Chapter 15 #2
and on the eleventh she rolled from her back to her front and then could not get back and was furious about it, and eight people stood around and watched her do it like it was an eclipse.
Tom used those days on the question.
He did it the way he had done everything since October, which was out loud, at a fire, with everybody talking.
"Four options," he said, on the fourth of May.
"Go," Kindra said.
"One. We stay here. They stay there. Cass keeps hauling meat eleven miles and we send back seed corn and soap and whatever we can spare."
"That's what's happening now."
"That's what's happening now and it's the worst of the four and I'll say why."
He held up a hand. "It costs one fifteen year old two days of walking a week, forever. It gives nine people nothing but food. And it means that in August, when somebody comes for the flats or the ranch or us, everybody's alone."
"Two?"
"Two. They come here."
"Nine people," June said.
"Nine people, and one of them's got one leg and one of them's sixty and can't walk a mile, and it's eleven miles over a pass with a man on it four days a week."
"Three?"
"We go there."
Nobody said anything for a second.
"Say the case for it," Kindra said.
"Flat ground. Three buildings and a barn. A hand pump well, which means water that isn't a river and isn't a broken spring. Fenced fields that were in hay four years ago and will grow anything."
Tom counted. "Nineteen envelopes of seed. Nine more people, eight of whom work. And it's the twelfth of May, which means there's about four weeks left in which anything can go in the ground."
"And the case against?"
"It's the place he named on a rock. It's got a man sitting on the pass above it four days a week watching it. It's eleven miles from everything we own, which is a hundred and ninety pounds of food in four holes in the ground, four rows of parsnips that are the only seed we have, and four chickens."
"What's four?"
Tom was quiet for a moment.
"Four is the one I keep coming back to," he said. "Four is neither."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning we don't go there and they don't come here and we find a third place, and everybody walks to it."
McKenzie said, "Where?"
"I don't know."
"Dad, that's not a plan."
"No," Tom said. "It's a question, and I've been sitting on it for four days, and I want to say the thing that's actually bothering me about option three."
"Say it."
"Nell said something in December and I've never been able to put it down." He looked over at the girl, who was sitting with her back to a rock and her bad foot out in front of her. "Nell, say the thing about the ranch. About how they took it."
Nell did not look up.
"He didn't sneak," she said. "He put people on the road with lights so everybody could count them all night, and then he came in the morning."
"Right. And what did that tell us?"
"That he knows what a place does to people."
"What's that mean?" Cass said.
"It means," Tom said, "that a ranch on flat open ground with three houses and a barn is the most visible thing in forty miles, and that every single person who has ever held it has held it because they could count and the other fella couldn't."
He leaned forward.
"Eleven years I lived on a bench with one road in and a cleared field of fire and I thought I'd built a fortress, and the thing that actually kept us alive was a stone wall two hundred yards up a draw and the willingness to walk away from everything we owned in ninety seconds."
"So the flats are a trap," McKenzie said.
"The flats are a trap the same way my cabin was a trap. It's a box. Anything worth living in is worth taking, and the better it is, the better it is for whoever comes next."
"Then there's nowhere," Oliver said.
"That's the wrong lesson and I want to fix it right now," Tom said. "There's nowhere that's safe because it's good. There's places that are safe because of what's around them."
"Like what?"
"Like a place with four ways out." Tom drew in the dirt with a stick. "Like a place you can't see from a road. Like a place with water and wood and open ground for a garden that is not the first thing anybody looks at when they come up a valley."
Kindra said, "Tom, that doesn't exist and you know it."
"It might."
"Where?"
Tom put the stick down.
"Cass," he said. "How many buildings at the ranch?"
"Four."
"How far from the road?"
"Right on it."
"How far to the creek?"
"Two hundred yards south."
"Does the creek have a bottom? Timbered? Cut banks?"
"It's all willow and cottonwood for about a mile and a half and then there's a cut where it comes out of the hills."
"How far from the buildings to the cut?"
Cass thought.
"A mile? Mile and a quarter."
"Is there water in the cut?"
"There's the creek."
"Is there a place in there where a man on the road can't see smoke?"
The boy's face changed slowly.
"There's about four of them," he said.
Tom looked around the fire.
"That's five," he said.
"Five what?"
"Five is the answer and it's been sitting there since the twenty seventh of April."
