Chapter 10 #2
They had Christmas on the twenty fifth and it was, by universal later agreement, the best day of that entire year and possibly of their lives.
They started it with a fire in the daytime, which they had not done since October, and Tom did it deliberately and told them why.
"He knows exactly where we are," he said. "He's known since September. The only thing hiding our smoke does now is make us cold. So today we burn wood at ten in the morning like human beings."
The cabin came up to sixty two degrees for the first time since the first week of November and Sofie took her coat off indoors and announced it to everyone.
Kindra made the stew again, the full one, four projects meeting at the end, with a rabbit and the last of the biscuitroot and a double handful of spruce tips, and it cooked all day and the smell of it was its own event.
And then at four o'clock they did the gifts.
The rule was one at a time, everybody watching, no exceptions, and it took two hours and forty minutes and nobody wanted it to be shorter.
Oliver had made everybody a fire striker.
He had ground four pieces of the old file into shape on wet sandstone over five weeks, and hafted each one into an antler handle, and each handle had a hole drilled through it with a bone awl and a lace of braided sinew.
"There's one for everybody," he said, going red. "So if anybody ever gets separated from everybody, they've got fire."
Tom turned his over and could not speak for a second.
"Oliver," he said.
"Is it okay?"
"It's the most useful object anybody has ever given me."
McKenzie had made cordage. Four hundred feet of it, dogbane and nettle, twisted in the dark in the stand and by the fire at night for six weeks, in three thicknesses, coiled and tied off.
"It's not a present," she said, defensive before anybody spoke. "It's just rope."
"Kenz, it's four hundred feet of rope," Kindra said. "There is no rope. There is no rope anywhere in the world anymore and you made four hundred feet of it."
"It took a while."
"How long?"
"Forty one hours," McKenzie said, and then looked at the floor.
Sofie had made everybody a bean.
Not a bag of beans. One bean each, chosen personally out of her four cups, each one polished on her sleeve and presented individually with a specific reason.
"This one's for you because it's got a mark like an eye and you see things," she told Tom, gravely.
"That's true. I do."
"This one's for Mom because it's the biggest."
"Thank you, bug."
"And this one's Nell's because it's the only one like it."
Nell took a single dried bean out of a six year old's hand and held it and did not say anything for a while, and then put it in the chest pocket of her coat and buttoned the flap.
She kept it there for the next forty years.
Kindra had made moccasins. Six pairs, from the doe hide and the elk scraps, sewn with sinew over six weeks in a woodshed at twenty degrees, and every one of them fit.
Nell's was a single moccasin with the toe box cut generously and a soft wrap for the bad foot.
"There's only one," Nell said.
"There's one for now. There's a second one when that toe comes off and I know what I'm fitting."
Tom had made spoons.
Six of them, carved from birch, each one different, and the bowl of each one was shaped to the hand of the person it was for, and the handle of each one had something on it: a fish, a raven, a dog, a mountain, a tree, and on Nell's, a small crude four-legged shape that could have been anything.
"What's mine?" she said.
"It's a mouse," Tom said. "And I want to tell you why, and if you hate it I'll make you another one tonight and I won't be hurt."
Nell went very still.
"Go ahead," she said.
"You told me that's what they called you and that you'd rather not be called it." Tom turned the spoon over in his hands. "And I thought about that for two weeks. And the thing I kept coming back to is that a mouse is the only animal in this valley that's beaten us."
"What?"
"Thirty one pounds of dried elk," Tom said.
"Gone in two weeks out of a rack on the eave of this house, by an animal that weighs less than an ounce, and it happened because a mouse is patient, and quiet, and it goes where nobody is looking, and it takes exactly as much as it can carry and comes back tomorrow."
Nell's mouth had come open slightly.
"You walked nine miles across a mountain in December with no boots and no pack and you got out of a place that nobody gets out of," Tom said. "And the way you did it was by taking nine pounds out of forty and putting the wrap back the way it was."
"That's what a mouse does."
"That's exactly what a mouse does, and it is the single most effective survival strategy on this entire mountain, and I have spent three months trying to teach it to my own children."
He held the spoon out. "So they called you a thing they thought was small. I'd like to give it back to you meaning what it actually means. And if you don't want it, that's completely fine, and I'll burn it."
Nell took the spoon.
