Chapter 13 #2
"No, listen. That's the end. Two hundred and twenty five pounds gets us to green-up. Fine. And then what?"
She looked up and her eyes were wild in a way Tom had not seen all winter.
"Then it's May and we're alive and we've got nothing to plant, and there's no store and no catalog and no neighbor, and we eat wild food all summer and go into next winter with nothing in the ground."
"We hunt."
"We hunt, and we fish, and we dig roots, and I have done the arithmetic and it is not enough for six people for a winter and you know it isn't."
She was on her feet. "The garden is the difference. The garden is nine hundred pounds of squash and beets and carrots and beans and it's the only reason we survived this year."
Nobody spoke.
"Where do we get seed?" Oliver said.
"That's the question."
Tom stood up and walked four steps and stood in the rain.
"There's four answers," he said, "and I want all of them on the table before anybody panics."
"Go."
"One. The garden itself. Kindra, what did we not harvest?"
She thought.
"The parsnips."
"The parsnips."
"We left two rows in the ground to overwinter because they sweeten with frost." Her voice changed. "And parsnips are biennial. If they're still in that ground they'll bolt in June and go to seed in August."
"That's one."
"That's one, and it's two rows, and it's an enormous amount of seed if it works."
"Two," Tom said. "The wild stuff. There's biscuitroot and camas and wild onion and a hundred pounds of rose hips on this river, and none of that needs planting."
"That's not a garden."
"It's not a garden, it's a floor. Three." He turned around. "The Keegan place."
Kindra's head came up.
"There was a garden at the Keegan place," Tom said. "Martha Keegan grew everything and she saved seed, because she told me so at the fire hall in 2017 and I remember it because I thought it was quaint."
"That's four miles downriver."
"That's four miles downriver and it's empty and there was a truck and a fire there on the thirty first of January."
"So it's not empty."
"So it might not be empty."
"What's four?" McKenzie said.
Tom did not answer for a moment.
"Four is the flats," he said.
Nobody said anything.
"There's three houses and a barn and a hand pump well on flat open ground nine miles east," Tom said, "and there's nineteen people in it, and four of them are children, and there is absolutely a seed store in that barn because there's always a seed store in a barn."
"Tom," Kindra said.
"I'm listing. I said I'd list all four before anybody panicked and I'm listing."
They worked on the parsnips first, because it cost nothing.
Tom and McKenzie went up on the fifteenth of March and they did the full circle and found nothing newer than three weeks, and they went into the garden.
The two rows were there.
The men had trampled the whole garden and torn down the fence and had not dug a single thing, because the garden had been made to look failed in October and the sheet mulch was still on it and there was nothing above ground in March to tell anybody otherwise.
Tom dug down with his hands and came up with a parsnip the size of his forearm.
He sat in the mud in the ruins of his garden and held it and laughed until he had to stop.
"Four rows," he said, that night. "Not two. I miscounted in October. Four rows of parsnips, in the ground, alive."
"How many plants?"
"About sixty."
"Tom, sixty parsnips going to seed is."
"It's thousands," he said. "It's thousands of seeds and it's the single most valuable thing on this property and nobody knew it was there including us."
"We leave them."
"We leave every single one of them in the ground and we don't eat one, and we fence the garden against deer in May, and we let all sixty bolt."
"That's a whole growing season of nothing."
"That's a whole growing season of seed for the rest of our lives."
On the twentieth of March the river dropped four feet and the ice went out.
It went out in a single afternoon with a sound like a train, and the whole family came out of the timber and stood on the rock rib and watched a winter's worth of ice grind down the valley in slabs the size of doors.
The log jam held.
It had moved eleven feet and it had lost the entire bottom course and the cavity was full of gravel and silt, and it was uninhabitable and would be forever, and nobody minded because they were standing in the sun.
"It's spring," Sofie said.
"It's not spring," Kindra said. "It's the twentieth of March and it'll snow four more times."
"But it's spring."
"It's spring," Tom agreed.
That afternoon they moved back up onto the bench, four hundred yards from the burned cabin, because the food was there and because Tom had decided something.
"We're not rebuilding the cabin," he said.
"I didn't think we were," Kindra said.
"I want to say why out loud so nobody thinks it's grief."
"Go ahead."
