Chapter 15 #4
I LEFT 9 AT THE RANCH WITH 11 DAYS OF FOOD AND I TOLD MYSELF I WOULD BE BACK IN 6
THAT WAS THE ARITHMETIC AND IT WAS WRONG AND I HAVE HAD 3 MONTHS TO LOOK AT IT
I CANNOT FEED THEM
I CANNOT WORK
I CAN CARRY 40 LBS AND THEN I HAVE TO SIT DOWN
SO I HAVE BEEN PUTTING THINGS IN THIS BARN SINCE THE 20 OF MARCH
EVERYTHING IN HERE IS FROM THE FLATS
I TOOK IT OFF THE ORANGE BEARD 1 LOAD AT A TIME
HE IS DEAD AND HIS PEOPLE WENT DOWN THE CLARK FORK IN APRIL
THERE IS NOBODY EAST OF YOU NOW
THE OLD MAN SAID YOU WOULD NOT COME OUT AND HE WAS RIGHT
I SPENT 5 MONTHS TRYING TO MAKE YOU COME OUT AND YOU NEVER DID
THAT IS WHY I AM GIVING IT TO YOU AND NOT TO ANYBODY ELSE IN THIS VALLEY
THE 4 CHILDREN ARE THE ONLY THING I GOT RIGHT ALL WINTER AND I ONLY GOT IT HALF RIGHT
DO NOT LOOK FOR ME
Nobody said anything for a long time.
Sofie said, "What's that mean, the last part?"
"It means don't look for him," Kindra said.
"Why?"
"Because he doesn't want to be found."
"Is he dead?"
"We don't know, bug."
Tom folded the bark and put it in his chest pocket, in with the four scorched rings of tin, and buttoned the flap.
"All right," he said. "Everybody at the fire in an hour and I mean everybody, all twenty of us, and we're going to start."
"Start what?" Loreen Tack said.
"It's the twenty eighth of May," Tom said. "There are about eighteen days left in which a bean can go in the ground in this country and come up before frost, and there are four coffee cans of seed sitting in that box, and eight of us in this camp have never held a hoe."
He stood up.
"So we're going to start."
They planted for eleven days and it nearly broke every one of them, and it was, in Tom's judgment for the rest of his life, the happiest fortnight he ever lived.
He taught it the way he taught everything, out loud, to everybody, all at once, and he got half of it wrong and Dee Marchetti fixed it.
That happened on the second morning.
Tom had laid out the first bed and was explaining row spacing when Dee, who had not spoken to anyone in a year, walked over and moved his stake four feet.
Everybody stopped.
Tom looked at the stake.
"Why?" he said.
Dee pointed at the ground, and then at the slope, and then made a flat motion with her hand.
"Water?"
She nodded.
"It'll run?"
She nodded.
"Show me."
And Dee Marchetti spent forty minutes walking Tom Thorn over four acres of ground without saying a single word, and at the end of it he had rearranged the entire garden and knew exactly why.
"She's right," he told the camp that night. "The ground I picked drains. It looks better and it drains, and in July that's four hundred pounds of difference."
"How'd she know?" Oliver said.
"Because she planted that field in 2024 and 2025 and she watched what died," Tom said. "Which is the only way anybody ever knows anything, and it's the reason we're going to write down every single thing we do this year."
He made McKenzie the recorder.
That started as a small thing and became the most important institution the camp ever had.
"Every bed," Tom told her. "What went in, what date, what the weather was, what came up, what died. And where. Every single one, on bark, and at the end of the season we bind it."
"That's a lot of writing."
"That's next year's food," Tom said. "And the year after. Kenz, in four years nobody will remember whether the beans in the west bed did better than the ones in the east, and if it's written down we'll know, and if it isn't we'll guess forever."
The planting itself was eleven days of the hardest work of the year.
The ground had been in hay and then in garden and then abandoned for a year, and it was solid with quack grass and thistle, and there was one spade, one shovel, two hoes, and twenty people.
So Tom built tools, and Hobby Nils built better ones.
That was the discovery of the season.
On the third day Tom showed him a broken hay rake and asked whether anything could be made of it and came back in four hours to find Hobby sitting on a stump with a forge he had built out of a truck brake drum, a length of pipe, and a bellows made from an elk hide and two boards.
"Where did you get the charcoal?" Tom said.
"The boy made it. In a can. He said you taught him."
McKenzie, who was standing right there, went red to the ears.
"The girl made it," Tom said.
"Then the girl," Hobby said, and did not look up. "It's good charcoal. Burns clean and hot. I can get a wrought piece to orange in about four minutes with this."
He made eleven hoes in nine days.
He made them out of the tines of the hay rake, flattened and drawn and socketed onto ash handles, and every one of them was better than the two store bought hoes in the barn.
He made four digging forks.
He made a draw knife out of a leaf spring, which took him two days and which Tom afterward considered the single most valuable object in the camp, because a draw knife makes handles, and handles make everything else.
"Hobby," Tom said, on the ninth day. "I want to say something and then I'll leave you alone."
"Go ahead."
"You've been in that ranch house since last summer."
"Since June."
"And you've had one leg since when?"
"2019. Diabetes." Hobby turned a piece in the fire. "Which I ought to be dead of, and I'm not, because there's been no sugar in this valley in fourteen months. Life's a comedian."
"And nobody put you to work."
Hobby Nils was quiet for a moment.
"No," he said.
"Nine people starving in a house and a man who can make iron sitting in the corner."
"I offered. Twice. In September." The old man's jaw moved. "Wallace said there wasn't fuel for a forge and there wasn't time, and he was right about the fuel, and he was wrong about the time, and I didn't push it."
"Why not?"
"Because I'd been sitting down for five years by then," Hobby said, "and a man who sits down long enough stops thinking of himself as somebody you'd ask."
Tom did not say anything for a second.
"I'm asking," he said.
"I know you are." Hobby turned the piece again. "That's the whole difference, Thorn. That's the entire difference and it took four days."
They got it in the ground.