She looked at it for a long time.
"Nobody's ever," she said, and then stopped, and then didn't finish it.
"You don't have to say anything."
"I want to keep it."
"Then it's yours."
And then Nell gave hers.
She had nothing. That was the thing everybody understood and nobody said. She had arrived thirteen days earlier with a dead toe and four layers of rags, and she had been sitting with her foot up for most of it.
She had made five bundles out of scraps of hide and tied them with McKenzie's cordage.
"It's not a real present," she said.
"Open it," Kindra said.
Inside each one was a small flat piece of birch bark, and on each one was a drawing done with a nail.
Tom's was the meadow, from above, with the treeline and the cabin and the draw, and marked on it in four places with small hooked X's were things.
"What are these?" he said.
"That's where he stands," Nell said.
The room went silent.
"That's where who stands?"
"Wallace." She leaned over and pointed. "That's the rock at the north end of the hedge. He stands behind that one when he's looking at the smoke. That one's in the cottonwoods by the bend, that's where he waits when he wants to see who comes out the door in the morning.
That one's up in the timber on the northeast, that's the one he uses when it's snowing because you can see the whole meadow and nobody can see up into it."
"Nell."
"And that one's the spring. He goes there almost every time, at the end, before he leaves, because he says a man always goes back to look at a thing he broke."
Nobody moved.
"How do you know this?" Tom said quietly.
"Because he draws it," Nell said. "He's got a board with charcoal and he draws your place on it every time he comes back and he makes the men look at it. And he leaves it on the wall. And nobody ever thought about who else was in the room."
Kindra put her hand over her mouth.
"You memorized his map," she said.
"I looked at it for four months."
"Nell, that's."
"It's not a present," Nell said again, miserable. "I'm sorry. I couldn't make anything, I don't know how to make anything, it's just what's in my head, I don't have anything else."
Tom Thorn got up from the table and crossed the room and crouched in front of an eight year old girl with a black toe and put his hands on both her shoulders.
"Listen to me very carefully," he said.
"Okay."
"That is the single most valuable object anybody in this family has ever received."
"It's bark."
"It's four months of watching a man who nobody watches," Tom said. "Every person in this valley has looked at Wallace Wingman. You're the only one who ever looked at where he stands."
He turned the bark over in his hand.
"This is how we live," he said.
And then his thumb found something on the back of it.
He turned it into the lamplight.
On the reverse of the birch bark, where Nell had drawn nothing, somebody had scratched four short words in square capitals, in a hand Tom had seen on a paperback page and on a birch sheet and in the soot on the bottom of a cook pot:
SHE IS MY COMPASS
Tom did not put the bark down and he did not raise his voice, and afterward Kindra said that was the only reason it did not become a disaster.
"Nell."
"What?"
"Come here a second."
She came, hopping, and he turned the bark over and held it where she could see the back of it in the lamplight.
Nell went white.
It was not the white of a person who has been caught. Tom had spent six months learning the difference and he was watching for it and it was not that.
It was the white of a person who has just understood something and has been knocked over by it.
"I didn't write that," she said.
"I know you didn't."
"I don't know how to write."
"I know. Nell, look at me. I know."
"That's not, I didn't." She was breathing fast.
"I took that bark off the wall of the little house in October. There's a stack of it in the corner where the roof peeled. I took four pieces and I've had them in my shirt since I left and I never turned them over, I never turned any of them over,
I drew on the smooth side because it's the smooth side."
"Give me the others," Kindra said.
Nell pulled them out of her coat. Four pieces. She had drawn on three and given them out and there was one blank one left.
Tom turned all four.
Kindra's had nothing on the back. McKenzie's had nothing. Oliver's had nothing.
The blank one had nothing.
Only Tom's.
"Sit down," Kindra said to Nell, and to Tom she said, "You too. Everybody sit. Nobody's in trouble and nobody's accused of anything and we are going to think about this out loud like we always do."
They sat. The stew got cold.
"Facts," Tom said. "Fact one. That's his handwriting. I've seen it four times and it's his."
"Agreed," Kindra said.
"Fact two. Nell took four pieces of bark off a pile in a house he lives in."
"Agreed."
"Fact three. One of them had writing on the back and she never turned it over."
"Is that plausible?" McKenzie asked.