Chapter 12 #5
She was already gathering the packs. "Because there's a version of this where a very intelligent man has spent five months learning exactly how this family thinks, and has just written four lines on a rock that are aimed directly at the softest part of us,
and knows we'll walk nine miles east in April to look at some children."
Tom stood there.
"Yes," he said. "There is that version."
"And there's a version where he's dead."
"What?"
"Tom, look at it." Kindra pointed at the cairn. "A man leaves the thing he's named for stuck in a rock. What does that actually mean?"
"That he's finished with it."
"Or that somebody else left it there," she said. "Somebody who won, and who took it off him, and who knows exactly what it means to leave it standing in the open."
They went back to the log jam on the twenty fifth and got there at dusk and Tom did not say a word about the cairn for two days.
He told the children about the food, which was the part that mattered to a nine year old and a six year old and to an eleven year old boy who had lost a woodshed once already.
Two hundred and twenty five pounds in the ground. The ash dump and the privy and the chicken run, all three untouched.
"Nobody digs in a chicken coop," Oliver said.
"Nobody digs in a chicken coop."
"I said that in October."
"You did not, I said that in October."
"I said it about the tree."
"You said it about the tree," Tom conceded, "and the tree got emptied and the chicken run didn't, so you are still ahead on points."
He told them the cabin was gone and he told them straight, and he watched three of his children take it and one of them not.
McKenzie took it the way she had taken it at the quinzhee.
Oliver took it badly for about an hour and then asked four practical questions about the stove and whether the iron was still good, which it was.
Sofie cried for a long time and asked whether her bean cups had burned, and Tom took the four scorched rings out of his pocket and gave them to her, and she held them and stopped crying and put them in her coat.
Nell did not react at all.
That was what worried him.
She sat by the fire in the log jam with her wooden spoon in her hand and listened to the whole account and said nothing and asked nothing, and at the end of it she said, "Okay," and lay down facing the wall.
Kindra looked at Tom over the fire.
He waited two days.
On the twenty seventh he sat down next to her at the ice hole while she jigged a gorge four inches up and down.
"You want to tell me?" he said.
"No."
"All right."
They fished in silence for eleven minutes.
"He's coming back," Nell said.
"Why do you think that?"
"Because he always comes back." She did not look up. "That's what he does. He goes and he comes back and he stands in front of you and he tells you the truth about what's going to happen and then it happens."
"Nell."
"And I left." Her hands were shaking on the line. "And he knows I left, and he knows where I went, and he's the only person who ever looked at me and asked me a question and waited for the answer, and I took his knife off his shelf."
Tom did not say anything for a long moment.
"That's the part," he said.
"What?"
"You took the knife."
"I took his knife and I gave it to you and I drew you his map."
"Nell, look at me."
She looked at him. Her face was absolutely dry and absolutely terrified.
"Do you know what I think?" Tom said. "I think I don't know what that man is, and I've stopped pretending I do."
"He's."
"No. Listen. He burned a woodshed and poisoned a spring and raked a dog and killed the only friend I had, and he also fed nineteen people all winter including four children, and he told a pregnant woman the truth when a kinder man would have lied,
and he wrote on a rock that the flats are empty and we should go there in April."
"That's a trap."
"It might be. It might be the best trap anybody's ever laid." Tom pulled his line up. "And the honest answer is that I have no idea, and neither do you, and neither does Kindra, and we're not going to find out this week or next week."
"So what do we do?"
"We do what we've done all winter." Tom rebaited the gorge. "We fish, and we count, and we put things in the ground in four places, and we don't walk out into any open field anybody invites us into."
"And in April?"
"In April," Tom said, "we'll know a great deal more than we know today, and I'll tell you every single thing I know when I know it, and you'll have a say in what we do about it. That's a promise and I've never broken one to you."
Nell dropped her line back in the hole and jigged it four inches.
"He said something to me once," she said.
"What?"
"In November. He was drawing your place on the board and he'd been quiet a long time." She watched the line. "And he said, Mouse, do you know what the hardest thing in the world is?"
"What did you say?"
"I said no."
"And what did he say?"
"He said, quitting while you're still able to."
Tom sat very still on the ice.
"He said that."
"And then he rubbed the board out with his sleeve and started again," Nell said. "And he did the whole map over, and it was the same map."