Chapter 9 #4
"He was loud," Nell said. "He talked the whole time and everybody thought he was stupid."
"He was not stupid."
"I know," Nell said. "He was counting."
Tom came back to the table and sat down and put both hands flat on it.
"Nell, I want to tell you something and then I want you to go to sleep."
"Okay."
"He's buried a mile and a quarter up that gulch under a rock overhang, and you already know that, because I watched you put your hands on the wall on the ninth of December at seven thirty in the morning."
Her head came up.
"You were watching me."
"From the boulders. Four hundred and fifty yards."
"I didn't see you."
"No. You didn't." Tom held her eyes. "Nell, that's the whole reason you're sitting at this table and not out in that meadow, and I want you to understand it clearly, because you're eight and you should get to know the rules you're living under."
"What rules?"
"I did not let you in here because you were cold," Tom said. "I would like to say I did. I'm not going to lie to you in the first twelve hours."
"Tom," Kindra said.
"No, she'd rather know. Look at her."
Nell was watching him with total attention.
"I let you in because I watched you for eleven minutes do things that a person pretending to be lost does not do," Tom said.
"You fed a fire one stick at a time, which is what somebody too cold to gather wood does. You had no pack. And you walked forty feet in the open to put your hands on a grave and then you went back and sat down, and there was nobody anywhere in four hundred yards to see you do it."
"So you were testing me."
"I was reading you."
"Is that different?"
"Yes," Tom said. "A test is something I do to you. Reading is something I do about you, and you never had to pass anything."
Nell thought about that for a long time.
"Okay," she said.
"And now I have to tell you the rest, because you'll work it out in a week anyway and I'd rather say it than have you find it."
"Tom," Kindra said again.
"She's been living with Wallace Wingman for four months. She already knows."
He turned back to the girl. "There's a chance you're not what you look like. There's a chance a very smart man let a child's foot freeze to get a door opened in this house. I don't think that's true. I think it's about one in twenty."
"That's fair," Nell said.
"That's not fair at all. It's just accurate."
"No, I mean it's fair that you think it." She pulled the blanket tighter. "I'd think it. If I was you I'd think it was one in five."
Kindra made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else.
"So there's going to be things we don't tell you for a while," Tom said. "Not because of you. Because of what happens to you if he ever gets hold of you again and you know them."
Nell nodded slowly.
"That's smart," she said. "Don't tell me where your food is."
"You already found one."
"Then move it."
"We're moving four of them this week."
"Good," she said, and there was, for one second, something almost like satisfaction in her voice. "Don't tell me which four."
Tom sat back.
"Kindra," he said. "I'd like to go on record that I like this child enormously."
"I noticed."
"Go to bed, Nell."
She got up on one foot and hopped to the ladder and then stopped.
"Can I say one more thing?"
"Go ahead."
"You should move your woodpile."
Tom's eyebrows went up.
"It's against the north wall," Nell said. "Wallace said that's the smartest thing you did and the stupidest thing you did. He said nobody can burn it without burning the house, and that's why it's safe, and that's also why it's the only thing on your whole place worth burning."
"Because burning it burns the house."
"He said one man with one can of diesel at that wall costs him nothing and takes everything." She looked at the floor. "He said he was saving it for if he got angry."
Tom and Kindra sat at that table until half past four in the morning.
"Move the wood," Kindra said.
"To where? Every other spot on this property is thirty feet of open ground and a man can stand off in the dark and light it."
"Then split it."
Tom looked up.
"Four ricks," Kindra said. "One against the house, small, three days' worth, and we live with the risk on that. And the rest goes in four separate piles at four separate places, tarped and bark covered, at least sixty yards apart, and one of them goes up by the stand."
"That's the answer," Tom said slowly.
"Same as the caches. Same principle. Nothing in one place, ever again, for the rest of our lives."
"That's four days of hauling and restacking in December."
"That's four days," Kindra agreed, "and we have them, and in February we won't."
They moved the wood on the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth of December, and they moved four caches on the nights in between, and Nell sat by the stove with her foot up and was told nothing about any of it and did not ask a single question.
On the eighteenth, Sofie taught her how to time the boil.
Tom came in from the wood at four in the afternoon and stopped in the doorway, because there were two small blonde heads and one dark one at the stove, and Sofie was saying the alphabet and Nell was mouthing it along with her, getting it wrong in three places,
and McKenzie was standing behind them correcting it without looking up from her brass.
"H," McKenzie said.
"H," Nell said.
"You skipped it."
"I know it, I just go fast."
"Everybody goes fast. Go slow."
That night at the table Kindra unwrapped the foot and looked at it for a long time.
The four small toes had blistered and the blisters were clear, which was good, and were already going down.
The big toe was black from the nail bed to the first joint and the line where the black stopped was sharp and clean and dry.
"That's a line," Kindra said. "That's a good line."
"What does it mean?"
"It means your body's drawing a border and the dead part's on the far side of it, and if it stays dry and it doesn't swell and it doesn't smell, it'll come off by itself in about six weeks and you'll have a short toe."
"That's it?"
"That's it, and it's the best possible outcome and you should be glad."
Nell looked at her black toe.
"Okay," she said.
"You're not upset?"
"Birdy's got no ear," Nell said. "A toe's fine."
At nine o'clock on the nineteenth of December, McKenzie had the window watch and said, in a perfectly level voice, "Dad."
Tom was up.
"North ridge?"
"No."
"Draw?"
"No." She was very still. "Everywhere."
He got to the window.
There were fires on the north ridge.
Not one. He counted them the way he had counted them on the twenty first of September, left to right along the bare shoulder, and he got to six and kept going and stopped at nine.
And then he looked east, up the draw, and there was one there too, high, near the rimrock.
And then, because something in the back of his skull told him to, he looked west, down the river, downstream, where nothing had ever been in eleven years.
There were two more.
Twelve fires, on three sides, all lit within the same half hour, all of them plainly visible, none of them hidden at all.
Behind him, very quietly, Nell said, "He's back."