whole day, ten hours of daylight in the second week of October, and we spent it standing in a yard being afraid."
"We moved a hundred and sixty three pounds."
"We did that Thursday. Today we did nothing."
He was walking now, back and forth. "And if he does it again next week, and the week after, and the week after that, we stop three days out of seven and we go into December with half the meat we need and he walks in here in January and we hand it to him because we're starving."
Kindra sat down slowly on the block.
"That's the actual plan," she said.
"That's the actual plan. It was never a raid. He's not going to fight us. He's going to make us spend our autumn on fear."
"Then what do we do?"
"We work," Tom said. "That's the only answer. We work like nobody's coming and we keep the stand ready and we stop letting a piece of soot on a pot cost us a day."
"And if he does come?"
"Then we're in the rocks in ninety seconds like we drilled, and he can have the box."
Saturday they worked and it was good work.
Eleven whitefish in the weir. Two grouse off the spring pole. Tom took a doe at forty one yards with the .22, one round, behind the ear, and they had it hanging by nine in the morning.