"That site is known to every single person in this valley." He drew it in the dirt. "Two gangs have been in that dooryard. There's truck ruts four hundred yards from it. It's the most famous piece of ground in forty miles and it always will be."
"So where?"
"I don't know yet, and I don't want to decide it in March, and I want to say the rule I've learned and then stop talking." Tom sat back. "Never live at the place your food is, and never keep your food at the place you live."
Kindra looked at him for a long moment.
"That's the whole winter in one sentence," she said.
"That's the whole winter in one sentence and it took me eleven years and a burned house to get to it."
They built a summer camp on the twenty second, in the timber six hundred yards west, and it was a lean-to and a fire pit and a rack, and it took four hours, and nobody thought of it as a home and that was the point.
And on the twenty fourth of March, McKenzie, who had gone up the draw to check the drop cache in the dead fir for the first time since January, came back down at a dead run.
She was not frightened. That was what Tom saw first.
"Dad."
"What."
"The tree."
"What about it?"
"There's food in it," McKenzie said.
Tom stood up.
"There's four pounds of dried meat and a fat cake in the split," she said, "wrapped in a rawhide wrap that isn't ours. And it's fresh. It's this week."
Nobody said anything for a while.
"Somebody's feeding our cache," Kindra said.
"Somebody's feeding our cache."
"That's."
"That's the ninth message," Tom said.
He went up himself at four in the afternoon and he did it the right way and it took him two hours.
The meat was elk, dried hard, thin cut, well made.
The fat cake was rendered and clean and sealed in a scrap of gut.
The rawhide wrap was not theirs and was sewn with a running stitch.
And wedged in the crack behind it, folded twice, was a strip of birch bark.
Tom unfolded it standing eleven feet up a dead fir with his heart going.
There were no square capitals.
There were four letters, printed very carefully and unevenly by somebody who had clearly practiced them, the way a person prints when they have only recently learned how.
They said: B I R D Y
Tom came down the tree slowly and sat at the base of it with the bark in his hand.
He did not go home for twenty minutes.
He sat with his back against the dead fir and looked out through the timber at nothing and let himself think it all the way through before he carried it to anybody else.
Birdy. The eleven year old girl with no ear.
Nell had named her in December at two in the morning at a table that no longer existed, and had never mentioned her again in three months, not once, which Tom had noticed and had filed and had decided not to touch.
He went home at six and he did not show anybody the bark until he had fed the fire and sat everyone down.
"I'm going to show you something," he said, "and then nobody's going to say anything for one full minute, because I want everybody to have their own thought before they hear anybody else's."
He put it on the flat rock they used as a table.
Nell looked at it.
She had been reading for eleven days and Tom watched her sound it out, letter by letter, with her lips moving, and he watched the exact moment she got it.
She made a sound like she had been hit.
"That's her writing," she said.
"You know her writing?"
"She couldn't write. She couldn't write at all, none of us could, there wasn't." Nell's hands had gone to her mouth. "Somebody taught her."
"That's not what I asked. Do you know her writing?"
"No."
"Then how do you know it's her?"
"Because it's her name," Nell said, "and nobody else in that place is called that, and there's nobody else who would know to put food in that tree."
Tom sat back.
"Say that last part slowly."
Nell's eyes came up.
"She knows about the tree," she said. "She's the only one. I told her."
"When?"
"In November. Before I went." Nell was breathing fast. "We used to talk at night in the little house. And I told her I found a place with food in a tree and that I was going to go there and that if I got there I'd come back for her."
The whole camp went silent.
"Nell," Kindra said gently.
"I said I'd come back."
"Nell."
"I said it four times. I said it the night before I left and she said take me and I said you can't walk nine miles, your chest is bad, and she said I know, and I said then I'll come back."
Nell's voice was completely flat again, which Tom had learned was the worst sign there was.
"And then I left and I never said her name again because I didn't want to think about it."
Nobody said anything for a long time.
"That's not a thing you did wrong," Kindra said.
"I know what it is."
"Nell."
"I know exactly what it is," Nell said, "and I've known since the twelfth of December and I'm not going to talk about it."
She got up and walked out of the firelight on her crutch and Kindra started to follow and Tom caught her wrist.
"Let her."
"Tom."
"She's eight and she's been carrying that alone for three months and the first minute of it needs to be hers." Tom kept hold. "Two minutes. Then go."