Chapter 16
Tom did not show the blank bark to anybody for two days.
He carried it in his chest pocket with the other one and the four rings of tin, and he took it out three or four times a day and looked at it, and it said nothing, and he put it back.
On the fourteenth of June he showed it to Kindra.
"What do you make of it?"
She turned it over twice.
"There's nothing on it."
"I know."
"Tom, there's nothing on it. It's a piece of bark."
"It's a piece of bark folded four times and knotted into a dog's fur with a strip of red cloth," he said, "by a man who has written on eleven pieces of bark since October and never once wasted one."
"Maybe it washed off."
"It's cut. He cuts. He doesn't write, he cuts, with a nail or a point, and cutting doesn't wash off."
Kindra sat down on the log.
"Then he had nothing to say," she said.
"That's one."
"What's the other?"
"The other is that the message isn't on the bark." Tom took it back and folded it. "The message is the dog."
They spent that summer building, and it was the first time since the lights went out that anyone had built anything they expected to still be standing in a year.
The creek bottom camp went up over eleven weeks.
Tom sited it himself and then made Dee walk it, and then Hobby, and then Cass, and he changed it twice because of what they told him.
It sat a mile and a quarter south of the ranch buildings in a fold of the creek where two cut banks came together and the cottonwoods were old and thick. Four shelters in a loose arc, none of them within sight of the road, all of them within a hundred yards of water.
Tom would not build a single structure that took more than four days.
"Why?" Cass asked, on the second week, sweating.
"Because in September I want to be able to build another one somewhere else in four days," Tom said. "Everything we make, we have to be able to walk away from. That's the rule and it's the only one I'll never bend on."
"That seems like a bad way to live."
"It's the only way anybody's lived out here since February and it's the reason there's twenty of us."
They built with what was there, which meant poles and hide and bark and sod.
Hobby designed the shelters and they were better than anything Tom would have made, because Hobby had spent five years sitting down thinking about how things were put together.
They were half dug. Three feet into the bank, back wall of stacked sod, pole rafters, bark shingles laid in courses like scales and weighted with poles, and eleven inches of duff on top of that.
"That's a debris hut with a basement," Tom said.
"That's a debris hut that don't blow away," Hobby said.
Each one slept four to six. Each one had two exits, because Tom insisted, and the second exit was a crawl tunnel out the back of the dug portion that came out in the willows.
"Nobody's ever going to use those," Frankie Pell said, digging the fourth one.
"I hope not."
"It's four hours of work for a tunnel that goes nowhere."
"Frankie, on the second of February my family went out the back of a woodshed in fifty five seconds and the house burned at ten in the morning," Tom said. "Four hours."
She dug the tunnel.
The garden grew, and it grew badly in three places and beautifully in four, and McKenzie wrote down every inch of it.
The corn came up one in three, exactly as predicted, and Dee thinned it and moved the survivors into two rows instead of four and it did better than anybody expected.
The beans came up nearly everything and then got hit by a late frost on the nineteenth of June that nobody saw coming, and they lost about a third of them.
"That's on me," Tom said that night.
"How is that on you?" June said.
"Because Kindra's knee said cold on the eighteenth and I heard her say it and I didn't cover the beds, because I didn't have anything to cover them with and I decided that meant there was nothing to do."
"There wasn't anything to do."
"There was dirt," Tom said. "You can hill dirt up over a bean seedling in the evening and knock it off in the morning and you'll save half of them. I've read that.
I've read that four separate times in my life in warm rooms with the lights on and I did not think of it at seven o'clock on the eighteenth of June."
Kindra said, "Write it down."
"What?"
"Write it in Kenz's book. Frost nineteenth June, lost a third of beans, hill dirt next time." She looked around the fire. "That's what the book's for. Not for the things that went right."
McKenzie wrote it down.
The squash went mad.
Dee had put them on the south slope in hills with fish guts buried under each one, and by the middle of July they had taken four hundred square feet and were still going, and by August there were winter squash the size of a child's head sitting in the vines.
"How many?" Tom asked, on the tenth of August.
"Two hundred and eleven set so far," McKenzie said, reading. "Dee counted them twice."
"Two hundred."
"And about forty more flowering."
