Chapter 15 #5
Beans in four beds, two hundred and eleven feet of row. Squash in hills on the south slope where Dee put them. Corn, flint corn from 2018, which everybody knew was a gamble and which they planted anyway in four short rows and which came up at a rate of about one seed in three.
Beets and carrots and turnips and kale.
And on the seventh of June, the last day of planting, Kindra did something she had been planning for three weeks and had told nobody.
She sent Cass and Oliver and McKenzie back over the pass with three packs and one instruction.
They came back on the ninth with sixty parsnip plants, dug carefully with eleven inches of root and the crowns intact, wrapped in wet moss.
"You moved them," Tom said.
"I moved them."
"Kindra, transplanting a bolting biennial."
"About half of them will die of it and about half won't and half of sixty is thirty plants going to seed in August," she said. "And I was not going to leave the only seed we own eleven miles away on the other side of a mountain in a garden that every raider in this valley has walked through."
Tom looked at the row of wilted, sad, half dead parsnips.
"That's the best decision anybody's made this year," he said.
"It's the second best."
"What's the first?"
"Sofie deciding she was in charge of a baby," Kindra said.
On the eleventh of June, at eight in the evening, with everything planted and twenty people around one fire and the light not gone until almost ten because it was June in Montana, Tom stood up.
"I want to say four things," he said, "and then I want somebody else to talk, because I've been doing all the talking for two weeks and that's a bad system."
"Go ahead," Loreen said.
"One. There's two hundred and eleven feet of beans in the ground and it's the eleventh of June and if nothing goes wrong we eat in August."
Somebody cheered. It was Petey, who had started talking on the fourth day.
"Two. There's twenty of us and that's the biggest number this valley's seen in one place since the gymnasium, and I want everybody to understand that's the whole thing. That's not a nice thing that happened. That's the entire strategy."
"Three?"
"Three. We're not living here." Tom pointed north at the buildings, four hundred yards away, catching the last sun. "We farm here and we store here and we pump water here, and we sleep a mile and a quarter up that creek in the timber, and that's permanent, and I'll fight anybody about it."
"Nobody's fighting you," Hobby said. "We've all lived in a house somebody came to."
"Four."
Tom stopped.
He had been composing the fourth thing for three days and now that he was standing up he could not find it.
Kindra said, quietly, "Say it."
"Four is that we're going to lose people," Tom said.
"Not this month. Someday. There's twenty of us and there's no doctor and there's no antibiotics and there's going to be a winter that goes wrong, and I want that said out loud once now while everybody's happy, because I've watched what happens to a group that's never talked about it."
Nobody said anything.
"And that's why we write things down," he said.
"That's why Kenz has the book. Because what we know is the only thing that outlives us, and there are nine people under the age of sixteen sitting at this fire, and in forty years every single thing they know is going to be something one of us said out loud."
He sat down.
Loreen Tack said, "Well, that's a hell of a toast."
"I'm not good at this part."
"You're better than you think," she said. "Now sit down and let me tell these children about the time in 1987 that a man in Deer Lodge tried to sell me a horse with one eye."
She talked for forty minutes.
It was the first time in four months that anybody at that fire had told a story about before that was not about how it ended.
Tom sat with his wife's head on his shoulder and watched a fifteen year old boy and a twelve year old girl argue about charcoal and watched a six year old hold a baby who had gained three and a half pounds in six weeks and watched an eight year old with nine toes sitting shoulder to shoulder with
an eleven year old who had one ear.
And at eleven o'clock, after everyone had gone to their shelters and the fire was down to coals, Shyla came out of the dark.
She came in low and slow with her tail going and she was gaunt and her coat was wrecked and she had three grey scars on her right shoulder, and she walked across forty feet of open ground and put her head in Sofie Thorn's lap while the child slept, and did not make a sound.
Tom Thorn sat eleven feet away and watched it happen and did not wake anybody.
He sat there until two in the morning with his hand on the dog's back.
And in the morning, when the camp came apart at the seams over it and Sofie screamed loud enough to be heard at the ranch, Tom found the thing that was tied into the fur at the base of her neck, knotted tight, weathered to almost nothing.
A strip of red cloth.
And threaded through the knot, folded four times, a square of birch bark with nothing written on it at all.