He picked the stick back up. "We don't live at the ranch and we don't live here. We farm the ranch and we live a mile and a quarter up the creek in the timber, and we never sleep where the food grows, and we never grow where we sleep."
Nobody said anything.
"That's the whole rule I wrote down in March," Tom said. "Never live at the place your food is. I said it and I wrote it in the dirt and then I spent six weeks trying to find a place that was both, because I'm slow."
Kindra was staring at the diagram.
"The buildings are the warehouse," she said.
"The buildings are the warehouse and the barn's the seed store and the well's the water, and every one of those is worth walking a mile and a quarter for and none of them is worth dying in."
"And the nine people?"
"The nine people move into the creek bottom with us, and Hobby and Loreen get carried the mile and a quarter one time and then they don't have to walk it again, because they'll be sitting in camp making snare wire and sewing hides, which is the work that actually keeps everybody alive anyway."
June said, "And when somebody comes for the ranch?"
Tom looked at her.
"Then they get the ranch," he said. "And we watch them get it from a mile and a quarter away, and we count them, and we decide."
They argued about it for three days and by the third day it had stopped being an argument and had become a list.
Tom put it to a vote on the eighth of May and made everybody vote, including Sofie, and including Nell, and including Cass.
It was ten to nothing with one abstention, and the abstention was Nell.
"You don't have to explain," Tom said.
"I want to."
"Go ahead."
"It's not because of him." Nell had her chin up. "Everybody thinks it's because of him and it's not."
"Then what?"
"Because Birdy's over there and I want to go so bad that I don't trust myself about it," Nell said. "So I'm not going to vote on it, because Dad says you don't decide anything in the first hour and I've been deciding this one since March."
Nobody said anything.
Then McKenzie said, quietly, "She called you Dad."
Nell went scarlet.
"I didn't."
"You did."
"It came out wrong."
"It came out fine," Tom said, and did not look at her, and fed the fire, and let it be.
They spent eleven days preparing and they moved on the twentieth of May.
It took three trips and nine days and it was the single largest logistical operation the family had ever attempted.
They did not take the food over the pass. Tom would not, and he was immovable about it.
"A hundred and ninety pounds stays in four holes on this side," he said. "That's our winter if this goes wrong. We take four days' worth at a time and we come back for the rest in September when we know what we've built."
"That's eleven miles each way."
"That's eleven miles each way four times and it is the price of not being a family who put everything they own in one place. I've done that twice now. I'm done doing it."
They took the chickens.
That was a four day argument that Kindra won by pointing out that four laying hens were the difference between a baby living and dying, and Tom built a crate out of willow and Oliver carried it eleven miles on his back and never said a word about it.
And on the second trip, on the twenty fourth of May, coming over the notch at six in the morning with Tom and McKenzie and Cass and forty pounds each, they found the man on the pass.
He was in the rocks above the notch, in the place Cass had described, sitting with his back against stone facing east.
He had been dead about six weeks.
Tom read the ground for twenty minutes and did not touch him.
"Not shot," he said.
"How do you know?"
"No hole in the coat, front or back." He crouched eleven feet away. "And look at the position. He's sitting up against that rock the way you sit when you're cold and you're going to rest for a minute."
"He froze," McKenzie said.
"He froze in the first week of April on a rock in the wind at seven thousand feet, and I'd guess he came up here at dawn four days a week for three weeks and one morning he sat down in the wrong wind with wet feet."
Cass said, "There's something in his hands."
There was.
Tom made everybody stand back and did it himself, and it took him a while because of the cold and the time.
It was a folded piece of birch bark.
He opened it in the grey morning light on a mountain pass with his daughter and a fifteen year old boy standing behind him.
There were square capitals on it, cut deep with something hard.
YOUR PEOPLE LEFT YOU UP HERE FOUR DAYS
I AM NOT GOING TO SIT WITH YOU ANY LONGER
THE ONES BELOW ARE MINE NOW
I WILL FEED THEM
And underneath, in the same hand, smaller:
IF YOU ARE READING THIS YOU CAME OVER THE TOP
WHICH MEANS YOU ARE THE OTHER ONE
GO DOWN AND LOOK IN THE BARN
Tom read it four times and then handed it to McKenzie without a word, which he would not have done in October, and which he noticed himself doing and filed away as a thing that had changed.
She read it twice.
"He was sitting with a dead man," she said.
"He was sitting with a dead man."