Tom sat down in the dirt at the edge of the squash patch and did the arithmetic in his head and then did it again.
"That's four hundred pounds," he said.
"It's more than that. Dee says these are a Hubbard type and they go eight to twelve pounds."
"Kenz, that's a thousand pounds of squash."
"That's if nothing eats them."
Something ate them.
Deer got into the squash on the night of the eighteenth of August and took maybe eleven percent of the crop before Shyla put them out at three in the morning, and the next four days went into fencing.
There was no wire. There was the rope and the cordage and the willows and four hundred acres of dead lodgepole.
They built a brush fence four hundred and eleven feet long, six feet high, of woven willow and dead fir laid butt outward, and it took twenty people four days, and it worked because Tom had learned exactly one thing about fences in a year and taught it to everybody twice.
"It doesn't have to stop them," he said. "It has to annoy them more than the next field does."
They ate on the eleventh of August.
Not the beans, which were not ready, and not the squash. The beets.
Frankie Pell roasted eleven pounds of beets in the coals and Loreen made a soup out of the greens and marrow bone, and twenty people ate food that had come out of ground they had broken themselves, and nobody could speak for the first four minutes,
which by then was a tradition that had crossed a mountain range.
Nell ate two bowls and then asked, in a small voice, whether there would be more tomorrow.
"There'll be more tomorrow," Kindra said.
"And the day after?"
"And the day after."
"For how long?"
"Until we've eaten all of them, and then there'll be something else, because there's forty different things coming in at different times, and that's what a garden is."
Nell put her spoon down and looked at the bowl.
"I didn't know that," she said.
The summer was not all of that.
There were four hard things and Tom made himself count them at the end of it, because he had learned in October that a person who only remembers what worked is a person who is about to be badly surprised.
The first was Petey.
He got sick on the second of July, and it was a bad four days, and for about eleven hours on the third it looked like they were going to lose a seven year old to something nobody could name.
Fever, no rash, terrible stomach, and Kindra sat with him for two nights and did the only four things there were to do: water, salt, sugar in the form of boiled rose hips, and cool cloths, and keeping the fluid going in when he did not want it.
He came out of it on the sixth.
Kindra came out of it differently.
"We got lucky," she told Tom, on the seventh, sitting on the creek bank shaking. "That's all that was. There's no version of that where I did anything. He fought it off and I held his hand."
"You kept him drinking."
"Yes. And if it had been the other thing, or if it had gone into his gut properly, I'd have held his hand while he died and I want everybody to understand that's what I am. I'm not a doctor. I'm a woman who read some books in 2014."
"You're the best we've got."
"That's the part that frightens me," Kindra said.
She spent the rest of that month on it and it produced the second institution of the camp.
She started teaching.
Not first aid. Everything she knew, in order, four evenings a week, to anybody who would sit down, and the ones who sat down every single time were McKenzie, Birdy, Frankie, and Cass.
"Why those four?" Tom asked her.
"Because Kenz wants to know things, Frankie's got a cook's hands, Cass listens harder than anybody I've ever met, and Birdy."
"And Birdy?"
Kindra was quiet a second.
"Birdy watched somebody take her ear off," she said, "and she has decided that the thing she's going to be is the person who fixes what's been done. And I'm going to help her be that, because it's the only good thing that's come out of it and she found it herself."
The second hard thing was the water.
The hand pump well at the ranch worked, and it was the best water anybody had drunk since March of the previous year, and in the third week of July the pump began to lose prime and then it failed entirely.
Hobby had it apart in two hours.
"Leathers," he said.
"Which are what?"
"The cup seals on the plunger. They're cut leather and they swell in water and seal against the pipe, and they've been in there since about 2004, and they've gone hard and cracked."
"Can you make them?"
"I can make them out of the right leather. Thick, vegetable tanned, not brain tan. Brain tan's too soft, it'll fold."
"We haven't got any."
"No," Hobby said, "we have got a pair of boots."
He cut the seals out of the uppers of a pair of dead men's boots that had been in the barn since February, and he cut them with a compass he made out of two nails and a stick, and he soaked them in water for a day and greased them with tallow and got the pump running on the second try.
"How long will those last?"
"Two years. Maybe four."
"And then?"